Administration of a World Wide Web site during a period of rapid growth: the OncoLink experience.

OncoLink is a cancer information resource on the World Wide Web that provides a wide variety of information for both patients and health care providers. Introduced in March 1994, OncoLink has enjoyed a 50-fold increase in use since then, with more than 1.8 million accesses per month as of February 1997. New items are added daily, and the OncoLink Web site currently contains more than 10,000 files. During this period of rapid growth, the complexity of managing and maintaining OncoLink has increased as well. Consequently, we developed administrative procedures to handle our workload, which involves content editing, technical (or production) editing, and Web site maintenance. The new strategies have greatly reduced the need for face-to-face meetings of our editorial and production staffs. The rapid growth of OncoLink would not have been possible without these efficient new strategies for managing its daily operation.