Web Design Ethiopia

Once your site has been up for a while, you can begin to investigate the use of the site. Studying the use characteristics of your site will help to inform future design decisions. Use studies differ from user testing in that they are more analytical and look at patterns of use. Also, they represent actual usage characteristics, not simply data generated from a lab setting.

Be cautious when interpreting this data. Without a clear description of use, it can sometimes be misleading to interpret the raw data. For example, suppose you see that a particular page gets 65 percent of your hits. You might think to yourself, “Wow, this page must be the users’ favorite; it must be very useful.”

In reality it may be that your navigational structure forces the majority of the users to go through that page in order to get the information they are truly searching for. This is a theme that will be repeated throughout this section. It is the relevance that matters, not the raw numbers.

Analyzing Your Hit Logs
An in-depth analysis of your hit logs can reveal a substantial amount of information. The logs can tell you about overall hits, conversion rates, entrance pages, search terms used to reach the site, effects of design changes, general growth over time, peak times, demographics, and system down-time.

Each of these is worthy in its own right, but it is the overall picture that the logs provide that is the most informative. A thorough investigation of your hit logs will give you an understanding of how your current site is being used and help suggest a direction for future design.

Overall Hits
It’s important to keep in mind that the goal of your site is not overall total hits, but rather relevant hits. For example, if you’re selling products, it’s much better to have 20,000 hits on your front page and 5,000 hits on your Products page than to have 300,000 hits on your front page and only 1,000 on your Products page.

Or, if you are selling parts for a car that is only sold in Europe, and you are getting 80 percent of your hits from people in the U.S., then you aren’t attracting the right target audience. While overall hits can be a good indictor of the visibility of your web site, it is very much a mere surface detail; the real meaty information lies in the relevance of those hits.

Conversion Rates
Conversion rates can be very revealing about the quality of your web site. Conversion rates tell you haw many people go from one place to another place – in other words, whether users are actually penetrating and moving through your site, or whether they are just looking at one page and leaving for greener pastures at a competing site.

This type of analysis can be particularly useful if you have some sort of linear or sequential operation such as a purchasing system. In this hypothetical purchasing system, which runs across several web pages, note the major drop that occurs after the special offer.

This might be telling you something – perhaps that special offer isn’t worth it. You’ll want to compare the number of people who accept the special offer (page 2) with the number who remain to enter the billing and shipping information (page 3), and then judge whether the extra value of the special offer is worth the loss of up to 4,500 customers.

However, the analysis is not that simple, because you still need to compare the results without page 2 – perhaps you would lose the same number of people in a different part of the transaction.

Entrance Pages
Hit log analysis can also reveal the pages from which users are entering your site. This is extremely useful information. If 90 percent of your users aren’t seeing your home page, then is it really worth spending thousands of dollars to make the home page look nice?

Entrance pages can also tell you what your users find valuable in your site. For example, we have determined that one of our web sites. Usability First (www.usabilityfirst.com), has a large proportion of its users entering directly into pages in the Groupware subsection of the site.

This tells us that perhaps the subspecialty is ore interesting to its specialized market than the overall set of pages is to the rest of the users.

Search Terms Used To Reach the Site
Hit logs can reveal the search terms used by users to reach your site. This can shed light on which keywords are working and which are misleading and can also suggest additional terms that you may not be using. However, this information doesn’t tell you who isn’t finding your site because the search terms didn’t lead them to you.

Analyzing users’ search terms can demonstrate which of your metatags and description terms users are matching; reveal users’ search terms that you don’t have in your metatags and description; and suggest new content areas or new pages that might be useful.

Analyzing Design Changes
Analyzing your hit logs over time can provide you with information regarding design changes and general growth over time. It can also establish peak times, help estimate spikes, locate orphaned pages, and demonstrate major traffic patterns. To analyze the impact of design changes, you can look at the logs before and after the changes have been implemented to reveal possible ways in which the changes have affected use.

However, you also need to consider other unrelated but simultaneous changes over time. In other words, you can’t be sure that it is your design changes that have affected the use. Rather, it could be general changes over time.

For example, if you make changes to the home page to include a top-level link for “Usability” and then your Usability page gets twice as many hits over the next six months, you can’t necessarily conclude that it was this design change that caused the increase in traffic. Instead, it could just be that the general public has become more interested in the topic and therefore the traffic has increased as a result.

