Since taking over administration of a web site, I needed to know what my client’s numbers were right from the get go. What I found out was the hosting service provider stats were reporting way more views/visitors than Google Analytics—thousands more.

My research identified several potential reasons as to why Google Analytics, SmarterStats, AWStats or Webalizer report such different results. It is important to understand that they use different sources for the stats they track. Google Analytics is javascript code that is inserted into the html web code at the bottom of site pages for tracking, while SmarterStats/AWStats/Webalizer utilizes actual server logs.

Here are a few of the reasons I found for the differences in reporting:

• Each bot and spider (crawler) that is sent out from a search engine for indexing is likely to show up in server logs as page views/visitors. Google Analytics does not track these.
• If a user has turned off their browser’s ability to read javascript, then that user’s visit is not being tracked by Google.
• With long page load times, it is possible many users are not fully loading the page before leaving the site. In this case SmarterStats counts the visit but Google doesn’t. Google is more accurate here with its reporting, since what we really care about are actual visitors.
• Scout Analytics released a press release on February 17th which stated: “Scout Analytics discovered cookies have an inherent weakness that causes them to overstate the user counts on an average of two to four times.”

After a significant amount of research, I have concluded I will be using these reporting sources: AWStats, Webalizer and Google Analytics. I will be looking for trends and using these three will give me a more complete overview, especially considering the varying results. I did contact both Bluehost and CrystalTech to ask their technicians which stat reports were more accurate. Both said Google Analytics were more accurate, so these will be the baseline stats I use to report back to my client.

What has your experience been with the different reporting software, plugins or Google Analytics? What reports do you use? What information do you find most helpful in putting together your web site strategy?

Even though the EACH wiki was password protected, it still needed to have a blocklist added to the config file. I opted to use code to automatically download shared blocklists from PM Wiki—see image. Since I have added that, the spam has been eliminated.

What issues have you encountered in developing a wiki? Any insights for someone starting out?

Since social media outreach has become a topic of conversation for education associations around the country, I recently began assessing different new media tools. I felt a tool was needed that would enable each association to maintain their organization’s contact information, contribute insights on what has worked for them, discuss the pitfalls to watch for and share return on investment (ROI) results. After looking over the different new technologies, I decided a wiki would give us the flexibility needed, so thus began the wiki development process.

First, what is a wiki? Wikis are a great co-creative tool for online collaboration where many people can contribute, edit and maintain a web site. Wikis can be used, for example, as a teaching tool, a knowledge and resource management tool, or a social network—very flexible, indeed. Many people are familiar with Wikipedia, THE Wiki Encyclopedia, where users can collaborate on just about any topic, person, place, or thing imaginable. The beauty for visitors of the wiki–and potential collaborators–is that it doesn’t take any knowledge of HTML to edit/add pages.

In my research I found out there were several ways to develop this tool. There are free hosting services where you can set up an account and create a wiki, like PBworks. Another way is wiki server software that can be installed as a SimpleScript, a couple examples are: PmWiki, WikkaWiki and MediaWiki that my Internet service provider offers as plug-ins.

Most of the wiki plug-ins are similar, but I chose the PmWiki plug-in because it offered a variety of layouts, design features and ways to control access. I won’t go into the wiki jargon about cookbooks, recipes and skins (themes) here–that could be a another post in itself! Suffice to say, I have learned a lot about wikis and still have much to learn!

In developing the wiki I wanted a custom design, so I added a skin, created logo graphics, chose colors and after much php hacking (modification, that is—that’s where the wacky comes in–it’s something I never thought I would get into!) the wiki for the EA Connection Hub (EACH) was launched.

Check it out….what do you think? Any tips? Have you developed your own wiki?

Once you add your sources or events, it is simple to embed the code into your blog post or onto your web site. Click on the “Embed Widget” in the upper right hand corner, then you can choose to create a timeline, flipbook or list widget (play with them and see what works best for your purposes), configure size and color, copy the code and paste into your page. Be patient as the application has now added advertising that comes up with each custom setting…I find this a minor nuisance, but understand the need to pay the bills.

