Modern Web Site Design: Getting People to Come Back, Part IV

Are you really USING the internet for your business?

This article was prompted by a client's responses to their website, after spending $30,000 on it's re-design and technology upgrades. Some of the comments and "suggestions" included:

1. Let's take the sample downloads away from the website and make everyone request it to be mailed.
2. Let's make people register with their name and email address in order to get the fact sheets on our products, and then put them all on a mailing list.
3. There are some errors in the content (that we provided), let's roll back to the old site (a week after launch and with the old site containing the same errors)
4. We can't include our product documentation online because the competition might see it.

There were more, but these are the basis for this article.

In case you are not familiar with the term, "brochure-ware website", it's a non-interactive website that just endlessly displays text and graphics, usually attempting a "hard sell".

Take a good look at your competition. No, I mean a really good look at them and their web sites. How many of them are brochure-ware? Probably not many. The reason for this is the fact that with it's exploding popularity, competition for the customer's dollar online, even if the purchase is made off line, is hot.

It's a shame that there are still people out there that just don't get it when it comes to the Internet. It's a medium that is all about speed, convenience and efficiency. If all you're doing is replicating your newspaper and magazine ads, don't even bother wasting your time, or risking your reputation with a web site.

Let's take a look at the individual comments from the client above and their associated problems:

1. remove downloads and force requests for mailers
   
   • This just completely avoids the purpose of a potential client visiting your website. A client is at you site to get information, now. By forcing requests for mailers, you're slowing the information process, and thus the purchasing process, by at least three days, assuming you receive the request and act on it immediately and there are no postal delays. Your website should *never* have requests for information to be mailed, unless it's a product sample (Videos and CD's are fine to be mailed, too, but there should at least be a summary and excerpt of the materials)
2. register email & name to get info, put on mail list
   
   • This not only (again) completely negates the purpose of your website (fast access to information), but forcing users on a mailing list is not only unethical (and stupid), but illegal in some states and countries. If you want the user's name and email address, fine, but make sure it's not mandatory in order to see information and let them know in no uncertain terms what you will do with the information. (Spamming, or sending unsolicited commercial email can also cost your your website and access account, too!)
3. errors in content, let's rollback to old site
   
   • First of all, doing a roll-back to your old site will cause viewers to wonder if you even know what you want to do with your corporate identity. Second, if you're paying someone to create your website (or even if it's your own staff), REVIEW and APPROVE your content before it goes up! So many people claim they don't have time to do this, but it's a feeble excuse for taking a couple of hours and going over your site for proper content. Take it home, if you have to, but get the information right the first time! There are also caching issues to worry about, too. People who visited your site last week and come back this week may see corrupted or wrong images if they're loading a completely different version from cache (Especially if you've used similar file names for your graphics and documents!)
4. Our competition might see our documentation
   
   • This is not only naive, but not a good reason to provide your potential clients with more information on buying your product. Though many don't like to acknowledge it, competitive intelligence by rivals is alive and healthy, using both ethical and unethical means. For something as simple as your installation manuals and help files, it's a no-brainer to get a copy of this by simply calling your sales staff or VARs and asking a copy to be sent as a pre-cursor to a purchase decision. (There's also simply going to your clients and asking to see their current product's (i.e. yours) documentation and promising to out-do it in a competitive bid. Good business practice assumes your competition knows all the simple stuff about your product anyway. In most cases, excessive secretiveness will make your company not only slow and inefficient for providing sales material, but will more than likely make you look silly.

Basically, your site should be able to provide information on your services in as fast and efficient a method as possible. Forcing clients to resort to off-Internet venues to get your sales information is plain stupid, as it's the same as telling them you don't want to sell to them right now. Trust me, your competition will not make the same mistakes. Worse, they'll be selling to your clients, for the simple reason that they made the purchase decision easier. 

Marc Bissonnette is the president of InternAlysis, a competitive intelligence and CGI Programming firm located in Beachburg, Ontario, Canada and CanadianISP.ca - Canada's largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) search and comparison tool!

Re-vamping a website

This month's article is on a few common items surrounding re-designing a website and how to go about it. 

The very first thing you should do, before making a single change to your site, is take a look at your site's traffic logs. This will show you which part of your site is getting the most exposure, thus giving you an idea of what your visitors are most interested in. You may be surprised at the results, especially if the content getting the most visits isn't your strongest specialty. If the traffic to a specific section is high enough, it may even be worth thinking about a slight change in your firm's or your website's focus.

