If you were asked today how is your website doing, could you give an informed, statistical answer (or even just a broad, general statement)? Most websites come with lots of statistics and you could actually easily spend hours (daily) analyzing these stats. But what are the important statistics and what should you focus on?

One of the largest misnomers that exists today with webmasters, owners and advertisers is the classic “hits” statistic, which is used to very misleadingly describe website visitation. 

Evidently this has really struck a chord – What exactly is a HIT?

A “hit” is a retrieval of any item, like a page or a graphic, from a Web server. For example, when a visitor looks at one web page with six graphics (photos, logos, graphical buttons, even a tiny arrow or other icon – these are all examples of graphics), that’s seven hits, one for the page itself and six for the graphics. For this reason, hits are never a clear indication of Web traffic. In other words – hits are based on the number of times a graphic is viewed (or another file, such as audio, video, or a document, is accessed). For instance, a website owner may have noticed, or been told, that the new photo gallery added to his/her site had increased the site’s “hits” tenfold. “Wow,” he or she thinks. “That must mean I’m getting 10 times more web traffic now!” Unfortunately, this is NOT SO. It simply means that the pages viewed are more graphic (or photo) heavy, thereby driving up that misleading “hits” statistic.

In a nutshell, a hit has no meaningful correlation with your website’s results.

But I have been quoted hits by my webmaster, by the radio station that sells advertising, and even by some very large and reputable business. Don’t lots of hits mean a very busy website?

A great analogy was given to me by my hairdresser (“Bubba”) when discussing this exact topic. He stated that hits would be equivalent to how many hairs he cut in a day (not how many heads). If he wanted to impress an associate he could claim to have cut 10,000 hairs on a given day – but in reality it would be the number of heads (people) that paid for a hair cut that would produce his bottom line results. I have to say to this very day I cringe when someone tells me how great their website is doing and uses hits as their statistic! Sadly, I know immediately they don’t actually understand their website.

So enough with HITS – lets get some real statistics on the table…

Here are some key statistics that can help you better analyze your website:

• Website Session 
• Unique Visitors
• Number of Visits
• Number of Viewed Pages
• Website Conversions
• Visits Duration
• Frequently Viewed Pages
• Referring Search Engines
• Referring Web Sites
• Key Phrases & Words

Here is a brief summary of these statistics:

Website Session:

A website session is the period of time between a visitor coming to your website and then leaving your website. The website session parameters are set by your website statistics package – so you can find variance in different packages – but generally, a session is a person coming to your website, browsing around, and then leaving your website.

Unique Visitor:

A “Unique Visitor” is the primary measuring unit you will want to focus on. Website owners care about visitors, because having lots of visitors is the target of nearly all websites. A visitor can buy a product, review a service, become a prospect, follow up with a call to your organization, or even simply view an advertisement. Most stats packages give you hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly unique visitors stats. This is your bottom line – no matter what outcomes you want from your website. 

Number of Visits:

The number of visits is the actual recording of each time ANY visitor comes to the site for a session – he or she may be a new visitor or a repeat visitor. You should pay attention to the difference between the number of visits and unique visits. If you are getting lots of new, unique visitors but only slightly higher numbers in overall visits, that means your visitors aren’t finding much on your site to bring them back. The overall number of visits is a great indication of levels of interest or progressions to an outcome on your site.

Number of Pages Viewed: 

Another very valuable stat is pages viewed. A page – any page that is browsed to on your website -records a page view (for that particular page). When people go to websites, they view pages, and this is always one of the most meaningful statistics on your website. Pages viewed always reminds me to make sure that a site’s content is kept up to date and accurate across the entire website.

Website Conversions:

The term “conversion” does not mean a recorded statistics as such, but it is the bottom line outcome you desire fom your website. When you develop your website these desired outcomes should be clearly identified. If you have a retail shop – your conversion is the actual sale of a product. If you are a realtor, your conversion may be an inquiry form being filled out, a house tracking account being opened up, or an e-mail inquiry being sent. For BeareWare, our conversions result in either a new web design inquiry or e-news subscriber. If the website has led a visitor to take some action according to the actual purpose of the site, then a conversion has been created.

Visits Duration:

Visit duration tells you how long a visitor actually stayed on your website. Time measurements are 0-30 seconds, 2-5 minutes, 5-15 minutes, 15-30 minutes, 30 minutes-1 hour, and then 1 hour plus. This statistic is an absolute eye-opener about the general behavior of visitors to your site. If your website’s current information (its “content”) is not up-to-date, or it is difficult for a visitor to find that information on your site, chances are the visits will be in the 0-30 second range. Good sites with rich information should experience 2-5 minutes or above. Either way, understanding visitation duration can really help you make adjustments and enhancements to your site.

