More Google discussion
Today I learned that I have visitors to my big site from further afield than I’d imagined. I’ve always known that I have visitors from the USA, Canada, Europe and Australia, but the Geo overlay from Google Analytics is showing hits from Singapore and Thailand. I can’t quite decide whether GA is accurate there or whether that’s the results of web proxies and unfortunately I’ve never had access to geographical splits before to be able to judge. It’s still rather interesting, though, and I’ll be keeping an eye on that.
I also learned that the majority of visitors to this site are based in the UK. Oddly, none of them so far use Macs but I’m sure that when I’ve got more than two days of data this will rectify itself.
A nice feature is the ability to download any of the data in several different formats, so that I could do further analysis on data if I so desired or insert graphs and charts into presentations. Again, none of the hosts or free packages that I’ve tried have offered that facility and I could see that being one of the selling points for big companies.
Being able to see how long people are spending on pages will also be useful. The site hosts a variety of content so I’m going to be interested to find out what people spend time on and what people gateway through quickly. And knowing the proportion of new and returning visitors is an important measure that I’ve never had before - the big site has lots of content, far more than can be absorbed in one visit, so I’ll be intrigued to see whether I’m getting mostly one-off visitors or whether there really is a decent sized core audience.
In other Google stuff, I introduced mother to Google Talk this evening. It was much less traumatic than I thought it would be. Now hopefully she’ll be able to talk her sister through it and they’ll be able to do more transatlantic gossiping.
I also took a tour around my father’s company’s new website. I’ve only had a few minutes, but it’s a definite improvement on the old one. It looks much better, more professional, and actually has a consistent design across the pages. An accountancy firm needs that kind of trustworthy design, I feel.
From an accessibility point of view, there are still some big improvements that could be made but it’s at least much better than it was. The horizontal drop-down navigation built in JavaScript is supplemented with a good sitemap and browsing it with images and styles turned off wasn’t too painful. There are elements that could be improved - web designers really should be trying to move away from tables used as layout - but at least it’s worth the money they paid this time. It will be going live next week and I’m going to be making gentle inquiries (*snort*) about it’s success not long after.