People often want to know how fast to changes occur on-line.  They may be used to traditional print advertisign, such as newspaper and magazine, in which changes to an ad might take weeks or months to be seen.

Even worse, consider wanting to change some text in your phone book ad.  If you see an error (imagine a wrong phone number), or want to make a change the week your book comes out, it will take a twelve long months to update your ad.

On-line, things can occur much faster. We can see errors and correct them at almost the same instant. We can try different lines of text in an ad, or add in products to our catalogs.

Recently, I was working with a client updating their website. They wanted to add a new package to their offerings on-line. They contacted me that morning, I made the change to the website the same day (which is fairly typical of minor changes to a site such as some text, or a new product or service) and within 5 minutes of posting it to the web server, the client had a request for the new service package. You can’t get that quick of turn around in any medium other than the web.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Image via WikipediaAdobe Dreamweaver is a tool used to design and develop web pages. I’ve used Dreamweaver for several versions, starting back in Version 4, when it was owned by Macromedia. Version 10 was just released to public beta yesterday.

I didn’t upgrade to the previous version (V.9) because Dreamweaver didn’t add all of the value I was wanting or needing, and as I’ve posted about before, there were some issues regarding how effective it was for me given the more complex types of web sites I have been working on. Dreamweaver for example didn’t support things like:

• JavaScript libraries and Frameworks
• Poor PHP support
• Produced Bloated Code
• No real support for version control systems

However, Version 10 seems to have added support for some of the features I’ve been wanting, including JavaScript libraries like JQuery and Prototype as well as content version control (a much needed feature for many versions). It also, from what I’ve heard, runs faster than the last couple of versions, which was desperately needed as site development was becoming slow if you had any complex CSS in the design, such as this web site.

This is where the bad experience sets in. I find the link to download the new version and I find out that I cannot use it because I don’t have the previous version (CS3/V9).

photo credit: Jay DuggerSoftware companies have been using the web to push out new products at a faster rate, which is good, but when a company requires you upgrade every 12 to 15 months, about how long Adobe puts out new versions, and pay hundreds to thousands of dollars, they need to realize that not everyone can or will upgrade, especially, if they do not give them the features they need.

Then if you block off part of your users, you risk alienating them. Because of the limitations I’ve found in some instances, I’ve already started using other tools, and might continue to based upon this latest run in with them.

So if you, want to leverage the Internet to brings products to market faster, that is good, just don’t do it at a rate which your customers can’t keep up (because of speed or time). And if you move at that rate, don’t expect everyone to upgrade every version.

Popularity: 22% [?]

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) as well as determining how long someone visited your site, and which was the last page they viewed.Most of these metrics were simple to user, and that is fine. However, now we want to look at the flip-side of which pages people leave on, that is what pages they are viewing, and which ones do they view first. This is which pages people go to first, and how many times was a page shown to someone. Let’s look at the larger picture: which pages were viewed, then look to see what order they saw the pages.

Pages Viewed may go by different names, such as Top Content, or Most Viewed Pages, tells you which pages are viewed most often. Depending upon your Analytics package, you may get this by file name, by web page title, or both. Depending upon your needs that you will look at. When they use the file name, anything after the file, which might change, will be displayed as a separate entry, despite the physical file being the same. This is because the part after the file name might change what the file displays. Consider these two examples:

• Product.php?id=21 – this might display product information for Widgets
• Product.php?id=32 – might display product information for Gizmos.

Because the content can change, each entry is listed separately. Pages based on internal search forms fall into this category quite often, and can cause quite a bit of confusion. Even if the parameters are reversed, it will often view the two entries as two separate pages. This is intentional in case someone wants to track the path on how they got to the file, or other similar things.

Why this is important: from here were can start to see what files are viewed the most often. Clients are often surprised to find out that it is not necessarily the home page (more on that in a bit). They are also (sometimes) surprised that some pages are viewed a lot more than others. Consider the following graphic. At the top, you will notice over 1,700 URLs (web page addresses), in the bottom graph, you will notice there are only about 30 page titles. This is for the same site, same time frame, the difference is the first graphic is for the page file name, and the second is the page titles. Because the file names are similar, but a lot of extra stuff is appended because of the search pages, the 1700 files are exaggerated. You have to find the report that works for you.

These reports came from Google Analytics, and they provide some additional information. We’ll look at that in the next article or two.

Why this doesn’t matter: outside of wanting to know what page is being displayed, this isn’t important. That is an important thing to understand. This report can’t show you why they went the page they viewed, if they found the information they were looking for, or, when viewed by itself, what did they do after viewing the page.

A count of individual page views is also unimportant because it doesn’t specify why the person has come to that page, possibly repeatedly. Are they lost? Do they have to go through a series of “hoops” to get where they want to go? Page views are a lazy man’s metric because it can look impressive, but not provide any key insight.

Top Landing Page, sometimes called an Entrance Page, is the page that the user enters the web site on. Many people naturally assume that someone will go to the home page first. They will spend lots of money making a cool splash screen, and not spend those resources on making the other pages better. There are many times another page is the used to enter the site. For example:

• Search Engines take people to the most relevant page, not the home page.
• Other people might link from their web page to a favorite article, product, or review.
• People bookmark the page in a site that helps them, not the homepage necessarily. (I commonly bookmark login pages – especially if I have to pay a bill on a web site.)
• Someone might send/receive an e-mail with a link to your site, that isn’t to the home page.

All of these and more cause other pages to be the “landing page”.

Why this is important: Knowing what pages people enter your site from, helps you know what pages to focus on. You should also watch to see if a change in your site/page increases or decreases the people entering your site through that page. While this wouldn’t necessarily define the cause and effect, it allows you to see some of what is happening and start to make an educated guess. It is also important to know if you will be moving a page, as it lets you know that other’s will be effected. Often if someone reaches your site, and it gives them an error page (404 is the Not Found Error) – they will leave your site and find the answer somewhere else. Knowing this can provide you with the information to take to your technical people to ensure that they use the proper redirects to make sure people don’t get lost on your site. (Hint: You should always redirect your pages…)

Why this doesn’t matter: When we put together this metric with some others, you will see how this can be a powerful metric. However, by itself, as with most other metrics, you will not be able to gather much information from it.

Popularity: 45% [?]