Tech: Webmasters, Help!?

Subject: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: wysiwyg
Date: 29 Jul 05 - 02:02 PM

I was the best person (only person) available for the job, so they made me webmaster on our church website. I have not screwed up anything seriously (yet), and I am learning a lot taking tiny babysteps each time and checking my work. I'm handcoding, not using a design program.

Now I need some help interpreting site statistics. I looked around for these terms in a couple of webmasters' glossaries, but no luck.

What are the relevant meanings of each of the following terms, if the thing I most want to know is how many people are coming to the site and actually using it?

Hits
Files
Cached
Pageviews
Sessions
KB sent

And how is a "hit" not the same as a "session" or a "pageview"? Can I compare the sessions to the pageviews to determine how many pages (average) people are looking at while they are visiting?

Help me, Rhonda!

~Susan

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: MMario
Date: 29 Jul 05 - 02:14 PM

from a website @ http://computerinfotech.com/webtips/stats/interpret.htm:

Hit:

A hit is any response from the server on behalf of a request sent from a browser. This includes any response from the server, not only text files or documents. If, for example, a HTML page has two images embedded, the server generates three hits if this page is requested: one hit for the HTML page itself and two hits for the two inline images.

Files:
If the user requests a document and the server successfully sends back a file for this request, this is counted as a Code 200 (OK) response. Any such response is counted for as a file. Again, "file" here means any kind of a file.

Code 304's - relates to cached:

A Code 304 (Not Modified) response is generated by the server if a document hasn't been updated since the last time it was requested by the user and therefore there was no need to actually send the files for this document. This happens if the browser (or a caching proxy server between the browser and your web server) still has an up-to-date copy of the page in it's local storage (cache) and therefore can display the page without requesting the actual content. This technique is used to reduce network traffic, but it also causes an inaccuracy in the statistics reports regarding the number of visitors, because the browser or proxy usually sends only one such a conditional request per user session if it still holds an up-to-date copy of the file. However, the ratio between files and 304's reflects the efficiency of overall caching mechanisms for at least those hits which made it's way to the server.

Pageviews:

Pageviews are all files which either have a text file suffix (.html, .text) or which are directory index files. This number allows to estimate the number of "real" documents transmitted by your server. If defined correctly, the analyzer rates text files (documents) as pageviews. Those pageviews do not include images, CGI scripts, Java applets or any other HTML objects except all files ending with one of the pre-defined pageview suffixes, such as .html or .text.

sessions:
this is the number of unique hosts accessing the server during a given time-window. This time-window is one day by default. For example, if the time-window is two hours, all accesses from a certain host in less than 2 hours after the first access from this host are lumped together into one session. All following accesses more than 2 hours apart from the first access will be counted as a new session. This way you may get an estimated number of how many sessions are started on different sites to access your server.

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: wysiwyg
Date: 29 Jul 05 - 04:22 PM

Oh my God, I actually understood most of that.

Thanks!

~S~

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 29 Jul 05 - 06:20 PM

And of course KB sent is the sum count of the number of Kilobytes sent from the web server - not sure exactly what is counted in this - but if probably includes all extra files such as .css files, etc as well as the .html .txt files etc.

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: wysiwyg
Date: 29 Jul 05 - 06:38 PM

Thanks. We are getting about 10 times more traffic than I feared, even counting all MY hits to check how pages look.

Next question-- I have a billion photos about to land on my desk to put into the website, in the next two weeks. For now I have loaded a few images that were on hand. They are not high quality... but they are in a variety of sizes that will let me play with layout coding.

What say you-- are these too lousy to hang up even temporarily?

CLICK HERE

Thanks,

~Susan

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 29 Jul 05 - 06:55 PM

A quick look at the pictures - they load fairly quickly and look fine on screen. Resolution of the couple that I picked off was on the low side if you intend to allow people to use them (for printing, etc.) - as opposed to just look at them. I would guess that you'd want a "looks only" site, and for that they're fine.

If you load 1,000 of your billion pictures per day, you do realize it will take 2,730+ years to get them all up? (That's for a US billion.)

John

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 29 Jul 05 - 06:58 PM

They look abouot normal for web piccies, quality wise.

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: Mary in Kentucky
Date: 30 Jul 05 - 09:03 AM

Susan, I have a very easy to use calendar if you're interested. It's JavaScript - lots of different bells and whistles, links, graphics, etc. To update it each month, only write one line of code for each day that you want an entry. I got it on the net somewhere for free. It was written by an unemployed programmer who made it for his synogogue and is happy to share it with anyone.

I'm sure you'll find that everyone wants a webpage - FREE! But the job of maitaining it can be time consuming. I found that when people give me info to put up - I do it immediately - the ball is back in their court. Then they back off after a month or so.

