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NBD News
September 24, 2008

End-of-summer NBD News

The cooler weather of fall is fast approaching--perfect for curling up with a good website, such as my featured client's site, www.lowrypei.com. Also in this issue you'll find a brief explanation of web hosting and domain names, and a look at some of the website statistics Google Analytics provides. Web News introduces Chrome, the new browser from Google.

Featured Client: Lowry Pei

I recently finished a complete revamp of author Lowry Pei's website. The main impetus for the revamp was to rebuild the site using a content management system, allowing Lowry to continue to add new work. As he states in the intro to the site, "Like all writers, I write to be read; this is my way of putting my artistic effort out into the infinitely branching network of readers and writers." To that end--connecting with readers--I reworked all the typography to improve online readability, and created a special "print stylesheet" for users who prefer to read a printed hardcopy. Also with this goal in mind, we added:

  • A ShareThis button, to allow readers to blog, email, or bookmark a piece they enjoy
  • A Paypal Donate button: a sort of "pay-what-it's-worth" approach recently used by the band Radiohead
  • An easy-to-use contact form
  • PDFs of (eventually) every piece on the site, for free download

I hope you'll check out some of these features and enjoy some of the stories, memoirs, and novels on Lowry's site.

Explainer: Web Hosting and Domain Names

To have a publicly viewable website, you need two things: web hosting and a domain name. I want to briefly explain each, to give you a better understanding of how a website works.

When you purchase web hosting, say from godaddy.com or aplus.net, you are essentially buying some hard disk space on a web server, which is simply a computer built to serve up website-related files, such as html code and images. These servers run operating systems made for this task, and also offer access to specialized web-related programming languages and database programs.

So, say you have purchased some server space from a hosting company--how does a web surfer then access that space to view your web site? This is where your domain name comes in. In fact, generally you don't need a domain name name for someone to access your site. If we were all robots and could remember 72.21.206.5 just as easily as we can remember Amazon.com, domain names would be unnecessary. 72.21.206.5 is the address of Amazon's web server, and the domain name www.amazon.com is mapped to that address via the Domain Name System. Conveniently, most hosting companies offer hosting and domain name packages which can be purchased together.

Please contact me if you have any unanswered questions about domain names or web hosting!

What's Next: Google Analytics

Once you've got your website or blog finished, how can you tell if anyone is visiting it, what content is popular, or what keywords people are using to find your site? Enter Google Analytics! There are many "web stats" packages available, but Google Analytics is free and thorough, and lately I've been adding it to all my clients' sites. My only complaint about the service is that there is so MUCH information that the interface can be overwhelming. I thought I would highlight a few of the stats you may find most interesting and helpful. For a more complete picture, visit the Google Analytics Help Center.

The overview page of the visitors section

Visits: The total number of visits to your site. This number will always be higher than absolute unique visitors (below), because some people (you hope!) will visit more than once.

Absolute Unique Visitors: The actual number of people who visit your site; even if a user visits several times, she will only be counted once here.

Bounce Rate: This is the number visits in which the user visits only a single page on your site, and then leaves. A more useful statistic maybe be bounce rate per page, which I explain below.

Map Overlay: If you click on the Map Overlay link, you'll arrive at one of the more fun aspects of the stats page, and that's seeing where your users are in the world. The darker green a state or country is, the more people have visited from that area. You can zoom in to the city level by clicking on a region.

The overview page of the Traffic Sources section

Here you can view Top Traffic Sources (other websites your visitors came from) and Keywords (search terms visitors used to find your site).

The Top Content page under the Content section

This is a very useful report showing all your top pages, initially ranked by number of times each was viewed. The most interesting items here are the Time on Page, Bounce Rate, and Exit Rate. Time on Page is self-explanatory but really interesting to look at, because you can get a window into what users are actually bothering to read/look at on your site. Here, Bounce Rate means a user viewed that page and only that page, and then left the site. Exit Rate refers instead to the total number of visitors that left your site from that page, regardless of what other pages they may have looked at.

If I haven't set up your site with Google Stats, or you have more questions about how to use it, send me an email.

Web News: Google releases Chrome

Though I will give Google's new browser, Chrome, a full test and review when it becomes available for Mac, I wanted to mention it now, in case my Windows-using clients would like to try it out. I'm always pushing any browser that isn't Internet Explorer, and this one definitely looks streamlined and secure. One particularly nice feature is that if you have several websites open, and one of them misbehaves and "freezes," you can simply close that one and all others will be unaffected. You can read the webmonkey article for an in-depth description of some nuts and bolts, or just try it out!