During a weekend retreat in Tewantin, on Queensland's Sunshine coast, they discussed a new layout and system for his Well-Being Australia 'bushorchestra' website. They decided to include a lot of white space, Mark's own art features as thumbnails, a vast reduction in the number of links displayed, and those links dispersed at different levels over the page rather than in columns.
The week prior to this, Mark and Delma Tronson attended the Australasian Religious Press Association (ARPA) annual conference 'round table' discussions where this very idea of the 'modern' web design was discussed. The 'bushorchestra' new design elements are well and truly in line with the guidelines that, visually speaking, 'less' is 'more'.
Mark could not help but feel confident his team was on the right track in the proposed revamp.
Back at the 'Tewantin Worskshop', the first thing the team undertook was a thorough statistical analysis of what files were being looked at, for how long, and where visitors to the site were from in order to determine the nature of the viewer analysis.
On analysis of the professional on-line statistical program, they found three consistent themes.
The photos, the Australian Missionary News IPTV and the Logo Story (genealogical records) were the big ticket items visitors had been viewing. Moreover most were on the site for longer than five minutes, representing the average length of the video interviews on the Australian Missionary News IPTV site.
The numbers of visitors were significant also. The lowest month was just over the 10,000 mark whereas the highest recorded month over the past 8 months was 25,000. A surprisingly large number of the international viewers came from the United States.
The possible reasons for this high volume of long-stay visitors were discussed by the team. They felt that the 'bushorchstra' site was unpretentious yet there were links to a wide variety of the ministries Mark Tronson had established with many photographs and good colour dispersion.
It was originally the home of the tourism ministry 'Australia's Bush Orchestra' in Moruya on the NSW south coast which operated for many years as a tourist bush walk under the canopy of an Ironbark forest with the dominant song of the Bellbird
For example, it has:
- been around for well over fifteen years - this represents a long-stay familiar situation to which readers have become accustomed. It came up on all the search engines.
- doubled as the home of Australia's cricket ministry as Mark Tronson had served as the Australian cricket team chaplain for 17 years and continued with his ministry of Life After Cricket from 2001; and also the home of the respite ministry for the elite athletes from the Australian Institute of Sport since 1992.
- housed Tronson du Coudray's art, the Basil Sellers Art Centre and the Basil Sellers $10,000 Art Prize based in Moruya.
- in recent years, expanded to include the Australian Missionary News IPT V along with the 'Logo Story' which, although the Tronson family story, is similar to that of many other Australian families and includes original diaries noting the establishment of farms as part of Australia's early years of nationhood and the history of migrations from Europe and Ireland with the heritage of a family coat of arms.
More recently, with the wisdom of his mentor Mr Basil Sellers AM, who advocated succession planning, the 'bushorchestra' site has also linked to the 25 'young writers' (Sport, Comment, Movie Reviews, Fashion, Music, IT) who provide articles for Christian Today Australia, and concomitantly to the international weekly feed of Mark Tronson's extensive world wide Christian media e-database.
The agreed conclusion by the 'Tewantin Workshop' team is that although it is a small site (compared with the denominations or international mission sites), nonetheless the 'bushorchestra' site with it's mix of longevity and specific interest such as the photographs, IPTV interviews, cricket ministry, respite and the Logo Story all work together to make it surprisingly attractive.
The new design will help to modernise it and keep the attention of the younger generation of visitors.
To view it - www.bushorchestra.com