We are unique

The Sunday Times on-line edition provides the reader at a glance the contents of the entire paper on the Home Page itself. The reader can then scan this list and follow links directly to articles of his/her particular interest. This is in contrast to the printed paper, where the reader has to leaf through all the pages to appraise its contents. On line readers can access their favourite article just by one mouse-click.

Searching the current issue

The Sunday Times is the only Sri Lankan on-line newspaper which provides the user with the facility to search the current issue's contents by keywords. This is another way by which readers can select articles of interest quickly and with ease.

To enable searching, a database is updated with each issue. This database indexes the entire on-line edition by keywords. To search the current issue, a reader issues a query to the database with keywords of his/her interest through the on-line fill-out form. A search engine searches the database for the keywords, and returns to the user a list of URLs, or paths to documents containing the keywords supplied.

The readers can get much faster and better search results using this customized search engine than any of the general purpose search engines available on the Internet.

Download the entire newspaper to your home!

Readers who face restrictions from reading the on-line edition conveniently either due to lack of time or due to bandwidth limitations, may download the entire issue to their own computer and read it leisurely, and even save it for later reference. The downloadable file is compressed and is available for transfer again at a click of the mouse . The reader can locally uncompress it and view the entire text as well as the pictures and graphics contained in the issue.

Interactive

The Sunday Times on the web is also the first Lankan on-line newspaper which introduced a truly interactive feature. An interactive forum was opened up in February 1998 for discussions related to the security situation in Sri Lanka. Although this forum, which became highly popular was discontinued, it will be back soon with some modifications.

Who reads, from where? and how?

A vast majority of the readers are international as can be expected. Interesting facts about the readership can be gleaned by examining and analysing the weekly access statistics.

The readership has grown remarkably during the past two years. The total number of hits has increased 10-fold compared to the first issue, and has doubled during its second year on the web. It is also possible to find the most popular items judging from the number of hits received by each article individually.

Analysis of the accesses by day shows that close to 40% of the readers read the on-line edition on Sunday and another 20% on the following Monday.

The Sunday Times on-line edition is being accessed by over 6000 different host machines scattered all over the world, the highest identified accesses being from USA, Canada, Australia, UK, Singapore and New Zealand. Other countries accessing the web site include among many others, Bermuda, the Vatican City State, Ethiopia, Khazakhstan and Papua New Guinea.

Archives

The key to maintaining a large information store is archiving it effectively. The Sunday Times on-line edition allows readers to access its entire archive in many different ways. The archive organizes the past issues by issue as well as by section. If a reader wishes to read a specific past issue, then he/she can select this issue from the list of all past issues. He will be taken to that issue just by a simple mouse-click.

The other way in which the archives can be accessed is by section. The archive contains a list for each section of the newspaper. Each list displays the contents of that particular section in each of the past issues for selection by the reader.

Each section of the archive is also searchable by keyword, month and year. For example, if a reader would like to see what the Sunday Times said about the Independence celebrations on its front page in the February 1998 issues, he can do so by selecting the appropriate section and month on a query form and supplying Independence as a keyword.

The Sunday Times is the only Lankan on-line newspaper whose entire complete archive is accessible to readers, and which can also be searched by keywords