OJNI

An Analysis of Web Site Usage

Rod Ward

Rod.Ward@Sheffield.ac.uk

Abstract

The World Wide Web is becoming an increasingly important source of information for all healthcare professionals. This paper provides an analysis of access statistics for the web site “Nursing & Health Care Resources on the Net”. The site itself, was one of the first for nursing on the World Wide Web, and continues to provide a gateway or index to relevant web sites, mailing lists, and newsgroups.

The site took over 100,000 hits during 1998. Access statistics were examined to see where these were coming from, times of day and days of the week, what browsers and operating systems were being used to build up a user profile. The results have implications for both those using the World Wide Web to find information and those wishing to publish via this medium.