Number Crunching – What Stats Software to Use?

Posted by David | Filed under Web Software

It’s always nice to know when you create a website who is using it, why, how they got there and how long they spent! Its a great way though to learn about what your visitors are searching for and how to get more by exploiting this information to your advantage. The first thing though is to collect some comprehensive statistics for your website, and there are many many solutions to this problem. In this article I am going to go through three ways you can collect statistics, all of which I use currently, in fact at the same time in many cases!

Firstly, many shared server hosts install something called cPanel on to your website, this often has an Awstats module installed which can allow you to view your site statistics.

For those using WordPress there is also many plugins available for statistics but my favourite currently is one called StatPress

Finally for those of you who don’t want anything complicated, and perhaps one of the best is Google Analytics.

Awstats

Awstats is a great little feature often found in cPanel. It gives you a wide range of information about your users for everything on your server, from the top file, to top users, top search referrals etc. The best thing about Awstats is just the huge amount of information it places in front of you.

Unfortunately Awstats doesn’t lay out this information very well, its all on one big page, and for a less experienced web user could be hard to decipher. For those of you who don’t want anything fancy – Awstats is your no thrills Statistics software.

Verdict: 7/10

StatPress WordPress Plugin

Easy to install like many WordPress plugins StatPress gives a good amount of information, not quite as much as Awstats but perhaps to many people more relevant as it concerns their WordPress blog only. It includes all the useful information such as search engine referrals, users visited, operating system and other information, but it also has a really useful “Spy” feature which allows you to see exactly where the user landed on your website when they searched for it or came to it, and then what they did once arriving – it allows you to anonymously “profile” your users and see what their behaviour is like as they roam through your site – where they go, what attracts there attention and for how long. You can then use this information to see where your site weaknesses are and where its strengths lie.

Overall StatPress provides less but more interesting and more relevant statistical information than Awstats, its unfortunate for non WordPress users it is only a WordPress plugin.

Verdict: 8.5/10

Google Analytics

This is one of my favourites, and is great for everyone, regardless of whether your website is made in HTML or PHP. When you sign up to Google Analytics you are given a small piece of code to place into the header of your website page(s). Google then starts collecting the statistics!

What’s really good about this software, and sets it apart from the rest is that it can display the information it receives in a useful manner. It manipulates some of the statistics into graphs and charts, for example country information is processed onto a World Map where the deeper the colour the more visitors you receive from that country.

Like other statistics software it can tell you what search terms people use, but it’s able to tell you which are more effective, by telling you how long on average a person searching for a certain term stayed on your website and how many pages they looked at on average.  If you use Adsense as well Google can tell you how successful your Adsense terms are compared with other “Organic” Google searches.

Finally Google Analytics has the ability to overlay your statistics onto your site, so you can see which buttons or links are the most clicked in the most visual manner possible!

Verdict: 9/10

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Read more | Comments (0) | Sunday, 10th Aug 2008

Easy Form Generating Software

Posted by David | Filed under Web Software

For those of you who aren’t able to use the delightful cforms mod for WordPress, for whatever reason, then you may be looking for some easy form generating software. In the recent past I have had good experience with two commercial form generating pieces of software both very succesfully with my clients commenting on both how they generate nice easy to read emails for them, as well as the effectiveness of their spam prevention techniques.

All of these recommendations have the following features key to a good form:

  • Ability to have required fields and email address verification
  • Some form of CAPTCHA or human identification ability
  • Ability to store data in a database online, though each goes to a different length in helping you manipulate that data.
  • All use CSS so things can always be quickly edited to fit in with your site template.
  • All easy to use!

What you would use these for

  • Contact Forms
  • Order Forms
  • Request Forms
  • Link Exchange Forms
  • Feedback Form

If you plan on doing more complex surveys, online shopping websites I wouldn’t recommend this kind of software, there are other pieces of software out there dedicated to surveys and shopping which will be better tailored to your needs.

cforms WordPress Plugin

cforms is a free WordPress plugin which allows you to have great and easily adaptable forms, even by a complete coding novice! The only downside is for non-WordPress users who cannot use it without installing WordPress first! It’s created using a lot of AJAX so it really is sleek and fits in well with the feel of the site.

It also doesn’t quite have some of the more advanced features of the commercial programs, but for free its covers probably 90% of what they do and for 90% of people that’s more than all they need!

If have already succsefully installed WordPress cforms will be a doddle!

  • Integration in WordPress is brilliant, saves a lot of hassle and looks better than having to use iFrames.
  • It’s Free!
  • Good use of AJAX, very easy to change and alter forms on your website without having to take them down.

Verdict: 9/10

FormFields

FormFields is the pricier of my two recommendations, it is very good at creating forms and has some snazzy CSS templates to chose between, it is split into 2 separate products one which just allows you to upload forms you have created on the FormFields website to your own website, and another which allows you to have the generator on your server as well (this is quite an expensive option for the amateur designer).

As with all three options FormFields has built in Captcha verification to ensure the submitter is human. It also has a host of other functions some of which will be useful to specific types of form you may want to create.

  • Easy to generate professional forms, nice stepped generator.
  • Do not need a MYSQL database unlike the other two options as forms can be created on the FormFields website and all you upload is a PHP file to yours.

Verdict: 8/10

MachForm

This is a much cheaper option, at £19 its not a particularly large investment even for an amateur designer. If it were free it would be my favourite! (cforms wins on that front!) It creates really nice looking forms, and has a brilliant manager backbone, the owner also appears to be very much in touch with his community which is always a great sign! I think it will be something to watch out for in the future if it continues to get the support it currently gets. The MachForms also have built in support for the reCAPTCHA scheme which may also be of interest to some people.

Out of all 3 this is by far the easiest for a novice to use as it really is written in the most basic non-technical language, it also uses AJAX like the cforms plugin which is something I really do like, as it means the page does not have to be refreshed when a user submits a form.

MachForm does require a MYSQL database which may be a problem for some people, but most decent web hosting these days does have a MYSQL database!

  • MachForms creates really stunning forms and uses AJAX making them even more impressive.
  • Impressive backbone manager supporting the system
  • Supportive software creator and community forum.
  • Not that expensive.

Verdict: 9/10

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Read more | Comments (0) | Sunday, 10th Aug 2008

Free Batch Image Resizing Software

Posted by David | Filed under Software

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Recently for a website, I had to re-size a large number of photos as the pixel resolution of the images was too high for the PHP software to create a thumbnail over the server, but in reality they were far to big for the web taking over my 20″ 1680×1050 screen no doubt swapping smaller resolution screens!

Fortunately I stumbled across some really useful software on the internet. The software is called Picture Resizer 3.0 (or PhotoReize, it doesn’t seem to know what to call itself!) this software on its own seems pretty limiting only resizing photos to a width of 400 pixels with the height kept to the correct ratio for the new pixel resolution.

An addon I also found to this called PhotoResize Options Express allowed for me to chose the new width resolution more efficiently.  This ad-don is simply added into the Photo Resize folder and it starts working just after you rename the original PhotoResize executable.

I was amazed at how fast this program work, I had over 100 photos to do and it literally did them all within a couple seconds, this would have taken me over 30 minutes at least to do in PaintShop Pro!

Overall a great set of free software, and another bonus of not having to install a program onto my computer that will clog everything up as they are both standalone (or standalone dependent in the case of the later)

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Read more | Comments (0) | Sunday, 10th Aug 2008