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Filed under: Business, Design

Web Stats for Small Business

"And we want to be on the first page of Google," another new client said matter-of-factly, as the after-thought of our Web design meeting. I nodded, inhaled, and began my spiel.

"What are your stats now?" I asked, although I knew the answer. Many small businesses don't review their site stats, don't know how to view them online and can't really interpret them, but all Web site rebuilding plans include being on the first page of Google results. Let's try to marry the want with some how-to and understand how this works.

KNOW YOUR STATS
Know what your Web stats are. Contact your Web firm and demand the link. Bookmark them. Look at them! Pay attention to the "search keyphrases" and "search keywords" that users enter into search engines and find your site.

Site traffic is saved to logs and statistics programs display the data. Web stat programs are usually loaded on the server, so they have to be available from your hosting company. One of the most common stat packages is Webalizer, a fast and free log file analyzer. There are countless guides to help you interpret the numbers. And the mystery between "hits" and "visits" is explained here. Another common stat program is AWStats, an open source project at SourceForge There is a plethora of stat programs, many of which are free [see DLS for more info]

BUY BETTER STATS
You can buy access to better, more colorful stats with graphs and charts and circles and arrows. If you have a marketing department, they should take a look at WebTrends for small business, one of the older analytics, and check out the demos. WebTrends, like many other quality stat packages, is not free, so decide if the pretty pictures are worth the price.

I WANT TO BE ON THE FIRST PAGE OF GOOGLE!
You want higher ranking in the search engines' results? In the olden days, everyone played on the same field. Nowadays, it takes a village to raise your rankings. Try these suggestions, many of which are human-intensive.

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Filed under: Design, Developer, Internet, Web services

Happy 10th Birthday, CSS!

css celebrates 10th birthdayCascading Style Sheets celebrate their 10th anniversary this week, making websites more attractive, flexible, and making for easier cross-media publishing. Good old CSS Level 1 was officially published on December 17th 1996, and even though many people chose to shun it back in the day, the majority of web designers rely on it today to make highly functional, standards-compliant web properties. In order to celebrate the occasion, the W3C is inviting developers to submit their favorite CSS designs that will be integrated into the CSS 10 Gallery. Sites that are currently on the list include CSS Zen Garden, A List Apart, and the CSS Validator. Here's to another 10 years, CSS! Now if only we can get IE straightened out and displaying you correctly.

[Via Slashdot]

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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