waltdesign.com » Web Development

New Website Live

Walter Wimberly — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:16:16 +0000

Just released another client website into the wild – In Focus Family Law. The site was developed using WordPress as a Content Management System. While WordPress is normally used for blogging, recent versions have allowed it to be used for normal websites even easier.

The front end interface was designed by a former student of mine, and I converted her designs into the WordPress template.

We choose WordPress because:

The number of plug-ins readily available to help develop the site faster and cheaper.
The ability to customize pages based upon their needs.
The ability for the customer to update their pages.

If you are looking to host your own site, or need a site set up, please let us know.

Additional needs for Efficiency

Walter Wimberly — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:10:46 +0000

Web Worker Daily recently brought up how some local Internet providers are looking to meter users bandwidth. What this basically means is that you are (usually) given a base amount of data you can transfer per month, then for each additional unit, usually gigabytes, they charge you an additional fee.

If you have a website, you are probably aware of this yourself. You can have so much traffic, and additional traffic creates an additional charge. We’ve discussed in the past how you will want to be careful of your site design as it will affect your charges.

Now, you need an efficient site because not only will it cost you more if you don’t, but it will cost your customers more. And they will not like that. If they start telling their friends it will generate the type of publicity you don’t need.

So make your site fast, cheap to host, and cheap to view.

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Optimize your site for more users

Walter Wimberly — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:26:13 +0000

We’ve talked in the past about optimizing your web site so it runs a quickly as possible. This is nice of course as no one wants to wait for your pages to load. And with so many people having high-speed internet access, people’s desire to wait has gone down. (High speed access isn’t a license to triple your page size!)

We’ve also pointed out how Google is using your page load time now as a factor for where to rank your “pay-per-click” adwords ads.

Well now a new survey has come out that says that many (about 35%) of the people who don’t have high-speed internet, choose to not have. They don’t see the need for the speed, or higher costs.

So when you are sitting at your office, or home, and zipping along on you web page, remember that a large number of people will see your site load 3 to 5 times slower. So if that 10 or 20 second load time is driving you nuts, remember that others might see it in 30 seconds to 2 minutes.

If you want to know how your page responds to a variety of users, feel free to give me a call. I would be more than happy to offer a free consultation on how to improve your website.

Firefox Blocks Attack Site

Walter Wimberly — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:09:15 +0000

Recently I downloaded the Firefox 3 web browser as part of the download day. I’ve been using Firefox since version 1, and have always like it. I find it is generally faster and more consistent than Internet Explorer, and also has fewer security holes.

This screen shot came up the day after I installed it. A link that I had followed from a trusted site took me to a site which apparently had been compromised.

Just another reason I enjoy using Firefox.

Web 2.0 – Understanding Wikis

Walter Wimberly — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:09:44 +0000

Image via WikipediaBlogs work great in some circumstances. For example, they work well with a singular person pushing out information and getting feedback. However, the person leaving feed back cannot change the original posting. And there are times when parts of a page need to be edited, and/or new content pages added. Wiki’s are a good Web 2.0 method of solving this problem.

Wiki – Hawaiian for Quick, although I know not how that relates allows anyone (within reason) to modify, add, and update pages to the system.

Wikipedia is the best know wiki with millions of articles in dozens of languages. It allows anyone to make changes, or even add pages and categories.

Wikis are based off of the idea of the wisdom of the crowd. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, first published in 2004, states that “the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

Instead of seeing an inaccuracy and reporting it, letting people continue to see it, possibly missing a comment, the person who sees the inaccuracy can go right in and change it.

Wikis are becoming increasing popular for project management and tracking. In it everything from meeting notes, specifications, documentation, and even library files can be stored in the wiki. IBM has become one of the best know companies to use wikis to track meetings minutes, events, projects and more. However other companies from law offices, to consumer stores, have implemented wikis to promote communication and knowledge transfer among their workers.

To make them easier to use by non technical people, many wikis allow standard features like Rich Text Editing (Word like editing), and allowing people to search within the Wiki, without requiring anyone to know anything about HTML, or Wiki markup.

Small Business don’t Utilize the Web 2.0?

May 1st – RSS Day

Walter Wimberly — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:32:15 +0000

I’ve waited to post the next article as this news falls so in line with keeping up with Keeping up with other’s blogs. I mentioned using RSS feeds to watch other people’s blogs easier.

Well someone liked RSS so much, they wanted to promote its use more. Thus RSS Day was born.