I've always wanted to find a teenager interested in taking photos and putting them up - but alas, not yet. (I also thought teenagers would want to print pictures of themselves, so I put up small thumbnails with links to large pictures.) The hardest thing for me was getting an easy file naming system in order to organize pictures, and swap them out often.

Also, I found that my scanner will scan a newsletter or calendar, and save it in pdf format. That easily sattisfies those who want to put something up each week.

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: Bill D
Date: 30 Jul 05 - 11:29 AM

after you most of this figgered out, here is a WYSIWYG (*grin*) free web page/HTML editor that is consistantly rated 'best' at alt.comp.freeware and Pricelessware.com.
It can help a lot as you decide to arrange the page elements and maybe add a few frills.

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: mack/misophist
Date: 30 Jul 05 - 11:31 AM

Some of the pics are fine, some not so fine. I don't think people are going to demand state of the art from a do-it-yourself church web site. Go with it.

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: wysiwyg
Date: 30 Jul 05 - 12:46 PM

Thanks, all. The flood of pix has begun, so I'm scrambling now.

~Susan

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: Mary in Kentucky
Date: 30 Jul 05 - 01:02 PM

Sooz, I'm almost finished with my "jobs." Before you spend much time on the pics, have you considered making them all the same size? I found that when I received either digital pics or scanned pics from one or two people, they were always the same size. I could quickly reduce all of them by the same amount to make a thumbnail, then just put up the big picture as is. I think having them all the same size on a page looks nice.

I'm posting here in case someone else is interested. Also, how much maintenance is required? A little forethought helps in keeping the logistics simple.

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: wysiwyg
Date: 30 Jul 05 - 01:18 PM

I am working on a tech spec sheet to let people know how to submit; I can't really make them all the same size, but I am going for a minimum and maximum.

I am doing everything I can to keep the cross-linking between pages such that a minimum number of pages will need to be opend to correct anything as we go on. I'm also a number of individual sub-page "editors" to keep an eye on each section (for activities they are involved with). They won't do any HTML-- just check "their" page regularly to let me know when copy/pix need to be changed. For now I am having to draft a ot of the new copy, but that is, hopefully, short term.

I set up a "What's New" page also, that I can change often, that will show one large pic from a recent activity, a short paragraph about how it fit into the church's mission, and a link to that activity's page where more info and pix will be found. This links off the main page with a big SHOW ME link, HERE. For now that SHOW ME link is under the mission statement, but it may move to a more prominent spot; I have to see what some folks think before I morph their site too far from what they created.

Consider this-- we've had over 5,900 visitors since opening in August of 2003, with only three pictures in there the whole time-- till now!

~Susan

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: wysiwyg
Date: 30 Jul 05 - 01:20 PM

I'm also a number of individual sub-page "editors"

LOL-- I AM! But I meant, "I'm also RECRUITING a number of individual sub-page "editors"!

~S~

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: wysiwyg
Date: 30 Jul 05 - 03:47 PM

I should clarify, I am not at all looking to host and maintain a photo gallery-- just wanting to illustrate our pages with faces typical of parish life. For photo galleries, they have a bulletin board in the hallway that gets frequent use, and this is a low-tech group of parishioners in most respects. If they had a photo gallery I doubt many would use it, but if someone has the idea and wants to speahead it, there are lots of places people can hang up pix to share, and of course if they did I would visit often and seek permissions for every goo shot I found.

What we want (for now) are photos that people NOT from our church can see, when they come looking into our little world for whatever reason-- much as one would, with a band website. In other words, it's promotional.

~Susan

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 30 Jul 05 - 05:54 PM

Along the lines of Mary in Kentucky's suggestion about sizing:

Photoshop Elements, and probably many others, will let you "one step" create a web gallery of all the photos in a folder. Throw the web gallery "pages" away, but in the process it creates all-the-same/similar-size copies of the images and a thumbnail for each image.

I'm not impressed with the "gallery" it makes (or with other "canned" web builders), but it may be an easy way to batch the creating of thumbnails if you get a suitable size/resolution from it. Note that I haven't tried this out as a processing technique, but it should work. You may have another similar program that does it even better.

John

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: wysiwyg
Date: 30 Jul 05 - 08:56 PM

Hm, something to think about..... thanks!

~S~

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 31 Jul 05 - 08:19 AM

Irfamview has a similar thumbnail facility built in and is free!

Subject: RE: Tech: Webmasters, Help!?
From: wysiwyg
Date: 31 Jul 05 - 11:04 AM

A two-week commitment to something else has just come my way, so most of this is on hold for now-- that's OK, too, because it will give time for other team members to catch up on photo-editing and permissions.

Thanks, all,

~Susan