In a web service research conducted by the Finnish IT weekly news journal Tietoviikko, partner of IDG, at the end of the year 2002, Helsinki Fair Ltd Wanha Satama received excellent results within its own comparison group. The research compared the quality of their web service with those of several companies, sectors and indexes.

Helsinki Fair Ltd participated in the research with their web site, www.wanhasatama.com. In its own group, Wanha Satama received the highest mean value. Companies and indexes used for comparison included the financial newspaper Kauppalehti, index 2002 Yrityspalvelut, index 2002 Finland 250, Talentum.com, Kontakti.net, the Finnish phone book yellow pages' web service Keltaiset sivut, the Finnish Fair Corporation and the corporate index Yritystele.

The Wanha Satama web service was evaluated in the following categories: corporate information, financial and product information, customer service, orientation, navigation and usability. According to the research, Wanha Satama's special strengths were in presenting corporate information, navigation on the pages (the possibility for users to move around within the service) and usability of the pages (logical structure and uniform visual design).

The Wanha Satama web service is a business-critical solution for Helsinki Fair Ltd, and therefore navigation and usability were stressed when designing the user interface. Users can easily and quickly go where they wish on the pages, and the pages themselves are easy-to-use: it is easy to learn how to use them and to remember how to use them. Teamware Group has realised the web service on its platform Teamware Pl@za®. The service offers an interactive market place for visitors to events and exhibitors at trade fairs. With the service, exhibitors at fairs are able to reach their desired target groups and visitors to events are able to easily find the experts, services or products they need.

'With our web site wanhasatama.com we wish to provide increasingly improving service to the customers of our exhibitors. It is very easy for a visitor to be in contact via our service with exhibitors and send requests for brochures, contacts and proposals to more than one company at a time,' relates Olli Syvänen, Managing Director of Helsinki Fair Ltd. 'It is profitable to exhaust every possible advantage of a successful event. Our web service enables that: an event continues on the web for twelve months and our customers can be reached online until the next event. There were 188.007 visitors to our web site in 2002 (source: Pl@za webalizer), which in itself proves that the web service together with the events are a combination bringing more value to the users.'