The Honest Way

Statistics play a very important part in running an online business because you need to know how well a site or blog is doing in terms of how much traffic it is attracting and where that traffic is coming from.

When you host your own sites, you can get most of what you need from your own cpanel and it’ll be a lot more accurate than any other form of statistical software and that includes Google analytics. I’ve found huge discrepancies on what traffic my own server tells me its received and what Google thinks I’ve received.

So if you do have your own hosting with cPanel support, use the tools it gives you like webalizer and awstats. They are probably the most accurate assessment of what is coming into the server that hosts your site or blog.

That aside, stats for this site are looking very healthy considering the still relatively young age of The Honest Way. While the site averaged a good 331 unique daily visitors for the whole month of October, so far this month that average is 433, so we’re up a hundred visits per day on last month so far and it doesn’t show any sign of slowing up. In fact day to day those viewer figures are improving steadily.

It’s all good for morale and motivation when you see your own site figures doing even better than expected. It spurs you on to work even harder at making your site or blog even better with as much new, fresh and interesting content as you can write!

For me, its also makes my dilemma as to whether to spend time on revamping the template to bring it up-to-date with the many really good looking web 2.0 templates that are available now. I’ve already upgraded two of my other blogs to a brilliant template that so far, I can’t fault as far as general good looks, flexibility and fast screen load time are concerned. Monika, my JV partner in crime has already endorsed my upgrading this blog to a new look.

But will a visual makeover improve visitor numbers?

Maybe. I like to think it’s all the great writing and information that spills out of my knowledge base that attracts the visitors here. Well, if I have the time this week, I might actually go for it!

Watch this space…

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way