If your business is totally dependent on the websites for generating revenues or more business, then it becomes extremely important for you to know exactly how everything is working and what your websites are doing. This means that you not only need to track your website but also measure the total effectiveness of your website. You can make use of either the spreadsheets or the log files for measuring the success of your website. There are software solutions available that integrate perfectly with your servers or some of the log analysis tool that come with the hosting packages.
It is a common thought by almost all the small business owners that the software installed on their local machines is the only solution they have for web analytics. But the fact is that there are tools which are hosted at the outside site and web analytics tool that are placed directly on your web servers. There are both the hosted as well as the server solutions available with each one having their own advantages. The main advantage of the server solutions being that they offer a greater flexibility and the hosted solutions are maintained outside or by someone else. You will need a solution on your web servers or for that matter hard drive if your main intention is to keep all your statistics a secret.
Whenever you select any web analytics tools it is very important that it should incorporate certain standard reports such as referrers, pageviews, visits and unique visits, HTTP errors, robots, entry as well as exit pages, countries, domains, operating systems, web browsers and authenticated users. Besides these standard reports there should also be an option wherein you can create your customised reports for getting the analytics of any specific area.
One of the most common methods adopted by any web analytics package to tack any web pages is to tag each and every page with a unique identifier. This way with the help of these tags the tools will have more accurate information about the pages that are being displayed and requested for. But for ensuring this you would need a tag assigned to each page. Another method of achieving good analytics would be by setting cookies for each customer that visits the site. This would enable the tools to have much better vision and information about the browsers that visit the site which would also include the unique visitors along with the information about the session lengths.
The two most important aspects of web analytics are flexibility and scalability. The more custom reports generated by you, the better for you as you will be able to generate and get more information out of it. In order to get maximum out of your tool, you should be able to find the one that is able to provide maximum support. The next important thing to be considered is the total cost that would be involved. To avoid any kind of problems later always remember to include recurring costs into your decision.
As discussed earlier, the HTML editors are those software applications which are used to design, create and manage high end web sites without writing HTML code. With HTML editors like Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe Dreamweaver, anyone can make web pages. From novice to professionals to web experts, everyone is using these editors to effectively mange their web sites. But as every technology has its own merits and demerits, the HTML editors also have its own virtues and vices. Let’s have a look at both the positives and negatives of the editors, as it will lead to better understanding of these kinds of applications.
Advantages of HTML Editors:
1. HTML editors allow you to draft web pages quickly. The most impressive aspect of these editors is that you don’t have to know about HTML codes at all in order to design your web site.
2. HTML editors not only help in creating the web pages, but it also maintains the site map and global structure of the whole web site. Thus, if in future the web site becomes complex you don’t have to face any type of issues while updating and maintaining it.
3. HTML editors help in maintaining consistency throughout the whole web site. If your web site contains large number of pages and if you want a particular element to be displayed on the top of each web page (for example your company logo), then instead of putting the element one by one on each of the HTML document you can simply put it one any one page and the editor will update it on the remaining ones.
4. HTML editors let you to insert complex elements into the web page with ease. For example: you can quickly insert flash animations, fireworks file etc. into your web site.
5. Forms, tables, frames and other important elements can be easily managed via HTML editors.
6. Not only in web designing, but the HTML editor also helps in generating the scripts for the web sites.
7. HTML editors also let you to easily embed DHTML effects into your web page.
8. With the help of HTML editor library, you can easily manage and access the frequently used resources.
9. HTML editors are WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) applications. So, you can easily know how your web page will finally look like on the web browser.
Disadvantages of HTML Editors:
1. No doubt that HTML editor makes it easy to create and maintain web sites but they are overloaded with lots of features. So, it is difficult for a newbie to first of all understand the working of the editor properly.
2. HTML editors are poor in error reporting. It may not very much effective in telling you about the bugs in the code.
3. The programming style (style of writing the HTML code) of a HTML editor is entirely different than your style. The editors write the code in a complex and professional manner. So, it would be difficult for an amateur web developer to understand it.
4. Due to lots of features, the HTML editors have become overcrowded. It is very difficult to know about all the available features and their usage.
5. No HTML editor is complete in itself. As the web standards are updated, these editors start getting obsolete.
