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Follow the trends of your visitors
A site is designed for others- not yourself- to see. Webmasters often
over-indulge themselves in what they like when creating a site, ignoring the audience's
needs. Just because you're an expert in Flash programming, and happen to love Flash on
your site, that doesn't mean your audience equally likes- or is even capable of viewing-
Flash. Knowing the make of your visitors, or more loosely, the general construct of the
internet is essential to designing an effective site.
There are many ways to go about gathering all this information, and we'll discuss the
major ones below.
The log files of your website is the most important tool you have in helping create a site
that caters to your visitors. These huge, clumsy files usually tell you when, how, at what
time, and using what browsers your fans are getting to your corner of the web. If 75% of
people coming in are using IE 4+, as are the visitors of JavaScript Kit, you know you
could more comfortably include extravagant, fancy DHTML effects on your site. If you knew
where your visitors are coming from, you could use that information to more effectively
promote your site, by forming deeper partnerships with sites that send you a lot of
traffic, and re-thinking your position with sites that don't. It's hard to overstress the
importance of log files to the success of your site's design and strategy. Now, these
files by themselves are not going to tell you anything; you'll need to run a log analyzer
on them to extract out human-readable information. A few good (and free) log analyzers
are:
-AXS Site Tracking System (http://www.xav.com/scripts/axs/index.html)
-WebLog (http://awsd.com/scripts/weblog/index.shtml)
For you poor folks who do not have access to your site's log files, as an alternative,
consider adding a third party tracking counter. Two good ones are:
-Extreme Tracking (http://www.extreme-dm.com/tracking/)
-Hitbox.com (http://www.hitbox.com)
-Tutorial Introduction
-Follow the trends of your visitors
-Follow the trends of the internet as a whole
Follow the
trends of the internet as a whole |