I have always provided and RSS feed for people to subscribe to if they want. Additionally, you can also get the same information via e-mail if you don’t have an RSS feed reader. Just use the bright orange icons near the top right of the column to subscribe to our posts.

However, what most people don’t know is that RSS can be used for more than just tracking author’s blogs. Here are some other ways which they can be used.

Tracking New Class Offerings – I developed this at my job a while back to inform others on training opportunities that the company offered
Managing Meetings – we noticed than classes are really just a meeting time with a specific goal, so why not use them to track meetings too. Google Calendar will allow you to generate an RSS feed which you and other’s can subscribe to.
Job Postings – I’m currently developing an RSS feed to allow people to keep up with new job postings on an internal job board
News outlets
- By category
- Popularity
- Overall
Tracking site changes
For Fun (Comics and TV Listings) – I’ve seen several instance’s where this has worked well. So don’t forget in all of this work, to have a little fun.

If you want to see a good video on RSS feeds check out this ~3 minute video:

Keeping up with other’s blogs

Walter Wimberly — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:24:08 +0000

As blogs make it easier to publish more information, the process of finding information becomes more difficult. This makes keeping up with the Blogs harder than keeping up with the Jones!

Consider one of two options to keeping up with the feeds:

Check and read every blog/web site of interest to you all the time (daily), wasting all of your time and energy doing so.
Ignore the blogs and use a search engine when ever you need information – but now you don’t keep up with things as they happen.

Neither of these are good things. The early developers of blogs knew this, so they create a way to let people automatically know about new postings. This is done through Really Simple Syndication, often referred to as RSS. RSS is a special file format that can be read by RSS Readers to alert users of updates.

RSS readers come in several forms. They can be a like a normal desktop application, built into most modern browsers, or web based services.

What they do is periodically check RSS feeds that you “subscribe” to, and alert the user when changes occur. If the Blog post a full feed, you don’t even have to leave your reader to view the post. Partial feeds give you a summary of the posting, or the first few paragraphs and require you to go to the site to see the full article.

You will find that different RSS reader applications provide different levels of usage. I used the built in feature to the Firefox browser at first. I was able to track 10 – 12 blogs that way. Unfortunately, it didn’t show me which posts I’d already seen, and it only lets you see titles, no summaries or full postings. This created a lot of wasted time.

Then I switched to Google Reader. Now I track over 120 blogs, and can even share items with others, because it lets me operate more efficiently. I track things that help me to do my job better, (Web technologies, database feeds, web analytics, search engine information) as well as news, cartoons, historical notes, and Feakenomics. Like most reader software, it allows me to mark items as being read (so I don’t continue to see them) star them for importance, and share favorite postings.

Because RSS can be used for many different purposes, I’ve been able to track regular postings, as well as meeting announcements, on-line classes, and more.

May 1^st is RSS Awareness day. While a week and a half away, it is a good time to learn about how it can help simplify your life.

photo credit: Chesi – Fotos CC

Blog Examples in a Website

Walter Wimberly — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:25:12 +0000

In the last article, we looked at why you would want to use a blog on your web site. We mentioned that people can either use a blog as their web site, or simply add it in addition to their web site. We even used GM’s Fastlane blog as an example of a corporate blog that you may not expect. Obviously GM, a manufacture of cars, is not the technology work horse you would expect when you think of other companies which might blog (like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and others).

Obviously, the amount of time you can provide to your site/blog will depend your time, your team (if more than one will be posting), and the importance you place upon your blog.

Blog Examples

Recently Mack Collier wrote for Search Engine Guide about some good examples of company blogs. Some are from companies which you would expect as well.

Kodak - 1,000 words – provides photo tips, sample photos from various people, as well as how to use their products.
Fiskateers – provides information about scrap booking. With several author’s they often post daily or more often, and include contest even.
Others include Dell’s Direct2Dell, LinkedIn’s blog, and Innocent Drink’s Daily Thoughts.

Integrating your Blog

Once you have decided to add a blog into your web site, you have to figure out how to integrate it into your web site.

Consider your existing design. You should pick a platform that will allow you to modify it’s design to fit into your existing site. I’ve seen too many people use something like Blogger.com, which allows only minimal configuration, so you cannot incorporate it into an existing site design. Creating a link to the blog, does not constitute incorporation.

The easiest way is to incorporate a WordPress blog on your site. If you cannot customize it, then hire someone who can.
Add Blog information to your existing site. Not only should there be a link to the blog (of course), but adding RSS feeds (more on those in an upcoming article scheduled within the next 5 days) to the existing pages. If you cannot add it on your hosts, you need to seriously consider moving to a different host.

