Web Site Management: Statistics

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will tell you who is visiting your site, where they came ... search engines they used, their browser types and even Statistics are your most important resource! Used properly, web sitestatistics will tell you who is visiting your site, where they came from,what search engines they used, their browser types and even their monitorresolutions.These statistics are critical for your survival as a webmaster.
You MUSTknow what's going on with your site. Is it being visited and who is visitingit? What pages are people visiting? These are essential statistics that youmust watch carefully and often.Why? To improve your site and it's ability to fulfill it's purpose.
You'veput a lot of work into creating a site and you want it to accomplish somegoal. In order to know if you are achieving the goal, you must look atwhat's going on.I guess the first question a webmaster asks is "is anyone visiting my siteat all?" A hit counter fulfills this need nicely.
You can create a simpleone with CGI, you can use a built-in feature if you use Frontpage 2000, oryou can use any number of free or almost free hit counters available allover the web.For the more complex questions I would recommend a good statistics package.If you are running your own server you have it made - lots of tools areavailable. Otherwise, you would be best served to use one of the freeservices available.
Some good ones are listed below.- Hitbox- Counter.ComIf you are being hosted on one of the many commercial or free sites, it'scertain that they have a statistics package of one sort or anotheravailable.But perhaps you're wondering why you need this data? What's it really for?Well, let's say you have written a site to sell stamps. You have four pagesto the site.
You look at the hit counter and see 400 people visited ityesterday, but only 3 of them bothered to visit your page to see what theycould purchase. In addition, you also see that there were no visitors fromyahoo.com and only a few from other search engines.Now you have some things that you can do.
You can come up with a betterdesign to get your users to the page where they purchase stamps. You can seeif your site is listed with yahoo.com and if not, fix it.
And you can checkthe rankings with other search engines and fix what's going on there.Another statistic might be monitor size. Let's say you designed your sitefor 1024X768 resolution.
You look at your statistics and you find that 80%of the visitors have 800X600 screens. Additionally, you see that there werefew hits on the inner pages on your site.
In this case, you might concludeyour visitors are being turned off because your site does not fit on theirscreen. A redesign might be appropriate.
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