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Access Counters
Access counters are often the most obvious but least helpful evaluation technology tools, because they only count the number of visits (or " hits") to a specific Web site. In other words, each time a particular page of your site is retrieved by a Web browser, the counter will register a hit. This means that if a viewer comes to your Web site and views five pages, the counter may register five hits, depending on its specifications. Also, if a single viewer visits your front page several times during one visit, each of these hits will be registered separately. Access counters can not provide other, more useful information such as the number of individual visitors to a site or the duration of each visit. Counters can be visible or invisible to the person accessing the site. The trend is towards invisible counters, because you do not necessarily want people to know how many (or how few) visitors you have had.
For more information about particular access counters and their capabilities, see the following sites:
- Free and Pay-for-use Web Auditing and Counting Services (http://www.digits.com/)
- Yahoo! List of Access Counter Sites (http://www.yahoo.com/Computers/World_Wide_Web/programming/access_counts)
- Bolero Home Page (http://www.everyware.com/products/bolero/bolero.html)
- wwwstat--Distribution Information (http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/websoft/wwwstat/)
- Gwstat (http://dis.cs.umass.edu/stats/gwstat.html)
- Microsoft Usage Analyst (http://www.microsoft.com/evaluate/intranet/effective.htm)