Once you know what section receives the most visitors, that will give you an idea on the content that is generating the most interest in your site. This should be kept in mind when updating the rest of the content on your site, as well as adding new content.

Next item should be the HTML itself. When you designed the site, where you relatively new? Did you use a WYSIWYG editor? If you've learned proper HTML by now, its worth going through you site and re-coding the pages by hand. You'll be amazed at how much you can shrink filesize just by getting rid of all the excess junk most WYSIWYG editors add to your code.

For those sites using graphical icons or buttons for navigational aides, here's a good test to determine whether your icons are helping or hindering your site navigation: Make a copy of your main page or nav bar. Remove any text or ALT tags from the images, or near them. Next, ask a friend or colleague who isn't a regular visitor to the site to find five of your most common documents on the site, using the changed nav-bar. If they can't figure out which icons link to which sections of your site, your graphical "aides" are more of a hindrance. It's amazing how many people choose imagery for their site just because they look cool, and not because they relate to the site or the content they are pointing to.

Next item should be dated content. If you have a news or what's new section, remove or archive all information that is older than six months. Not only does older content take up more space and cause more time to be spent finding information, but it looks a little silly to have content from 1996 in your "What's New" section. If you want the content available for viewing still, create a sub-section called "News Archives", or similar, and put the items there.

Next is your products and / or services list. Take a look through them, their descriptions and their pricing. Over the years, you've probably thought of better ways to describe and sell what you are offering than what was originally put up on your site. The last time I re-vamped my site, I was a little surprised at some of my descriptions of my programming services (And they could probably be better worded, still!)

Remember when you checked your stats page for your highest-traffic areas? Now is a good time to put a few discreet links from those sections to your lesser-visited sections to encourage more visibility. Even if you have a nav-bar in a frame or sidebar, put a link in the content somewhere. People tend to put the nav-bar to the back of their mind when reading content. Try to keep the links related to the high-traffic content, as well. (Ex. My highest-traffic areas in www.internalysis.com are two of my shareware scripts, multipass and membermanager, so the logical link from there is to my Perl programming services)

While you're in your code, take a look at your Meta tags for descriptions, keywords and titles. If they're not there, fix that! You may need to update keyword lists and descriptions, as well, especially if they're more than a year old. The search engines will be much friendlier to you for the effort!

As always, if you have questions or comments on this article, feel free to contact me. I've done a lot of work in re-vamping sites for content, as well as speed and navigability and am willing to lend a helpful comment here and there if need be.

Marc Bissonnette is the president of Internalysis, a competitive intelligence internet research firm located in Beachburg, Ontario, Canada and CanadianISP.ca - Canada's largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) search and comparison tool!

Physical Telephone Line Checks

First, the disclaimer. (Everybody's got one): I am not an electrician, representative of Bell Canada, Sympatico or anyone else even remotely related to Bell Canada. If, by following this advice, you get yourself electrocuted, melt your computer, any of its components, cause your neighbourhood to sink into the ground or trigger Armageddon, it's all your fault for doing this in the first place. When working with ANY live wires, follow good safety habits. I've shocked myself a few times by stupidly touching two wires, or one wire and a ground. Personally, I use insulated construction boots when working on home wiring / telephone wiring.

If you're not sure of what you're doing, HIRE A PROFESSIONAL. It's not worth the hassle (and potential injury) if you haven't a clue :) If this works, and you're connect speeds triple to 15 gigabits per second then, of course, I take all the credit :) (Unless you're getting 15 gigabits into your coffin, in which case I've never even heard of computers)

