Elias Biryabarema
12 September 2008
The Monitor Publications Limited, MPL, the publisher of Daily Monitor, has upgraded its news website, www.monitor.co.ug that carries the online edition of the daily, introducing new features that allow broad user interactivity and deepens the site's functionality.
Most popular among the new features is the 'Article Commenting' that allows readers to immediately post their responses on any story and also read what others have said on the same.
The Daily Monitor website is among the very first news site in Uganda to permit readers to post commentaries on stories.
Across the globe however, nearly all reputable news media websites have had this reader feedback feature for years.
Mr Ronald Muyimba, a Web publishing specialist who re-engineered the site, said readers will also now be able to view a ranking of the most read and popular stories.
When a reader clicks on a story, he will be able to get links to all stories that have been published on the same subject.
"We now interlink stories using key words and when a reader opens any story, he will have instant access to several others that are related and that's particularly good for researchers," said Mr Muyimba.
Traffic on the website has surged tremendously since the new user interface and other improvements were made.
Alexa, a technology company that ranks world websites on account of traffic now puts Monitor online at 26,299, having climbed from around the 30,000th position. In Uganda it is ranked No.1 Most popular website.
Mr Muyimba said they had also adopted a new web file nomenclature and now append numbers to the Universal Resource Locators(URLs) which has vastly improved the website's visibility in search engines, particularly Google news and Yahoo directory.
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