Analyzing Website Statistics

I was looking through AngleBracket's visitor statistics and found some interesting things:

-The average visit length to Anglebracket was less than five seconds. Have to improve on getting people's attention.

-Google provides most of the hits to this blog. One more reason to polish up on your SEO so Google will rank your pages higher, by reading some of AngleBracket's SEO posts.

-91.96% of hits from search engines were from Google.

-Most visitors were from the U.S. Next was Finland. Very strange, I agree.

-More visitors came when AngleBracket was updated more.

-Firefox 2.0 was the prevalent browser. In second place was Firefox 3. In third place was IE7, and in fourth, Firefox 3.01. Firefox rules! (Actually, in fifth place was IE6)

-99.39% of visitors had screen resolutions higher than 1000xSomething.

And finally, some interesting search terms I noticed:

firefox friendly make you website

how to make a form where ppl enter stuff on a website
glossy.css,
ftplive safe

Seven things to look for in a web host

1. Stability
Make sure your host makes a big deal of this. They should be boasting about their stability, praising the worthiness of their redundant servers, touting the dozens of (maybe that's an exaggeration) backup backbones--you get the point. If they aren't doing so, you can be pretty sure they haven't taken the necessary steps to ensure stability. A sure sign of an unreliable host: pages on their own site don't load, take too long to load, or sometimes load and sometimes don't.

2. Professionalism
The generic images of a server on a silver grey background give a bad impression. Unless you are looking at a free host (even then, try to avoid hosts that seem generic), never go with hosts that are generic or seem unprofessional. These are simply hosts that are meant to be bought out by other hosts. Hosts with "Under Construction" or any dead links are never be used. Keep your four ninety-five for a nice juicy hamburger instead.

3. A "logical" price
For example, $1.99 a year for an ASP Windows host probably shows that the host is just desperate for clients and doesn't provide good quality hosting. After all, if the host is good, why won't people all rush to get on the bandwagon? And if they are really a great host, how can they be so cheap?

Normal prices should range from $4.99 a month to $10.99 a month for basic plans.

4. Logical features
Unlimited bandwidth? Unlikely. If it's unlimited, how are they going to pay for the added costs? Unlimited storage? Impossible. Every host has physical servers, and there is absolutely no way the servers will have an unlimited amount of space available even if someone keeps uploading large files. What is more likely is a large amount of storage space, for example, 1000 Gigabytes of space. Many people hardly use 50% of their storage space, so the host ends up with a lot of extra server resources for others to use.

Look for at least five to ten times the amount of storage in the amount bandwidth they offer.

Also, do not underestimate how often you will need customer service, so make high quality customer service a prerequisite for your host.

5. Affiliate program
A sure sign of quality services, confidence in their own company, and a relatively long period of peace before another host will acquire that company. Web hosts with affiliate programs take a great risk: they give away hundreds of thousands dollar's worth of commission to affiliates--they must therefore both have a very good service and a lot of confidence in themselves in order to give away that money in advance.

6. Rave Reviews
Need I say more? Oh yes, I do have to say more. Websites with affiliate links to hosts tend to be biased.

7. Money back guarantee
Sometimes, even when you've taken all the precautions above, the host still turns out to be a sour lemon. Make sure they have an unconditional money back guarantee so that you can start all over again.

What to Learn: Coding, or Coding Software?

The question always exists for novices: should I learn to do everything with code, or should I just create the site with an editor?

Some answer, "Use the editor: nothing can go wrong, and it's easier."

Really? Not really. The built-in inflexibility of webpage editors makes it ideal for small webpages, but impossible to use for slightly more complex sites.

Take this for an example. A friend was creating a website with Dreamweaver CS3, the newest stuff, only to have three PHP errors inside the code because DW didn't know the hierarchy of the files it was creating.

Adding three "../"'s fixed the problem.

Here's one thing to remember: If you learn to program in code, you will have no trouble using a WYSIWYG editor, but if you learn to go the (seemingly) easier way may produce more troubles than you desire.

PHP vs ASP??

Yep, there have been many blog posts elsewhere about which one to use. And they all point to... PHP. I agree.

Point 1: You'll find that because PHP is open source, hosts that support PHP are cheaper. And with some hosts, ASP servers usually cost quite a bit more.

Point 2: On hotscripts.com, a website providing an innumerable number (not really) of scripts, there are more than four times as many PHP scripts as there are ASP ones.

If you are talking about functionality, basically anything that works in one language works in another; that is not to say that both are interchangeable, just that they both have equivalent functions.

