Sunday, April 20, 2008

Want of a million

7 Easy Secrets to Understanding Web Statistics

Understanding what your visitors do on your site is crucial information. If your visitors proceed to purchase a product but then a large majority leaves the site when they get to a specific page in the order process, you need to know about it. It could be that this page is confusing or hard to use. Fixing it could increase your sales by 200%. This is just an example; there are many reasons why you want a detailed analysis of your site visitors.
Most website hosting services offer a stats package that you can study. If you're not sure where this is, call up your hosting service and ask them. Statistics are a vital part of tracking your marketing progress. If you don't have access to website statistics get a package that can help you in this area. Do not get a counter that simply shows how many visitors you've had. You'll be missing out on vital information that can help strengthen weaknesses in your site.
A good website hosting service offers traffic logs that provide an invaluable insight into the traffic being referred to a web site from various sources such as search engines, directories and other links.
Unfortunately traffic tracking provided by web hosting services is often in the form of raw traffic log files or other difficult to understand cryptic formats. These log files are basically text files that describe actions on the site. It is literally impossible to use the raw log files to understand what your visitors are doing. If you do not have the patience to go through these huge traffic logs, opting for a traffic-logging package would be a good idea.
Basically, two options are available to you and these are: using a log analysis package or subscribing to a remotely hosted traffic logging service. A remotely hosted traffic logging service may be easy to use and is generally the cheaper option of the two. WebTrends Live and HitsLink are two good, remotely hosted, traffic-monitoring services worth considering. However, WebTrends Live is a more complicated system and is suitable for larger ecommerce websites. "SuperStats" is another recommended traffic logging service.
These services do not use your log files. Typically a small section of code is placed on any page you want to track. When the page is viewed, information is stored on the remote server and available in real time to view in charts and tables form.
Log analysis packages are typically expensive to buy and complex to set up. Apart from commercial packages there are also some free log analysis packages available, such as Analog.
A good traffic logging service would provide statistics pertaining to the following:
1. How many people visit your site?
2. Where are they from?
3. How are visitors finding your site?
4. What traffic is coming from search engines, links from other sites, and other sources?
5. What keyword search phrases are they using to find your site?
6. What pages are frequented the most - what information are visitors most interested in?
7. How do visitors navigate within your web site?
Knowing the answers to these and other fundamental questions is essential for making informed decisions that maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your web site investment.
The most important aspect of tracking visitors to your website is analyzing all the statistics you get from your tracking software. The three main statistics that will show your overall progress are hits, visitors and page views. Hits are tracked when any picture or page loads from your server on to a visitor's browser. Hits, however, can be very misleading. It is quite an irrelevant statistic for your website.
The statistic that is probably the most important for a website is Page Views/Visitors. This gives you a good indication of two things. First, how many people are coming to your site, and secondly how long are they staying on your site. If you have 250 visitors and 300 page views you can figure that most visitors view one page on your site and then leave. Generally, if you're not getting 2 page views per visitor then you should consider upgrading your site's content so your visitors will stay around longer.
If you see the number of visitors you have increasing as well as the number of page views per visitor increasing then keep up the good work! Always look for this stat as an overall barometer of how your site design is going and if your marketing campaigns are taking hold.
Also, a good stat to look for is unique visitors. Once a person visits your site they will not be added to the unique visitors' category if they visit again. This is a good way to track new visitors to your website.
Page views are a good indication of how "sticky" your website is. A good statistic to keep is Page Views divided by the number of Visitors you have. This statistic will give you a good idea if your content is interesting and if your visitors are staying on your site for a long time and surfing.
Some people are intimidated by web traffic statistics (mostly because of the sheer volume of data available), but they shouldn't be. While there are many highly specialized statistics that can be used for more in-depth web traffic analysis, the above areas alone can provide invaluable information on your visitors and your website performance. Remember- this data is available for a reason. It's up to you to use it.
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/web_design_and_development/article_708.shtml

