Getting statistics about your site is always useful and interesting for every type of site, be it personal or an e-commerce money making machine knowing who, how, what, when and even why your visitors decided to take a look at your site. For e-commerce this can be vital and for personal/non-commerce sites its just interesting!

So today we are going to take a look at Google Analytics this is probably the best service for providing easy to read information about how your site is doing, like with Awstats and Webalizer which is provided with XDnet’s cPanel accounts, watch this space for articles about how you can use these to take a look at your site stats soon.

• What browser are your visitors using?
• Check out exactly how many visitors have been looking at your site.
• How fast is visitors connections?
• Look at how people navigate through your site and where they exit.
• How do people find your site? What keywords are they using to get to your site?

These important facts about your site can help you make informed decisions about the direction of your website, find problems users face and fix them – notice users aren’t finding that page you want? which pages make users leave? whats wrong with it? All these questions and more can be answered with the information gathered after just a few months of using analytics tools.

Log Files…

For basic web statistics, you can download your site’s log files. Access is included with all our packages. Log files are simple, they take a note of all page accesses, but the downside is they are not user friendly. There are software available to make them into a more friendly format, but why bother when there are tools which are easy to understand and more importantly use “out of the box”.

Using Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great tool, and one of the many great sites which we have and will look into on XDnet, which really can help make your site great.

Small catch, unlike with Awstats and Webalizer which comes with XDnet’s hosting, you will have to do a little more than just activate it in cPanel, you have to add a code snippet to the bottom of every page on your website… which can be a long and tedious process, especially if your site is not template based.

Many people simply do not have the time (or patience) to do this, especially if they are not code litterate, and can end up paying a lot of money for this to be done. However XDnet offers this service for a fraction of the price - Just open a Technical ticket.

Map Overlay:

Now this could be one of the most helpful and interesting features that comes with Google Analytics, and appears to have incredible accuracy most likely because Google is a multi-billion dollar company which can afford the very best Geo-location databases I am sure.

With this tool you can see exactly where visitors come from instantly, but of course that’s not all, you can get even deeper and get close up views of what town or city your users are from, and of course like with colour coding you can easily see which cities have the most visitors, to the right is another screenshot of a website i run. London obviously has is the most visitors which will probably be the case with most sites simply because London is a very big city, but second is Swindon (home of XDnet) and also where the sites organisation is based.

Of course you can break this down even further and take a look at how many visitors you get per day for an individual city and much more.

How users view your site:

You can also check out how your users are viewing your site, find out what browsers they are using, what screen resolution, what colours and so much more.

Google Analytics takes everything you can possibly know about your visitors and makes it into an easy to read, easy to understand and most importantly useful format.

With useful information like user connection speeds, if you find 99% of your visitors are on dial-up, maybe you should think about streamlining your site to be more low-band friendly? And vica versa, as much more likely in today’s market you find all you users are on Broadband (or higher) then maybe you can start thinking more about quality, use a slightly high resolution of images – your users are unlikely to notice a great difference so long as they have a fast Internet connection, but they will notice shiny new images where pixelated pictures used to be, however don’t forget to use caution everyone wants fast websites, and only sites with good, interesting and useful content are worth the wait of loading images.

I feel like I am starting to repeat myself a little so all i can say is, check it out, give it a try!

During my time on the web I have noticed how many users have misconceptions about HTTPS or SSL, so hopefully this should help clear a few things up and ensure your clear about what SSL does… and doesn’t do and how to be safe on the web.

Firstly i would like to explain a bit about HTTPS and to try and clear up some of the misunderstandings a lot of people seem to have about it.

HTTPS:// which stands for Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol Secure, which is a secure connection between you and the server. HTTPS is NOT a protocol in it’s self. HTTPS is exactly the same as HTTP except it has a extra layer of “security” called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). When comparing HTTP and HTTPS the only “physical” difference is HTTPS uses a different TCP port (usually 443) where as HTTP uses 80 (or 8080 depending on server set up).

SSL was developed by Netscape for you guessed it sending files and information via the web without nosy neighbors peeking. SSL uses a cryptographic key system. This system uses two keys which encrypt the data being sent, the first being the public key which is known to every Tom, Chris and Rumpelstiltskin and then we have the Private key known only to the intended recipient of the data.

