Re: UKNM: Re: Portals?

[Phil Gyford]

At 12:03 20/08/98 +0100, you wrote:

>One can hypothesise 'til the cows come home about how long anyone stays on

>a portal site. The only answer to that question is to ask them. We used to

>have a counter on the homepage which would give us that information but

>since we've reverted to static pages, we don't get it any more. What it

>was telling us however was that our users spent an average of 40 minutes

>per day looking at the site, which as far as I'm concerned is about the

>same as the average person spends reading a magazine or newspaper. What's

>more the majority of our users return up to 5 days per week. Not bad for a

>"portal" site.


(a) I'm amazed many people would spend 40 minutes on any news site, let

alone it be an *average*. Did the counter just count how long the page was

in the browser? If so, then such a counter on Mr Showbiz would think I've

spent the entire morning reading their front page, as it's been sitting

there in the background for the past few hours.


(b) Your site isn't a portal. It's a meaningless term at the best of times,

and it doesn't help when everyone starts calling their sites portals. As I

understand it, a portal site is trying to do everything - directories,

searching, email, chat, forums, entertainment, news, weather, homepages,

ads, pagers, personalisation, shopping, and whatever else if flavour of the

month. Thankfully, NewsNow only offers news. Oh, and TV listings and

searching of Loot.



   Phil Gyford

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