by Andrew S. Lennon | The Daily Anchor
This is the first in a series of posts where I’ll bring you the best tools in my arsenal. I’m an online marketer and business development pro and these tools have served me well in a thousand applications.
Measuring Load Time
1. Octagate Site Timer: Allows you to monitor how long it takes for a user to download one or more of your web site pages.
2. URI Valet: Calculates page load time and time-to-download on various connections, and reveals your server headers, internal links, and the size of every object/image on a page.
xHTML / CSS Validation
1. W3C Markup Validation Service: Checks the HTML/xHTML markup of any web document, which is great for making sure you don’t have any major ‘grammar mistakes’ that will keep a browser or robot from properly viewing/crawling your site.
2. W3C CSS Validation: Checks your CSS validation of any web document; use it for the same reasons as above.
Net Rendering: see how your site looks in other browsers
1. Browser shots: An open-source service that renders your website in Linux, Windows, Mac and BSD browsers. The only super-annoying thing is that it can take several hours to receive your rendering results, because after submitting your address its added to a job queue that runs it through a number of computers in their network, which take screenshots of your site and upload them to the central server. A GREAT tool but a little frusterating if you’re as impatient as I am. Anyone know of a better one? A good rendering tool is hard to find.
2. NetRenderer: Renders your website in IE5.5, IE6, IE7, IE8 and allows for overlay comparison between IE6 and IE7.
Traffic Statistics
1. Google Analytics: GA stands apart from the field and I give it the highest recommendation. It’s well-supported, has a great UI, great reporting tools, and allows you to view all your sites from one platform. One downside is that it’s javascript-based and isn’t hosted on your server, so it’s not as insanely accurate as tools like Piwik and Firestats, for example.
2. Yahoo Web Analytics (formerly IndexTools): This just launched at the end of 2008 and runs head-to-head against Google Analytics (duh.) I have yet to use it, but one major benefit is that it offers real-time tracking (I usually see a 1-4 hour lag on Google Analytics.) I’m drunk on Google kool-aid so I think I may check this out later today.
3. Piwik: An open-source PHP MySQL web analytics program that you download and install on your web server. They aim to be the open-source alternative to Google Analytics (GA).
4. Firestats: Offers similar benefits of GA, but “protects the privacy of your users, unlike Google Analytics” (note: free for non-commercial usage, $25 per installation for commercial usage)
5. Woopra: Live tracking, beautiful interface, real-time analytics and a GA-like ability to manage multiple websites.
6. Snoop: Javascript-based tool that gives you real-time notification, audible event alerts, and name tag integration (allows you to tag IP address with a name)
7. AWStats: A down-and-dirty traffic stats tools that could have a much better UI. They recently launched JAWStats, which runs in conjunction with AWStates and produces “clear and informative charts, graphs, and tables about your website and visitors…” don’t all these other traffic tools do that out of the box?
8. Clickheat: Doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of these other tools, but creates a really cool visual heatmap of clicks on a HTML page, showing hot and cold click zones.
Traffic Rankings
1. Alexa: The definitive resources for tracking traffic ranking, daily reach,
2. Alexa Toolbar (Sparky): Firefox Add-on that shows traffic rank, traffic trend, reach meter, and related links for every site you visit. Completely non-obtrusive (just hangs out in the footer of your browser)
3. Compete: Comparative ranking tool that measures daily reach (the number of people that visit a website on a given day as a percentage of all U.S. Internet users that day.)
Did I miss something great? Leave a comment and open my eyes.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
In the face of the tough competition, Alexa is coming up with more and more user friendly and unique features. Ability to create own search engine by giving access to the crawler is quite a novel feature in itself.
Thanks for the link to my JAWStats project, it is much appreciated.
Your write-up implies JAWStats was created by the people who created AWStats but this is not the case. JAWStats was created purely as a “web2.0″ (how I hate that expression) interface for a product that many, many web hosting companies do provide out of the box for their customers. JAWStats wouldn’t exist at all if the AWStats interface was nicer, but it isn’t so I opted to step in.
You should mention that “front end” stats packages (ala Google Analytics, Piwik) and “back end” stats packages (ala AWStats, Woopra, Analog) base their information on fundamentally different data. A webmaster should use one front end system and one back end system in conjunction with each other for the most complete view. Let me know if you want to know more about this.
A good article, Andrew, thank you. It’s really good to see such healthy competition in the analytics market.