J Coast Conserv (2012) 16:439–448 DOI 10.1007/s11852-012-0186-3
The effectiveness of coastal management web portals – a critical analysis Matthias Mossbauer & Gerald Schernewski & Steffen Bock
Received: 21 April 2010 / Revised: 27 September 2010 / Accepted: 13 October 2010 / Published online: 10 March 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Abstract Effective and efficient information dissemination is crucial for a successful management of coasts and beaches. Almost all coastal management activities use Internet portals to provide electronic accessibility of data and information. In this respect, we have analyzed web tracking data and costs to investigate the effectiveness and efficiency of two coastal management web portals. Indicators for the visiting quality, the volume and characteristics of the information flow and the associated costs were combined. The results show that mainly professional users were attracted by the two investigated online coastal management information offers. Furthermore, the coastal management contents were mainly relevant on regional scale. The results indicate that it is not enough to provide various information, instead it further needs also efforts to disseminate this information to a broader public. Specific preparation and presentation of information for the target groups would lead to an active dissemination process. The investigation of the costs shows that an increasing efficiency of information dissemination via the Internet goes together with the long term use of the information infrastructure. Therefore large coastal management web portals need runtimes of several years. The applied method combined and simplified actual used web analytic methods to allow valuable insights into the information dissemination of coastal management web portals. In this way the method can be used to help coastal decision makers or other practitioners to screen their web presence in the background of information supply and demand for all visitor groups they want to reach. M. Mossbauer (*) : G. Schernewski : S. Bock Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research, Seestraße 15, 18119, Rostock, Germany e-mail:
[email protected]
Keywords Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) . German Baltic coast . Costs . Internet
Introduction The ongoing pressure on European coasts forced the European Commission to develop a strategy for Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM). In 2002, these efforts resulted in the recommendation concerning the implementation of Integrated Coastal Zone Management in Europe (2002/413/EC). Each EU member state was asked to develop a national strategy to implement the principles for integrated management of the coastal zones. These strategies should “include adequate systems for monitoring and disseminating information to the public about their coastal zone. These systems should collect and provide information in appropriate and compatible formats to decision makers at national, regional and local levels to facilitate integrated management” (2002/413/EC). It is well known that information is important for participation, decision-making, management and awarenessrising. The availability of and access to information not only plays an important role in coastal management, it can be regarded as a prerequisite for successful management initiatives (e.g. Doody 2003; Geskou 2003). Steel et al. (2005) showed that public knowledge is a critical element to support ocean and coastal management. New technologies are regarded as effective means for enhancing public knowledge as well as for provision and dissemination of information about coastal issues (e.g. O'Regan 1996; King and Green 2001; Claus et al. 2007). In this respect, the internet plays the most important role, because it is free, easy to access, open to everybody and the maintenance costs for Internet portals are comparatively low. Nowadays, nearly all coastal
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projects and regional coastal management initiatives use the Internet for the presentation of results, internal communication and information dissemination. Also the EC Recommendation 2002/413/EC (European Parliament and the Council of the European Union 2002) and the national German strategy on ICZM supported the development of existing and initiated new coastal information systems in Germany. (Bock and Schernewski 2005; Thamm et al. 2007). Kay and Christie (2001) already analysed the impact of the Internet on coastal management and the potential future use and concluded that while such a potential exists, further research is necessary before possible impacts of the Internet on coastal management can be fully assessed. The main aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of coastal management information portals. We investigated the following questions: Are Internet portals on integrated coastal zone really effective and efficient in providing and disseminating information? And: How can we measure their success? To address these questions and to be able to provide concrete recommendations, two national coastal information portals have been analysed in detail for the last 5 years. This includes measurements of the ratio between the set tasks of the portals, the achieved objectives and the efficiency of the information dissemination via the Internet. Another aim of this research was the documentation and application of a simplified methodology to assess the characteristics of the use of a web portal which is suitable for the task at hand of coastal decision makers who are not usually experts in website analysis. Based on this assessment practitioners should be have the possibility to make improvements for their future information dissemination via the Internet.