Frequently Viewed Pages:

This statistic tells you what specific pages are being viewed by visitors to your website. It also tells you the amount of times a particular page is visited, so you can establish what your key pages are on your  site, as well as what pages you have that people are not visiting (and appropriately analyze why.). Obviously, you want your conversion pages (ones that lead to conversion-specific actions) to be way up there on visitation. Viewed pages also includes entry page statistics (the first page a visitor goes to – which is quite often not your home page if they are taken there via a search engine), and also the page on which they exited your Web site (which can sometimes hint at a page that is out of date or lacks any key information).

Referring Search Engines:

Search engines are a great opportunity for getting new visitors to your website. There are many things that can be done to ensure that you have a prominent listing on a search engine – but knowing which search engines are producing the most referrals can help with your search engine strategy. Of course, there are lots of other methods to get visitors to your site (word of mouth, general advertising, links,) but this stat really is about people not knowing you and finding you by key words on a search engine. Search engines have robots that search the Internet continuously and establish key phrases and words that describe your site. This is how the search engine establishes an index on your website. You can also submit these phrases and words directly to the search engine to improve your chances of appearing on a search (this is one aspect of what is known as SEO – Search Engine Optimization). Google Word ads and search engine advertising will also help increase search engine traffic, but at a price. 

Referring Website:

Referring websites are what I consider “word of mouth” online.  This is the stat that shows you which specific website the visitor found out about you on (and actually took the link on that site to get to you). Online advertising is the primary method that sends visitors to other websites, but key links are also a good way to get additional traffic. Usually there will have to be a key relationship or benefit to have your organization linked on another site, but there is no doubt that getting your website’s link on other sites can help grow your business and also increase your positioning on search engines. This is a great statistic to use to monitor how well your outside advertising or link exchanges are working, for instance, and may help in your future marketing decisions.  

Key Phrases & Words:

Being listed on a search engine is not enough to ensure that people will find you through key phrases and word searches. Your website will also need “meta tags” which are tags that the web robots will look for that describe your site for search engine indexing. Adding these phrases and key words to the search engine directly, and also in your title line on each page, will also help in searching. This statistic tells you which are the primary key phrases and words visitors used to search for your website. They are the words people type into a search engine to find you when they don’t know your company’s name. If your website is missing obvious key words or phrases, then you should make sure your webmaster adds them to your meta tags and search engines submissions to optimize your results.

As can be seen by statistics explanations I have listed here, developing your statistical understanding of your website will take some dedicated time and effort. If you have a good web company that works with you on hosting, support and management – they should be your key contact in terms of reviewing these statistics periodically. Besides your hosting statistics package there are also statistical packages known as “web analytics” which are offered by leading search engines. Statistics reinforce your investment in your website, identify results, and give you a clear path to adjustments for future results. They also are extremely valuable when developing a new website – by knowing what the results are from your existing site, you will be much more in tune with the changes and improvements you will need in a new site.

Take the time to understand your website statistics. It will be time well-invested!

Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) have become the new standard of websites on the Internet and are clearly the way of the future for website owners.  When the Internet first came into being, computer people and then graphic design people stated developing websites.

If they were like BeareWare, most likely their first development was for a friend or a club, and the initial tools used to develop the website were wide and varied. Besides coding in HTML directly (which was the preference of many programmers), a group of tools were developed by companies that helped in the development process. Some of the most common tools were Microsoft products such as Publisher or Frontpage. More sophisticated products were found with Dreamweaver and Flash (which really became specilized for great graphic effects), as well as other development tools.

With these first generation website development tools, the webmaster would install the development tool on their PC and then would use the tool to help develop the website. This would usually be done “off-line” – and then when the website was finished, it would be FTP’d (published) to the Internet.  Of course, this was fine for the webmaster, who would make the changes and then re-publish the updated site. For the “non-webmaster” – which in essence became a website owner (client) – it meant that all website content was bound to go through a webmaster to get online. This really was the first generation of websites: a website owner (client) would use a product like Microsoft Word to type out his/her new content or changes, then would e-mail the information off to the webmaster (and pray that it would actually get online quickly). A few more adventurous web owners learned to use publishing and editing tools in order to manage their site directly, but most would have found that the task required a lot more than just having the new content ready to go.

