Web page investigated: http://ameristat.org
Date accessed: May 9, 2000
Objective of the page:
This page was developed by the Population Reference Bureau and the Social Science Data Analysis Network and provides information and statistics on U.S. population data. Both the PRB and the SSDAN are private organizations that have collaborated on producing the Ameristat web-page.
Effectiveness of the page:
I found this page to be full of useful and interesting data. The page provides excellent graphical representations of data. It also allows you to produce graphs of data in ways that it is not already presented and the site gives you access to data files used (these can be downloaded into Excel or as a tab-delimited ascii file).
Moving around through the site is easy, although at this stage they have no search mechanism associated with the site. All links are current and updated as the page is relatively new (its actually still being developed and many parts of the site are not completed yet). The site gives you links to all the sites from which data was obtained, so you have easy assess to delve further on any one topic.
The only problem I found with the page was one associated with presentation- its graphics (and sometimes text) often did not come through clearly, although this could be rectified by enlarging and reducing the graphics. This is likely a problem with the browser used, although I tried both Netscape and Internet Explorer and found the problem occurred when using both browsers.
Topics currently covered on the site:
Topics that are still be developed: