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Hit Counters For Your Website (are useless)

Well some of them are anyways.  I recently had a potential client brag to me about how many "visitors" he had visiting his site.

At the time of this writing, his "visitors" had reached a whopping 30,863!  Wow!  Awesome right?

Well it would be if that number was accurate, but alas, that figure is WAY off.

Look folks, hit counters are useless, pointless, and unnecessary.   Don't bother.  The only thing they show you is how many times your page has been loaded.

"What do you mean dude?"  Let me show you by example:

I created a copy of my homepage and installed a hit counter here: Copy of Home Page with Hit Counter

Go there and refresh / reload the page (F5 for my fellow shortcut keyboard junkies out there).


The number goes up each time you refresh the page!   Basically, as one single user, you could theoretically refresh the page 100 times and the counter would appear as though 100 people have visited your site!

Now I hear some of you say "well that will make my site appear popular, thus giving my site credibility".    To you I say "dude, there are about 100 other things that will increase the success of your website, hit counters make the site look tacky, and can distract your potential customers/clients from your website's overall objective (i.e. clicking the checkout button, of filling out an important form)".

Now I'm NOT saying that numbers are not important.  However, how many times your page is viewed (refreshed or reloaded) is much less important than statistics such as where people are coming from, what search terms they are using to arrive at your site, how many UNIQUE visitors are going to your site, and even what page they are leaving on!



Look into installing practical statistic keeping software.  I have been using statcounter.com and I LOVE it.  It's free.  Not only does it impress the hell out of my clients, but the information is actually USEFUL when it comes to tweaking the sites pages so that the website makes more money!


google analytics is probably the most popular utility although I have not used it much.  I recently installed both on a website so that I can compare the accuracy of the numbers, but I will save my comparison analysis for another blog!

What is the best size to make a website?

As of 2010, the best size to design a website would be 975px wide.  As far as height, I would put your most important content no lower than 530px which is "above the fold", or the portion that can be viewed without scrolling down.

Here is why:

To date, the most popular screen resolution is 1024px wide by 768px tall.  Keep in mind that this information may be out of date in as little as 1 or 2 years.

As you have probably already noticed, when you open a browser window, you immediately lose a sizable amount of height due to the title bar, the menu, navigation buttons, tabs, and, often times extra toolbars such as google's or yahoo's search bar.  In my former career as a computer repair technician, it was VERY common to see one or 2 extra toolbars in addition to the default functions located at the top of popular browsers.  The most common anti virus programs like to install their own toolbars at the top of Internet Explorer, and have all too many times seen yahoo's toolbar being "piggy-backed" on top of several software applications.  Then, of course on the right side you almost always have a scroll bar which also removes some width from your common 1024x768 screen resolution

While visiting family, I found that the computer they used appeared to be a perfect representation of what I thought would be your average novice to medium tech savvy person's computer.  I noticed that almost every website I visited was just a little bit too wide!  As most web designers know, having a horizontal scroll bar is a big no-no!  I created this website to measure screen resolution of a web browser so that I could see how much "screen real-estate" their browser contained.  I was VERY surprised to find how little space there was!

Using the link above, the red box in the upper left corner shows you where a web page would "start".  When I opened it in Mozilla Firefox, I noticed that it immediately moves a web page about 5 pixels down and 5 pixels to the left.

I checked on my laptop, which is currently set at 1440px by 900px resolution and I have about 1400px by only 725px using my browser!  And this is with a minimum of toolbars and functions opened!  

Anywho, I hope this is of use to someone else besides myself. 

Keywords for Search Results

I was emailing a potential client today on the subject of keywords for search results. This is just one branch of what is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). 

One thing that I thought I should mention to everyone out there, is that keyword SEO is mainly for sites that contain products or services that a substantial number of consumers are already searching for on google.  Put simply: if your website offers a product or service that is relatively new and/or very few people know about, people will not be searching for it on google!  If this is the case, you need to either explore other options (going viral on facebook or youtube and/or blogging), OR optimize your site for something similar. 

For example, I have a local client that offers an less expensive alternative to marble sinks. Let's say the product is called "Widget Sinks" and his site is "widgetsinks.com".  We did a quick keyword analysis and found that hardly anyone was searching on google for "Widget Sinks", and that there were several thousand people a day searching for "Pensacola Marble Sinks".    Since nobody knows about his product, we have to develop his site around the key phrase "Pensacola Marble Sinks", so that those searching for the real, more expensive marble sinks will stumble upon his site!

I hope this helps someone!