Apparently a lot of website owners are still sending content to their Webmasters for updates. So what came along to give Website Owners an opportunity to manage content independent of a webmaster ?

What actually came along was the second generation of website development tools in the form of Opensource Systems, Website Builders and Custom Application Websites. These are actually systems that allow website owners to update their content directly through a web browser, with no extra software tools needed. Let’s have a quick look at each system:

Custom Application Websites are usually created for very large website projects that have unique business requirements within their business model. This is the most expensive way to develop a website – starting from scratch and developing each piece of the application. Of course, any change to the site may require additional custom work – and support and upgrades are a key consideration. Many smaller companies in the early 2000’s period chose to develop websites this way, but sadly many did not have a specific unique business model and did not truly need a custom application. These companies ended up spending thousands of dollars on a site that become obsolete within several years. Ultimately, the company invested heavily in a program that had no long term future. Custom Applications are now geared towards major business applications and have ongoing development aims.

Website Builders are websites that actually allow a website owner to build his/her own website through the online builder. Once the site is built, the website owner can then update their own content and ultimately elminate the need for a webmaster. Today there are many web builders out there – but the biggest issue with the web builder is their limitation to customizations that a client may need. The builder uses pre-existing theme templates and therefore does not directly design the site based on the client’s business & marketing models. Website builders are less expensive than custom websites, and if you have a very limited budget, are fairly proficient with computers, and are simply looking for a starter website, this is a reasonable option to consider.

Open Source – which was a form of system development that had been around since the 1970’s really caught wind in the Internet world with Content Management Systems (CMS) in the late 1990’s. In early 2000, several world class CMS systems started to emerge. These systems are database driven and come as a base application which is installed on a web server. The source code of these systems is “open”, meaning that programmers (like BeareWare) are allowed to customize the system for each client’s requirements. At the same time, these systems allow for direct content management through a web browser, giving website owners (clients) the full ability to manage and update their content.

You’ve no doubt come across hundreds of sites driven by CMS without even realizing it. Take blogs, for instance, or those news sites that allow you to add your comments to a story. These are very powerful systems that are developed by some of the leading programmers around the world, with the development of new versions being an on going process. Open Source CMS systems also have a very large user base who all contribute to feature requests and future enhancements. The beauty of Open Source CMS is that the application you are using is state-of-the-art (and would cost thousands of dollars if written from scratch) – but actually comes royalty free, with the client cost being spent in customization and implementation of the website itself.

So, Open Source Content Management Systems are the future?

Absolutely!  BeareWare has been using OpenSource CMS Systems with our clients for over two years. The system we use is called Joomla! (with an exclamation point enthusiastically included in the name). It has an estimated 5 million users around the world, and we believe it is the best content management system in existence, not only delivering our clients the latest technology today, but also ensuring them the lastest technology of the future. The system comes with a custom administration area that is simply superb and very user friendly. CMS puts the web owners in the driver seat while reducing their webmaster management fees long term.

I cannot emphasize how important it is to look forward 3-5 years and think about where your website will be. If you have to start from scratch every few years – you will be perpetually questioning your website investment. But if you have an Open Source CMS website, the latest technology will always be right at your fingertips. And while you may decide to change the look of your website in the future, you can rest assured that your Open Source CMS site can undergo a graphical makeover in a very short period of time, and for just a fraction of the cost of a completely new website.  

If you have used Mircosoft Word or Publisher, you will find similiar content tools for updating both text and images with your CMS systems. These systems also have add-on modules such as Online Shops, e-NEWS, Photo Galleries and Events Calendars (just to name a few). They all intergrate beautifully into the Joomla! CMS system. We at BeareWare anticipate that all of our clients will be using the CMS system by the middle of 2008, and we will be dedicating resouces in the area of client training and documentation as our clients become content managers and take charge of their website. It is definitely an exciting time to be a website owner with the new Open Source CMS Systems…

What are the key factors to consider when selecting a web design company?

This seems like a very broad question. I don’t think it needs to be. Here are some things I would recommend looking for:

1. Does the company have a good website itself? Does their website provide easy access to their portfolio and websites they have developed? Is there plenty of information that is easy to find about their services, their expertise and what they specialize in. As dumb as this seems if the web design company doesn’t have a great website you have to question their ability to produce a great website for you.