The case studies Criteria for the choice of the two case studies where a) general accessibility, b) a lifetime of at least 5 years with continuous development and maintenance as well as c) a focus on coastal issues. Altogether three Internet-portals in Germany meet these requirements: the North Sea – Baltic Sea Information System (NOKIS, www.nokis.org), the portal of EUCC – The Coastal Union Germany (www.eucc-d. de) and the Coastal Information System Oder Estuary (www.ikzm-oder.de). NOKIS was excluded because it is a meta-data system with strong focus on coastal engineering and only parts of it are generally accessible. In the national strategy the need of an Internet-based ICZM platform for ICZM in Germany was recently expressed, but the demand already became obvious several years ago and leads in 2002 to the foundation of "EUCC the Coastal Union Germany”. It is the independent German national branch of the international non-governmental
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organization "EUCC - The Coastal Union". The main objective is to promote sustainable coastal management in Germany by integrating coastal sciences and practice. EUCC further has the aim to raise international awareness of German initiatives of ICZM. It is the only national organisation in Germany in this field. EUCC-Germany provides relevant information, hosts workshops and conferences, and runs demonstration projects. One major activity is the maintenance and further development of an Internet portal on coastal management (http://www.ikzm-d.de/ and http://www.eucc-d.de/). It is under discussion, if this portal shall officially serve as a focus point for coastal management activities in Germany. However, it is well suitable for our analysis. The number of associated members, which are subscribers of EUCC’s regular national newsletter, is above 1000 and clearly underlines the demand. The members are experts from fields such as spatial planning, research, nature protection, coastal engineering and other disciplines related to the coast. These members and other German coastal practitioners and experts are the target group for the webpage and largely determine its content. Focus is on the entire German coast. In 2002, the Federal State Minister for the Environment in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany, and the Polish Vice-Marshal for the Environment of the Voivodeship Western Pomerania the regional Agenda 21 “Szczecin Lagoon” was signed. This German-Polish cross border agenda 21 covers the entire Oder/Odra estuary region, with the city of Szczecin in the south, the large shallow Szczecin Lagoon and the two Islands of Usedom and Wolin at the Baltic Sea coast. Focus activities explicitly mentioned in the Regional Agenda 21 are e.g. ICZM, sustainable tourism, environmental education and scientific cooperation as well as the development of indicators to monitor and evaluate the success of measures. ICZM is, and always has been, a part of the Agenda 21 process (Schernewski 2004). The aims are similar and one can call ICZM the implementation of the Agenda 21 in coastal regions. The regional Agenda 21 “Szczecin Lagoon” actively wants to promote a sustainable development and to involve the regional population and coastal stakeholders. The regional Agenda 21 is a clear and high ranking political commitment and forms an important basis for coastal management activities. Against this background the project ‘Research for an Integrated Coastal Zone Management in the Oder Estuary Region’ (ICZM-Oder) was initiated in 2004 as one out of two national reference projects on ICZM and is funded by the National Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). One major task was the development of the Coastal Information System Oder Estuary in the German/Polish cross-border region. It addresses scientists, authorities, the local population as well as tourists and visitors and is an open and generally accessible regional internet platform.
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Because of the cross-border character of the Oder estuary region, the regional information system disseminates information in German, Polish, and English. It offers a wide range of regional information and data, such as scientific documents, project results, statistical data, spatial data, photographs and press reports. Furthermore, the regional information system serves as an umbrella for regional projects and activities. Established in 2004, it soon became the largest portal of its type in Germany.
