Anatomy of a modest web site - lessons for all

Tony Austin
Wednesday, 03 September 2008 16:14

Opinion and Analysis

If you're the owner of a web site, or interested in web site design or maintenance or traffic analysis, here's a pictorial snapshot that shows some things to look for. Included are some current trends, including the state of the Browser Wars just as the upstart Google Chrome browser appears.

I've recently briefed a team of local university IT students who've just begun a project on recommendations for the redesign of my web site, for which I gathered a few facts and some figures to help them on their way.

Now I'm going to open the kimono and share some of this with you, dear iTWire readers. This is only happening because I'm the site proprietor (whereas many site owners or administrators would hold such information very close to their chests).

I suspect that many of you probably haven't seen such website facts openly exposed, and that you'd be interested in seeing the story they tell. ... If this is not for you, just mosey on along to the next iTWire article from our talented team of writers!

Let the journey begin. Firstly, it's interesting to see the overall history of the site, so let's turn to the Wayback Machine (officially known as the Internet Archive). You'll read there that The Internet Archive "is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public."

Upon entering the relevant domain name, in this case "asiapac.com.au" without the quotes, and clicking on the "Take Me Back" button (or just click the following link, or the image), and you'll get the following result:

The Wayback Machine publishes statistics starting with whenever it first detects the appearance of a web site, with the latest capture shown being roughly six months ago from the present.

You'll see that I launched my site way back in the second half of Y2K (an acronym now fading into a distant memory as the Internet generations roll on). You can examine site snapshots from subsequent years to examine how the site design and content changed. Not bad, eh? You really should try other sites too, it's rather fascinating and just goes to show that not much is private on the Web.

Okay, this certainly provides an overall picture. But, as a webmaster responsible for site design and maintenance and/or a site content owner, you'll need to know a lot more than that. How about measuring site visits to show whether or not individual pages were popular content-wise (that is, frequently visited)?

PLEASE READ ON...