In vogue for web site design where statistics are concerned, are keeping your numbers relatively private, and putting the focus on the quality of your site. Learn more about common web statistics terms mean, and learn how to see what they mean for your site.

A hit, for example, is generated by each object that loads on your pages and registers with a web browser. That means if you have 5 graphics on a page, each one of them will register a hit. More important is a web page view, or page view for short. That measurement tells you that the page loaded successfully in your visitors browser. If you have an informational site, it may be important to have more page views - no one wants to have a resource site that people immediately click away from, for example. Conversely, if most of your blog readers follow you by your feed, you’ll only get a page view registered for each time they access your feed, no matter how many entries they read.

In these cases, it’s even more important to count the visitors. The visitors are counted by the number of times a unique address, computer or person visits your site. Sometimes, the address that would normally determine one visitor is shared, so when visitors go by unique IP address, as they are called, it isn’t always accurate.

It may under-estimate how many visitors, in the case where an Internet Service Provider such as AOL, may use the same IP address to represent all the visitors from one particular area. It may over-estimate how many visitors are coming to your site in the case of an auto-surf program or purchased visitors that aren’t generated by re-directed expired domains or manual surf exchanges. Your web visitor log or statistics program may register thousands of visitors from thousands of IP addresses, and yet none of them view your site.

A more reliable way to measure is by a program that places cookies on a remote user’s computer to track their visit, however some visitors don’t like them as much and may block them. The Google Web Analytics program uses cookies to track visitors, and is free.

If you have visitors that you think will have a problem with cookies, add the purpose of the cookie to your site’s privacy policy. Before you use a program that includes cookies, weigh the probability that more sophisticated users will block them, or not use your site, against how valuable having that data will be in helping you server your clients better.

The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series continues. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below.

Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 24 : Freshness is Key.

You’ve heard, hundreds of times probably, that people come to the internet for information. But what we often overlook is that you and I come to the internet for fresh, updated information. The very nature of the internet implies that the latest thing is available at any hour of the day.

So do so few site owners update their sites on an on-going basis?

Not only should you be updating the content on your individual pages from time to time, you also want to keep adding new pages and sections to your site. The internet is quickly moving to a more dynamic nature.

Leading internet brands such as Google, Yahoo, Technorati, Amazon and Ebay, are all tending towards an internet that is constantly moving into the era of a web that changes on the fly. It is one of the reasons that updating web technology is so popular.

Blogs, content management systems, RSS and any other technology that makes it easier to update portions of your site appeal to this new trend of the web, and it is no accident that frequently changing sites are at the top of the search engines.

Static web pages and sites are becoming a thing of the past. If you don’t want your site to be a dinosaur, join the era of the dynamic web and update your site.

Nina

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