This can be done even if the site doesn’t follow modern web conventions. A few weeks ago I had to integrate a WordPress blog into a site which we developed using tables and images. While it made integrating the information into the site more difficult, it was put in, and if you don’t know to notice the blog specific pages, you cannot tell. I’m currently waiting for the site owner to publicly release the site before I showcase it here.

Should your blog replace your site? This is always an interesting question. WordPress, for example, allows you to have pages which are different than posts. Because they can be processed independently, instead of in a chronological order as posts as, you can move your entire site to be driven from your blog. This obviously makes integration easier, but you have to talk to someone who can check your site for custom code to see how likely it is to be able to be moved.

I’m currently doing this with a site which you should see finished in a few weeks. The entire site, standard pages and all will be done within WordPress, and it has made several parts much easier to integrate into the system than if it had been split between normal web pages and blog pages.

Why use a blog on your website?

Walter Wimberly — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 02:28:45 +0000

Image via WikipediaWhat makes blogs interesting and the most often used form of Web 2.0?

Because they are self contained, and allow for existing pages to be edited without knowing (X)HTML, once a theme is created and applied, it can be easy for a non-technical small business owner to work with.

You wouldn’t buy a new work vehicle without know how it was going to be used! Likewise, it is important to know how you will use your blog. Will it be as a traditional blog, for internal use, for working with a new project, or as a site? Knowing this will increase the chances of you successfully implementing the blog.

For example, a blog might be created to:

promote new product line being developed,
inform people about new things happening in your company,
to allow those outside the core team to stay informed about a project, or
as a complete web site.

All of these are ways to use a blog, you just need to know how to use it, and work within its strengths and weaknesses.
For example, one common mistake is that people expect and think that to have a successful blog, one has to post every day, or sometimes more often. This is simply not true. This is a misnomer from common news media which references many successful blogs, thinking you have to do it “their way”. In reality, you can add a blog to an existing site, or use it strictly as a site. You might even see blog authors telling you about it. As a small business owner, I doubt you would have the time to do something like that.

Regular posting is often touted, but rarely defined. What is most important is having some thing worth saying, but much inline with Occam’s Razor however, it should be updated only as often as required.

If you have questions about using implementing a blog on your site, feel free to contact us. We have experience in implementing blogs into existing web sites, setting up new sites to run as blogs, as well as traditional website design and development experience.

What is Web 2.0 – Blogs

Walter Wimberly — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:57:41 +0000

Short for Web Log, it allows someone(s) to post articles easily, and allow others to respond.Blogs are one of the most common forms we can see for two way communication, because they are easy to establish and use. They also allow the owner/publisher the most amount of control over an area.

With many simple platforms and software uses such as Blogger and WordPress, it allows almost anyone to publish articles. In turn, viewers can respond to the articles published, adding their insights, correct and/or contradict the author, or more.

While many blogs are seen, and truly used as on-line diaries, and carry little business weight, several well know businesses are actively using Blogs.

General Motors

Image via Wikipedia
General Motors is one well known company who has turned to blogging to get information out. A business can use it to communicate with external customers as a marketing tool, to promote/solicit new ideas, and share trends and information which they think the media, customers, and even critics might find interesting.

Obviously some information is filtered, to prevent corporate secrets from getting out, but as with any web site, a blog can also be password protected, or put within an Intranet to allow communication from management (executives, product, or project managers) to other staff members.

The biggest issue is of course with Lawyers getting in the way, wanting to “sanitize” everything.

Next we will look at why you might want to look at blogging for your company.

What is Web 2.0?

Walter Wimberly — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:00:49 +0000

To first understand what it is that people are calling Web 2.0, you should know a little about what is Web 1.0.

The first version, what went through the initial Internet Bubble, was a process of sending out information in a one way format. It allowed for users to interact on a singular platform, but didn’t allow information to move between systems, or even between users of the same system.

Web 2.0 is often referred to by a series of technologies; AJAX, Flex, Flash, and more. Others will refer to it by the style of the design of the web site.

While in reality, many of sites defined as the second generation of the web utilize these technologies, it is not what defines them.

Wikipedia, which we will discuss in greater detail later on, defines it as a series of “…web-based communities and hosted services such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies, which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing among users. …[I]t does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use webs”. This general definition came from Tim O’Reilly in 2004.

Were Web 1.0 was more of a one-way street, Web 2.0 is more of a two-way street allowing communication between initial author/publisher and the community, and then between the community and itself.

