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About one in a 1,000 visitors will send you an e-mail about your site. And that one will be about why you should put a link on your Model Railroading website to his website dedicated to commercial grade suppositories. I guess he figures Model Railroading to be a pain in the ___.
But I digress. What you really need is a counter. A counter is a means of counting the number of visitors to your website and/or to multiple pages within your website. Counters can tell you things like how many people have visited your website, what pages they looked at, where they came from, what browser they were using, and how long they stayed. You can also build databases of information about visitors which can then be used to compile statistics that describe the activity generated by your submission and promotional efforts. You can use one or both of two types of counters: public counters and private counters.
There are several benefits offered by these public counters. First, they are very easy to install. You only need a very rudimentary understanding of HTML to install the counter. If you wrote the page, you can install the counter. And no special equipment or software is required. You simply copy and paste a few lines of HTML code unto your page and you are in business. Another benefit is that the counter website usually produces a list of the most popular pages with links to those pages along with the count. This is suppose to benefit your site in two ways. First, it provides a public accounting of the success of your page. And second, it provides free publicity for your website. If the counter's page shows a lot of traffic to your page, this will cause a lot of curious people to visit to find out why your page is so popular.
There are also some problems with public counters. The public accounting of your visitors may not be very accurate. I have found that these counters can seriously under count your visitors. There are several reasons for this. If their counter server is busy, or if it is not operational (down), or a network connection cannot be completed, it can't and won't count your visitors. In fact, it will likely hang up your page where you have the HTML counter code. The counters work by requesting a binary image file from the counter machine. If your page can't access that image file for the foregoing reasons, then your page cannot complete execution and it will sit there while the browser's stop light remains "on" and "red". After a while, a savvy user will click the red stop light and continue, but only after sitting there for a few minutes wondering what's wrong with your page and/or your server. This points up another problem with these counters. If your visitor doesn't have his Auto Load Images function on and he doesn't click on Images when he gets to your page, his visit will never be counted.
Not only will your pages be definitely under counted, but those other sites with whom you are competing for most visited website may be cheating. With a few tricks, they can generate a lot of hits on their page to increase the counts to make them look good and make your website look relatively bad. I'm not sure being all that popular on these counter pages is that great. Most of the high hit pages are blatant pornography websites that are getting upwards to 30,000 or more hits per day. Now how is a Model Railroading website going to compete with Ts and As. Can't do it. Don't want to do it. Won't do it.
So why use a public counter? Several reasons. They are free. They are easy. You can also use them from American Online and similar services. They are better than nothing. If you would like to explore using a public counter, you can visit Web-Counter.
The counters can be very simple like the public ones, or very sophisticated and advanced in their statistical analysis. They are generally very accurate. If someone can access your page, there access will be recorded and accounted for. If you can use a private counter on your server, it is usually for free. No charge for the processing.
Private counters can tell you what page was visited, when it was visited, by whom was it visited, what time and day they visited, what browser they used, and what website referred them to your website. This data can easily be stored and saved for further analysis. If your ISP does not provide easy to use counter facilities, and access count statistics are important to you, you should investigate other Internet Service Providers.
The following is a list of freeware or shareware http access log counters which run on the Unix platform. Some of them operate only on specific hardware or require specific versions of a programming language, usually Perl or C. You should review the specifications carefully to be sure the program will work on your server before attempting to install it. Some will work with or require referrer log data. Most will work with any industry standard httpd log file available on any Unix system. You should note that this software runs on your ISP's server and not your client computer. You can run the programs using a client on your PC, Mac, or other workstation.
I'm not sure anyone knows the measure of success in website hits. Whatever it is, it is probably very relative. And it probably depends on what you are using the counts for. If you've put your website together as a part of your personal hobby of Model Railroading, it's probably enough to know that you're getting some visitors. But if you have a commercial website which is intended to generate more sales and revenues for your business, or it's a website you plan to charge admission to, or you plan to sell advertising at the website to generate income, you need to be able to start qualifying what these counts mean. In order to give you a rough, and I mean rough, idea of what your access counts mean, I've tried to quantify them in the table below:
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You might also want to visit my business, Electronic Software Publishing Corporation, to see what I do when I'm not doing this sort of thing. Now, let's start using Eureka!