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Although you can't tell exactly how many people have looked
at your pages, and although you can't say for sure how much
those visitors have read, you can still get a lot more feedback
on use of your web site than you can about your paper-based
publications. A web counter might only show you how many visits
to a particular page you have had, but a more sophisticated
web site traffic analysing service can tell you about browser
that the user has, how they got to your site and much more...
How many visitors?
The exactness of the numbers can tempt you into believing
them, but beware! Firstly, not every visit to the site is
registered, as numerous computers between the user and our
web server might be keeping their own copies of your pages
(caching them) and giving copies of these copies to the user
rather than fetching a copy of the original from the University's
web server. In short, if the University's server isn't asked
for a copy, it won't register a request. The result is that
the number of page requests registered by the University's
server is likely to be lower than the number of times the
page has been viewed by users.
My popular pages
Just beware that you don't assume that the page with the most
visits is the best - it might be that users are going to this
page because they are expecting to find something else there
(perhaps you have a misleading link ?). Combine your interpretations
with usability tests
to firm up your understanding of how people are using your
site.
University monitoring
The University monitors requests for pages from the web server
and summaries
of this information are available. There is also a facility
called SPOT
that can check your site for broken links etc. on a regular
basis. The web
team can set up these services for your site.
Other traffic tools
There are numerous services on the web that provide tracking
and statistical analysis for your web site. For most of them,
you only need to copy a bit of code and include it in your
web pages. Unless you want to pay for their professional editions,
you will probably also have to display a small icon that links
through to their web site.
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