By allowing the users to share and comment between themselves, it allows people to gain additional insights, allow mistakes to be corrected, and share additional points of view. This is the strength of Web 2.0. Next we’ll look at how companies can use some this to help build and expand their customer base and get buy in from their employees. It is sometimes harder to see when being looked at from a non-Internet based company, but we’ll see examples.

If you have experience in using the Web 2.0 in your company, feel free to contact us, or add a comment.

Photo Credit: dogbomb

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Small Business don’t Utilize the Web 2.0?

Walter Wimberly — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:10:56 +0000

The results of a survey released at the end of 2007 show that small businesses aren’t buying into the hype of Web 2.0.

The study asked more than 300 small business owners in the U.S. to rate the relevance of different Web 2.0 tools as a means of obtaining business management information over the next five years. Only 14 percent of respondents said they believe that blogs will be very or extremely important. Wikis earned 21 percent with social networking sites and Web casts scoring 22 and 31 percent of the vote, respectively.

The results were attributed to small business owners wanting to know how it will help them. They want to know how will it expand or simplify this their existing business practice. I believe their reluctance comes down to two specific reasons:

Remember the hype and promises of the web in 1999-2001, and
A lot of what is shown is for social purposes with teenage and college students. Few businesses are shown being profitable with these ventures.

So what I plan is over the next few articles showing how small businesses, their employees, and their customers, can utilize Web 2.0. In these articles I plan to look at:

What is “Web 2.0″?
What is a Blog?
- How do people use blogs…
  - to consume information?
  - to produce information?
- How blog comments can help the author?
How RSS feeds can be used for more than articles?
What is a Wiki?
- Building good documentation from Wikis.
- Understanding the Wisdom of the Masses.
What is Pod Casting?

Getting the most from your consultant

Walter Wimberly — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:42:34 +0000

In a recent article 7 Things I Love About Small Business SEO the author gives 7 things he likes about working with small businesses.

As someone who routinely works with small and new businesses, I have to agree. Generally they can move faster than a large business, are more concerned with results, and are loyal if you perform for them. This is part of the reason why I love working with small businesses myself.

However I would like to offer a few things small businesses must be careful about when working with someone who helps them with their web site, be it as a Search Engine Optimizer, Web Designer, or anyone else.

Do your homework when checking someone out – then trust them. Often I find people want to second guess the person they hired. I think this is often because many small business owners are used to working with just them. Sometimes you have to let go.
Communicate your needs and any important dates. I have some friends who did a website for a person. A few days after finishing the site, the person went on a popular nationally syndicated radio show and announced his new site. The server wasn’t ready for that level of influx, and problems ensued.
Understand your budget. As a small business owner, I understand the budget. Most web local web developers are in the same situation. I know I can’t go out and drop thousands of dollars at the drop of the hat, and you probably can’t either. But at the same time, I know to be honest with what I ask and what I can afford. Many times people want to buy a BMW on a Hyundai budget – and this just frustrates everyone.

If you can do this, then you can get the most out of your business and the work with your consultant.

Watch out for those scams

Walter Wimberly — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:18:48 +0000

From time to time different clients call me up to ask me about something that comes across their desk. Most of the time their gut instinct had it right, and they were looking at a scam.

Sometimes the scam is legal, just immoral – like charging $100 a year for a domain name when it can cost under $10. Or they are charging $200 for submitting your site to Google every month for a year, when in reality, you can do it yourself for free. By the way, over submitting to Google or the other search engines doesn’t help you and can actually hurt you as they see it as a form of spam.

Other times the scam is illegal. I don’t want to post too much just yet, as legal action might be taken, however I wanted to post a couple of links for helping you check out a scam.

www.ic3.gov/ – Internet Fraud Complaint Center
http://www.nethelp.org/scamhelp/ – list of common scams and types of scams
http://www.b4usplashcash.ocba.sa.gov.au/money/scams.html – from the Australian government
http://www.forexscams.org/ – foreign money exchange. This can take many forms, and a variation of this was attempted on my client.
http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.html – from Craig’s List – a simple easy to follow guide
http://suckerswanted.blogspot.com/ - a list of scams and how to protect yourself

Luckily my client kept her head, realized some of the issues, and when she stepped back to look at the big picture, she saw it as the scam it was, before losing any money. (She did lose about 6 hours of time over a week – and time is money…)

Hopefully the links will be able to help other’s out.

If you know of any resources, please let me know as well.

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What does a spike in bounce rate mean?

