Archive for July, 2008

In the early days on the Internet website traffic was measured in “hits”. It was never an accurate guide to the number of visitors to your website but it took off anyway.

Over time many of us in the biz have tried to educate people about the correct terms to use (page views, visitors, unique visitors and so forth) with varying success. And it’s always frustrating when you hear someone refer to “hits” as you know just how much education is going to be required. So it was with great joy that I read the following quote in Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus’s fantastic book Web Design For ROI:

If your standard answer includes the words “hits” please take a moment to close this book and whack yourself in the head with it. There. Now remember that every time you’re tempted to use that term again. It’s an open secret in the web design community that anyone who uses the word “hits” in reference to their website most likely has no idea what they are talking about. Just don’t tell anyone we told you.”

Hehe. Seriously though analysing your website traffic is a vital part of running your online business. It can take a bit to get a handle on but is well worth doing. Here are some resources to get you started:

Web Analytics Demystified - by Eric Peterson
Google Analytics - probably the best free web analytics program around.
Measuring Your Web Site - great forum threads from Cre8asite.
Hurol Inan - web analytics guru.
Web Design For ROI - get the book.

Arrow Building Services provides commercial and residential property maintenance services in Sydney, NSW. You can learn more about who they are and what they do on their website.

Williamstown Psychology is the psychology practice of Camille Folley and Fiona Lacy who each have over 15 years of experience and specialised training in psychological counselling and psychotherapy.

We worked with them to develop their online strategy and design and optimise their website for the search engines.

ZDNet Australia’s Jude Willis has written a great post Why eBay tried to screw Aussie users. Apart from it’s discussion on the failed eBay PayPal debacle it has some great insight into the lack of an online shopping industry in Australia.

Some interesting points:

“According to Jenny Wilson, lead technology partner for Deloitte Australia, consumer confidence with online transactions has been scaring even the major, trusted brands away moving beyond bricks & mortar.”

“Predominantly, Australian retail chains use their websites to spellcheck their catalogues and offer cryptic advice as to how to locate your nearest store. Any online shopping is restricted to baffling lines of merchandise that barely represents their total product range.”

It goes on to quote Jenny Wilson who states that online retail in Australia is two or three years behind other countries.

Apart from the lack of consumer confidence I’d suggest that the inherently small size of the Australian market has a lot to do with the lack of online retailers in Australia. And with the Aussie dollar almost on a par with the US that leaves us doing our online shopping overseas. Which is a shame, cause I know I’d do a lot more locally if I was able to.

How about you?

Like many businesses we have online forms on our website to make it easy for prospects to get in touch with us. Unfortunately like many businesses this means we also get a lot of spam. Did I say a lot? I mean a ton. It’s frustrating and takes time to be cleared out of the in-box each day. So much so that my husband and I have discussed adding a captcha option to our forms.

If you’ve not heard of captcha before I’m sure you’ll remember a time you’ve filled out a form online and had to enter some funny looking characters before you could submit it. I also suspect you had to fill it out a few times because they never seem to be accepted first go. Now I don’t know about you but this frustrates the heck out of me - I just want to submit a form - why are you making it so difficult?

So I suspect you know what we decided. Not to captcha. Its a fantastic idea, and definitely has some uses, but why should we make our prospective clients lives that much harder to make our lives easier? It just doesn’t make (business) sense.