Cre8tive Flow

“If I only have time to fix two pages on my site, which two should they be?”

Almost every website owner I know would like the answer to this question. How do you prioritize website changes to best use your available time, money, and skill?

If you have been following this series, you already have some good ideas for changes to your site. In fact, your list may be way too long, and we only looked at a couple of web analytics reports! Data has a tendency to do that – you sometimes get more answers than you can handle.

Last post we looked at identifying visitor goals – what is your visitor’s purpose in coming to your site? The obvious next issue is, how you meet their needs while also meeting yours?

This is a great area to learn from the successes and failures of others. Pay attention as you browse the web. What is your purpose in visiting a particular site? How well has this site done in making it easy for you to meet your needs? What exactly works (or doesn’t work)?

In Web Analytics II we were talking through learning a little about good traffic to your website. I’d lay money that many of you looked at your referrer reports and saw at least one source of traffic you’d like to get better results from. If you didn’t, take one more look :).

When I’m trying to figure out how to get a certain group of visitors more interested, I almost always start with the question, “What are people expecting when they get to this website?”

My last blog post kicked off a short series about helping people get warm and fuzzy with their web visitor data. After reading Warming Up To Web Analytics, Part I you should have a list of questions about website traffic that are important to you.

Now it’s time to get your toes wet in actual data.

First step, make sure you have data. The free stats programs that come with practically every decent webhost these days are so limited they generally aren’t really useful for my purposes, but start there if you have one. The following two easily installed programs have far more features than any of the other free tools I am aware of, and can be used to tickle all questions addressed in the rest of this series.

Elizabeth (AbleReach) recently asked me to contemplate writing guest posts for the Cre8asite blog. We discussed topics on web data analysis and creativity, and how to get people excited about playing with their web data. I felt brave and bold, and promised to deliver.

About three days later, a conversation in the Website Hospital compared analyzing website data to “shoveling water.” Soon afterwards a great thread about if links should be underlined and blue touched more and more on measuring web site traffic to analyze results. Finally, Sophie Wegat’s new thread asks, “Analysing Your Data, How do you do it?” Yet again, opportunity knocks!