Comments on: In praise of Coys http://lancewiggs.com/2009/11/30/in-praise-of-coys/ NZ Internet, Media and Business Sun, 27 May 2012 02:05:38 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: e-Government, Done Right. Congrats MED! http://lancewiggs.com/2009/11/30/in-praise-of-coys/#comment-21500 Thu, 24 Jun 2010 02:28:21 +0000 http://lancewiggs.com/?p=2122#comment-21500 [...] a response to Lance Wiggs’ criticisms, the new site has nice rich searching, all from the front page – there ya go [...]

]]> By: In praise of Coys | CarJam http://lancewiggs.com/2009/11/30/in-praise-of-coys/#comment-16823 Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:04:39 +0000 http://lancewiggs.com/?p=2122#comment-16823 [...] and CarJam. Read on. [...]

]]> By: Justin Hygate - Group Manager Business Registries http://lancewiggs.com/2009/11/30/in-praise-of-coys/#comment-15395 Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:54:06 +0000 http://lancewiggs.com/?p=2122#comment-15395 Hi Glen,

Yes we are moving to RESTful APIs

There will be an ability to link directly to entities (URIs)

No there will not be the ability to download the entire database. We reserve the right to reintroduce a search fee at some point. The Companies Office is entirely third party funded and the fees pay for the operation of the office. New Zealand is relatively unique in that we do not charge a fee for search information or an Annual Return (or license) fee. We have had to build the new system in such a way as to be able to reintroduce a search fee should that be needed one day. NOTE there is no suggestion that a search fee will be introduced at the time of Enterprise.

Yes there will be mechanisms available to allow for queries of the database for records that have been added/updated/changed within a certain date range such as New Companies.

I’ll raise the Nielson issue with our new Manager Web and Intranet next week and see what the story is.

Your friendly porcine beautician, Justin

]]> By: Glen Barnes http://lancewiggs.com/2009/11/30/in-praise-of-coys/#comment-15388 Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:49:35 +0000 http://lancewiggs.com/?p=2122#comment-15388 Lest be blunt here. The redesign was putting lipstick on a pig really. For all the awards the site is dated and the core functionality is the same as it has always been (namely search). Yes, yes, yes it works but it is no longer excellent. In saying that I do hope that the long awaited changes fixes these issues. More important to me though is the updates to the API. Specifically we need:

- A RESTful API (move away from SOAP)
- The ability to link organisations (apparently in the new database)
- The ability to download the entire database
- The ability to query the database for records that have been added/updated/changed within a certain date range (i.e. tell me all new company registrations in the last 24 hours)

I was thinking about hacking up a Coys style site (before I had heard of Coys) but without some fundamental functionality it is just too hard – Tip ‘O the hat to Anton for hacking his way around the issues. I have friends in law firms who tell me they get their underlings to manually lookup companies office records each Monday looking for changes to records. If New Zealand wants to have any chance at increasing productivity then we need to be smarter about how we provide services.

I also question the page view numbers here:

Unique Visitors: 118,178
Number of Visits: 346,055 (2.92 visits/visitor)
Pages: 25,158,987 (72.7 Pages/Visit)*
Bandwidth: 479.42GB (1452.69 KB/Visit)*

72.7 page views per visit is unheard of. I’m wondering why the Companies office does not add the code to the Nielsen Online Market Intelligence numbers as the other sites in the MED group have?.

]]> By: alastair thompson http://lancewiggs.com/2009/11/30/in-praise-of-coys/#comment-15365 Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:53:39 +0000 http://lancewiggs.com/?p=2122#comment-15365 This site is a fantastic tool for reporters. You can do the same thing that takes hours on COmpanies office in minutes.

Excellent work Anton.

alastair

]]> By: Lance Wiggs http://lancewiggs.com/2009/11/30/in-praise-of-coys/#comment-15271 Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:29:03 +0000 http://lancewiggs.com/?p=2122#comment-15271 Yes good on you for the detailed reply Justin. From memory, in comparison Trade Me does over 1 billion pages each month. L

]]> By: modsta http://lancewiggs.com/2009/11/30/in-praise-of-coys/#comment-15266 Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:57:43 +0000 http://lancewiggs.com/?p=2122#comment-15266 Good on you Justin :-)

]]> By: Justin Hygate - Group Manager Business Registries http://lancewiggs.com/2009/11/30/in-praise-of-coys/#comment-15264 Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:44:33 +0000 http://lancewiggs.com/?p=2122#comment-15264 Sorry modsta el al,

Visits are not 25 million but page visits are. You might be interested in these. Here are the stats for companies.govt.nz stats for the month of November 09:

Unique Visitors: 118,178
Number of Visits: 346,055 (2.92 visits/visitor)

Pages: 25,158,987 (72.7 Pages/Visit)*

Bandwidth: 479.42GB (1452.69 KB/Visit)*

*Does not include traffic generated by robots, worms, or replies with specal HTTP status codes.

Total for calendar year to date:

Unique Visitors: 1,334,858
Number of Visits: 3,734,208

Pages: 279,813,129

Bandwidth: 5063.97G

Sorry for the yeah right moment, Justin

]]> By: modsta http://lancewiggs.com/2009/11/30/in-praise-of-coys/#comment-15246 Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:48:12 +0000 http://lancewiggs.com/?p=2122#comment-15246 I’m delighted to hear the Companies Office “get it” so much. God knows I wish I could say the same about my personal life.

However its surprising that despite the fact they get, they misquote metrics (25 million visits a month – yeah right), have failed to grapple with UI and haven’t managed to so any SEO.

The order of the roll-out seems funny too. Its cool they have a mobile site, but you’d think they’s get the basics right first – UI and search findability.

Anton and the Carjam guys have done a great job with COYS as they did with the core Carjam site. And the “something for nothing” consumer offer there must be hurting VIR and Lemon Check. It’s a brilliant piece of foreplay to engage a customer into taking the next step and paying.

These are smart guys. Hell, they might even “get it”. Cheers MOD

]]> By: Anton Koukine http://lancewiggs.com/2009/11/30/in-praise-of-coys/#comment-15170 Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:44:16 +0000 http://lancewiggs.com/?p=2122#comment-15170 Thanks Justin :)

25 million visits per month seems to be quite high — trademe has just over 6 million :) I find it hard to believe #4 site in New Zealand is doing so much less than companies.govt.nz (#205).

http://www.carjam.co.nz/ is doing 1 million searches per month which equates to approximately 400,000 visits and about 1.3 million page views.

Alexa links (yes, this is not a definitive source of analytics):

Trademe:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/trademe.co.nz

TradeMe’s own:
http://www.trademe.co.nz/About-trade-me/Site-stats

NZCO:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/companies.govt.nz

carjam:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/carjam.co.nz

Top 100 in NZ:
http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NZ

Interestingly, coys.co.nz is doing quite more pages per user than NZCO site. Maybe it’s easier to use?

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