Behind the Scenes of Setting up a Website

Taking the plunge and deciding to set up a website can be a daunting process if you aren't already experienced in domain purchasing, hosting requirements, dns delegation etc. In this article I am going to attempt to familiarize you with some of the concepts and clarify some of the jargon. There are quite a few manual configuration requirements to get a domain even started in the right directon of being available to the public. Three things have to be considered initially to secure your virtual block of dirt. The three requirements are as follows. 1. Your initial and ongoing cost to own the domain name of your choice subject to availability. 2. Who is going to host the website for you and the ongoing costs associated with having your site hosted. 3. Domain Name Redicrection. A service that can answer requests to resolve your domain name to the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the computer hosting your website. Domain name pricing varies and for initial registration of a new domain you can get it quite cheap. Once you've found the best priced domain reseller to purchase your domain name from it is best to buy as many years in advance as you can. If you purchase a domain name for one year for $7.95, when it comes time to renew that domain the price is suddenly $24.95. Hunt around for the best hosting package you can get. Depending on the size of your site and expected traffic hosting packages can be purchased from as little as $5.95 US per month. Some of the cheap packages include massive bandwidth allocations. Make sure your host uses CPanel. CPanel is a graphical Server Management tool making configuration of your domain a matter of pointing and clicking. To save money on ongoing hosting fee's, hunt around for a free DNS Service Provider. One in particular is http://freedns.afraid.org. Sites such as these allow you to add several hostnames to your domain. ie mail.yourdomain.com. Once you have searched all these avenues and have decided it is in your budget to move to the next step the first thing to do is to register your domain. Once you have registered your domain you will receive emails to your nominated email account with the domain management login information for your domain. Keep these emails as you will need that information soon. Sign up and pay for hosting with the provider on the hosting plan you chose for cost effectiveness. They will email you your login information and server IP addresses. Again keep these emails for future reference. Now go to your free dns host. Sign up for an account. During the sign-up process they will notify you of their name server addresses. Write down these addresses as they are also needed soon. DNS Hosts require that their name servers respond as authoritive for your domain before your domain can become active, this requires the name servers retrieved during the DNS host sign up process be entered into the domain registrar. Go back to the emails you received for registering your domain name. There should be a link in the email to the management section for your domain. The username and password for the management section will also be in this email. Click on the link and enter the username and password. Depending on your host their should be a section related to Name Servers. Becareful not to select to use your hosting company's name service hosting unless you already paid for it. When you have the correct section there will be space for you to enter from four to six name servers. This is where the name server addresses received from the Free DNS Host are to be entered. This tells the backbone internet servers that if you want to find www.yourdomain.com ask ns1.nameservercompany.com. This change can take 24-48 hours to propogate through the world-wide domain name servers. Once the world-wide domain servers register that www.yourdomain.com is now pointed to your free dns hosting company as authoritive you will be able to specify the IP address of the actual machine that will host your web pages. This IP address will have been in the email you received from your hosting company. This IP address should be added for the domain prefixes mail www ftp smtp and any others that may have been specified in the email from your hosting company. Your domain is now pointing to your hosting provider and the behind the scenes redicrection process is taken care of. You are now ready to start building that high rise building on your virtual block of dirt. There is no limit to how high you can build on your land. For a ready made, customizable website have a look at Joomla. Joomla is a reliable PHP based complete website solution. Extensions are available to customize Joomla in many ways, from an online store to a virtual community or dating site. It takes time to understand how Joomla works but once you get the hang of it you will realise how invaluable it is. My site http://www.bizebooks.com.au has two packages containing complete website scripts and utilities. The best part with these scripts is that after you use them to build your site you can resell them and make money from them. Two products in particular I recommend are The AX Gold Webmasters Toolkit and Scripts2Sell. Search for them on the site and have a look at some of the scripts in these packages. Have a look today.
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/web_design_and_development/article_1158.shtml