I have come across quite a few people who assume that because a web-page has “Secure” it means their information, which often includes full credit card details, are secure for the short journey across cyber-space and the comfy stay in a little server on the other side of the world. However often what most do not understand is this is not the case, yes the information can not be easily sniffed or taped on its connection between you and the server, but it does not secure its safety when it reaches the server OR how the webmaster as well as every one who has access to the server (which can often be a lot) do with your information.

Just because a server uses SSL (which any body with a website and a spare £23 ($45)ish can obtain, without any security checks for the website i might add, doesn’t mean the server can’t be hacked or even be already hacked.

Dodgy webmasters, not only do you have to worry about your personal information being sniffed or viewed on transfer, while it’s sitting on the web server and crackers seeing it, But what about the actual website Administrator? what is he suddenly thinks hey, i have a database full of all the transaction details  from when i have sold naff to over the net…

Getting security certificates validated by browsers.

Now virtually all modern browsers are both SSL capable and show some type of alert if the incoming SSL certificate  is self signed or invalid.

I would like to make this perfectly clear, ANY webmaster can set up a secure connection for his/her website(s) and it will have EXACTLY THE SAME level of security as a certificate signed by a authority, the only difference being that many browsers have been “told” by the “certification authorities” that your site is OK!

Other wise your browser experience is hindered by warnings (especially with browsers such as Internet Exploerer 7 and Google Chrome who refuses to show the page unless you accept)

If you would like more information about setting up SSL of purchasing a SSL Certificate through XDnet  – Just Ask! and we can help with the process.

Hopefully this post has helped users understand what SSL does do – offer an extra layer of protection to your data, but also helps to understand the importance of not providing personal information to any website on the internet, if you have doubts about the intentions of the webmaster, try asking them about their policies and how they might use your data, if they can’t answer honestly about how they process your information, don’t risk it.

I was surprised to notice a remarkable difference in the quality of image in Google Chrome when I was toying with some design ideas.

I plonked a RSS icon onto the latest posts box so i grabbed my overly large (400 x 400px) PNG icon and then shrunk it down to 25 x 25px, obviously this is not ideal because many browsers have difficultly in scaling down images without distortion.

So anyway below is an example of the difference between Internet Explorer 7, Google Chrome and FireFox and i think without a doubt Chrome really beats them with the scale rendering.

Apologies that this isn’t necessarily a useful post, just quite interesting at how Google Chrome has really taken browsers to the next step, and i look forward to the others catching up and seeing the next generation of browser, made for today’s web, not last weeks.

Google Chrome is here, but what is it like? Is it really better than Internet Explorer 7, FireFox or even Internet explorer 8 (which passes the Acid test BETTER than FireFox 3)? Let’s take a look…

Now I have to admit I am not my usual self and have been wrapped up with starting new things and developing XDnet more recently and have not been reading much from my RSS gadget and it slipped my attention Google’s Browser was even close to release, so when a friend began questioning me about it I thought it best to download and check it out! However my first thought was “O no, not another browser to worry about!” however so far I have not come across any browser compatibility issues with Google Chrome… yet.

Now with as with any new software comes a whole host of new exciting features. Google realised “the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications” and have come at creating Chrome from a whole new angle, it’s very different to most browsers, and from my experience so far makes the browsing easier.

Under the hood:

Okay so unlike most I will go through a brief over view of what is under the hood.

Chrome was built using components of Apple’s WebKit and uses Mozilla’s FireFox and uses Google Gears among others so it has a good base, also Google has developed their powerful JavaScript engine, dubbed V8, developed in Denmark the V8 engine runs on a VM (Virtual Machine) giving it platform independence. The V8 engine is rather special in that unlike other JavaScript engines which generate internal representations of it, the V8 engine compiles it into Machine Code which runs directly on your CPU, without going into more extreme detail, Google’s V8 engine is also much cleaner compared to other JavaScript engines, which are messy and leave unused fragments of code hanging around and generally can be disorganised and causes lag, of course V8 is not like that its clean and dumps waste so it runs a lot faster. So a quick round up of the V8 is that it should run JavaScript a lot faster, meaning as scripts and web-apps, such as Google Gmail etc, evolve into more and more advanced interfaces the V8 can and will cope fine and “power the next generation of web applications which aren’t even possible in today’s browsers”

Tabs:

I won’t try to give a balanced view here. Google has done it.

