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Analytics - April 28th, 2008

Analytics packages are very useful resources for web designers and can help you find out more about your website and the people who use it. Many packages allow you to see statistics such as how a user has got to your site (e.g. direct, Google, BBC etc… ), how users move around your website and how long they spend on each page. These figures can be used to analyse several things, however by far the most useful feature is goal tracking, which allows you to follow a user around your site until they make a purchase, seeing how they arrived at the checkout or enquiry form.

These figures can be used to improve your website, if users are reaching the payment page but not purchasing, maybe they don’t want to use the payment gateway you provide, or prehaps as you don’t use SSL they don’t trust your site. If users are adding products to baskets but never reaching payment then maybe the payment process is too long- we recommend payment should be 3 clicks away from the homepage for all products. Finally, and probably the most common is when a site recieves a lot of visitors, but few view the products, this is usually because prices are too high.

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Google Chart API - April 25th, 2008

The Google Chart API is a tool that enables developers to easily create charts dynamically by sending an HTTP request that includes data to the Chart API which returns a PNG image of the chart which is then embedded in a webpage with an image tag it really is that simple.

Many types of chart are supported, all simply by making the request into an image tag you can simply include the chart in a webpage. It was originally developed by Google in-house exclusively for Google products such as Google Finance and Google Analytics, it has now been opened up to developers to incorporate into web pages and report usage.

Here are a few examples of what can be created: