Website Statistics and Usability
Several times a month I analyze my website visitor statistics through Awstats (a stats tool within cPanel) and my Google Analytics account. Doing so allows me to stay abreast of how people are using my site and with what kind of software/hardware. Not only does this help me as a web designer and developer for my clients, but it shows me how to make my own site more efficient.
To illustrate certain trends and how I interpret and apply this information as a designer, I’ve provided some of my visitor statistics below.
Note: I highly encourage all companions to consider using one or both of these tools. Awstats is included within cPanel if you host with me and Google Analytics is a freely available if you set up an account (it requires adding a block of code to the bottom of your pages).  Doing so will not only show you overall site traffic, but you can view which pages are most popular and how long visitors are spending on each page.  These tools also provide visitor IP information, which can be a very powerful resource for security. I will write more on that in a future post.
Although most of this information came from my Google Analytics account, the Awstats tool in cPanel provides the same kind of data (with exception to screen resolution or connection speed info).
Visitor Operating Systems:
- Using Windows: 94%
- Using Macintosh: 5%
- Using Linux: 1%
How I use this information:
This is mainly just a point of reference. The visitor’s operating system isn’t nearly as important as what type of browser they are using.
Visitor Browsers:
- Internet Explorer: 47%
- Firefox: 45%
- Safari: 5%
- Opera: 1%
- Netscape: 1%
- Mozilla: 1%
How I use this information:
Although Internet Explorer currently dominates the browser market, it is actually somewhat of a ‘problem child’ for designers and developers due to lack of web standards support. A simple definition of ‘webs standards’ in this context is a set of coding guidelines or universal rules outlined by the w3c so websites display/work properly in all browsers.
IE is notorious for interpreting some things differently in your website source code. This often requires a developer to apply certain workarounds or hacks to make things display or work as they should. A perfect example is IE version 6, which doesn’t support png-24 transparencies (a .png graphic is sort of similar to a .gif), which just happens to be a very useful type of image format. The ‘Veda Designs’ title graphic at the top of all my pages should be semi-transparent in most browsers - though isn’t in IE6. Microsoft fixed this in version 7 (among other things) - so now it just a matter of waiting for people to upgrade their browsers (have you upgraded yet?).
Firefox is currently the fastest growing browser and I was pleasantly surprised to see how closely matched it was to IE in my site statistics. This is generally the browser of choice for designers and developers because of it’s loyalty to web standards.
As you can see, I don’t have many Safari (mac), Opera or Netscape visitors. My general policy on cross-browser compatibility is that I make sure things work 100% in the top two browsers. For everyone else (5% or below), the website should be accessible and working, but may have quirky display/layout issues. My VedaCMS tool doesn’t work correctly in Safari - but this is due to limitations with the browser itself.
Specific Browser Versions (only including info from the top two browsers):
Internet Explorer:
- Version 6.0 - 56%
- Version 7.0 - 41% (get it)
Firefox:
- Version 2 and up - 80% (get it)
- Version 1.5 and below - 20%
How I use this information:
Again, this is mostly just for reference. Most everything works correctly in all Firefox versions, so my primary concern is how many people are still using older versions of IE. The new IE7, although not perfect, complies much more with web standards and requires less hacks/workarounds. Version 6, on the other hand, still requires additional tweaking to make everything look right.
Visitor Screen Resolutions:
- 1024 x 768: roughly 50%
- 1280 x 1024: roughly 20%
- 1280 x 800: roughly 10%
- 1280 x 960: roughly 10%
- 800 x 600: roughly 5%
- 1600 and up: roughly 5%
How I use this information:
Screen resolution is extremely important in terms of website usability. A website looks completely different on a 800×600 screen than it does on a 1280×800 setting. As you can see, 1024 x 768 is the most popular setting (this is usually the default on new computers). The biggest problem for designers are those few folks who insist on keeping their resolution at 800×600 (to their credit, this is usually due to their ‘just not knowing any better’).
It is challenging to design a website that will look great on all resolutions. If you make a fixed-layout too narrow (which will accommodate the 800×600 folks) - there will be too much empty space for those people on higher resolutions. On the other hand, if you try to keep things comfortably wide for higher resolutions, there is a chance you will force horizontal scrollbars on anyone browsing on a 800×600 or even a 1024×768 if they have their window resized too small.
My preferred style of design for companion websites is to use more compact, fixed-width layouts. I feel these are more modern and attractive in terms of design - but generally don’t work well for incredibly verbose text. Although there are exceptions, most companions keep their site text short and sweet (a handful of paragraphs or less) - which works perfectly for compact designs.
Screen Resolution Tools:
- Check to see what screen resolution you are using
- Instructions on changing screen resolution: Windows XP | Windows Vista | OSX |
Visitor Connection Speeds:
- Cable/DSL: 87%
- Corporate/T1: 9%
- Dial-Up: 4%
How I use this information:
Connection speed determines how fast website pages will load for a given visitor. These statistics tell me that most of my visitors are on a high-speed connection and should not have to wait very long for my pages to load. Companion websites often use a lot of photos in the design & gallery, so it is important to consider how convenient (or not) your website is to browse. Regardless of connection speed, I always make an effort to keep page sizes well within the average by optimizing photos and graphics for the web and coding to web standards.
