With all of the seemingly bigger issues surrounding the business of Web publishing, it's almost taken for granted that the basic mechanics of a site are supposed to work properly, but many publishers would be surprised to learn that one in seven home pages of well-known consumer sites recently failed a simple link integrity test conducted by Jupiter Research. While the causes were myriad - ranging from broken links to server errors to links to nonexistent sites - the results were the same: the errors were severe enough to cause visitors to "defect" from the page, according to findings of the study, which was released Wednesday by Jupiter. In all, Jupiter Research tested more than 22,000 links - more than half of which were routed through manual "redirect" or tracking scripts - to measure consumer behavior, a tactic especially prone to generating errors. Given these results, it's not surprising that a recent executive survey conducted by Jupiter found that the No. 1 challenge facing web site operators is improving site usability. Nearly half (49 percent) of site executives ranked that challenge as a greater priority than the challenge of budget constraints (47 percent) or measuring a site's ROI (40 percent). Perhaps most shocking is the fact that Jupiter found these home page failures occurring on some fairly established sites, not a bunch of fly-by-night operations. "If you picked a dozen sites you use every day, 90 percent of them would have been in the panel," said Matthew Berk, research director and one of the authors of the Jupiter report entitled "Managing Web Site Quality: Stanching Consumer Defection." Based on the one in seven failure rate, Jupiter estimates that at least 80 percent of web sites have errors severe enough to undermine visitors' confidence and cause them to turn elsewhere. "Despite the high priority of improving site usability, the basics of website operations having error-free pages, consumer-friendly messaging, and navigation that makes sense require putting yourself in the visitor's shoes, a fact only indirectly served by traditional quality assurance," asserted David Schatsky, senior vice president of research at Jupiter. In order to "stanch" consumer defection, the report recommends that sites operated by more than 12 full-time employees with more than 1,000 pages should deploy consumer-centric quality controls.
A series of offline actions ranging from a key endorsement to an appearance on a popular late night TV show sent traffic soaring to the Web sites of some Democratic presidential hopefuls. Al Gore's much anticipated endorsement of Democratic front-runner Howard Dean this week increased traffic to Dean's site by 263 percent, according to estimates from Hitwise. The study further notes that Al Gore's public endorsement probably raised awareness to other democratic hopefuls as well, although it was Reverend Al Sharpton's appearance as host on "Saturday Night Live" that garnered one of the biggest spikes. For the period of Dec. 1 to Dec. 9, traffic to Sharpton's site jumped 637 percent over the preceding period. Meanwhile, Gore's 2000 running mate Joseph Lieberman experienced a surprising 373 percent increase in traffic to his site - ostensibly because of his 2000 ties to Gore. Also, John Kerry's site surged 144 percent, Dick Gephardt's 108 percent, Carol Moseley 143 percent, Dennis Kucinich 120 percent, and John Edwards a paltry 16 percent increase - all for the first week of December. The Hitwise data also found traffic to Democratic hopeful sites by Internet users for Iowa, with the Iowa Caucus only five weeks away. A geographic analysis of the data, meanwhile, shows that Congressman Dick Gephardt has front-running Web traffic emanating from Iowa, the state that will host the first nominating caucus in only five weeks. Gephardt's site received 30 percent more visits from users in Iowa than any other state. That was nearly ten times greater than the next leading candidate in the upcoming Iowa caucus, John Edwards. Joe Lieberman and General Wesley Clark, noting that the caucus is little more than a primary dress rehearsal, pulled their campaigns out of Iowa to focus on primaries in other states, a move the report deems "the right strategic decision" based on the data. As a result, both candidates received the least amount of increased traffic from Internet users in the state of Iowa compared to other leading candidates.