The combined website of the Zoutpansberger and Mirror managed to break all existing records during May when it lured more than 9 000 visitors who requested over 40 000 pages.

Traffic to the website continued to increase over the past few months, but May's figures are really outstanding. During March this year the website was visited by 7 539 users who asked for 26 979 pages. On average 244 users visited the site every day during that month. The figures stayed about the same during April, with the average daily visits dropping to 238. Activity picked up dramatically during May and the average number of visitors rose to 292.

During May the website was visited by 9 025 users who browsed through 40 362 pages. These are fairly conservative numbers in that it does not take into account pages that are "cached" by proxy servers. Proxy servers are computers that act as "in between" servers with the aim of speeding up the flow of information on the internet. When various users connect to the internet via the same proxy server, the server will store the page once the first visitor requested it. When the other users request the same page, the proxy server will simply send the page it "cached". This, however, means that the other visitors are not counted by the computer that hosts the website.

The busiest day during May was on Friday, May 3 when 759 visits were recorded and 3 528 pages were sent. More than 52% of the visitors used Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 when viewing the pages, while 1 228 visitors (or 12,33%) opted for Internet Explorer 6. Netscape 4 is also still a popular choice and was used by 13,52% of the visitors.

The Zoutnet website is not a "copy" of the two newspapers, but a different product altogether. Although it does not carry the same number of stories and advertisements, it is stacked with useful information ranging from tourist attractions to sporting events. A good example is the section concentrating on the past weekend's Kremetart Cycle Race. The site not only carries the race's complete results, but also more than 40 pictures of the event.

Contrary to various other South African news sites, the Zoutnet site is freely available on the internet at www.zoutnet.co.za.

(The statistics used in the article was obtained from the server log files which is regarded as a more accurate reflection of the internet traffic.)