Methods The acquisition of knowledge was achieved in three major steps (see Fig. 1). The first step included the collection and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data and information. User statistics, literature, online surveys and personal discussions served as information sources. In a second step, the gathered data and information were combined to measure the benefit visitors of the page can generate from the content, the characteristics of the information flow and the costeffectiveness of the information dissemination via the investigated portals. In a final step, the effectiveness, strengths and weaknesses of the investigated Internet portals were determined. To investigate the websites, two major methods were applied: the analysis of visitor statistics and an online questionnaire. The visitor statistics were generated by visitor tracking, an approved method of analyzing the characteristics of usage patterns on websites (Clifton 2010; Jansen et al. 2009). It has to be mentioned that all data were gathered and stored anonymously. The analyses are based on
Fig. 1 The way of analysis: data input (left), results (middle,) and discussion (right)
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statistical work with numbers, not with identities of users. Visitor tracking can be realized by a variety of methods and tools. Each of these methods has its individual strengths and very own set of problems. This leads to discrepancies in structure and details between reports created by different web analytics solutions (Huntington et al. 2006; Jamali et al. 2005; Kaushik 2007). To get solid and reliable findings in our investigation, we interpreted the results of different methods in terms of trends and numerical ranges rather than the numbers by themselves. Table 1 show the analyzed tracking data and explains the indicators and information contained therein (Arndt 2006; Aden 2009). In our study we considered cookie based tracking methods and log file analysis to create a data pool for generating web statistics. This decision was made on the basis of data availability, precision and analysis options. Log files are electronic records of interactions between a web server and the users of a website (Jansen et al. 2009). Initially developed to report errors of web servers, today log files are the most easily accessible source of data for web analytics (Kaushik 2007). Web log data easy to handle with many freeware analytic tools and efficient at gathering longitudinal usage data (Huntington et al. 2006). In contrast, there are various problems regarding the accuracy of logs. Especially robot visits from web crawlers, user identification and session detection difficulties result in multiple visit counts and minor data quality and accuracy (Jamali et al. 2005). These inaccuracies of web logs prevented the use of these data for the analysis of visit quality and the behavior of the visitors. But on the basis of the availability of web log data series since 2004, the web logs were suitable for the long-term history analysis of the number of page views in the study. The weaknesses of the web logs were offset by the use of cookie based tracking methods. Cookies are small locally stored text files, transmitted from a web server to a web browser. With the help of these short text messages the activities of a visitor on an investigated web page can be traced back (Clifton 2010). In our studies we used Google Analytics, a free service offered by Google, to generate cookie based user statistics. The cookie based data recordings we were able to use include the time between August 2007 and July 2009 and contain tracking data of visitors from all referrers including search engines and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents. Google Analytics offers data which allow the analysis of the visitors’ origin, their activities on the site and if they are satisfied with the content. Gathering web statistics with Google Analytics makes it possible to identify the common interests of the visitors and to determine what the Internet is currently used for and by whom (Clifton 2010; Aden 2009; Jansen et al. 2009). Because of the
442 Table 1 Data types, analyzed information and indicators for the effectiveness measurements
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Data type
Information analyzed
Indicator for
Visits
Number of times a web page has been viewed
Volume and characteristic of information flow
Page views per visit Time on site Origin of the visitors Time of visit Top content Bounce rate
Average number of page views during a visit Average length of a visit Geographical distribution Time of day the user visit a page The 50 most commonly viewed pages Percentage of visitors who leaves the portal after the first page
Visit quality Visit quality Direction of dissemination Intention of use Interests of the target groups Visit quality
detailed database provided by this tool in combination with a wide range of evaluation possibilities (e.g. special custom reports, advanced segmentation), we chose cookie based web tracking to measure the use of the portals. To gain a better understanding of the information flow between the websites and the visitors, the data of the cookie based web analytics were assigned to focus groups. These groups correspond to the target groups of our case studies and are composed of private users (personified for example by tourists or the local population) and professional users (e.g. Coastal decision makers, scientists, practitioners) on regional, national and international scale. Divisions were made on the basis of the place where visitors used the information portals and the times when they did this. Two major segments were pointed out: a geographical segment and a segment following the intended purpose (see Table 2). The geographical segment is subdivided into four parts: The German Baltic coastal region (corresponding to the federal states Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, SchleswigHolstein and Hamburg), Germany, Poland and the World. Table 2 Segmentation of visitors Geographic origin of user A-1: German Baltic coastal region federal states Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg B-1: Germany C-1: Countries with ICZM cross border Cooperation Poland D-1: International scale Worldwide Intended purpose of use A-2: professional users access between 8 am and 5 pm B-2: private users access between 5 pm and 8 am
