About

The Port Arthur Web Census is an independent measurement of how the small businesses of Southeast Texas show up online. It is published free, with no signup and no paywall, and the underlying data isavailable to download and republish.

Who publishes it

It is researched and published by 9th Avenue, a web studio in Port Arthur, Texas. We build websites for a living, and yes, some of the businesses in this dataset would be better off with a better website.

That is a real conflict of interest, so here is how it is handled: the study names no worst performers, ranks no business against another, and sells nothing. Every business is listed alphabetically with the same columns. Nobody is contacted because of how they scored. If a listing is wrong or unwanted it comes down on request, no questions asked, via the opt-out page.

You are welcome to check that against the method, which documents what is measured, what is deliberately left out, and where the numbers can be wrong.

Why bother

Because nobody had counted. Plenty of people will tell you that small-town businesses are behind online; nobody had put a number on it for this metro, and a number is a more useful thing to argue with than an opinion.

Measuring one site

This study is a snapshot of a whole metro, taken on one day. If you want to check a single website whenever you like, that is a different tool: Presencr runs the same kind of measurement on demand.

Contact

Corrections, questions, and requests for the raw data in another format: info@9thavenue.dev.