Basic web analytics

Web analytics is one of the less exciting, yet sometimes damn interesting, fields of the web industry. Web analytics helps you understand how your website is being used.

I had a quick peek at my web stats and came across a bit of a shock... quite a few people were clicking on the my recent projects link, then leaving the site.

The projects section had been long neglected. The “latest project” link in the sidebar lead to the only project I had bothered to post; worse still, it was little more than a couple of paragraphs from Lipsum.com. This was always something I intended to fix, but had simply forgotten.

Now, my laziness seemed to be having a negative effective on the visitors to my site.

Unfortunately, Webalizer doesn't allow me to filter out bots well, and my current host doesn't give me the level of access to stats that I'm used to. It's possible that a lot of these hits are from the Googlebot or similar agent. Yet, despite its flaws, it helped. It indicated that something was wrong with my site. Even the most basic of web statistics will give you some idea of what is going on with your site. If you do have access to them, take a look. You could be in for a shock.

The problem has now been given a quick patch, which will do until the redesign is completed. I also got rid of the ridiculous “Lorum ipsum sit ala mocktoo” text in the archives section. I'll be running some other patches on Thursday.

In other news, I am insanely busy right now.