NEW FEATURES POTLIGHTS SEMISSOURIAN.COM WEB STIE

Today I am kicking off a new feature about the Internet and Southeast Missouri. Regularly in this space I will write about some of the latest Internet developments -- with particular focus given to semissourian.com, the Web site affiliated with the Southeast Missourian newspaper and other regional media organizations.

If you haven't checked out semissourian.com, let me encourage you to do so. In October, the newspaper unveiled a redesigned site with expanded news and sports content, interactive features and hundreds of changing photographs. The result of this initiative has been an explosion in traffic. In October 2000, page views on semissourian.com were 310 percent higher than October 1999. In November, we topped the charts more than 320 percent higher than the previous year.

During our redesign, we invested in comprehensive (and expensive) Web statistics software. Some of the reports generated by this program are fascinating, and we use them to modify our site to the benefit of both our users and advertisers. I thought you might like to know some of the things we found out about the Internet users in Southeast Missouri.

Peak traffic period

For example, when would you think most people sign onto the semissourian.com Web site? Currently, the peak traffic period for the site is between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. each workday. A second peak in traffic happens between noon and 1 p.m. Finally, traffic spikes again at 4 p.m. before dropping significantly until another rise around 9 o'clock at night.

What does this signify? First, the data suggest a significant portion of traffic to semissourian.com is from people at school or work. Unsurprisingly, these users check the site upon arriving at the office, perhaps because they have easy access to computers and the Internet there. Then, more people check it during their lunch break, with others logging onto the site just before they depart for home in the afternoon.

Finally, there's an uptick after 8 p.m., presumably because little ones have gone to sleep. Or, teen-agers are checking into the high school areas of the site, where traffic has been growing like gangbusters lately.

At semissourian.com, we understood the spikes in traffic, but we weren't content that the highest peaks were generally first thing in the morning. So we immediately accelerated our plans to add content on the site throughout the day, even scooping the newspaper when appropriate. There were two goals here. First, increase the reason for users to visit the site again and again throughout the day. And, second, provide the best, up-to-the-minute news for our users so they could rely on us for the latest happenings.

The timing for the launch of our live updates could not have been better. Starting on Election Day, semissourian.com became the first media organization in this area to break several key stories, especially regarding the election brouhaha in Florida. One avid user told me she loves these updates, because she leaves her browser on semissourian.com during the day, and she knows the most important election stories will be automatically updated for her.

For the time being, except in the event of major breaking stories, our live updates stop at the end of the work day. But it's only a matter of time before 24-hour updates of national, state and local news will be available at semissourian.com.

Making it worthwhile

Why don't we do it now? Simply, a lot of people put continuous updates on their sites, which include extraneous news about floods in Bangla-desh and bus wrecks in Turkey. These are important stories for people in those areas, certainly. But we believe it important to select the most important stories -- and the more local the better -- to make our user experience the best possible. We're still determining the best and most efficient way to do this.

There is another trend in semissourian.com traffic which reinforces our analysis that a significant portion of the user base is from people at school or work. On weekends, our traffic peaks at about 60 to 70 percent of weekday levels. And the spikes in hourly traffic smooth out so there is a general hump throughout the day.

Where do most people live who look at semissourian.com? That's a tough question, because there is currently no registration process for those who use the site. The only way we can track where users live is either by their Internet Service Provider (ISP) or through the comments they leave. Doing this, it is clear that most of the users are in the immediate area. (Curiously, one of our most frequent corporate visitors is a certain television station, which is headquartered in a tall building in downtown Cape Girardeau. I'm certainly not critical of this, however, since I visit the KFVS-TV Web site too. More on the TV station's site in a future column. They're doing a lot of things right.) But we do know that there are thousands of users who visit semissourian.com from all around the world. The comments on our guest book quite often come from these folks. It's not unusual to find someone who grew up in Cape Girardeau or Jackson saying hello to past friends and schoolmates, even if they haven't been back here for 30 years.

Valuable retail info

Another important aspect about semissourian.com is that users can find valuable information about retail sales and other commercial information on the site. Next to this column are a few of the businesses who are advertising on the news pages of semissourian.com. If you were to go to the site and click on their ads, you could find out more about local sales. In some cases, you would be linked to their own business or information Web sites.

All in all, Internet penetration continues to increase in Southeast Missouri. And with faster access becoming more available in our area, usage will continue to expand dramatically. If you have any questions about the Internet or semissourian.com, please send me an e-mail at jrust@semissourian.com. Or write: Jon K. Rust, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo. 63702.

Jon K. Rust is director of the semissourian.com MediaLab and vice president of Rust Communications.