http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/stopthepresses_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000893246
[Talks about news sites, but probably relevant to us too- we should analyze the logs :) Has it really come to the point where significant numbers of people who visit news sites bypass the home page? Well, listen to the experience of the The Globe & Mail, Canada's national newspaper. According to its Web site's editor, Angus Frame, 41% of globeandmail.com visits now begin on non-hub pages (that is, all but the home page and section pages such as Sports, Business, etc.). These are site visitors who come to article pages via search engines, news aggregators (like Google News), RSS feeds, news alerts, e-mail newsletters, notes from friends, and the like. Other news sites report similar user behavior. CSMonitor.com, the Web site of the Christian Science Monitor, tracks only 23% of its visitors' sessions coming in via the home page, with the rest entering at the article level or other page. The Monitor's Joel Abrams notes that "a shockingly high percentage of those sessions that start on a story end on that story." He says, "For an upcoming redesign, we're putting a lot of thought into [article-page design]. The Monitor, like other news sites, is trying to recognize that other editors -- and algorithms -- have become the gatekeepers to our reporting." -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list