1. Find the demarkation point in your house. This is where the phone lines come in from the outside. In some older houses (like mine), it's a little black box with a brass bar and screws inside. CAUTION: There is electricity flowing through these! It'll give you a nasty shock if you touch both wires (Or touch one wire and aren't properly insulated). If you're uncomfortable working with electricity, ask someone who is comfortable / competent to do it.
   Un screw the brass plugs from the bar (I think it's called a lightning arrestor, I could be wrong, though) and with a dry cue-tip, wipe off the threads and the socket to which they screw into. Re-screw the plugs.
2. While still at the demark point, check the connections of the wires coming out of it and leading to the next junction box by disconnecting them (make sure to remember where they were connected in the first place) and clean them with a piece of sand paper or emery cloth. (If you're using sand paper, 80 grit or higher is good. Make sure there aren't any particles left on the connectors (If you still have that cue-tip handy, it's a good thing to clean off the sanding debris.) Re-connect the wires.
3. Inspect all phone wires leading from the demark point to the rest of the jacks. Look for aged wires (insulation that has dried out, cracked, split, etc), damaged wires (from mice, vacuum cleaners, your kids, you, acts of God, etc). If you find any, replace the whole run. (It's not worth soldering it, since you probably won't get a *perfect* joint and telephone wire is cheap anyway :)
4. Open all your jack boxes, clean the connections in those with the sand paper / emery cloth and your handy-dandy cue-tip (get a new one :). While they're open, look for excessive corrosion or build-up, especially if they're in a high-moisture room like the laundry room (This happened to me, I had a jack directly behind a dryer vent, which made a TON of static). Move these jacks if possible, but if it's not (or you just plain like the convenience of talking while washing your undies), I'm pretty sure you can buy special jack boxes for high-moisture areas (or get an outdoor box).
5. If you've got any really old phones, now's probably a good time to polish them up and have them bronzed, stuffed or sent to the great Switching Office in the Sky. Get modern phones for your extensions.
6. If at all possible (and it really isn't hard) install a dedicated line from your demark point to your computer. The lower the number of junctions and connections between the 1 meg modem (or ADSL) and the outside line, the better. (You can also call Bell, or an independent contractor to do this for you).
7. After all of this, pick of the phone and dial a single digit (except 0) to get rid of the dial tone. Make sure the kids aren't making a racket in the background (can you tell I'm a father?) and listen to the line for static, popping or hissing noises (even faint ones). You should also try this by calling a friend and telling them to shut up for a second, so you can hear the line quality on a live connection.

If you've done all of the above and still hear noise on your line, call Bell Repair (611) and tell em you've got line noise, which is interfering with your data connections and would they please check your line (Be nice, they're busy people). Only do this if you think there really is a problem with your line. (There's probably a limit to how nice they'll be if they get a zillion calls on clean lines :)

For me, I did all of the above and it improved my 56K modem connection from a variable connect rate of 34.4K - 42.3K to 50.3 K steady (Dialling into Interlog, using a v.90 Diamond modem). I'm sure the clean lines have something to do with steady 100K downloads on the HSE, too :)

Marc Bissonnette is the president of Internalysis, a competitive intelligence internet research firm located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and CanadianISP.ca - Canada's largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) search and comparison tool!

Return Traffic - What's In It For Me?

Though this topic has been touched on indirectly in several articles, it's worth going into much more specific detail now. 

Now that the Internet, as a form of popular media, has left its infancy and entered its toddler years, there is a lot more competition out there for user's time, attention and eventually, dollars. As traditional advertising agencies finally clue in and realize that this is an *absolute neccessity* for their portfolio of services (And yes, this is a topic for a whole *series* of articles), there are more and more resources being brought to bear on client site development.

The problem, as has been pointed out by so many, is that Web sites are being developed by developers for developers, albeit on a subconscious level. Without getting into the specifics of technologies, cgi's and levels of interaction (well, in this article, anyway), there is one important question being asked these days, and that is "What's in it for me?" If you think you or the clients are asking this question, you're in the wrong industry, since the answer to that from the site owner or developer's point of view should be obvious (though my next article will be on "Pitching a Web solution"). No, the question is being asked by the *users*.

One of my favorite points to bring up whenever I'm speaking at a conference or convention is the fact that there is *nothing* you cannot find on the Internet. This means you can find everything from detailed plans on building thermo-nuclear weapons to 101 variations on recipes for chocolate chip cookies (for curiosities sake, I also searched for recipes using Spam and even found several dozen of those!) This fact should mean one important thing for you: Whatever you are offering your viewers on the web, the chances are that someone else is offering the same category of information, but only better. Now, "better" could mean more variety, volume, better presentation, better frequency, or any number of improvements.

This knowledge, in turn, should be urging you to spend several afternoons, on a regular basis (spread out, of course), checking out not only your direct competition, but those sites that seem to be attracting a lot of attention.

Far too many are the web sites, and even worse, web site developers, who seem to think the site they deliver exists in a cocoon. They pay no attention to what and how the rest of the net is delivering information and fail to implement similar strategies themselves.

