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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 12 times per month, which is a slight increase
compared to last year's 11 times. Most people visit DPRP one to thirty times per month, but there
are also people who visit the pages several times a 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 the same rating as we got in 2000.
The small majority of the people (55% in 2001, where in 2000 it was 77%) still think that DPRP has improved during 2001. See the table below. The table also shows that, according to most people, the improvement was less substantial compared to the improvement in 2000. This might indicate that DPRP
is slowly reaching a stable level of quality.
| Change ? |
Participants |
Percentage 2001 |
Percentage 2000 |
| It has improved a lot ! |
88 |
12.1% |
30.9% |
| It has improved a bit |
312 |
42.9% |
45.8% |
| It stayed the same |
200 |
27.6% |
12.7% |
| It's worse than it used to be |
23 |
3.2% |
0.6% |
| No Opinion |
101 |
13.9% |
10.0% |
By the way, the 32 persons that said that DPRP used to be better in the past still rated the
site with an 7.7 on average !
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 4 years.
Some pages have less visitors than the previous year,
but most of the times these are pages that have not been updated all that frequently during the
past year. For example, considering the fact that we haven't done anything on Counting Out Time
the last 2 years, it still receives an impressive number of visitors.
Forgotten Sons has also conquered its core of prog die-hards that are interested in all these
obscure bands from the past. The ratings show a rather stable picture. Only the World Gig Guides seem to need some extra attention.
Favourite Band Page
43% of the participants regularly visit the band pages, and the
overall rating for these pages is still very good (8.1). Let's see which band pages
are most popular.
Last Year's Wish List
Last year we asked the participants what should be improved or changed abut DPRP. The most mentioned
remarks were:
- More Releases updates (25x)
- More (frequent) News (19x)
- More CD reviews (12x)
- MP3s (on Reviews & Releases page) (11x)
- More Concert Reviews (9x)
Let's see what we've done about these requests last year ....
Mid 2001 Charlie Farrell has joined the team as new editor for the releases page. He's done several
updates so far and we're certain the up-to-dateness of that section of DPRP will improve even further.
At the same time Derk has gotten back into the habit of doing a weekly update of the News Page. Every
now and then the workload of his 'daytime' job might be a bit of a bottleneck for a full length update,
but nevertheless we think he's doing a splendid job at the time.
As far as more CD reviews are concerned, DPRP published 306 reviews in 2000 and 318 in 2001. Personally
I think this is a major accomplishment and about the best the team can produce. We basically review
all the prog(-related) albums we receive, including several duo and roundtable reviews, and with
1 or 2 updates per week we think there's no reason for complaining. ;-)
As explained in the DPRP FAQ we won't put any MP3s
on the site, for several reasons. However, by including links to soundbites with the CD reviews,
we think we've solved this issue last year.
Finally, there hasn't been an enormous number of gig reviews in 2001. There's several reasons for
this. First of all, there weren't that many major concerts that the DPRP team members themselves visited. Also, we haven't had a lot of input from
you, the DPRP readers, either. So if you want more gig reviews, you'd better get writing. Nevertheless
Gig Review editor BJ has tried to do one update on each Friday whenever possible for the last couple
of months.
Improving DPRP
This year the participants in the DPRPoll 2001 mentioned the following things most often as
potential areas for improvement.
- More (Regular) News (mentioned 27 x)
- More CD Reviews (mentioned 27 x)
- Earlier CD Reviews (mentioned 14 x)
- More Counting Out Time (mentioned 10 x)
- More Up-to-date Releases Page (mentioned 10 x)
Regarding the News and Releases columns, we have discussed these above and we think that they will
continue to improve, the way they have done the last few months.
As in 2000 and 2001 we have plans to resurrect the Counting Out Time column again, but it all depends
on the 'regular workload' of the editors if we can find the time to actually do something with the
old classic albums again. Rest assured that this one is high on our wish list as well.
There's still some requests regarding the CD Reviews. As mentioned above I think we've got a high
enough output with the current pool of +/- 10 reviewers. I do agree with some poll participants that
the reviews could sometimes be a bit more 'compact' and that we should refrain from reviewing
albums that haven't got anything to do with prog rock. We'll be more critical regarding these
criteria than we've been in the past 2 years.
Lot's of people have said that we are still missing some major releases in our reviews. The reason
for this is explained in the DPRP FAQ and is basically
the same reason why several reviews are often delayed when they finally appear. Since DPRP depends highly
on what bands and labels send us, we don't always receive releases on time, and for some bands we
don't receive promo copies at all because the concerned label probably doesn't consider DPRP
important enough (or whatever). In those cases we depend on the own personal purchases of the reviewers,
and you'll understand that our budgets are as limited as any average prog fan. ;-)
Some record labels, like for instance InsideOut, have always been perfect partners, sending out their
releases well before the release date, enabling us to prepare the reviews well before the concerned
album hits the shops. Other labels however, only send out promo packages once or twice a year. In those
cases we will never be able to review those albums before the release date.
Since we have added a couple of extra reviewers to the team, the average lead time for reviewing
albums once we have received them should become shorter. Please note though that at any time we've got
about 50 albums in the pipeline, which is an average of 5 per reviewer. And since there's only 24 hours
in a day .... ;-)
Nevertheless, if you think a specific album should be reviewed on DPRP, feel free to drop the concerned
band or label an e-mail and suggest that they send us a promo copy. Under normal circumstances we should
be able to review the album in 2 months (which also includes postal lead times of distributing the
albums among our international team).
There's been a lot of other suggestions, which can be found by clicking here.
We'll try to give feedback on all of these 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.
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