2. Does the company provide a strong design portfolio on their website? The best way to really see how good a website design and development company is – is to look at their work. Do they have a good portfolio – do they explain the different industries they develop for and do they identify the features involved with their portfolio. And…. do you like the websites in their portfolio?

3. Does the company offer expertise in multiple disciplines? This should include graphic & web design, web marketing, web development & computer programming, web hosting & management and business development. You should be looking for a company that will collaborate with you from the start of the project thru to web hosting & support.

Does that mean hiring a large company that has a lot of different people who have these skills sets?

Not at all – but you want to make sure you have a full understanding of the team that is going to develop your website and that they have the necessary skills sets.  It generally takes at least two people in my opinion to ensure a great website. You should have a dedicated designer and developer and then at least one other person managing the entire process (Project Manager and Customer Relations). When you take into account how subjective graphic design can be it is always a good idea to have the client, the web designer and the project manager all working together during the design process.

The designer and developers primary job is to produce the best possible design and then successfully develop and implement that website. Their focus should be very specific. A project manager helps keep the development on track – and also looks at areas such as hosting, management, support, training and domain names. You also want this process to be mean and lean – and within your budget and time frames – so look specifically at the team that is going to build your website and make sure they can deliver.

Other key points to consider are:

4. Does the company offer Web Hosting and Management? Beware of companies that sell you on the best website designs – and then look you in the eye and state – “You can host your website anywhere….”. This is a sure sign that this company does not see a role with your company once the website is launched. They don’t see you as a long term relationship – and they are there to basically design and run.

5. Will the company meet or conference call to discuss your business in detail? You really want a web design company that has a collaborative approach to your website – teaming up with you to produce a successful outcome. It is unlikely that filling out a quick application form online and a “we will be back to you shortly with your quote” is going to cut it. Your website is an extension of your business and marketing models and collaboration is required to successfully incorporate that into a website.

6. Will the company provide client referrals for design, development, hosting and management? Speak to the web design company’s new client(s) and discuss the design and development experience. Then contact an existing client to discuss hosting and support experiences. This should give you a good feel for whether the company is right for you.

7. Will the company provide you with a detailed proposal/quote? This should include hourly billing rates, specific breakdowns of the project, timelines for tasks to be completed, and should include domain setup and registration and hosting. The proposal should cover from the start of the project all the way to annual hosting, support and training. 

You seem pretty passionate about this. Care to elaborate?

BeareWare provides fixed pricing on all our proposals and quotes. We are passionate about delivering a client’s website on budget and on time.

I think a web development project can go south before it even gets started pending the proposal and quotes that you have in place. I cannot imagine how many businesses have entered into a web development project and not got fixed costs and guaranteed timelines. Months later and thousands of dollars spent the client still hasn’t actually got the website they want – and worse – the web design  company doesn’t host websites – so now the website’s full responsibility falls back to client.

The proposals and quotes don’t have to be pages of agreements to be effective. They must cover all aspects of the web project – hourly billing rate, specific development tasks and the time involved, hosting and domain name setup and training. You want to cover everything and you want have a guaranteed cost on that these tasks. And if things need changing – if the first sample designs don’t meet your expectations – what happens – who pays for extra project work. All these items must be clear before you commence you new website.

8. Do you feel you can communication effectively with the company? This should be established in your inquiry calls, meetings, and proposal/quote process. Your website is such an important part of your business and in many cases it will be part of your daily business operations. In these cases do you feel confident you can pick up the phone for support or for analysis discussions with this company?

9. Can the company identify clear units of measure to track the success of your website? This is an area that is often overlooked. What are the parameters that are most important to the website – is it overall traffic (unique visitors) or is it specifically the e-commerce dollars generated or prospects established. It may be a combination of each – but the measurement of your website should not be based purely on “it looks nice” – it should be based on statistics – so make sure the design company has a strong knowledge of webstats.

10. Does the development include training for your CMS Website? I have seen several web design companies stating “how easy” it is to update you own website content with a CMS system. Of course this statement is generally written by an industry based professional – and although the CMS systems are reasonably straight forward to use – always ask about training – does the design company provide users manuals. Establish whether the web design company has a heart of a teacher in their approach to working with you.

In summary there are some good questions that you can ask when researching a web design and development company. Look for a company that has a long term view to your relationship as this will help guarantee your long term success and satisfaction. Stay clear of the design and run companies and make sure your development has a fixed budget. Ask plenty of questions and make sure you find a company that you feel comfortable communicating with…

Goodluck with your new website!