Admittedly, this failure is often a failure on the client's side to dedicate either the time or the budget for ongoing development and market research. It is up to you, the developer (or your sales reps) to educate the clients on this need. (As I said, next article is on pitching a Web site and this will be covered). In the meantime, take a good look at the site you've just finished developing, or paid to have developed, and ask yourself this; What's in it for the user? If you think that gobs and gobs of information about your products or your services is exactly what they want, you've just wasted a ton of money and time on a site people will read once and forget. Try to think about it this way; When you get a brochure in the mail, or any other form of junk mail, how long do you keep it? Do you read it again and again? Will you display it on your coffee table for your guests to enjoy? No, you won't. This is because it is information on one, narrow topic and is only of limited use.

Think, now, on magazines; You do keep these around for a while, you'll show it to a friend or a colleague and it may even occupy space on your coffee table! Why is this? When you think of it, a magazine is essentially one big marketing vehicle. The reason, however, that you read it is that it covers a range of topics within your area of interest. The same principle should be applied to a web site; After all, it's relatively easy to get someone to read something (or at least glance at it) once. Your focus, however, should be to get them to keep coming back for more. 

Marc Bissonnette is the president of Internalysis, a competitive intelligence internet research firm located in Beachburg, Ontario, Canada and CanadianISP.ca - Canada's largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) search and comparison tool!

Modern Web Site Design: Getting People To Come Back Part III

Since the first two articles in this series seems to (still!) generate a lot of traffic, I thought we'd carry it on with another installment :) 

So what's next, you ask? Your site is in all the search engines, your URL is everywhere but written in the sky (and you're working on that, too), your content is being updated bi-weekly, at least, and your site transfers in less than half a second on a 300 baud modem :)

There is an area of web site maintenance that people often overlook: CGI Upgrades.

We tend to write a lot of our own CGI stuff, but the original ideas for these scripts have to come from somewhere. Our bookmark file is absolutely crammed with sites that list and categorize freeware, shareware and commercial CGI scripts. Using this as a reference, we've found we've been able to not only increase the useability of our own scripts, but increase revenue from our clientele by offering upgrades or technology shifts to clients with existing CGI solutions. Here are a few thoughts to consider:

First of all, take a look at all the CGI's you are using, as well as those of your clientele, *even if you no longer do business with that client* (This is a great way to 'bring them back into the fold' if they've left you for another web developer)

Separate your CGI list into categories; mailers, search engines, discussion boards, guest books, etc.

Then take an afternoon and look through the CGI resource sites to see how these scripts have progressed, whether there are upgrades to the specific CGI you used or scripts with similar goals, but added functionality.

For example, last time we took a look at all of our clienteles CGI's, we found there were a couple of clients still using an original version of a mailer script that simply printed a $key:$value pair on each line. Since implementing those mailers (two years ago), we've moved on to templated mailers that allow the users to write a plain text template, with slots for the variables to be replaced as they're mailed (allows for more 'letter-like' CGI mails. After contacting all these people using the old scripts, all of them upgraded to the newer mailers, which increased revenue for us (the web developers) and added funtionality to them (the clients) in making the mailed results more useable.

The same thing can be looked at for any script-type: Search engines have come a long way since two years ago (I'm talking about the simple Perl-based fake-a-bases here, not the ultra-expensive 'real' databases like Oracle, AltaVista, etc, etc). Discussion boards have evolved tremendously, file uploaders, so on and so forth.

If you are managing your own site, or that of your employers, the benefits are tangible:

• Increasedfunctionality in your scripts
• Better "PR Value" from your clients/users as your firm keeps a modern image
• Better information retrieval as you move more of your scripts to storing copies of data into database format for later analysis
• Increased speed and response time from your scripts as they take advantages of newer environments (Perl5, for example)
• Brownie points from your supervisors/managers as you increase the above mentioned attributes for your firm (Remind them of this when you ask for your raise!)

If you are a web developer, the benefits are equally tangible:

• All the above benefits for your clientele
• Earned 'brownie points' from your clientele as you prove you are looking out for their best interests
• increased revenue from the new work this creates
• A good starting point for new business you may want to pitch

And of course, the users of sites with new / upgraded or revamped scripts all benefit from:

• Fresh look to tradidtional interfaces
• Increased speed
• More functionality
• More 'toys' to play with on their favourite sites

If you would like a list of the sites we commonly use for CGI ideas and implementation, please feel free to contact me.

Marc Bissonnette is the president of Internalysis, a competitive intelligence internet research firm located in Beachburg, Ontario, Canada and CanadianISP.ca - Canada's largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) search and comparison tool!

To WYSIWYG Or Not To WYSIWYG?

This article was inspired by my latest client project, a web generator that creates web sites on-the-fly based on form input.