Different Types of Web Hosting Explained

There are many different types of web hosting available. Which type one chooses should hinge upon what one wants to accomplish with his or her web site. Some web hosting services are free, but place ads on web sites. Whereas other web hosting types can be more expensive, but provide a lot more assistance and bandwidth. The four main web hosting types are free web hosting, shared web hosting, and dedicated web hosting (both managed and unmanaged).
Free web hosting is the simplest kind of web hosting that one can get. This type of web hosting is usually supported by ads on hosted web sites. Features for this type of web hosting are limited, and therefore it is a better option for people who are just starting out on the Internet and are interested in having a small site with little traffic. The type of domain one receives in free web hosting is typically a subdomain (yoursite.webhost.com) or a directory (www.webhost.com/~yoursite). Most free web hosts do not have support for MySQL, multiple e-mail accounts, and PHP.
Shared web hosting is actually the most popular type of web hosting service. Shared web hosting allows more than one site to be hosted on the same server. Additionally, the hosts provide system administration. For users that do not want to have the burden of running a sever, shared web hosting is a great choice. The individual hosting plan may differ, but most hosts provide the user with elements such as PHP, ASP, MySQL, more bandwidth, and multiple e-mail addresses. More services are often available in shared web hosting than are available with simple free web hosting (including the ability to have your own domain name!).
The last two types of web hosting are managed dedicated web hosting, and unmanaged dedicated web hosting. Dedicated web hosting is a wise choice for someone who wants more storage and bandwidth, and also wants features that are not available with shared and free web hosting. In dedicated servers, users are not limited to a certain number of databases and e-mail addresses. Additionally, users usually receive a very high amount of bandwidth in comparison to other hosting types. The typical dedicated server plan provides the user with 500 to 1,000GB of monthly bandwidth.
In unmanaged dedicated web hosting, the user is the server administrator. This allows the user the greatest amount of control and flexibility. Of course, many people do not know how to handle the task of being a server administrator and do not want to learn. Therefore, this is not a viable option for some.
When looking for a web host, it is important to consider the purpose of the web site and what one’s capabilities are. Pricing for web hosts is dependant upon the support, reliability, features, and security one wants. Choosing a type of web hosting may seem like a daunting task, but simply doing research and making an educated decision should yield satisfaction and success on this critical matter.
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/web_design_and_development/article_940.shtml

Site5 Web Hosting Review

Why I choose Site5 I got to know about Site5 through the webhostingtalk forums. At that time, I was searching for a reliable and reputable cheap web hosting company for a couple of my new websites. And I’ve heard a lot of good reviews about Site5 and so decide to try them out. Since they have a 60 day money back refund, I figure if I did not like it, I would ask for my money back. Anyway, I was basically testing their web hosting on my new websites so I was not terribly affected. Site5 Hosting Plan Site5 only offer two types of hosting plan : shared and reseller. So I took the superhosting extreme package. Basically here’s the brief web hosting package details : Diskspace : 8GB Bandwidth : 500GB Multisite Accounts : 5 Unlimited : domain pointers, ftp, mysql It also comes with fantastico, cpanel. All this for about $109 annually which is pretty cheap. Please note this hosting plan is no longer available and is replaced with multisite dynamite plan. It is basically the same as my previous plan except for more diskspace and bandwidth. As I’m writing this, they have a promotion where you can get this hosting plan for 2 years at only $149 which I consider to be a good deal. Unique Features of Site5 hosting One feature I like about site5 hosting is the multisite accounts. It is basically a full featured control panel for each domain. Unlike other shared web hosting companies which uses domain pointers, a multisite accounts exists on its own with its own subdomains, domain pointer, ftp, mysql etc. This help me to organize my websites better especially if you have a lot of domains. You can set the diskspace and bandwidth from the main pool of your web hosting account. The other feature is the flashback which allows you to undo any changes you make to your website. It is a life saver especially when a website breaks down and you do not know the cause. Things that can be improved Though I like Site5 and would recommend it to friends, there are a few things that could make it better. One of them is the upgrade option. I recently upgraded my hosting plan to multisite dynamite and was told I had to shift to another server. The problem was I had to do the data transfer myself. With 3GB of data to transfer, not to mention the dozens of ftp, mysql and email accounts, it was a real hassle. Something I am sure their staff could have easily completed in a short time. The other thing I didn’t like was I could not request for more IP addresses. If you know about SEO, then you know how having multiple IP addresses can be useful. In all, I would still recommend site5 due to its cheap web hosting plan, good support and high availability. Ricky Lim runs a cheap web hosting reviews site. Visit his site for more information on Site5 and the best cheap web hosting services.
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/web-hosting-review.html

