Counting KompoZer

KompoZer is a great tool for creating web sites and for learning web authoring techniques. As a WYSIWYG editor, KompoZer makes it easy to put content on a page. One thing KompoZer can’t do is help you assess your audience and determine how effective your pages are. I had to find another tool that would.

The “right” content can help get your site found. In a post on search engine optimization I said:

When building your page consider what search terms your intended audience will use. …my audience would search on, “WYSIWYG HTML editor, Nvu, KompoZer, free software downloads, and beginning web author.”

That piece entitled “Who do you think you are talking to?” also noted that “you are simultaneously talking to no one and everyone.” I admitted that blogs, including this one, “tend to be ramblings but some are regarded as important to thousands. Some of you have told me that I ramble so I know I’m not talking to no one. I doubt that I'm talking to thousands.”

Of course all this would have been easier if only we knew what we were supposed to do before we did it. Unfortunately, you and I as beginning web authors don’t know all the rules, techniques or tools that are available when we start.

Hit Counting Tool

One of the things I try to do is to tell you about a brick wall I have hit hit so you won’t need to hit the same one. When it came to creating a web site I didn’t know what I was doing but I was doing it with great speed. I kind of had the idea of what I needed to do to be found by search engines and followed those rules. Later I went back and polished things a little as I did more research. This is a learning process you know.

I had seen visible web site hit counters and thought they were kind of tacky. Besides they don’t tell you anything other than how many times you checked the page to see how many times the counter had been tripped. More research led to an article about StatCounter. A 16 year old named Aodhan Cullen launched the package in 1999 and won BusinessWeek's young entrepreneur contest. Not bad. Other points made in the article are:

• StatCounter currently has more than 1.5 million users and tracks more than 9 billion page views per month across its network of 2.2 million Web sites.
• Alexa Internet Web Search, which ranks sites by traffic, currently lists StatCounter as the 34th-most-visited site in the U.S., ahead of household names like Adobe, Dell, and Wal-Mart.
• StatCounter is going after small and midsize firms that don't need highly sophisticated analytical tools—and can't afford to spend $10,000 and up to buy them.

The article says that StatCounter is signing up 1,500 new members per day. The good news is that StatCounter services, at least up to 500 records per site, are free.

Wysi Free

That’s right: What You See is Free. This hit counter is really a good deal and more than a hit counter. What makes it a good deal is that it is not only free but is really a slick application. StatCounter gives me a lot of insight into who you folks are and what I ought to be doing to serve you. What makes it more than an invisible hit counter is that it gives me detail about where you are from and why you are here.

StatCounter has a number of ways to present the data it tracks. Like I said you never know who you are talking to but it is called the World Wide Web. (I knew you folks were out there. I was just surprised to see so many of you stop by. G’day to you all.)

This is an early mapshot and I’m sure you can understand it gets cluttered fast. In addition to the graphical representation there are pretty serious spreadsheet-like compilations that tell you a lot about your visitors, where they came from, and what they did while on your site.

StatCounter has the "visitor by country " data ready in other forms. The free version tracks 500 visits to your site but you can eliminate addresses (like your own) that tell you nothing so you can focus on the real customers for your information. The other significant point (to me) is that the data is real time. What you see is what is happening at that moment on your site.

Some folks on the StatCounter support forum say they can pinpoint problems in real time but I’m not sure how that happens.

Surprise, surprise, surprise…

Some of the data collected are not surprising. The vast majority of operating systems are Windows versions. I thought it was interesting that Vista is less than 8% at this point. It may be a long time before Vista has a share equal to XP and even longer before I upgrade to it or its successor. Bad Vista!

Mac users are a dedicated lot but less than 3% of the total visitors here. KompoZer is available for Macs and Linux as well.

I really hope the Linux community gets a Windows replacement out there before I am forced to do something. My friends at Windows have developed long snouts.

I also wasn’t surprised to see the number of Firefox users. Firefox is really slick and if you aren’t using it you are doing yourself and the community a great disservice. Internet Explorer has progressed. By that I mean IE is probably able to present a valid page as you intend it to appear. There are still no guarantees if you are using one of Bill's browsers.

If you do the math the folks here are about even between IE and the Fox. I’m sure my good friend Bill is surprised by that. I have 7 on another machine and 6 on this one to test my sites. I don’t think web authors can ignore the versions of IE because there are just too many of them. I also don’t think web authors need to cater to IE by offering different versions of the site. How about “catch up or be lost” as a policy? Maybe it should be "Fox up or be lost."

A surprise is that Google and Google blogs account for 93% of my visitors. I’ve used Yahoo! for years and recently switched to Google myself. That high of a percentage was not expected but underscores my suggestion that you visit Google’s Webmaster Help Center to make sure you understand what their bots are looking for as part of your search engine optimization program. Whether you like it or not Google rules according to my numbers.

The other surprise was that more visitors come from the locked since June, Nvu support forum than the active KompoZer forum. I forget the number and am too lazy to look it up but my memory says the Nvu support forum is second only to Google as a source of visitors. (Welcome to you folks too.)

Go get ‘em

KompoZer is clearly a “go get.” It is free. It works. It is easy to use. I like those qualities in anything I need to use and I like those same qualities in StatCounter. Kazé did good when he took Nvu, made it work and made it better. Aodhan Cullen saw a need and filled it. He offers some of it for free and that’s good enough for me. Who knows? We may even get big enough to buy one of his reasonably priced upgrades. Meanwhile, if you don’t have it on your site go get StatCounter. StatCounter is Wysi approved.

Wysi

; .