Walter Wimberly — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 20:18:07 +0000

Well it depends. We had started to set up on a Friday the analytics for a large existing site. We know that several key areas are used more than others, and some of the pages rarely get seen. While in the past articles I’ve not gone into how do you set up your application, this is a key element of the process. Without good (enough) data, you can never make good decisions on your web site. Site configuration is often the first place to look.

The first few days was busy trying to get the data in to all of the pages. This is difficult as it is a site which uses a specially configured web application, and little things can throw off its balance – causing the pages to not load.

After the first few days – I noticed a big spike in the bounce rate. While I considered the original rates to be semi-normal as this is a business-to-business (B2B) web site, I wasn’t expecting that huge jump when we went from testing to live. Looking into it, several files were not properly uploaded on the production server, and thus while activity continued as normal, the pages were not being counted.

The next morning was spent double checking the files, and we went from ~70% bounce rate to 22-25%. This is a much more accurate representation.

Now that we know our files are being checked, we can trust our data better, and start to draw some conclusions from what is going on in the site.

More Metrics – exit pages and bounce rate

Walter Wimberly — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:15:48 +0000

Learning how our web site works is an important task. We’ve seen some simple examples in previous steps (visits, page views, and unique visitors) and we’ve seen some data that gets calculated (average page views and time on site).

While these were simple, and often given on the front page of your reports, I want to look at two related pieces of information that are not always so prevalent: exit pages and bounce rate.

The Exit Page is an easy metric to understand. This is generally a list of pages that was last page that a user visits. So if a user X visits p1, p2, then p3; p3 is the last page they visited, and this is counted as the exit page. If user Y visits p2, p3, then p1; p1 is their last page, and counted accordingly as the exit page.

Why this matters: This information is important because it allows us to see where people are leaving the site. In some cases this may not be a bad thing. Look at figure 2 to see how people are often leaving on the Sign Out page, which means that they have concluded their business. Additionally, people might exit after viewing a FAQ, because their question was answered. However, if people start to exit on an Account Sign Up page or on a Check Out page, this might start to indicate an issue. While this does not directly define the issue, it does allow us to know where to start to look.

Why this information can be misleading: Every user will eventually leave your site. So worrying about users leaving your site does you no good. Worrying about users leaving your site for no reason, or for the wrong reasons should worry you. Unfortunately, this metric doesn’t tell you why they left. And when you consider the number of “tire kickers” there are on the Internet, many will leave after checking your price to go and shop around to see if they can find a better deal. (Web conversion rates are notoriously low, with 2-4% being considered good depending upon type of product, price, etc.)

We will also notice that there are files which it is perfectly acceptable to be the exit page. This would be things like the last page in checking out with their order, a sign-out page, etc. It can also be noted that many people will go to the homepage when leaving. Don’t ask why people do this, but the more I see different sites, the more I see this happen.

Bounce Rate is a modification of the Exit Pages metric. What can make it difficult to determine is that there are different ways of calculating this metric. There are two main ways of calculating a bounce. In the first example, a person visits a site, and then leaves the site without visiting any other pages; then they are counted as a bounce. The second method used, is to determine if the user was on the site less than a given amount of time, 10 seconds for example. If this is the case, then they are counted as a bounce. (Remember, we don’t know how long someone is on the last page, if they were on the first page for 7 seconds, and the second page for 30 seconds, we don’t know about the 30 seconds, and a bounce could be calculated.)

The bounce rate is a huge contention between different analytics people, and some analytics packages don’t even offer this as a metric. Let’s take a look at how it can be used, and why it may or may not matter.

Why this matters: If someone is on your site for less than 10 seconds or 1 page, then odds are, they are not engaged in your site. This means that your end goal cannot be met. Finding out what the bounce rate is, and more importantly why, will help you determine how to improve your site, to be more effective in meeting your end goal(s).

Why this may be misleading: As mentioned above, if this metric is being based on length of time of the visit, we don’t know how long the last page is viewed, we can get less than accurate information. Secondly, the bounce isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Let’s take an example of a person who is searching for a piece of information. They come to your site from their favorite search engine. When they get to your site, they find what they are looking for, and leave once they have properly consumed your information. If your site’s end goal is to provide information, it has succeeded, while still having a bounce. And finally, it isn’t uncommon to have an acceptable bounce rate on the web. Depending upon the type of site, you may have a higher or lower rate of bounce. For example, niche sites, will have lower bounce rates, and blogs tend to have higher bounce rates, landing pages might have higher bounce rates, while a portal or intranet tend to have the lowest.