The concept for the scripts themselves are relatively simple: take all the input from a form and put those values in place of some pre-defined places within a template form and write a new file, unique to each new user.

There were two problems in developing this product: The first was the fact that all of the HTML files were created by a Macintosh, resulting in some funky control characters that only the Solaris system would see and thus cause the scripts to hiccup (Of course, on my PC, these files appeared perfectly normal). And the second was the absolutely horrible quality of HTML the WYSIWYG editor my client used generated.

The first problem was easy to solve, literally cut and paste the entire file into a new text file and save as ASCII text (or run a conversion utility, same result) the second, however, required almost completely re-writing the HTML to something approaching a standard quality.

There are several reasons for having structured HTML code and I'll cover a couple of them here, but first, I'll quote from a book I've used occasionally for Perl reference, and this sums it all up very nicely:

"Using Perl for Web Programming"

(Written by David Harlan, Shelley Powers, Paul Doyle and Michael O Fohlu, Published and Copyright 1996 by Que Corporation)

"Form design is a key step in the creation of a CGI application that programmers often overlook. If you are working with a form that has poorly named variables or strange values for check boxes or menu items, writing the program is more difficult. I recommend that you spend significant time getting the form right before you get too deep into your programming; you'll save time in the long run. Also, it frequently makes more sense to change the form than to go through some programming magic to make the form do what you need it to do."

This quote is * so * true! Basically, if you're creating a site that will either:

• remain static (not change much)
• be maintained by the same people
• not use any complex CGIs

Then your HTML style and quality is pretty much irrelevant, as long as it displays properly to your target audience. If, however, your site, or your client's site is destined to be maintained by people other than your own, or will be using more complex CGI scripts, it is well worth your while to consider learning the raw HTML yourself.

There are several advantages to knowing HTML by heart:

• You can do things in HTML right off the bat, as you become aware of them, or as they become available, without waiting for an update to an editor.
• Your code (should be) much more easily readable by other coders, be they in your own team or subsequent site managers.
• You have the pride and right of saying that you're a "real" html programmer, rather than a button pusher :)
• Complex CGI's, such as search-and-replacers, some forms of search engines, cataloguers, etc, will be able to read and parse your code more efficiently.
• Your code tends to be much tighter than a WYSIWYG editor (Properly done, there is more white space to your code, but browsers ignore that).
• Troubleshooting your sites tends to be much easier, since you *know* the code and what does what.

There is nothing to say that you shouldn't use a WYSIWYG editor for redundant or quick-and-easy tasks (although I have yet to see an editor that creates a proper table format), though you should always go into the code itself and clean up any quirky layouts your editor may create.

If you're still new to HTML, and have to use an editor to get started quickly, I'd recommend an editor that shows you the code as you create it. Personally, whenever people ask me about editors, I always recommend (after suggesting they learn the language itself) Hot Dog Professional by Sausage Software (www.sausage.com) as their first-exposure to HTML. It's a WYSIWYG editor, but it shows you the HTML in a separate window as you edit, thus actually teaching you the language as you go. This is a Good Thing, since you will eventually become much less reliant upon third party software to maintain your living :) 

Rather than take up a chunk of this newsletter with samples, I've put a sample page with good code / bad code up here:

www.internalysis.com/nwex.htm

Naturally, in the "proper" half of this sample code, you can go even further with the indentation, in order to be 100% technically correct, but I feel the trade-offs here are minimal to retain both "good coding" standards, as well as readability.

Marc Bissonnette is the president of Internalysis, a competitive intelligence internet research firm located in Beachburg, Ontario, Canada and CanadianISP.ca - Canada's largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) search and comparison tool!

Using Web Stats To Build Your Site

Everyone knows (or should know) what web traffic statistics are, at least in the basic sense. What most people do not know however, is all the information they contain (actually, that should read "all the information they *can* contain", depending on your ISP).

First of all, my caveat: My first article with Net World covered the fact that not all stats are necessarily accurate or complete, due to the large amount of cacheing servers on the Net. With that being said...

There are far too many site owners who use their stats solely for the purpose of determining total number of visitors to their site. While this is nice to know, it certainly doesn't help you determine which areas of your site need more work, which are the most popular, which might be attractive to advertisers, and which sections can be turfed altogether.

So just how do your stats do tell you all of this? First of all, you'll need one or more of a few things;

• Access to your raw server logs
• A stats analyser (or one being run on/by your ISP)
• Patience

or hiring someone to interpret it all.