Top Ten Reasons to Choose a Web Hosting Provider

Choosing a web hosting provider is different for everyone. Every website has a specific set of needs and you have to find a web host that provides the needs that are specific to your website. However, there are certain things to look for when choosing a web-hosting service. In this article I will give you the ten most common things people should be looking for. These are not necessarily in the order of priority, because as I said every website has different needs and your priorities might not be the same as the next website owner. 1. Tech Support: Tech support in any business venture is always important. As a website owner though, the tech support that your web-hosting service provides is going to be crucial to your business. If your website is offline or not working properly it will cost you sales. If you have been buying traffic to your website and it goes offline, you are still being charged for all of those visits to your website, which they never saw. The money you are spending on your ad campaign, AdWords program or other traffic sources is going right down the drain. You cannot afford to choose a web host that does not respond quickly when you have a problem. 2. Feedback Forums: A web host that provides a forum, message board, or chat room to discuss hosting issues or to get help in is more likely to get a user to use their web-hosting services. The reason behind this is people feel more comfortable with a web host that gives a personal touch and one that cares enough to provide a higher level of service. 3. Room to Grow: If your web-hosting service only offers one package, it’s a bad sign in most cases. What happens as your web business grows and so do your web hosting needs? If they offer upgrades to dedicated servers, larger storage and bandwidth plans, and a lot of other options, then you can feel confident choosing them as your web hosting provider. You don’t plan to stay small and your web host shouldn’t plan for you to stay small either. 4. Storage Space: This is usually only an issue with websites that will be offering users a lot of downloads such as music or software. The average website can get by with about 10 megabytes of storage, but again you want room to grow, plus you can actually use your storage to back up files from your computer. Don’t backup secure documents there, but a lot of your files can be backed up online. You have storage so use it. The more storage space they offer, the better. 5. Bandwidth or Transfer: This is the size of every file visitors to your website download automatically to their computers each time they visit. The average webpage is around 30k and then you add the graphics and other files that are displayed to the user and you get your bandwidth or transfer usage. The average website can get by on less than 10 gigabytes of bandwidth per month. However if you are offering downloads like software, music, and movies, or you are going to be driving a lot of traffic to your website, you may want to choose a plan that offers you more bandwidth. Make sure your webhosting provider has options that give you room to grow here as well. 6. Easy to use Control Panel: Cpanel is one of the most popular control panels for web hosts to offer, but there are others. Ask what type of control panel your web host is offering to provide you with. Again, this need is different for everyone and this is based on your level of expertise. Some advanced users would rather not have or don’t care about control panels because they know how to configure everything in the server by themselves. Less advanced users need to be sure they pick a web hosting service that provides an easier interface so they can feel comfortable making the alterations they need to their website. 7. FrontPage extensions: A lot of people that do not know HTML still use FrontPage or other programs to design their websites with. If you use FrontPage, you need to make sure your web host is set up for FrontPage extensions. 8. Type of Servers: An example of this is websites that will be built using the .NET framework or ASP. For your website you will need to make sure your web host has a windows based server. Most web hosting providers are on Linux or Apache and ASP websites will not function on them. A better choice is to stay away from building a website that requires a windows server in the first place. 9. Added Features: Instant Install is a feature offered by most web hosts these days even if they call it another name. It’s an automated process for installing databases and database driven features you can add to your website like photo galleries, forums, blogs, content management systems, calendars, guestbooks, and more. It’s just as easy to choose a web-hosting provider that gives you these features in case you need them as it is to choose one that doesn’t. Again, room to grow is important. 10. Is your web host a good neighborhood: This one is a little more difficult to explain and find out about but it is important. Some search engines punish websites who are in a bad neighborhood. They do this by banning websites that come from a particular set of IP addresses due to previous problems with websites on those IP addresses. You need to see samples of other websites that are hosted by your web hosting service. If a lot of them are warez websites, porn websites, file sharing websites, or other websites whose activities do not seem to savory, then you may be looking at a bad neighborhood and may want to find another web host. That’s my top 10 tips for choosing a web hosting service. I hope you find these tips helpful when you look for where to host your next website!
http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/5-25-2006-97366.asp

