A comparison of the daily page views (number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site) allows for a realistic assessment of the institutions utilisation of the web (Figure 1). The UOC (red line) receives by far the most page views per day because all students and teacher activity is conducted on the site. The FU (blue line) comes out next in the number of pages accessed. However the UPC stakeholders produce about the same number of page views as the institution is offering content on both www.upc.es (broun line) and www.upc.edu (green line). As was expected content from the LSE website, even though well structured and adequately representing the organisation, is requested the least.

To complement the analysis of the daily page views a number of indicators have been collected. Given the expected heterogeneity and sometimes awkward results (e.g. international access) of the dataset obtained, only selected results of the Alexa source are presented here (Table 4.2). The important conclusion that one can extract from the indicator collection is that the sites like the institutions have very different features and that for incoming links, which can be interpreted to represent global interest and popularity of the site the LSE is leading by far, followed by the FU, and the UPC and UOC follow almost at the same level. The universities’ home country traffic rank seems not really expressive as the relative national environments are very different. E.g. there are much more sites overall in Britain.

Table 4.2 - Alexa website statistics comparison [i]

The other source consulted about website evaluation is the Webometrics project conducted by the Centre for Information and Documentation at the National Research Board (table 4.3).

Again the measurements and methodology of these statistics are not established but still emerging and several of the results can not be interpreted. The FU receives a very good ranking, despite the fact that it is not very as well structured as the LSE. The LSE actually performs also quite good given the fact that it is a social science institution and its members are not too innate in the digital. The UPC is represented quite realistically in all accounts. For the UOC, as the only fully virtual university, the fact that it turns out 41 in the national ranking must be considered mediocre. Especially as it has very high rankings in all categories, there must be some factor not accessible to the researcher that influenced this result.

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[i] Graph provided by www.alexa.com/ Apr. 15.2007
[10] Based on www.alexa.com Apr. 15.2007
[11] Could not be determined as the two pages rank is not representative

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