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Since 1998, DPRP has given the visitors of the page and participants in the poll the opportunity to tell us what they think of the pages in general and how they rate the various sub-pages. We also ask for suggestions of improvements. This part of the DPRPoll Results looks into that evaluation.

Visits per Month

The average DPRP visitor comes to the page 11 times per month, which is a significant increase compared to last year's 9.7 times and 6.7 times in 1998. Most people visit DPRP one to thirty times per month, but there are also people who visit the pages several times during one day !

Rating of DPRP

We asked the participants to give an overall rating to DPRP on a scale from one (very bad) to ten (excellent). On average, the pages got a rating of 8.5, which is a steady increase from the 8.3 in 1998 and 8.4 in 1999, of which we were already very proud.

A big majority of the people (77% in 2000, 75% in 1999) thought that DPRP has improved during 2000. See the table below. The table also shows that, according to most people, the improvement was less substantial compared to the improvement in 1999.

Change ? Participants Percentage 2000 Percentage 1999
It has improved a lot ! 214 30.9% 39.0%
It has improved a bit 317 45.8% 35.8%
It stayed the same 88 12.7% 8.9%
It's worse than it used to be 4 0.6% 0.6%
No Opinion 69 10.0% 15.8%

By the way, all 4 persons that said that DPRP used to be better in the past still rated the site with an 8 !

Evaluation of the Various Sub-Pages

Besides an overall rating for DPRP we also asked the participants to tell us which sub-pages they visit on a regular basis and to give a rating to those pages. The results can be found in the table below.

This table includes the percentage of participants that visited the sub-page and the average rating the sub-pages got in past 3 years. For the first time this list also includes the rating which subscribers of the DPRP Update list gave to this information service.

Page Visitors 1998 Visitors 1999 Visitors 2000 Rating 1998 Rating 1999 Rating 2000
CD Reviews 70% 78% 88% 8.0 8.3 8.5
News 79% 84% 87% 8.3 8.0 8.1
Releases 61% 55% 61% 7.9 7.8 7.8
CDelight 39% 45% 56% 7.8 7.9 7.9
Band Pages 55% 52% 51% 8.2 8.2 8.3
Prog Links 43% 49% 50% 8.2 8.3 8.3
Concert Reviews 45% 43% 43% 7.8 7.8 7.5
Counting Out Time N/A 51% 37% N/A 8.9 8.7
NL Gigs 31% 27% 31% 8.3 8.2 8.1
Specials 20% 21% 27% 7.6 7.9 8.1
World Gigs 27% 24% 20% 7.7 7.2 7.3
Art Corner N/A 28% 19% N/A 8.0 7.7
Vision Pit N/A 14% 11% N/A 7.8 7.3
Forum 7% 7% 8% 6.9 6.9 6.8
DPRP Update List - - - - - 8.7

Since a couple of months DPRP has switched from 2-3 updates of 10 CD reviews per month to 1-2 updates per week with 5 CD Reviews. We were wondering if the visitors of the web site appreciated these more frequent, smaller updates so we asked them in the DPRPoll. 81% preferred the new, frequent and shorter updates (11.5% the larger updates and 7% had no opinion), so it seems like we made a good change and will continue with the '5 reviews per column' updates.

Favourite Band Page

More than half of the participants (51%) regularly visit the band pages, and the overall rating for these pages is very good (8.3). Let's see which band pages are most popular.

Band Page Votes % Visitors 2000 % Visitors 1999
IQ (Lush Attic) 208 30.1% 28.1%
Spock's Beard (Gibberish) 136 19.7% 16.2%
Arena (The Cage) 124 17.9% 22.0%
Pallas 38 5.5% 5.8%
Landmarq 17 2.5% 2.4%
Jadis 16 2.3% 2.8%
Twelfth Night 12 1.7% 1.9%
Triangle 12 1.7% 0.2%
Wolverine 10 1.4% 2.1%
Forever Times 2 0.3% 0.6%
Chinawhite 1 0.1% 0.4%
Helreidh 0 0% 0.2%
Monolith 0 0% 0.2%
Swivelfish 0 0% 0.2%
Karibow 0 0% 0.2%
No Specific Page 115 16.6% 7.0%

Last Year's Wish List

Last year we asked the participants what should be improved or changed abut DPRP. The most mentioned remarks were:

  • News Page: updated every week/more regularly (mentioned 39x)
  • More (frequent) CD Reviews (32x)
  • Releases page: More frequent updates (21x)
  • Loads too slowly (new layout/grafics) (10x)
  • Sound Samples (MP3) / Samples with reviews (10x)
Let's see what improvements we were able to make last year:

Since a couple of months Derk has taken over the News page and - with a very occassional exception - has done a weekly update. The team thinks he's doing a great job and will ensure more regular updates than in 1999 and 2000.

The number of CD reviews has almost doubled in 2000 to more than 300 reviews per year, so we did pretty well on that front. We have added some new people to the review team and are currently able to do 1-2 updates of 5 CDs per week. No reason for complaints anymore if you ask me.

Some changes to the way the lay-out of the page is triggered (using texts instead of buttons) has drastically improved the loading time of some of DPRP's most visited pages. We'll continue to look into any issues.

Improving DPRP

This year the participants in the DPRPoll 2000 mentioned the following things most often as potential areas for improvement.

  • More Releases updates (25x)
  • More (frequent) News (19x)
  • More CD reviews (12x)
  • MP3s (on Reviews & Releases page) (11x)
  • More Concert Reviews (9x)

The releases page was and still is a bit of an issue; we admit it's not updated as much as we would want it to be because we had to set priorities on other things in the past year. Also, we are depending on labels and artists to provide us with news on their release and often their is a lack of communication on their side, combined with a lack of time to screen all the prog label web sites on our side. We're currently looking into the problem of the Releases page. We'll keep you informed. If there are any volunteers that think they would be able to help out, feel free to contact us.

As mentioned above, we think we are doing quite well on the CD Reviews and News pages nowadays, so don't expect any major changes there.

Regarding MP3s, as we have explained in previous years, we will not provide any on our side. The main reasons are that the take up a lot of space (which we don't have; we are currently pushing the boundaries of our server space) and the copyrights issue. In Holland BumaStemra charges people for putting MP3s on web sites (damn crooks!). Since DPRP is a voluntary operation, it does not have any funds, should such a charge be made. In most reviews were the concerned band has samples on their homepage, we have provided links to the specific page. We'll see if we can standardize this in the future.

There haven't been an awful lot of Concert Reviews last year. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, whereas 2000 was a great year on the album side, it was also quite meagre on the gig side. Second, most of the DPRP team members that normally write Concert Reviews have been very busy with other things (DPRP related or not). And last but not least, the visitors of DPRP are just a lazy bunch themselves. The Concert Reviews column is the only reviews section on the site where we invite 'outsiders' to post their gig reviews. You folks better get writing ! ;-)

There were more than a hundred other suggestions for improvements, which we will discuss in a feedback special soon.

Click here if you want to return to the DPRPoll index.

You can also check out what the DPRP Team voted for themselves.

Click here if you also want to see the list of prizes and winners.

For comments about the poll, please e-mail Ed Sander.