Background The Web is a frequent dissemination path for injury prevention and care information, but little is known about naturalistic, real-world use of Web-based information. AfterTheInjury.org is an empirically grounded website developed to help parents help their children recover from injury, focusing on secondary prevention of traumatic stress symptoms.

Methods AfterTheInjury.org pages have embedded Google Analytics code to track use and navigation. Each page was categorised (by content) as a page for parents to: learn about injury/traumatic stress (Learn), rate child reactions (Rate), or find ways to help their child (Act); plus administrative pages (Administration). The Google Analytics interface was used to download site use statistics. Analyses were conducted to describe patterns of: overall use, use by page type, and users navigational paths.

Results In calendar year 2009, 7695 users visited the website. For the majority (73.05%), this was their first visit. On average, they visited 4.66 pages for an average length of visit of 2 min 13 s. The longest time was spent on Learn pages (597 516 total seconds across users) followed by Act (243 359 seconds), Administrative (125 719 s), and Rate pages (60 583 s). Most users enter and leave the site via Learn pages (enter: n=6908, 89.77%; exit: n=5740, 74.6%).

Conclusion New, robust analytical tools revealed that users preferred learning to intervention on this website. Such analyses provide insights for optimising websites to meet user needs while effectively delivering evidence-based information.