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Stat Counter

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There are a lot of different ways to gather statistics for your blog or website. You might use the C-Panel area on your web hosting account to look at stats using the built in “webstats’ system, or you can place some code on your site that gathers information every time someone visits your site.

Most of the companies that have you place code on your site to gather statistics are free, but you must go to their website in order to see your sites stats.

I use an external statistics system called StatCounter. As I’ve described it consists of code that you place on your site – either on each page, or in a part of your site that is seen on each page.

I have a free account at StatCounter so I can only see stats on my last 100 visitors. You can purchase a subscription which will increase your log size and allow you to see more stats if you’d like.

I like the stats that this company gives me. I can quickly see where my visitors have come from, or see which domains have sent visitors to me, check to see what keyword searches on the big search engines have brought visitors to my site as well as a number of other stats on the visitors (browsers, country of origin etc).

I use StatCounter in combination with the statistics that I get through my web hosting account.




Fuelmyblog

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Have you heard of Fuelmyblog yet? I believe this site went public sometime in December 2006. Fuelmyblog is a site where you can advertise your blog or myspace page absolutely free.

The creators of Fuelmyblog provide a page that is filled with 625 40 px X 40 px squares. To advertise your site simply visit Fuelmyblog and select whichever square that you’d like to advertise your blog on.

When you click the square a pop up will ask if you’d like to ADD that square. Select the word ADD and fill out the form on the page that comes up.

You can supply an image that is no more than 500 kb in size. It will automatically be resized to 40 x 40 px, or if you don’t have a photo to use for your site you can select from a number of free images.

Once you’ve completed the information page you’ll be able to preview your square, if it looks fine submit the form. When you view the site after filling out the form you’ll see that the square you’ve selected now has an X in it meaning that it’s reserved for your space.

Usually within only a few hours you’ll find that your site is up and being advertised on Fuelmyblog.

This service is completely free. It was created as a way for people to find interesting blogs.

At the time of writing there are only 213 squares left on the main page. There are many more unfilled squares on their feature pages – More, Business, Life, and All Sorts.

I listed several of my sites on Fuelmyblog a couple of weeks ago, and when I look at my site stats I can see that I’ve been getting a few visitors each day from Fuelmyblog, for each of the blogs that I listed.

So what are you waiting for? Get over to Fuelmyblog before all those squares are filled up!

What not to do to your Blog design

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One of the forum that I visit regularly had a thread about what you should not do when designing your website or blog.

Here’s my list of blog design – “what not to wear”

  • Autoplay video

  • Autoplay music

  • flashy buttons

  • too many buttons (put them in a roll up menu if you must have them)

  • advertisements that take up the whole header area making me scroll to see the actual header and posts below.

  • Too many advertisements – don’t do the max Google Adsense – you actually make less money from them if you do too many!!! Plus it turns off your visitors.

  • Pages with so many plug ins, large file size images, buttons etc that make the page really slow to load- or worse cause it to freeze when loading.

  • Text that is hard to read – white on black doesn’t work if you are trying to read a long post – light gray text works better … same for florescent coloured text on black or white backgrounds, or neon backgrounds with black or white text.

  • no paragraphs – this makes posts very hard to read. If you want visitors to come back or stay on your site for a while use paragraphs.

  • Set your posts so that only 5 or 10 display on the main page!!!! We don’t need to see everything you’ve ever written on your blog for the last two years!

Tips!

Use roll up menus in your sidebars if you have lots of buttons or blogrolls etc. It really makes the page look so much tidier.

Test your blog design in Firefox, Internet explorer, Opera and Netscape – all easy to download and have on your computer. Make sure your site loads correctly and works well in all the browsers listed above,

Also look at your site on different computers. Text and background colour might look great on your monitor, but really bad on 5 other computer monitors that you test it on.

As I said in the last point- visitors only need to see your last 5 or 10 posts when they load your page. If you have more than that showing your page will load very slowly.

Same with categories and archives. Do your visitors need to see your archives dating back to 2001? That’s a long list taking up valuable blog sidebar real estate. Use a roll up menu or modify the code in your page so that only 5 or 10 archives and or categories are viewed.

Every once in a while ask your readers their opinion on your page. Ask for constructive criticism. If the majority of your readers state they don’t like something or that your page loads slowly – do something about it.

I’m sure I could add many more points to this post, but I think this is enough to get you started.

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