The tab structure is perfect, and incorporates a feature I myself have been greatly anticipating from a browser, the ability to detach a tab, you can either detach and just drag into an empty space where it will open into its own window or if you drop it over an existing window it will attach to that, it’s simply superb.

EDIT: Yes i know FireFox can get a plugin to do the movable tags, but still surly having it built in is better?

Separate Processes:

Of course this ability is greatly to thank for because of the independency of each tab, each tab has its very own process so when a page decides it will munch a little too much CPU you can terminate the tab and (in theory) the browser should not crash and cause you to lose other tabs (and work), you can also easily manage the processes using Google Chromes Task Manager which shows each process as well as plugins’ enabling you to easily see the offending part and terminate it accordingly. You may also notice on the Task Manager you have a small link which says “Stats for nerds” … so me being a nerd I checked it out, this opens up a new tab with full memory stats not only for the Google Chrome tabs but also for other browsers you may be running at the time, as you can see in the screenshot – Please note my IE7 had 10 tabs open, Google Chrome 4 and FireFox 1 hence the hugely varied memory usage.

Compared to other browsers:

Personally, design wise Google Chrome beats all others hands down, it’s sleek, simple and flows nicely, and because Google has used Mozilla FireFox as part of Chromes base you will notice some similarities between the two browsers.

Both FireFox and Google Chrome share an almost identical remember passwords bar,

Google Chrome:

FireFox:

Security:

Because virtually ALL browsers on the market have grown from back in the day when there was no viruses, no threats and geeks ruled the web security wasn’t such an issue, however as we all know… times have changed, and Google took this approach when building Google Chrome the glass isn’t half full, it’s half empty you will get attacked at some point by malware, virus and many other nasties lurking on the world wide web, it’s a fact of life when using the Internet. So once again we come back to Chromes multi-process feature, each tab has its own process which has had its rights stripped away, meaning it can’t access your personal files, can’t write to your hard drive. Your browsing tab is happy playing in a sandbox with armed guards on each side.

However while Google Chrome itself is in a jail there is one small problem… Plugins. Google simply has no control over how high the privileges these run at, a plugin could easily let in the nasties, Google is trying to work with plugin makers to get them to run at lower privileges meaning they can run more securely making a safer browsing environment.

Phishing Lists:

Google Chrome automatically downloads two lists of harmful websites, Phishing (ones which try to steal your information, and in the long run your identity and or money) and those which will damage your computer, if you come across one of the websites on the list while browsing you will be alerted of the danger.

New Tab:

One of the great things about Google Chrome is when you open a new tab you are presented with a useful page, not a blank page, not your homepage which you have to wait for it to load, instead you are shown a page with the top 9 sites you visited book marks easily accessible making it easy and fast to find what you want.

Gears:

Possibly Google’s answer to Microsoft’s Sliver Light, Google Gears aims to make browsers better for developers, in their own words there is no point on browser being able to have all the bells and whistles if another one can’t and this is where gears comes in gears can help developers get the most out of their web apps.

Omnibox:

Google refers to their URL bar as an “omnibox” simply because it does everything, this one text field displays suggested searches, top pages you have visited as well as pages you haven’t visited but which are popular to others this is one of the many features aiming to make your browsing experience easy, quick and painless.

Open Source:

As I mentioned above Chrome is completely open source, it uses open source elements and Google are giving this to the world and other developers, and are actively encouraging developers to take the good parts of it to use within their own browsers and to tinker and play with this interesting new browser.

The down side:

Nothing perfect and neither is Google Chrome, while I have only been using Chrome for a few hours over the past few days and I have noticed a few problems and for me, they are big two of the key functions which I use video streaming and RSS.

So far every time I have tried to watch programs on iPlayer it has worked but seems to lag and stop and start and just doesn’t work, where as in FireFox or Internet Explorer 7 this works fine and works perfectly, so possibly some buffer issues or it could just be Chrome not quite handling the process smoothly.

And as for RSS… where is it? Google claim this browser is to lead the web and is designed for today, so why not include Google’s feed reader or something to enable users to read feeds within the browser environment. Personally I like the RSS features and reader included in Internet Explorer 7.

“Started from scratch and built on the best elements out there.” Google Chrome is here, and it looks like it has put its feet up and is here to stay.

But I am eager to hear your feedback and find out what you think about what you like, dislike and what you would like to see in Chrome in the future.