See: http://blackbeak.conversionchronicles.com/2006/04/12/bounce-rate-or-single-page-access-industry-averages/

Given all of this, you might ask, why is this one of my favorite metrics. As with everything analytics, this is a starting point. With it we can measure and track trends, and start to look for reasons why. Looking at the bounce rate as a web site wide number doesn’t really help, however when we start to drill down into the numbers, we can start to see more details that can help us.

More Metrics – Pages per Visit and Time on Site

Walter Wimberly — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 15:03:55 +0000

Learning how our web site works is an important task. Learning how to properly measure it is even more so. We have to look at not only the data, but we also need to know what questions to ask when looking at the data to put it into the correct perspective.There are a couple of “obvious” measurements mentioned in the last article (visits, page views, and unique visitors). While that information is often raw data, and easy to display, we will now look at some data which most systems will calculate for you. Once people move out of the “visitors” and “page views” mentality, they feel they take a large step forward with the secondary measurements.

The two metrics we’ll look at can easily mislead, or provide “no real information” to the user. I’ve included these early on because people often want to look at them, as they are “easy to understand”, but harder to get information from. We’ll look at them, and look at why they are not as important as one might think.

The secondary obvious measurements

Pages per Visit, and
Time on Site.

The Pages per Visit is an easy enough metric. Generally, it is displayed as an average by taking the total number of pages from a site and dividing it by the visits to the site. So if you had 1,000 pages in one day, and 100 visits (remember unique visitors are different than visits) you would have an average of 10 page visits per visitor.

Why this matters: By watching how many pages people are visiting, we can begin to see a couple of things. First, under most circumstances, people will not reach their end goal in a single page, or even two. Therefore, as we see people tracking numerous pages, we know that they are looking for information, and believe that they can find it on our site. Second, if we see the number growing, we might see we have a problem. For example, let’s say it take a minimum of 3 pages to reach an end goal, and that people on average visit 10 pages to compare information on different offerings, may be they look in the wrong area, et cetera. However, if we see that number go up, 15, 20, and 30 pages, we now can start to look to see if the site has an issue where it isn’t clear. With this information, we can start to look at areas more specifically, to know if we need to simplify the pages.

Why this can be misleading: This site is an average, and if the site only has few people one day (holidays, weekends, etc), then we might see artificially high or low numbers in this area. Second, we don’t know how much “comparison shopping” a person may or may not want to do. The user may not be lost, just curious. These are things that just looking at the numbers cannot answer for us.

Time on Site is a metric that can also easily mislead. It is usually displayed as an average of users by adding the total time each user spends on a site from the time they start, to the time they leave. From there, they divide that by number of users, and you have your average…sort of. I’ll explain why the number can mislead in a little bit. First, let’s talk about why it matters.

Why this matters: The theory goes, the longer that someone is on the site, the more likely they will convert into making good on the end-goal. The theory is that you are building a trust with the user. The truth might be your site is slow, and/or confusing – and we should know which one it is. Each site should determine a base line for this metric and see if it rises or falls and know how that equates to the success of the site. For example, a site that has 2 to5 minute long video clips would expect longer time on site, than a site that allows you to download product information sheets as a PDF.

Why this can be misleading: First of, the numbers we have to work with are not accurate, and this is beyond the normal accuracy of the numbers. We only know how long a person is on a page given the time they view from one page to the next. However, if there is no follow up page, we don’t know how long the person was on the last page. It might be very long, or very short, but we always see that as a zero time length, so nothing is added, even if they view a 5-minute video as their last action.

Second, people who only view one or two pages can scale this average in ways not expected. Let’s consider 100 people visiting your site for an average of 1 minute. This means the total amount of time tracked was 100 minutes. However, lets assume that 30 of those people visited only 1 page on your site. This means the 100 minutes should be divided by 70 people, not 100. This gives you a new average time on site of: 1 minute 25 seconds.

Third, if your site is a little slower on any given day, even by only a few percentage points, it will slow down the user viewing the site, and they may either leave early (good to find out why) or spend longer on your site waiting to check out.

And finally, people may be on your site long, if they can’t find what they are looking for, but know that this is where they need to get it. (This directly correlates with too many page views.)

Because of this, I like to look at time on site from a trending point of view, and figure out the cause of the effect. Consider a site where the person is looking for information in the FAQ. The person is directly linked from a search engine, or finds it in just a couple of clicks, and finds the information.

Next we’ll look at information that can start to tell us something.

