June 2005 Archives

For the longest time I've been wanting to put together a better set of reporting for the websites I build. I, like many others, have been a slave to page views and hit numbers, knowing that there was more to the site than these base stats. The "big project" forced me to dig much deeper than I have before, and look to resources on the web to create a better web report.

Eric Peterson Leads the Web Designer to Water

I've read numerous posts, articles, and ideas on how to start gauging return on investment, but all have been theory or just vapor. That is until I found a wonderful book with a horrible title "Web Analytics Demystified".

Once you get past the corny title, you find a very succinct review of:

• Web traffic reporting tools
• Typical types of reports
• Best of all, how. He presents a litany of possible Key Performance Indicator (KPI) metrics to create statistically valid gauges on website performance, and how to put them together

Finally a "how-to" book! I was thinking "Great, we'll read the book, get our statistics in-line and we're done!" Of course, things are never as easy as they look.

To say I've been remiss in writing to my web log this year is a woefully inadequate adjective for the sheer lack of attention I've been giving my website and any possible readers of it.

In the same breath, it's also telling of the enormous impact the "big project" at work has made on my life, and my free time.

However, I do not believe the two need be mutually exclusive anymore. So my latest bright idea is to start posing questions, answers, and ideas that I've encountered in the last six months woking on the "big project". I thought I'd start with is the long road we traveled (and are still going down) trying to find the shangri-la of ROI reporting for websites (see the next post).