Now, having access to all your server logs isn't necessarily a guarantee that you'll get all this wonderful information. You have to make sure the ISP is tracking all the data you need. Some things like http_referrer and user_agent are left out of server logs to save space. (http_referrer tracks which page linked to yours, pages visited, the path users took through the site, average length of visit etc, and user_agent tracks which browser people are using to view your site, which Operating System they're using, etc). If your ISP doesn't track these right off the mark, you can ask your ISP to implement them either in general or for your particular VWS (Virtual Web Server).

So, assuming you have access to this kind of data, how do you access it all? We use MarketWave's Hitlist Standard (freeware version, although there are some *very* impressive "pro" versions in the US$295 to US$995 range) for our statistics analysis.

There are many other excellent statistics analysers, running on all platforms, as well as versions that will run directly off of your server.

So what do you do do with all of these numbers?

There are a zillion different uses for these numbers and I'll try to cover a few of the more important ones here. (The section titles are used from HitList Standard, your stats analyser may have different titles, but they're fairly self-explanatory)

* * *

Total Visitors / Requests: There is an important difference between the two (Visitors and Requests). Total Visitors is the total number of unique visitors to your site. Total requests are the total files transferred from your site. (Remember, one visitor can make 15 requests in a single visit: Consider: One page, with fifteen images and one java applet, is 17 requests or hits: 1 for the HTML page, 15 for the images and one for the java applet). I've seen a lot of people get really excited by seeing 15,000 requests to their site, but then come crashing down when they discover that those hits all come from 300 people alone.

* * *

Most Popular Pages: These, as the name implies, are the most frequently viewed files within your site. What this should mean to you, however, is that these are the pages where you will get the most bang for your buck, so to speak. These are also the pages that you would use to drive traffic to other, less used sections of your site that you wish to draw attention to. These numbers are also the ones the advertisers will want to see to ensure that they're not being placed in the "back corner" of your website.

* * *

Most Popular Entry Pages: These are the pages where people are first coming into your site. This can occur either from the users typing in the URL directly, from a bookmark file, a search engine or a cross-link from another site (Remember how important cross-linking is!)

* * *

Most Popular Exit Pages: These are the pages that users last viewed before leaving your site. These are a good indication of which pages may need some tweaking in order to keep people within your site.

* * *

Most Popular Single-Visit Pages: These are the files that people are entering your site to view and leaving without visiting elsewhere. These are also good targets for tweaking to encourage users to visit further within the site. Chances are that the users have viewed the site and left immediately for one of the following reasons:

1. they were looking for specific information and found it/did not find it (usually from a search engine)
2. the page they entered did not appeal enough to them to continue to visit
3. wrong number :-)
4. the information they were looking for was not clearly defined (similar to 1) above)

Again, take a look at the single-page visits to determine what can be done to encourage further exploration of your site. Ideally, get a neutral, third-party to view the site and ask their opinions. Personally, I ask my wife to do this from time to time for some of my sites, since

• she is not in this industry (or even remotely linked)
• she is typical of the target markets
• she was not involved in the process of design and therefore is less biased
• she loves finding faults :)

Even better would be to get a client to do this for you, as a favour, since they are definitely your target market.

* * *

Visitors Origins: This is usually the list of countries people are visiting from. It's amazing the number of companies / business owners that discount international visitors to their sites. Unless you're selling groceries in a corner store, chances are you have the capability of international business of some nature or not. Consider your home nation's dollar, as well. Personally, as a Canadian, our weak dollar vs the American dollar makes InternAlysis very attractive to U.S. firms looking for our type of services. I would imagine that a great deal of the readers of this list are from New Zealand (about 1/2 - Ed), which is in an equally attractive position for international marketing.

As an example, my own site has traffic from United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Denmark, Japan, Brazil, Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, Norway, Netherlands, New Zealand, Israel, Malaysia, France, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and Singapore.

If you think that because my business is Canadian based, I ignore requests for service from all of the above, you'd be quite wrong! :)

Depending on the types of services and / or products you offer, you may want to consider keeping your international visitors in mind when updating your site.

Well, those are the most common logfile elements, though by no means are they the only ones. Depending on your log analyser, you can manipulate your display to show literally hundreds of combinations of the data and their patterns/trends

I should also mention that for those of you who have further questions or comments about this article, or any of the others I've written, please feel free to email me.

Marc Bissonnette is the president of Internalysis, a competitive intelligence internet research firm located in Beachburg, Ontario, Canada and CanadianISP.ca - Canada's largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) search and comparison tool!