I set up an account for my personal and business social media accounts. Here you see it in the timeline format:

There is one limitation to the application though. You can only connect to 17 social media sources plus RSS feeds. I do not know if there is a limit to the number of RSS feeds you can have. I have two blogs fed through to my Dipity account. I would like to see a few more social media sources added here.

Besides being a great graphic, using it to track what I have been doing and getting a sense of where my time and energy has gone is helpful. It also pinpoints what more I might need to focus on. It’s also a great way to follow current events, political leaders, news feeds…there are endless possibilities. I found Dipity on Jennifer Granholm’s web site where it is being used as a newswire. I have to say, I have been impressed with the way some of our political leaders are using social media now.

What ways can you see using this tool?

Here is MEAOnline’s social media in the list format:

MEAOnline Facebook: We now have 2,009 fans on MEA’s Facebook page!!! My goal was by the end of August to have 2,000 and we surpassed that! Since the last update on 8/6/09, we gained 200 new fans in less than two weeks time. We are advertising the FB “new fan” contest in the MEA Voice Online e-newsletters and the MEA Voice print magazine only, so that’s where we are generating the new fans. We have a grand total of 912 new fans since the start of the contest, which equates to 912 fans that are members!

The poll question regarding test scores and teacher evaluations had 30 comments overnight. A hot topic.

As for MEA Web site stats, I have an average for the past 4 months and will begin looking at it monthly starting in September.

April-August:
47,475 visitors with 98,596 total visits.
– 67% come from direct traffic….links to the home page we send out in newsletters, etc.
– 22% from search engines
– 11% from referring sites like Facebook, which made up half of this percentage.

Where we need to focus is on keeping them at our site once they are there, so I will be looking at ways to do that.

Facebook fan base for MEAOnline is continuing to grow….up 32 since last night and closing in on the 2,000 mark at 1,809 current fans. The FB contest for new fans will be in the next MEA Voice magazine so I anticipate many more then. We are up 712 fans since the beginning of the contest, and even better is that these 712 new fans are members.

The final look incorporated a larger two-column area at the top for our main stories where we can post a video if we have one, a center area for sub-features, a Question of the Week poll and buttons down the right for quickly navigating important pages or MEAOnline’s social media networks and alphabetized navigation on the left.

Once the design and code was in place, came the arduous task of updating almost 500 pages. This was a process alone with many late nights and long hours. On February 19, 2009 the new look of MEA.org went live…two days BEFORE the deadline of February 22nd and in less than 3 months, start to finish, I’m thrilled to add!

Side note: In May, the Communications staff also had a brainstorming session to generate PR ideas, many of which centered around MEA’s Web site and online presence. There were lots of terrific ideas tossed around that day.

During the training from Ragan Communications it was discussed that the MEA Web site needed to be redesigned to allow for more home page content, daily updated news and all with more video and multimedia capabilities.

MEA’s Facebook page was created on July 23, 2008 by the Creative Projects Team Supervisor. Updates were added over the next several months when someone could “get to it”. MEAOnline Twitter was created November 26, 2008 according to Twitter Counter.

Before going into that process, I would like to illustrate where MEA’s web presence was to where it is at now and then continue on this blog to explore what is and isn’t working for MEA’s site and in their MEAOnline social media presence.

Approximately in the Summer of 2005, I helped design the look of the Web site. At that time, one of the biggest challenges was content management. There were thousands of pages that my colleagues needed to go through along with determining what navigation was necessary. I will keep it simple here and say that this was no small task. Not only was this a major organizational undertaking, but there were many association considerations to incorporate. This site was also the first time Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were used instead of tables. The Web Administrator, at the time, created the templates and did the coding based on my design mock-ups.

So it began with needing a ‘portal’ to determine which audience you were:

Once you clicked a link, let’s say “For Members”, then you went to that home page. All of the sub pages were coded to automatically put the section name in the black area above the navigation. That way people would know where they were on the site. This is the Members home page:

This is the Press Room: