When air is rare: behind the scenes of an asthma web site.
OBJECTIVE
The number of medical Web sites has increased tremendously during the past 5 years. While the quality of the content has also been on the rise, some questions are still open: Where are users referredfrom, how large is the target audience, and how do they behave during their visit?


METHODS
The Asthma Information Center is an independent Web site for physicians, patients, and other health care professionals providing information about asthma. Besides mirroring electronic documents of the Global InitiativeforAsthma, numerous interactive pages have been constructed.


METHODS
Logfiles of the Web server were analyzed for a 5-year interval for numbers of page views, visitors, visits, and external referring sites.


RESULTS
The number of visitors has increased since 1995, up to 100,000 page views at the end of the observation interval. In February 2000 approximately 9000 visitors were recorded per month. 3.4 pages were retrieved per visit, which lasted on average 1:57 min. Users are referred primarily by portal sites and only to a lesser extent by search engines.


CONCLUSIONS
The audience is large for a specialized medical Web site. Users are usually referred from nonmedical sites. They are seeking fast information, most probably as a second opinion after having consulted their physician.
Wjst
M
M
Institut für Epidemiologie, GSF Forschungszentrum für Umwelt und Gesundheit, Munich, Germany. m@wjst.de
D001249:Asthma / Q000517:prevention & control*; D003256:Community Participation / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D014943:Global Health; D006293:Health Promotion / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D007255:Information Services / Q000592:standards / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D020407:Internet / Q000592:standards / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012017:Referral and Consultation / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D013997:Time Factors