November 18, 2009 - AccessKenya Group’s portal, @home in Kenya, has partnered with exclusive websites to provide diverse shopping avenues for its fast growing audience numbers and as demand for varied relevant information keeps on a steady increase.

 

“We are pleased to note that visitor numbers to the portal hit the one million hits mark and its content is growing at an impressive 20 pages per week. Additionally, the portal has received consistent improved ratings by international website ranking service, alexa.com <http://alexa.com> and today stands at position 17 up from position 63, two weeks ago. No mean achievement,” commented Petra Somen, the Portal’s manager.

 

This month, the country's top restaurant listings website, EatOutinKenya opened its full restaurant listings and table booking service on the site. In @home's new shopping mall, the first online store to go live was totallytoto.com <http://totallytoto.com>, specialising in high-quality kid's clothes and accessories that are delivered within 24 hours of ordering. The next store to open in the online mall will be bagalicious.com <http://bagalicious.com>, selling handbags and accessories. The portal will soon have a leading online bookstore on board.

 

 Already available on the site are jobs from webarazacareers.com <http://webarazacareers.com> , which is ranked among Kenya 's top 100 best-read websites; more than 1,000 properties for sale from 34 estate agencies supplying content to market leader propertyleo.com <http://propertyleo.com> ; and articles from specialist websites, such as kenyakidz.com <http://kenyakidz.com> .

 

“With the landing of the fibre optics and increased online population, there is need for more content for users to find the need to stay online and this is what the portal is doing. What we are finding is that once people do come to the site they are using many parts of its content, across many different types of information, opening a lot of pages on each visit, and visiting repeatedly,” said Petra .

“The uptake by the site, even in such early days, by a growing audience adopting it as their own homepage is exactly in line with our aim,” added Petra .

 

The Kenyan homepage, which is now 8 months old, offers the day's top Kenyan news headlines, Google searching, weather, local shopping online, blogs, jobs, more than 1,000 properties for sale, Yellow Pages' contacts, hotel and home let listings, as well as a high-quality range of Kenyan features on health, beauty, restaurants, recipes, i.e. if you are stuck for tonight’s dinner party, sports and lifestyle, has now emerged as the country's top entry point to Kenya's local Internet content.

 

AccessKenya now leads the market as the provider of residential Internet connections and the portal is aimed at enabling the home users to access truly Kenyan information found on the site www.home.co.ke.

 

According to the site’s Managing Editor, Jenny Luesby, “Our target was to draw together, from a single starting point, the very best information services the country had to offer, across multiple content partnerships, and combine them with the highest quality of information produced by our own team of in-house journalists.”

 

The website, whose traffic and advertising are growing steadily, has become a primary resource web site for finding information in Kenya . In the last three months, users of the portal viewed an average of 11 pages per visit to the site and spent an average of 25 minutes per visit.