Once way to test the impact of a design change is to make the change for a set period of time and then revert to your previous design. If the traffic increases following the change, then decreases again when the change is removed, then you have more reason to believe the traffic increase wasn’t due to an external factor. While this tactic is not recommended for any site that survives purely on the basis of increasing traffic, it can provide better evidence that a specific design change has affected the traffic.

A more reasonable way to examine the effect of a design change is to look very closely at the exact time of implementation. If you made the change on Monday at noon, and your traffic tripled at exactly that time (and stayed at three times the previous amount), that should be a good enough indication that the design change is working. However, if your number of hits is small or the degree of change is relatively minor, such as 10 to 20 percent (which is still a nice increase), then it’s hard to be certain that the increase really was stimulated by your design change.

Watching General Growth Over Time
Log analysis can provide you with basic information about the growth of your site over time. If you have multiple sites to compare, you can get a better idea of how well each is doing. Some sites may grow exponentially, while others may peak and stay at a consistent use level.

In addition to looking at growth rates across sites, you can compare different sections of a single, large site. For example, large corporate sites may compare the differences in use across divisions. Some way grow from month to month, while others may stay static.

Establish Peak Times
Hit logs are useful for seeing when your web site is used the most and to establish peak times. There may be trends across the time of day, day of the week, or months of the year. This knowledge can be useful for scheduling maintenance times. It may also be useful for scheduling maintenance times. It may also be useful for determining when to make revisions.

Peak times may vary tremendously across the time of day. For example, in the United States many sites are fairly inactive in the late evening and early morning (EST). However, the Usability First site has fairly even use throughout the 24 hours. This is most likely because Usability First is used widely outside the U.S.

Finding Orphaned Pages
When analyzing hit logs, you may find a page or two that rarely gets hits. It could be that these pages are just not interesting or important to the users. However, if you think these pages are important, then there may be something else at work. Often you can find orphaned pages, pages that aren’t consistently linked to the rest of the site, or links that are hard to find in the page layout.

Finding Extremely Popular Pages
Hit logs may also reveal where your most popular pages are located. These pages can then be used as a measuring stick against the rest of your pages. Better yet, your may use these pages to drive users to other important but less popular areas of your site. You can use them to guide the direction of your site. Hit logs can also help to determine which areas might be candidates for expansion in new popular sections.

Determining the Value of a Page from Hit Logs
Beware not to overvalue the data from your hit logs. As with most data, it is what it is. Taking too much meaning from the data can lead you down the wrong path. Always keep the following in mind:

The Number of Hits Does Not Always Reflect the Value of the Page to a User.
You can’t automatically assume that because a page gets five times as many hits as the rest of your pages that it is the most valued page on your site. It could be quite the opposite: users may hate the page!

It could be that your navigation forces them to go through that page in order to get to where they want to go. In this case, you would have an inflated number of hits, and you can’t determine the value from that number alone.

Similarly, because a page gets only a few hits doesn’t mean its value is low. The page might contain information for emergency data restoration. You would hope this page doesn’t get used often, but when it’s needed, it’s probably the most valuable page on the Internet to the individual using it!

Demographics
Hit logs can provide you with several forms of information about who has visited your site and what type of software they’re using – their operating system (PC, Mac, Linux, Unix, Palm, etc.), their browser and version, their IP address, which, like a domain name, can suggest their affiliation (.com = business; .edu = education; .gov = government) and country – without really guaranteeing that they fall into a specific demographic.

Beware! You may be missing an entire group of individuals (say, Lynx users) because the users simply aren’t out there or aren’t interested in the site. However, it may be that they are interested in the site, but it doesn’t work well with their browsers.

System down Time
Your server logs can also indicate how frequently your server is available, and at what times the server has been down. Your web site can become unavailable for a variety of reasons: system crashes, regular system maintenance, network outages, power outages, incompatible software upgrades, expired security certificates, accidental changes to server settings or file permissions, and so on.

No one guarantee 100 percent server uptime or web site availability, but a variety of contingencies are handled by professional hosting companies, such as backup servers, backup network connections, backup power supplies, appropriate software testing platforms, and systematic maintenance procedures. Episodes of server outages should be recorded and tracked by the hosting company in order to continually measure performance and evaluate steps for improvement.

Typically, availability goals for servers are based on a weighted availability metric, where outages during peak times are considered more severe than outages in low-traffic times. Thus, regularly scheduled system maintenance should be scheduled for off-peak times.

In summary, there are several keys to analyzing your hit logs: be sure to keep in mind the relevance of each page, look for numbers that are meaningful to the goals of your web site, and beware of making false assumptions.

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