The partitioning follows the approach of www.ikzm-oder.de to generate an information flow on a regional, a national, a cross-border (between Poland and Germany) and an international scale (Schernewski and Bock 2004; Bock and Schernewski 2005). For the www.eucc-d.de we omitted the segment “Poland” because for this information platform the cross border information dissemination between Poland and Germany does not play a major role (Schernewski and Bock 2004; Thamm et al. 2007). The definition of target groups for the multi-sectored content of the websites (Thamm et al. 2007) led to the second, the usage segment. Decision makers and scientists were classified as so called “professional users” (access to the web content between 8 am and 5 pm). The professional usage is reflected by two indicators: The marked increase of user numbers during the general office hours between 8 am and 5 pm and a decrease in visitor numbers during the lunch break around noon. Visitors with access between 5 pm and 8 am were nominated “private users”. It is supposed that during this timeframe tourists and local people mainly cause the traffic on the investigated web pages due to private use. For a detailed investigation of the information flow between the case studies and visitors, the 50 most commonly viewed groups of pages were separated for each geographical segment. The websites were grouped by aggregating their title tag value. In a second step, the groups were allocated to different categories for each portal, shown in Table 3. Overall, 37% of the entire analyzed ICZM-web content could be assigned to one of these categories. Table 3 Content categories for the investigated coastal management information portals www.ikzm-oder.de
www.eucc-d.de
Networking Coastal information, spatial data Project results
Networking Coastal information Coastal education
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Because of the described imprecision of web analytics, the fact that web analytics are inefficient tools to identify the behavior and the underlying motivations of the visitors (Clifton 2010; Jansen et al. 2009), there are only limited opportunities to derive suggestions for future improvements. For this reason an online survey, based on a questionnaire, was created to investigate the use of the portals and to infer why the users come to the websites. We chose a web based survey (in German language) in our study to eliminate data coding time and human error, to offer fast response, to decrease costs (Jansen et al. 2009; Jeong et al. 2003) and to easily reach people in different geographical areas. The survey was implemented into the homepages of the case studies. The structure, questions and possible answers of the survey are listed in Table 4. The questionnaire combines multiple choice-, Likert-scale- and open ended questions. We used multiple choice questions for those objects of investigation we had an understanding of the range of possible responses. This applies to question 2 and 4 in the questionnaire (see Table 4). A Likert-scale was applied in question number 1 to find out the degree to which the participants agree with the statements on the list. Question 3 is partially open ended to explore as many answers as possible. A further part of our study was the evaluation of the benefit the users can derive from the online contents. Visitors attribute benefit to the content when they get what they want: access to unique, valuable, reliable and up to date information (Yang et al. 2005). We measured this benefit on
the basis of a composition of several indicators. For this purpose an equation was developed by the author: benefit ¼ ðtime on site pages per visit Þ=bounce rate These parameters are the main indicators of visiting quality (Kaushik 2007; Puscher 2001) and their composite measure captures the effectiveness of the web content because visiting quality plays a key role in user benefit (Pather et al. 2003; Stolz 2007). The equation combines these indicators and generates a numerical value for the benefit. The information content of the calculated benefit value lies not in the numerical value itself – it provides the base for the comparability between measurements of different subjects of investigation. The cost-effectiveness was determined through the long term history of page visits (number of site views per month) and the costs for the information dissemination. The project ICZM-Oder and the companion portal www. ikzm-oder.de, launched for ICZM information dissemination, served as a case study for this research. Because of a lack of appropriate data for this purpose, the efficiency of second case study, www.eucc-d.de, could not be analyzed. The investigated cost-effectiveness was based on the time the scientific staff needed for the online provision of information and the development of the web pages. This time was determined through personal interviews and, in a second step, converted into monetary values per month on the basis of pay scales. In a third step, these values were assigned to the monthly number of visitors to the page.
Table 4 Questions and possible answers of the online questionnaire at www.ikzm-oder.de and www.eucc-d.de Questions 1 Are you satisfied with the information provided on www.ikzm-oder.de/www.eucc-d.de?
2 Why did you visit the portal today?
Possible answers A-1: Very satisfied B-1: rather satisfied C-1: neutral D-1: quite satisfied E-1: very satisfied A-2: I wanted to inform myself about coastal issues (basic knowledge). B-2: I already have basic knowledge and wanted to benefit from expert knowledge. C-2: I wanted to search contact data (E-mail addresses, telephone numbers …
D-2: other 3 If you searched for information – have you found what A-3: Yes you were looking for? B-3: I found some, but not all information. C-3: No D-3: Which information did you search for? Please type in _______(open question) 4 You are … A-4: A coastal expert B-4: Student or graduate in the field of coastal management C-4: An interested member of the public? D-4: None of the categories applies to me.
