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The Vitality of Children and Youth Web Sites

I surveyed almost 1000 web sites belonging to organizations serving children and youth. As their "entry" page I selected the page that they themselves had indexed as such with a major nonprofit index service. Eliminating those for which there was inadequate data, I determined the number of days since that page was last revised.

In summary: I found the median age of the pages was over two months, the mean age was over four months, and less than 14% of pages had been revised within the last week. I will discuss "last modified" as one of many factors in determining the vitality and utility of a web site, acknowledge the limitations of this methodology, and bring up a few ideas for future study.
 

Purposes | Methods | Results | Discussion | Conclusion
 

Purposes

I had three central objectives in mind: (1) To start my studies of the use of Internet tools by nonprofit organizations with a focus on those serving children and youth. (2) To develop and test a simple, but useful assessment tool. (3) To start to develop a set of tools that could measure a web site's "vitality."

I also had several "meta" objectives: to test my ability to publish the studies on the web in a clear and simple manner, to gather feedback on the study, to build momentum for further studies, and to develop my relationships with the organizations who can benefit from such studies. Of course, I'll have to wait and see how well I do with these greater objectives.
 

Methods

I chose as my sample the 959 web URL's indexed under "Children and Youth" with the Contact Center Network. I felt that the specialized nature of this index would provide me with a better sample than Yahoo or the other general web indexes. It was certainly superior to the sample that would have been provided by a full text web search tool.

My web robot collected the HTTP headers returned from each of these URL's, fed them into a database and extracted the "Last-Modified" header. Out of the 959 URLs in my sample, 577 of them returned useful data. The rest either did not return the required header or, in some cases, did not return a useable response at all.

I defined my first measurement of vitality as the number of days since the page was last modified.
 

Results

Out of 577 valid samples, the median age of a page was 64 days. The mean was twice that at 128.
 

The breakdown in various time periods was: 36 (6%) were a day or less old, 43 (7%) were two days to a week old, 118 (20%) were from 8 days to 31 days old, 146 (25%) were from 31 days to 92 days old, 174 (30%) were from 93 to 365 days old, and the remainder, 60 (10%) were over a year old.
 

Discussion

There are four factors which will cause this indicator to understate the vitality of a web site: (1) We are not finding out whether there is new content somewhere in the web site, only whether the main page has been changed. (2) In a few cases, the main page could be an unchanging frameset, with frequently changing content. (3) The site may be a front end to a database. (4) A changing main page is only one indicator of a site's vitality.

But there are also at least four factors which might cause it to overstate the vitality of the sites: (1) Many of the several hundred invalid samples are probably broken links, with no redirect to the correct page. (2) Trivial changes are counted the same as significant ones. (3) Some of these pages haven't been changed since they were first put up, so these aggregate numbers might very well increase over time. (4) The web is growing rapidly, with new sites going up all the time.

That said, the age of the main page is still an important indicator. It is the page that people normally bookmark. It is the page that is publicly listed for people who don't bookmark it. It is the page that journalists would go to for news.

Although surveys of other pages or, better yet, access to web server logs would tell us more about the vitality of a site, we have a strong indicator in the age of the main page.

Why is "vitality" important?

For many sites, it's not. There are many web sites which serve primarily as online brochures. Most of the sites with very high "last modified" ratings probably fall into this category. Others may be sites that are archival in nature (such as conference proceedings), where it's unreasonable to assume that the page will change.

But more and more, web sites are being used to build relationships and community. Perhaps that means attracting new members or donors. Perhaps it means coordinating the activities or increasing the involvement of existing supporters.

All other things being equal, if the main page doesn't change, it's a good bet that people stop coming back.
 

Conclusion

Many of these pages are pretty stale.

Although I can't determine the vitality of any individual site from this single measurement of "freshness," I do have a strong indication that these web sites are not well integrated into the regular flow of communication of their organizations. Many of them are probably volunteer projects that are infrequently maintained, at best.

I can only hazard a guess as to the reasons for this staleness. Ad hoc experience and anecdotal evidence suggests that many nonprofits think they ought to have a web site, but they lack the resources, experience or commitment to fully integrate the medium into their workflow.

There are many directions to take this line of inquiry. Here are three possibilities: performing the same study several times over a period of weeks or months, comparing this part of the nonprofit sector to other parts, or selecting a smaller sample and going deeper into the site for information about page updates.

 
Your advice, criticism and feedback would be most appreciated. Please contact us with any thoughts you have to share on this topic.

Thank you,

-- Michael Gilbert

Published: 1997