How effective is your web site

Walter Wimberly — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:00:01 +0000

Learning how our web site works is an important task, which is often measured incorrectly. We have to look at not only the data, but we also need to know what questions to ask when looking at the data to put it into the correct perspective.

Without understanding how the data works, we can run into all types of problems by drawing the wrong conclusions.

In this section, I assume that we will be looking at data from some source such as Google Analytics and we are wanting people to purchase something from us. Not all web sites are built with purchasing in mind, some want to allow answers to be found, collect user registrations, etc. We will group all of these into a generic “end goal” that you have predetermined. It is important to know what your web site is supposed to do, so you know this end-goal. Is it selling products, providing information, getting someone to arrange an appointment with you, or letting people find answers on their own so they don’t have to call you?

Another key thing to note, is that your metrics information is going to have flaws. There are a wide variety of reasons for this, but you must know and be willing to accept this. We must be willing to assume a certain level reporting errors in our data. While I cannot go into all of the reasons why there might be errors, I will try to point out some obvious reasons why there might be errors as we go along the process.

The obvious measurement

There are a couple of “obvious” measurements. Everyone looks at these because they are often predominately displayed in your analytics tool. They would be:

Visits,
Page Views, and
Unique Visitors.

A Visit is one of the two most commonly looked at pieces of information which people look at. It is also one of the most useless pieces of information when it is looked at by itself. A visit is when a user goes to your site. Their entire experience there, be viewing only one page, or 100 pages, is summed up as a single visit. It generally assumes that this is an active process, and the user does not break for more than a few minutes between any two pages. If the user leaves the site, and returns the next day, or even an hour later, this is a second visit.

Why it is important to know: Without visitors, your web site sits idle and unproductive. By measuring visitors you can start to track other, more important, pieces of information. namely how many people are completing their “final goal”. By using the number of visits your web site has, vs. the number of final goals completed, you can start to determine what your conversion rate is.

Why it can be misleading: There are a couple of things that can get in the way of you understanding your visits metric. First, not every visitor is tracked. This is usually for technical reasons beyond your control. For example, if your software relies on use of a JavaScript, your visitor might have JavaScript disabled. If you have to send a cookie to a third party, these can be blocked by your web browser, of if it looks at log files from your web server, your pages might be cached and accessed by a Internet Service Provider. Each of these, and other reasons, are beyond your control, and can effect the quality of your numbers. You have to be willing to live with these errors, and work to establish the best information you can even with these problems, knowing that you don’t have 100% accurate data to work with.

Of course if there is a metric which someone loves more than Visitors, it has to be Page Views. This is approximately, see “Why it can be misleading” for visitor counts, how many web pages have been viewed by users. People love this number because it is often “big”. However, this can be the most misleading metric of all time. Why; because Page Views mean nothing by themselves. Page views, unless you are using an advertising based model, mean and show nothing. However, at the same time, Page Views are extremely important. For without them, you cannot move someone to the end goal. But you must remember that they are not the end goal.

Why it can be misleading: Number one, psychology. We love to see this number go up, and it can cause us to look solely at this number, without seeing how the end goal is affected. We cannot be distracted by the sirens call, and so the first problem with this metric is we cannot focus on it. Second, this number is often artificially low. Depending upon how your metric tool works, page reloads/revisits may not be calculated as they could be cached either by your end user’s computer and/or their web host to reduce the amount of bandwidth they use.

A Unique Visitor is someone who has gone to your web site. If they visit your site five times throughout the reporting period (day, week, month, etc), they should only be counted once.

Why it is important to know: By understanding how many unique people have visited our web site, we can start to determine if we are providing a site which users want/need to return to. Many web sites are built with this purpose. As people return to our site, we develop a sense of authority with this person, which can allow them to return, and/or encourage them to complete the end-goal.

Why it can be misleading: This number might be inaccurate however because we must track a person to a computer. So if I were to visit a site twice while at work, once on a mobile phone while commuting home, and twice later that evening, it would show as three unique visitors because I used three devices.

It can also be wrong because of technical reasons. For example: the cookie, which was used to track the user, was deleted between visits. Now the device, which was used to visit the site, appears to not have visited before, and we show a second unique user when in fact only one exist.

Once we realize that our data will never be complete, that is OK. We can move forward a lot easier knowing we are 70-90% accurate, and just have to make decisions with that in mind.

In our next article we will look at how many pages your visitors see, as well as how long they are on your site.

Web analytics series coming soon

Walter Wimberly — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 22:29:01 +0000

I’m working on finishing up a series of articles for the new year on Web Analytics.