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Results Characteristics of the information flow Page visits The number of visits emerged in three phases (Fig. 2). The first phase began with the launch of the portals and was characterized fast growing number of visits. During the second phase, the visits peaked. During the last phase, visits showed variable trends (Fig. 2). Data generated with cookie based web analytic tools show significant lower number of visits per month than data generated with web logs (Fig. 2). The trends of the visiting numbers derived from cookie based web analytics and web logs do not match. Origin of users This differentiation was used to visualize visit volume metrics for geographical regions (Fig. 3). The differences of the origin of users between the www.ikzm-oder.de and www. eucc-d.de amounted on international scale (including Poland) 25%, for national visits 6.4% and for regional visits 18.9%. In Germany, especially the contents of www.eucc-d. de primarily reached people of the German Baltic coastal region. Outside this area, both coastal information portals attracted comparatively lower numbers of users. Outside the German language region www.ikzm-oder.de reached a larger number of people than www.eucc-d.de. Traffic sources The analyses of the data, gathered by cookie based web tracking, showed that for users of www.ikzm-oder.de, search engine result pages like Google are the dominant gateway for their visit. The people who clicked to the portals from another site, labelled as “Referring sites” in the pie chart (Fig. 4), account for 20.8–26.5% of all visits. Direct
Fig. 2 Long-term history of page visits of www.ikzm-oder.de and www.eucc-d.de based on data generated with cookie based web analytics and web logs
Fig. 3 Distribution of the origin of people visited www.ikzm-oder.de (a) and www.eucc-d.de (b) during August 2007 and July 2009. (Categories: German Baltic coastal region (GBCR), Germany, Poland, World)
traffic, caused by people who typed the URL of the portals directly into their browser, achieved comparatively high percentages for www.eucc-d.de. Intention of use The majority percentage of people used the content of the two coastal information portals in a professional context. This was illustrated by an increasing percentage of visitors during the typical office hours between 8 am and 5 pm and, furthermore, by a decreasing amount of users during lunchtime and the evening hours (see Fig. 5). This was more observable for the German Baltic coastal region than for countries with integrated coastal management cooperation and on a global scale. The portal www.eucc-d.de was particularly subject to this trend, an exception were users from Poland, who visited www.ikzm-oder.de in the evening hours and thus for private purposes. Top content The qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the information flow, investigated by the 50 most frequented page groups and their thematic sorting in categories, differ on the international, national and regional scale. The portal www. eucc-d.de has a higher information flow on a regional scale which results mainly from visits in the content categories
Fig. 4 Traffic sources (a: www.ikzm-oder.de; b: www.eucc-d.de)
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Fig. 5 Percentage distribution of visits according to the time of visit (a: www.ikzm-oder.de; b: www.eucc-d.de)
‘coastal information’ and ‘networking’. On a national scale, the two case studies had comparable flow volumes, illustrated by the green color in Fig. 6. The portal www.ikzmoder.de generated this volume on the basis of coastal information dissemination, for www.eucc-d.de ‘networking’ played another important role. On an international scale, the case studywww.ikzm-oder.de showed substantially more visits in all categories. Benefit In our studies, the benefit, calculated with the help of a mathematical formula, combined three indicators of visiting quality: bounce rate, pages per visit and the time on the site. Comparatively low bounce rates were measured for visitors coming from the German Baltic coastal region and having a professional intention of use (see A-1, B-1 in Fig. 7). This attested a comparatively higher relevance of entrance pages of the portals which stimulated the users to an increased interaction with the pages. This was further illustrated by the number of pages they visited during a session and the time the users spent on the portals (see A2, B-2 and A-3, B-3 in Fig. 7). The combination of these measures lead to high benefit values for professional users and visitors German Baltic coastal region (see A-4, B-4 in
Fig. 7). This was more observable for www.eucc-d.de than for www.ikzm-oder.de. For people from Germany (without German Baltic coastal region), Polish as well as other international visitors, the first page they visited on the site was less relevant so that they left the portals from the entrance page immediately. This was indicated by high bounce rates (see A-1, B-1 in Fig. 7). These visitors also often had less visits per session and shorter visiting times (see A-2, B-2 and A-3, B-3 in Fig. 7). Therefore, the calculated benefit was lower for these visitor groups. This trend was more obvious for www.eucc-d.de than for www. ikzm-oder.de. The pages of www.ikzm-oder.de achieved comparatively high benefit rates for international visitors. Results of the online survey The online survey was placed in a highlighted box on the homepages of www.eucc-d.de and www.ikzm-oder.de. The questionnaire was available over a period of 9 months. Despite this, only 43 questionnaires were completed for the www.ikzm-oder.de and only four people took part to evaluate www.eucc-d.de. Besides the low number of participants, a second problem arose: nearly 35% of the questionnaires were not completed by people but obviously by spam submissions. In this context, the validity of the survey could not be guaranteed. For that reason, the results of the online survey were excluded from this study. Cost-effectiveness
