SAGA Progress Report-2004-Annex-Research-Website

SAGA
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SAGA PROGRESS REPORT (12/03-12/04) &
UPCOMING WORKPLAN (1/05-12/05)

ANNEX

VII. WEBSITE

This SAGA website provides for global communication of information about the program—its research themes and technical assistance objectives, its personnel and partners. It disseminates research results as downloadable working papers and conference papers, announces upcoming conferences and workshops and describes previous ones, including links to presentations. The website offers links to the research proposal and progress reports as well.

We are currently working to update and redesign the website to offer a more comprehensive view of the SAGA program in a more accessible approach to the viewer. We are including the SAGA logo (as seen on the cover of this report) on each page, along with logos to USAID, Cornell and CAU, all presented prominently in the page top banner, with links. We retain the sidebar navigation links, rearranged in order, in a graphic display, with text links at the page bottom. We think we have maintained an original goal of creating an easily and rapidly downloadable and viewable site, through simple and efficient construction.

With respect to website content, we have added additional details about the research areas. Our working papers section, renamed publications, now includes both working papers and conference papers, as well as links to articles now published in refereed journals. We are seeking permissions to publish abstracts from these published articles, as well as include the abstracts for all conference papers. Our publications are listed chronologically, from most recent to earliest; we are now offering a few alternative views of this listing—by research theme, by geographical focus, and by author. These views can be reached through a link at the beginning of the Publications page. For the technical assistance and conference pages, we are updating the content of these pages to make them more comprehensive in listing all SAGA events.

A separate website for the SAGA Competitive Grants program is maintained at CAU. We are updating the link on our own site’s navigation bar to connect to a transition page within our own site, consistent with our site’s design, that provides a brief overview and links to the CAU site from that page, rather than linking directly from the navigation bar.

We began collection of data quantifying web usage on May 28, 2003. In this report, we update the website statistics for 2004.

The number of “hits” measured in the first 11 months of 2004 is 83,298 (A “hit” is a single action of the web server – a visitor requesting a web page, for example, that includes 2 images, will be recorded as 3 hits). This averages approximately 7,573 hits per month in 2004, and reflects increased visitation of the site over 2003 when monthly average was 4,403 hits.

The measurement of hits commonly reported by website counters does not, by definition, actually reflect how many web pages are being viewed; it is useful for a general measure of activity and for comparison purposes. The number of visits actually made to the site in 2004 is 17,844, with 7,745 of these counted as unique, their subsequent visits within the reporting period being excluded from the total. This averages to 704 unique visitors per month.

Working papers and conferences papers are available for download as PDF documents, as are versions of the research proposal, progress reports, conference programs, and the SAGA brochure. The total number of files downloaded January-November 2004 was 29,012, of which 24,354 were publications. This indicates that SAGA publications are being downloaded approximately 2,214 times, on average, each month by visitors to the website.

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