Human Rights in Armenia website (HRA) is a very useful resource for both specialists in human rights, researchers and journalists. It has a good archive, and in Armenian segment of Internet HRA website is probably one of the best resources available in the field of human rights. Unfortunately, it does not have many visitors.



Sections



HRA has a user-friendly interface. Each page allows for a user to easily access all other parts of the web-site. The design and ideology of HRA makes it a real tool for a researcher and interesting resource for a common user.

(Due to contemporary web-design, it is difficult to distinguish inner
links\buttons from the banners. For example section “Freedom to political
prisoners” (belongs to HRA), Human Rights Forum (belongs to HRA but domain belongs to Civil Society Institute) and “Hetq Online” is a banner of another website.)



Library



The “International publications” section of the Library is probably the best catalogue of international reports about Armenia – as it is the most complete, has a good archive and full-proof (as well as whole HRA ).

“Armenian NGOs' publications” sections content is very old. The main part of new publications of NGO`s is issued from the owner of HRA, Civil Society Institute,
and this part of the website is updated very rarely. But the tracking shows that the majority of the visitors trying to find information related to activities of Armenian human right NGOs. The keywords which allows for users to get to the HRA website from search engines can be divided into two big groups. First are the keywords related to reports about human rights in Armenia, and the second connected to the activity of Armenian NGOs or famous activist in HR (e.g. Larisa
Alaverdyan).



Point of View



This section has no clear content. In the headline announced “actual articles &
interviews with interesting people”. But actually there are copies of
international reports about Armenia from Library section and a few exclusive
articles or interviews. This section should be more dynamic and actual.



Find partner



The main part of the Directory of the Armenian HR NGOs was last updated in 2001
and is obsolete. For example in the directory of New Armenia- Center of
Humanitarian Assistance NGO there is no information about the existing website
of the organization. The newest update contains no information about NGO except
the name of the chief. This is possibly a reason why HRA may loose its regular
visitors.



Useful links



In the Armenian part of the HRA website, it contains only one issue in the
Useful links directory while the English part contains a lot of links. This
makes Armenian part of the HRA not useful for a great amount of potential local
users.



News



This is a good tool for all kinds of people interested in the situation in
Armenia. This part is full of news form agencies and internet resources can
interest both specialists and ordinary visitors. Perhaps, it would be better to
have more news from newspapers too.

The weekly subscription on the news can be especially useful. But it looks very
muddled and must be improved.



Human Right review and subscription



This section is very helpful tool for researchers, journalists etc.



Promotion



HRA is not registered in some well-known Internet catalogues. For example, in
Russian Rambler search engine or in Armenian biggest net-catalogue Port. It can
be very useful to become a partner of other human rights resources and put the
links on their websites. (On HRA, there can be a new section added - Partners –
with hyperlinks to partners’ websites).

The exclusive materials from News or Point of View can be sent to HR or media
resources such as Reporters without Borders or Groong.



HRA has good locations in the biggest search engines such as Google, Yahoo or
Altavista. For example in the search with keywords “human rights in Armenia” HRA
is at 2-d and 5-th place in Yahoo, 2-d and 3-d place in the Alltheweb, 4-th and
5-th place in Altavista (including the prepaid first two places), the 4-th and
5-th place in Google. This means that for people all over the world who are
involved in human rights, HRA will appear as the best and the most famous
resource in Armenia connected to HR.

It is unable to open HRA for users which have Internet connection through ISP
Arminco. This is a serious problem – about half of Armenian users are clients of
Arminco. This proves to be a serious problem for local users and can effect the
loss of Armenian visitors of HRA.



Statistics and Suggestions



Only 28% of visitors of HRA are from Armenia. The majority of regular users are
from Australia and USA. The average number of weekly unique visitors is 75, hits
- 126.

Advertising, banner exchange combined with providing of dynamically updated
materials are required in this situation.



Samvel Martirosyan,

Journalist and political annalist, Yerevan