MORE readers than ever are visiting the Newsquest Lancashire web site with virtually every category recording record-breaking figures.

Overall our site saw a 32 per cent increase from Christmas into the new year with page impressions now totalling 5,347,690.

And the Preston Citizen almost doubled its on-line readership. In January we received almost 8,785 page impressions - our highest ever - and February is on course to beat that.

With more than 60,000 web pages to search, it's no wonder our comprehensive electronic guide to Lancashire is reaching readers others can't.

In the past year our traffic has increased by 365 per cent, firmly establishing Newsquest Lancashire, as a leading regional web site.

The impact of the Internet cannot be ignored.

As Preston Citizen editor, Naomi Bunting, said: "We know from the volume of email sent to us daily how effective and well received our web site is.

"But it's still hard to believe that we receive almost 12,000 requests for pages PER DAY!"

In January, our situations vacant received 9,206 hits, a 77 per cent increase since December.

Classifieds broke records with 41,300 accesses in January, that's 64 per cent up on last year.

And it's been a similar success story for property and tourism. Motors enjoyed record traffic with some 4,338 hits in January and our what's on site is obviously the in-place for your social diary, with some 2,618 hits made last month.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.