FAQ's

Web Site Statistics

How do I see my web statistics?

Type in the URL address of your web site followed by /webalizer eg. http://spiral.co.nz/webalizer/

You will be asked for a username and password. Contact Spiral Web Design if you are unsure what these are.

Please explain the terms used

Hits represent the total number of requests made to the server during the given time period (month, day, hour etc..).

Files represent the total number of hits (requests) that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as 404-Not Found requests and requests for pages that are already in the browsers cache.

Tip: By looking at the difference between hits and files, you can get a rough indication of repeat visitors, as the greater the difference between the two, the more people are requesting pages they already have cached (have viewed already).

Sites is the number of unique IP addresses/hostnames that made requests to the server. Care should be taken when using this metric for anything other than that. Many users can appear to come from a single site, and they can also appear to come from many IP addresses so it should be used simply as a rough gauge as to the number of visitors to your server.

Visits occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same visit. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remote sites that link to graphic and other non-page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.

Pages are those URLs that would be considered the actual page being requested, and not all of the individual items that make it up (such as graphics and audio clips). Some people call this 'metric page views' or 'page impressions', and defaults to any URL that has an extension of .htm, .html or .cgi.

A KByte (KB) is 1024 bytes (1 Kilobyte). Used to show the amount of data that was transfered between the server and the remote machine, based on the data found in the server log.

Common Definitions

A Site is a remote machine that makes requests to your server, and is based on the remote machines IP Address/Hostname.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator. All requests made to a web server need to request something. A URL is that something, and represents an object somewhere on your server, that is accessable to the remote user, or results in an error (ie: 404 - Not found). URLs can be of any type (HTML, Audio, Graphics, etc...).

Referrers are those URLs that lead a user to your site or caused the browser to request something from your server. The vast majority of requests are made from your own URLs, since most HTML pages contain links to other objects such as graphics files. If one of your HTML pages contains links to 10 graphic images, then each request for the HTML page will produce 10 more hits with the referrer specified as the URL of your own HTML page.

Search Strings are obtained from examining the referrer string and looking for known patterns from various search engines. The search engines and the patterns to look for can be specified by the user within a configuration file. The default will catch most of the major ones.

User Agents are a fancy name for browsers. Netscape, Opera, Konqueror, etc.. are all User Agents, and each reports itself in a unique way to your server. Keep in mind however, that many browsers allow the user to change it's reported name, so you might see some obvious fake names in the listing.

Entry/Exit pages are those pages that were the first requested in a visit (Entry), and the last requested (Exit). These pages are calculated using the Visits logic above. When a visit is first triggered, the requested page is counted as an Entry page, and whatever the last requested URL was, is counted as an Exit page.

Countries are determined based on the top level domain of the requesting site. This is somewhat questionable however, as there is no longer strong enforcement of domains as there was in the past. A .COM domain may reside in the US, or somewhere else. An .IL domain may actually be in Isreal, however it may also be located in the US or elsewhere. The most common domains seen are .COM (US Commercial), .NET (Network), .ORG (Non-profit Organization) and .EDU (Educational). A large percentage may also be shown as Unresolved/Unknown, as a fairly large percentage of dialup and other customer access points do not resolve to a name and are left as an IP address.

Response Codes are defined as part of the HTTP/1.1 protocol (RFC 2068; See Chapter 10). These codes are generated by the web server and indicate the completion status of each request made to it.

Hosting and Domains

What is a URL?
It stands for "universal resource locator". This is the address typed in to view your web page on the Internet. For example, you would type in http://www.spiral.co.nz to access our home page url.

What is a domain name?
A domain name is a specific web site address that you choose and register with a New Zealand authorised registrar (domain names can end in .co.nz; .org.nz; .com; .edu; etc). Our domain name is spiral.co.nz. The www does not form part of the domain name.

Who administers the New Zealand domain space?
The Domain Name Commissioner (DNC) is responsible for the day to day oversight of the .nz domain name registration and management system. Under the .nz Shared Registry System, authorised registrars can register and manage .nz domain names directly with the registry. More »

Portals

What is a portal?
An informational web site for a specific purpose.

Doing business together

What about commercially sensitive information?
We will maintain the confidentiality of your business information.

At Spiral we work collaboratively, as your partner to meet your internet business goals . To do this effectively, we need to be able to share information about how you do business now and about your plans for the future . Sometimes we may work with several clients who have similar business interests. We take pains to maintain the integrity of our relationships with all our clients, especially in these circumstances.

We're very aware of the sensitivity of these matters, and we appreciate your trust in us.

CMS and Blogging

Why does my page / blog look wrong?
This is a complicated question that has many possible answers but I will address some of the most common. I have grouped CMS and blogger together here because both use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get editors) and are effected by the same issues.

Word and word processors These often use markup very similar to HTML the language of the web so when you cut and paste from word into a WYSIWYG editor some of words HTML like formatting is transmitted into the editor which can cause problems.

Solution: Try to use the WYSIWYG editor to do your formatting and if your cutting and pasting from a word document you may want to first save as text so your copying the raw text with out the markup. Also when formatting text in a WYSIWYG editor try to use predefined styles and headings as much as possible to keep the styles consistant throughout the site / post.

WYSIWYG Vs HTML mode. Both Blogger and Nautilus CMS have both a WYSIWYG (called compose in blogger and the default mode in Nautilus) and an HTML mode. Copying HTML into the WYSIWYG or formatted text into the HTML editor can cause problems so make sure you know which you are using.

Emailing to blogger. You can update your blog via email which is a very handy feature but like cutting and pasteing from word an HTML formatted email can take markup into your blog. And word can take markup into an email. The easist solution to this problem is to send your email as plain text but if you want some formatting to be displayed in your blog you will have to send it as HTML just make sure it is formatted the way you want it displayed.

Fonts. In Blogger(if you have a customised blog) and Nautilus CMS pages, headings, paragraphs etc will have fonts defined in there style sheets so it is usually best not to define fonts and let the style sheet control them.

Google Tips

How do I get my website recognised by Google?
When you go live we will put a link to your website from ours.

Google visits our website approximatley every 3-4 weeks so the next time it indexes us the Googlebot will see a new link to your website, follow that link and index it.

There are also a few other tricks we can use such as a google site map that can reduce the time it takes for your site to get listed to as little as a few days.

For more info see our Find-Me Service or Speedy Listing on Google (Case Study).