Internet Tip - Don't Count Your Hit's!Written by Maria Marsala
Do you have a hosting service that provides statistics for your website? Did you notice that number of "hit's" to your site is astronomical? Many individuals think that number of "hit's" tells you how many visitors you've had to your site. WRONG! The correct number to find would be number of unique visitors or unique sites. Even if one person visited your site 4 times and viewed 10 of your pages, they'd count as "1" unique visitor.What do you do if your hosting service doesn't provide "unique visitor" statistics? According to Jim Wilson, owner of one of most useful sites on web, www.jimtools.com, your "best bet is page views when dealing with your server logs. Another way to go is to use a service like WebTrends Live www.webtrends.com which does a pretty good job of figuring out total visitors and first time visitors." Jim has written an excellent article on web traffic www.jimworld.com rafficreports.html HIT: Every time someone views a page on your site, each page, each document they could download on that page, and each graphic on that page makes up "hit's" for that page. Example: one page with 4 pictures is equal to 5 hits.
| | Choosing A Web Site Content Management System Written by Michael Park
As saying goes on web "Content is King." There is no argument that if you are going to have an effective Internet presence you must have current, dynamic content that gives your visitors reasons to come back time and again. While content may be king there seems to be little discussion about optimal way to manage this content for small to medium sized businesses. Have you ever noticed that when your building web site you have plenty of helping hands but once site is launched and daily grind of support kicks in it becomes harder and harder to find that help. This is why it is so important to evaluate your Content Management System (CMS) for you web site in development stages. Every web site has some form of content management system in place, except for those that never change. The CMS can be as informal as an email to web developer or a multi-million dollar computer program that warehouses data from several different databases. In focusing on small to medium sized businesses I have decided to eliminate big dollar systems and concentrate on three major types of CMS's available. The first type of CMS is default traditional and most widely used method I call manual update system. This usually requires sending information to web developer. The web developer then utilizes their FTP program and HTML coding skills to make requested changes. The changes are then reviewed and approved by requester. The problem with this model is that web developer is usually a high priced contractor and not an in-house resource. This means that you end paying a hefty price for web site changes. The cost of web site changes becomes a budget issue so you end up reducing number of changes you make to your site in turn reducing its overall value. The second type of CMS is WYSIWYG system. This model allows web site owner to use one of graphical web development tools on market today such as FrontPage or Net Objects Fusion. These are great programs that allow you to make changes to web site in a graphical look. The changes are simple and if you configure software correctly you can update your web site with a few clicks of mouse. The problem with this model is that you become dependent on WYSIWYG tool. If you can't get to FrontPage then you can't make your change unless you resort back to our first model. But now it gets a little trickier. These WYSIWYG tools create very convoluted HTML code so manual changes can become very time consuming. Another draw-back of model is that if your company utilizes a tool like this to create their site they may limit themselves to graphical templates that come with software. You end up getting a site that looks pretty much like everybody else's. Furthermore, I think it is important for any company planning on building or revamping their web site to meet with a web development company to at least review best practices for web development.
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