Fig. 6 Quantitative (number of page visits) and qualitative (type of content) characteristics of the information flow for www.ikzm-oder.de and www.eucc-d.de with regard to different contents and visitor origins
To cope successfully with the set tasks, the web portals needed financial resources. The costs depended on the progress of the project. In our case study 2, the applied financial resources for information distribution decreased in the first 5 months of the project and dropped from 3€ to 1.20 € per visit. After this period of time, the reduction of costs slowed down and reached ratios between 0.04 and 0.08 € per visitor. This cost reduction for the information distribution regarded to comparatively high technical costs and low costs for the provision of information. During the beginning
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Fig. 7 Values of the indicators of visiting quality (A1-A3; B1-B3) and the calculated benefit (A4; B4) for the categories German Baltic coastal region (GBCR), Germany, Poland, world, private users and office users. (a: www.ikzm-oder.de; b: www.eucc-d.de)
of the project, the costs were at a high level. The reasons were substantial financial outlays for the technical design, the implementation of tools and the launching of the coastal management information portals. After 5 months the costs for the information distribution mainly based on the development of the content and the adaptation to the requirements of online publishing. These costs were comparatively low.
Discussion However, advantages and disadvantages of the single methods were experienced. The valuation of benefit and the
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qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the information flow are subject to considerable technical and methodical uncertainties and, to a certain degree, to judgment. The different numbers of visits, received by cookie based visitor tracking and the analysis of web logs do not reflect the conclusions of the literature (Aden 2009; Jansen et al.2009; Olson 2007) Different tracking methods generate different numerical values. The overall trends are comparable in our study. Technical uncertainties are based on the quality of the visitor statistics derived from the tracking data of web logs and cookies. The applied web tracking with the help of cookies can lead to misleading results because about 10% of the users have disabled cookies in their browser and 40% delete them monthly (Olson 2007). If the visitor deletes the cookie the visitor will appear as a first time user. This leads to an increased number of visits in the statistics. But this error rate is smaller than the error rate of the web analysis based on web logs (Clifton 2010). Methodically based inaccuracies were caused by data aggregation and data interpretation. These imprecision are particularly obvious for three major aspects: The intention of use was classified according to the time of day a user visited the website. Knowing this behavior (time of use), we estimated the possible motive for the visit (professional or private search for information). In order to achieve more reliable results for the analysis of the intention of use, another method should be applied. One alternative would be the investigation of the intention of the visitor by institution, company or association the users belong to. An analysis of the Internet service provider domains the visitors used to get access to the Internet could be used as data base for this research. Secondly, the indicator “time on site" can be misleading because users often leave their browser windows open even when they are not using the site (Clifton 2010). And thirdly, the classification of single websites based on the type of their content causes difficulties because of the existing diversity of the single pages and the ambiguity of the content. The trisection we used in our study is comparatively rough. Thus, only poor qualitative and quantitative scientific conclusions could be drawn from these thematic sections. In the future, the subdivisions of the content categories should be further specified to gain a richer understanding of the details of the information flow. The inaccuracies described can be mitigated with the help of a successful survey. To achieve this success, the questionnaires should be sent to the participants of the survey directly by e-mail to reach higher participation rates. Additionally the survey should be conducted multilingual to improve data availability. In our case studies the numbers of page views have passed their peak. Exact reasons for the visiting trends cannot be identified with the applied methods because they
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Table 5 Strengths and weaknesses of the investigated case studies Indicator
