Cheerful Net is a web service for seniors established in September 2000. The idea of Cheerful Net is to function as a portal for seniors having only a little or not at all experience in using computers. The aim was to allure the seniors to use the Internet. The content was supposed to consist of themes interested for seniors. There are three "main worlds" in the web service: the world of learning, the world of travelling and the world of health. The aim is to take the needs of seniors into consideration in producing the context as well as in the de-sign of the web pages. The service should be practical and easy to use.
The service was established as a part of the Adult Education week campaign and marketed through its channels. A brochures called 'Computer for joy and help' and 'Cheerful net magazine' were produced and distributed to guide the seniors' way into Internet and arouse their interest. Insufficient financial resources and co-operation with the partners have been the main problems. The co-operation has not functioned as expected. The producing of the content has been the responsibility of the Finnish Association of the Adult Education Centres and it's member organisations, although the expectation was, that Alma Media would have participated in the producing of the content or at least supported the work financially. There were not enough resources for co-ordinating the service and producing and maintaining the content. No extra funding was planned for this job, which turned out to be a big mistake. The only existing funding was the one gained for the Adult Education week campaign from Ministry of Education, but it was totally inadequate for developing of the web service. The expectation was, that the financial resources would mainly come from commercial stakeholders (like Alma media), but this had at least not yet happened. The result is, that by now there has not been enough own content in the Cheerful net. It has been too much based on the links to the other web pages. If a web service is not constantly maintained and new content produced, it is a kind dead service and people won't use it. Consequently, the number of monthly users of the Cheerful net has fallen.
last update 2002-03-18