I have been asked to provide some information about our school website for the annual report as it about 10 years old and is now well into its third year in its present form:

It is not just a prospectus for prospective parents, although many of our enquiries do come from parents who have been attracted to our website. It is also a source of information for parents, pupils, staff and Old Scholars and also provides a pictorial record of what has been happening in the School.

We have just under 600 pages online today and the site takes up 2.66GB of web space.

Including the thumbnails, we have over 10,000 photos on the website which surely must be a record for any school website.

The music section is expanding and we have 64 music mp3 files of our our pupils' compositions and performances available online.

We have plenty of links from other sites to our own and also from our site. This and the frequency at which people access our site means that we are coming top of the list in the Google search engine when anyone searches for either 'Friends' School' or 'Quaker Schools'.

We have a search engine for our site, which is regularly used.

There are 2 databases on our site. One is for the compilation of the 1000 plus educational links that have been amassed over the years. The other is for the Old Scholars making it possible to search for any past pupil by just knowing their first name or surname or when they left school.

It is difficult to determine the number of quite separate hits that the website receives each day, as a lot of the hits are from robot search engines and I find the 20,000 recorded hits a month difficult to believe. However, we do know that we had hits from over 100 countries last year ranging from Argentina to Zimbabwe.

Apart from the main page, the most popular pages accessed include in order: Mp3 music files, the Quaker pages, the News section, Educational Links, the Pupils' page and the Parents' page.

This year we developed a website for the Junior School with its own web address at www.friendsjunior.org.uk

We have not used professional companies to design and maintain our website.

I hope that some of the above may be of interest? Please make www.friends.org.uk your home page.

Martin Hugall

Webmaster