Know About The Web Hosting Control Panels

There are so many players in the web hosting field from individual to big corporation. Web hosting service is a highly competitive field and this drives the web hosting players to offer feature rich hosting plans at affordable cost. Web hosting is the basic thing a webmaster needs to make his website presence, to the whole world. The competitiveness of the web hosting field compel the web hosting companies to excel each other. So almost all the top companies are giving very efficient technical support. The extra features like free domain name and site builder and the pricing are varying from company to company. But the control panel makes a difference and you have to pick up the correct service which suits your need. The control panel is a soft ware provided by the web hosting company to control and manage your web site hosting. It is like a vital part of your body. Through control panel you can mange all your activities like email creation, opening of your FTP accounts, statistics report and many more. Though control panel alone can not be used as a yardstick to judge the quality of a web hosting service, it is important to know about the control panel as it is an vital aspect of a web hosting service. Control panels for Windows Only platform Helm is a Windows only web hosting control panel. Helm control panel has many customer friendly features and the most striking feature is the billing information. Except the H-sphere, all most all the commonly used control panels do not provide billing information inside the control panel. Helm is easy to operate and has a good standard interface. Hosting Accelerator is another windows only web hosting control panel. It seems to make a best impression by showing more stuff, but showing too much won't make a best impression. It makes an impression that the interface is not planned properly and it lacks in extra feature. It suits the seasoned players. Control Panels For Linux Only Platform cPanel occupies the number one place among the control panels, because of its many features with easy operation and inexpensive aspect. It is based on Linux platform and serves for over ten flavors of Linux. Many hosting companies prefer it, as it costs only $20 per month/server. Interworx has many features and deserves to be ranked at the top of Linux only platform web hosting control panels. Considering the fact that there are more Linux based web hosting providers, Inteworx has dedicated to the Linux platform. It has a feature to see the up streams and sown streams. Interworx has a clean interface. DirectAdmin is another control panel serving Linux platform. DirectAdmin provides low hosting cost at $10 per month. It is the easiest control panel to use. Though it claims to have more features, needs lot of improvements to match the other Linux only control panels. The disadvantage of both Linux only and Windows only control panels is that they lose the hosting customers of the other platform. Control Panels For Both Linux And Windows Plesk, because of its availability for both Linux and Windows platforms, has little advantage over the panel control panel. Many web hosting providers who serves both Linux and Windows hosting customers prefer Plesk. Plesk interface looks like Windows XP and it is expensive as it serves both the platforms. The website builder tool and other features integrate well with Plesk. H-Sphere is another control panel for both Linux and Windows. Through H-Sphere is widely used by the web hosting sites, it lacks some features when compared to Plesk and cPanel. But it offers many features from key functionalities to complete automation. Ensim, another control panel for both Windows and Linux, has to cover more grounds when compared to other web hosting control panels serving both Linux and Windows. As per the ratings, cPanel is preferred for Linux platform and Helm control panel is for Windows platform. Author Information: After deciding on the control panel, choose the web hosting service which offers extra features, apart from good technical support, at a reasonable price. The extra features you can look for are, free domain name, website builder, unlimited sub domain and many more. Cheap Web Hosting The author's web site presents top ranking web hosting services offering affordable web hosting with extra features. Visit his site to get details of web hosting companies offering free domain name, free site builder, cheap domain names for any number of sites and many more.
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/know-about-the-web-hosting-control-panels.html