In case you haven’t been keeping up with BlogJunction or visiting your favorite library community site (right?), we launched an all new version of WebJunction last week! The improvements include a wide range of new social tools, more and better courses, and a bunch of other enhancements.

Got your interest? Take a look at some helpful videos and steps to get started.

It was a busy week, and the next few promise to be even busier. We’d like to pause to share a bit about what we’ve learned, what you told us, and what to expect next.

First up, some stats and facts:

• Nearly 15,000 unique visitors stopped by last week, which would put us on track for the most traffic WebJunction has seen in any given month.
• Monday was our busiest single day ever, about 250% of a typical day’s worth of visitors and 20% above our previous all-time high set back in February.
• 18% of visitors were from outside the US (hi!).
• In web statistics lingo, our bounce rate went way down (meaning that more visitors were intentionally visiting WebJunction, a good thing!) and each person viewed many more pages than on the old site.
• More people than ever came in through direct links from our newsletters, member emails, and so on, which means you’re reading those…Nice!
• Our members love Firefox, with over 30% using some version of that browser.
• Friending was one of the most popular activities on the site – though also perhaps most fraught with things to improve, judging by the volume of support emails on the subject we received (see below).
• Creating Groups was also popular, with interesting ones such as Wordpress for Libraries and the Library 2.0 Interest Group. You can see a complete list of newly created groups in the lower left corner of the Member Center.

Next up, feedback – lots and lots of feedback came in from all directions, much of it positive, much of it very pointed yet helpful. The teams in Seattle and Dublin glued ourselves not only to the various feedback and feature request discussion forums, and our support email aliases, but also to helpful tools like Twitter (via the ex-Summize search in particular), Friendfeed, blog searches, and more. If you commented on WebJunction via anything that could be indexed, we probably heard and hopefully replied!

The positive feedback was welcome and very exciting to see, but I want to highlight some of the helpful comments and clear areas where we must improve – and how we’re addressing them. The most common comments revolved around:

1. Performance – This is one of our top priorities, and will be ongoing as we sort through, identify, and fix various things that are causing slow page and portlet load times. Over the weekend we rolled out some server improvements that are helping, based on our measuring tools and what we can see from browsing the site. However while we’re seeing some incremental gains in performance, we understand the site isn’t quite as fast as we want it to be, so we’re continuing to work on it. Stay tuned for more updates.
2. Broken Links – The two most commonly pointed out are in the Friend Request email and in the Activities lists, with links to discussions and groups. We’re happy to share that the Friend Request email link was largely fixed over the weekend, and it now takes you to your My WebJunction page, a logical place to access your Friend Requests from. The others are planned for a subsequent rollout in the coming weeks.
3. Inadvertent Slighting of the Public Librarians – When you edit your profile and are prompted to share what type of organization you are with, many of you noticed that “Public Library” isn’t there – a bit odd given WebJunction’s extensive roots in serving public libraries. This is a case where the list we intended to use didn’t quite make it into the final development release of the site, for various reasons. It’s one of our top priority changes in the next few weeks – and we welcome comments on the proposed revision over on the Site Feedback discussion.
4. Various other bugs and issues – With so many changes to the site, there are a range of other odd happenings popping up, and we’re sorting through all those reported to prioritize and get them fixed up as soon as possible.

To everyone who reported errors or had helpful suggestions, our entire staff would like to say THANK YOU! Those emails to support@webjunction.org and posts to our discussion threads are immensely helpful and will only make the site better over the long run. Please, keep them coming! Visit the Help and Support section to let us know.

We’ll share updates here both on the fun stuff – new groups, topics, milestones reached, and so on – as well as updates on the things we’re fixing or adding to WebJunction in the coming weeks. So please, keep reading, keep using the site, and thank you for an exciting first week.

The WebJunction Team