Hello everyone:  My name is Carolyn Percival and I am a Health Promotion
Officer with the Region of Peel Health Department.  I have been a "silent"
participant in this discussion group for sometime now and have appreciated
the discussions and useful information that has come out of the list.  I
now have an opportunity to pose a question for which I hope to get whatever
suggestions and comments you can offer:

Peel Health is getting close to getting their revamped website live on the
Internet.  Before doing this, however, we are tackling the issue of
evaluating the new site and building in a process to do that in our action
plans.  As a first step in the evaluation action plan, we wish to get
feedback (internally at first) on aspects of the site such as the content,
ease of use (e.g. time to download files, graphics...etc.), and aesthetic
appeal. The suggestion was made also that it would be useful to get
baseline information about the site we currently have live, in order to
assess the "impact" the switch to the new site would have.  The current
live version and the revamped version are so totally different, however,
that another suggestion was made that we would essentially be starting from
scratch, in a sense, evaluating the site, as well as users' use of it (e.g.
# hits, # visits, % respondents indicating site is useful, user
profiles...etc.).

Any information about specific evaluation questions we should be asking to
users, how to best get the information (manual surveys, on-line surveys),
pitfalls or things to be aware of in evaluating Internet sites...would be
appreciated.  Also, I'd be interested in hearing about others' experiences
with using the Internet as a way to provide information from and about
their organization.

Secondly, any useful information about marketing Internet sites would be
helpful.   Our site is geared toward the general public with an emphasis on
school-age individuals for many of our sections, as well as their parents.
Thank you in advance!

Carolyn
*****************************************
Carolyn Percival
Peel Health
Health Promotion and Disease Control
199 County Court Blvd.
Brampton, Ontario       L6W 4P3
(905) 791-7800, ext. 2218
E-mail: [log in to unmask]