For those that don't know what these languages are, they are server-side scripting languages that allow people to view pages (containing PHP/ASP and HTML) that have been processed in the server, then only the HTML part is sent to the browser. This makes the webpage much more useful, for simple applications

Website Form User-Friendliness

Here are some tips on form user-friendliness. A good rule of thumb is to ask, 'Will this form be inviting people to fill it in?' This article has a few examples of making your forms friendlier.

Website forms can be convenient, but are also intimidating. A form should be as helpful as possible - try to clearly identify all your fields, so that all people, from 'dummy' to geek, can easily see specifically what the field is for.

Text labels can be a great help when filling out forms. Try to direct the user to the field you want them to fill in. A subject field in a comments form can be used to nudge the user to help them say what they want to say. Of course, there would be more than five, but keep it to less than seven.

Details for what is to be filled into the form can be placed inside the text field, like the AngleBracket Newsletter signup form to your right. This is a real space-saver, whether you're tight on it or not.

A helpful form element utilizes Javascript to guide the visitor in entering their information. Try clicking inside the text input field to your right, then clicking out of it:

<input type="text" onfocus="if(this.value=='enter email address')this.value='';" value="enter email address" name="user" onblur="if(this.value=='')this.value='enter email address';" size="18">

About the OnFocus event handler: when the user focuses (puts his/her cursor) inside the box, it turns the text into ' ' and when the user clicks out (onBlur), then it turns ' ' into 'enter email address.'

Another type of form is a website opinion poll. Many webmasters have four to five fields: name, email, 'do you like [website name]?,' and a huge scary 'comments' textarea. Here's one thing to remember: textareas are scary. If you can, try to avoid using textareas and use checkboxes, radio buttons, and <select>ion boxes (see the pic).

A great way to avoid the textareas would be to replace them with radio 'rate this feature' buttons, or just a yes/no qeustion, 'Do you like this feature?'

Last, but not least, one important factor that influences the friendliness of a form is color. White seems very cold for an inviting form (sadly it's the default color). Inserting this code into your <input> fields can brighten the field and make it friendly:

<input type="text" maxlength="10" name="name" style="background-color: #ffffcc;">

Here's the conclusion to everything above: a good form will have the visitor fill it in without hassle or hesitation. They will feel at ease filling in the form. Keep this in mind when looking out for more ways to make your forms more user-friendly.

Creating the User-Friendly Website

A site with lots of CPM ads covering the face of the website means it is a high-traffic site, but what do those ads say about your website? You care more about 'revenue' than about aesthetics.

A site with lots of 'helpful' links and banners, scrolling marquees, blinking text (that works only in FF), and fancy logos and backgrounds: what do these tell about your site? You're a novice. Those add-ons don't necessarily equate with un-user-friendly; they're usually signs of web novices who don't have content for their website. When you have real content, you won't have room for those add-ons.

There are uncountable gazillions of websites on the net, with reports popping up all over say that there are thousands of new websites every day. Which of those are considered user-friendly?

Here are a few guidelines to give you an idea of what a user-friendly website should have:

1. Keep every site within one to two clicks from your home page. Not only does this make it easier to navigate, it lets the search engines index your site more easily.
2. Create a contact page with FAQs instead of giving out your email address or creating a mailto link.
3. Keep the page clear of leaks. A leak is something that distracts the visitor from what you want to achieve. If you want to capture the visitor's email address, you wouldn't put ads on the page, or the like. If your site is about, say, basketball, you wouldn't put an affiliate link to DreamHost just because it'll bring you money.
4. Make a sitemap for your website. Even if you have search on your website, you would want to make a sitemap for two reasons: 1. Sometimes people are simply 'surfing,' and not looking for anything specifically. A link to the sitemap from the website's home page would tell them what you have on your site. 2. The search engines find it easier to find and index your pages when you have a sitemap.
5. Keep the navigation in one place, i.e. don't put some navigation menus here, and some there. It's okay to have some 'featured' content like Yahoo does, because the featured content is not hard to find. The thing is, if you have some menus here and some there, the page looks very disorderly.
6. Align your page elements. I have seen pages with huge gaps on one side of the two column layout because there wasn't enough content. See, that's the problem when you have an inflexible template: it doesn't expand and shrink to fit your content. When you have such a template, make sure you add something to, uh, fill the gap.
7. Here's the rule to making the user-friendly website:

DON'T MAKE ME THINK! (Sorry Steve Krug.)

Yeah, that's the name of a great thin book that talks about web design. The book's central theme is don't make your visitors think. Don't make them look for what they need. Put the most important info where they would see it first.

Make it easy for your visitors to get around in your site, to use the features on your site. That's user-friendly.