Rating
www.ikzm-oder.de
Rating
www.eucc-d.de
Page views
+ ++
Comparatively high Decreasing over time Percentage of direct traffic very low Percentage of private users low High benefit of content on regional and international level Unbalanced ratio of benefit between professional and private users
+ + +
Comparatively high Decreasing over time Balanced ratio of traffic sources Percentage of private users low High benefit of content on regional level
-
Unbalanced ratio of benefit between professional and private users
High information flow on national level
++
High information flow on national and regional level
Traffic sources Intention of use Visiting quality
Characteristics of information flow
+
investigate the behavior of the visitors and not their motives. Major gateways for the information dissemination via www. ikzm-oder.de are search engine result pages. This can be interpreted as low embedding of the portal in the World Wide Web, or, in other words, as a lack of back links from other pages (SEO 2010). In contrast the traffic sources of www.eucc-d.de are balanced. Our studies show that the patterns of use vary between national, international and regional levels and between different visitor groups. In the German Baltic coastal region the majority of person using the investigated portals and benefit from the contents are professionals. Private users constitute a minority in the visitor statistics. Therefore it can be deduced that the contents of these websites have the potential to cover the data and information needs of professionals at the best. With regard to qualitative characteristics of the information flow, the benefit, private users like tourists are less linked to the online contents of the investigated websites. In our study www.ikzm-oder.de reveals strengths of international information dissemination. The benefit worldwide visitors can generate from the content of www.eucc-d.de remains comparatively low. Concerning the quantitative characteristics of the information flow the case studies have their own specific strengths: www.eucc-d.de on regional and www.ikzm-oder. Fig. 8 Costs per visit, costs per month and visits per month for the coastal management web portal www.ikzm-oder.de
de on international level. On national scale the information flow of the portals have similar values. The pages of www. ikzm-oder.de disseminate mainly coastal information, for the portal www.eucc-d.de networking information play another important role. The strengths and weaknesses of www. ikzm-oder.de and www.eucc-d.de are summarized in Table 5. Overall it can be stated that investigated coastal management portals fulfilled their set tasks. This is realized by the addressing of a comparatively large number of users per month and high benefit and information flow rates on the regional level. The regional level, which means the German Baltic coastal region, is therefore most important for the information dissemination because most participants of the German coastal management activities come from this region. Thus, the investigated coastal management information dissemination via the internet was rated as effective although there are still possibilities to improve this information dissemination. In addition, the analysis of the costeffectiveness of the www.ikzm-oder.de shows that this dissemination can be provided efficient. We think that there are two major ways to achieve an even higher level of efficiency in information dissemination. The first idea is to split the information sources for private and professional visitors. For this case a simple website for
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professionals should be generated, perhaps with an included database or blog, to allow the cheap and useful exchange of data and information in this target group. Simultaneously, journalists should be hired to publish coastal management information on other portals (e.g. news portals) and in other media which are assumingly used by the public and by people who search information for private purpose. The second way to achieve a high cost-effectiveness of portals is to extend the period of low costs for the information dissemination in relation to the total project period. This means that the phase of development, testing and launch has to be followed by an extended dissemination phase without costly technical modifications of the websites. In our case study, this dissemination phase begins around month 5 (see Fig. 8). From that point on, the efficiency is at a high level and the costs are low until the end of the project. A further extension of the phase, based on a continued use of the pages for following coastal management projects, for example, would increase the efficiency even more. Attention should be paid to the number of visitors to the information portals because without sufficient users belonging to the ICZM target groups, the costs per visitor are too high and no efficient information flow can take place. Acknowledgements The work was funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research within the projects IKZM-Oder III (BMBF 03F0465A), BaltCICA (Part-financed by Baltic Sea Region Programme of the European Union) and RADOST (BMBF 01LR0807). We like to thank Inga Krämer, Stefanie Boede and Dana Weiss for many helpful comments on the manuscript.
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