What is web analytics?

Glad you asked. People build new web sites every day, but most have no idea how they are doing, if they are getting better or worse, or why. Web analytics can help you answer those questions. However, we need to know what numbers are important, which to ignore, why, and what we can do about it.

This series is designed to be simple to read, and easy to follow. While not an in-depth look, it should allow you to know when your web person is BSing you, and when they are giving it to you straight. This gives you the overall value of — helping you make more money.

Look for it starting January 1st 2008.

Using your analytics data to improve web site performance

How to reduce your bounce rate

Walter Wimberly — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:09:41 +0000

In our last post, Why People Leave Your Web Site, we referenced the Bounce Rate, and why its not something you want your site to have much of.

In order to understand how to reduce your bounce rate you need to know why it is happening. Here are some unacceptable reasons why you might have a bounce, and what you can do to fix it:

Your site takes too long to load. This could mean you need more bandwidth/better server or, more likely, you need to optimize your site.
Your presentation is too simple/complicated. We could call this the ugly factor. While it might be unfair, people do judge a book by its cover. How your site looks will influence people’s decision to stay or leave.
You provide too much information. Long paragraphs, longer pages, no headlines, etc. make your text difficult to read. People want fast information, and if they can’t find it, they’ll go somewhere where they can.

However, you might have some reasonable “bounces”. Here are some acceptable reasons:

The user found the information right away – they were looking for your address and found it, wanted to know the price of X and now they do, etc. – no need to keep looking.
The user clicked on the wrong link/typed in the wrong address, noticed, and left right away. I’m looking for ABC, you’re CBA, and I figured it out. – This is a bummer, but it happens. The site address could have changed, a spelling error occurs, etc., but then you get the incorrect user, who may not even be looking for what you have to offer.

Because of things like this, you will usually have some bounce.

So what is an acceptable bounce rate?

This will often vary depending upon what type of site you offer. Just as sometimes you will walk into a store and leave, your users will not always purchase or even stay very long. This may be your site, it may be them.

The more niche your site, the less accidental users you will get. An Intranet site will be about as pure as you can get. One Intranet site I watch actually has a bounce rate of less than 7.75%. People generally only go there if they need to.

I oversee a niche site, that while they only get about 140 visits a day, their bounce rate hovers around 15-18%. This means very few people leave when they see the site, and they can convert more users. They also get a lot of links for authority sites, and word-of-mouth advertising. Their off-line marketing of their website helps them immensely.

For a more general website, what you will hear varies. Anywhere from 40-55% is considered common and acceptable. I like to find what I have, and work on reducing it from there.

Why people leave your web site

Walter Wimberly — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 13:06:08 +0000

When I introduce someone to Web Analytics for the first time, they generally go through several “light bulb” moments. They usually include things like:

That’s how many users I get?!? (either with glee or frustration)
So that’s where I get people from.

This will often lead to questions they didn’t know they could ask such as:

Why don’t I get more sales?
Why are people leaving the site?
What is this bounce rate?

Why don’t I get more sales – a whole other article could be written on this, so we’ll leave it alone for now. But lets look at why people wil leave your site?

Legitimate reasons users leave your site

Every user will eventually leave your site. This is normal, so don’t worry about it – unless they are leaving before they should be doing what you want. Here are some good reasons for people to leave your site:

They clicked on an ad you had on your site (you make money)
They finished checking out from their purchase (you made money)
They just contacted you (so you might make money)

What is a bounce rate?

Many terms are quite understandable when named (Time on Site, Page Views, Unique Visitors, etc.). Bounce Rate is one of those odd terms that most people don’t readily understand. It is measured as a percentage out of your total number of visitors.

A bounce is when someone visits only one page, and then leaves your site without visiting any other pages, or even refreshing your page (in the case of a news site where content is updated often).

Why is bounce rate bad?

Without seeing much content (only one page) it makes it difficult to make a sale, get a contact, or whatever you want your business to do.

What’s worse is that it potentially eats up a lot of resources. How you ask? Generally each page in a website should share numerous resources with other pages in your website. This would include things like background images, navigation images, CSS, and JavaScript files, etc. When you download a first page, you will download all of these resources from the site. However, once they are downloaded, the second file is much faster to download since all of the resources shared between the two are already taken care of. This means only the page, and any page specific resources should need to be downloaded.

However, if you send all of the files to someone who is only going to view a single page, you are not able to send them to someone else, thus slowing down your web site.

So how do we work on reducing your bounce rate? That will be covered in the next article.