One of many great advantages the Internet provides over traditional media like print, TV, radio, etc. is the accountability. On your website you have the ability to track just about everything. You can see exactly how many users come to your site, what they did on your site and even how they got there.

There are many tools out there that you can add to your website to help track your analytics, some paid, some free. One of the most robust and useful tools comes from Google. One advantage of Google Analytics is that it flushes out all the search engine crawlers, spiders and bad data that can distort other traffic tools. This gives you the best representation of the true traffic and activity of your website. And the best part of Google Analytics....it's completely free!

The first step is to get signed up for an account with Google. Go to www.google.com/analytics/ and you'll notice a blue Access Analytics button on the right hand side and the ability to sign up below. If you already have a Google account, just use that and sign in. Next, provide Google with the URL of the site you wish to analyze. Then follow the steps of providing what country your site is in, your contact information, etc. Once you click Create New Account, Google will provide you with a block of code. Copy this code. You will need to insert this on your website.

Placing this code on your site is a straight forward process for most sites out there. You simply copy the analytics code in the footer. If you're not comfortable doing something like this, just give us a call. Our Service & Maintenance team can place this on most websites in under an hour. The benefits will easily exceed the time and small investment it will take to get you up and running.

Many people do not know that Google Maps allows you to control the map listing for your business.  You can claim your company, move the map marker to exactly the right location, and list a range of information, including category of business, phone number, hours of operation, a link to your website, description, and up to 10 photos.  It even lets you create a free online coupon.

http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter

Make sure your company and website are on the map!

With much anticipation, Google released its own web browser back in the last quarter of 2008, called Chrome. Many of us in the development community wondered at the impact, everything from how good it would be knowing the effort that Google typically puts into their products, to the concern of yet another browser to have to develop and test sites for. So far the impact has been minimal. Chrome is a good product that adheres quite well to web standards and has not caused too much concern for web developers having to make many special accomodations for it. Current estimates put its usage somewhere around 5% give or take of web users actually using Chrome, putting it ahead of Safari and Opera in just the few months of its existence.  

One bigger concern that the web community should have beyond simply how good Chrome is, should be the privacy issues that it brings with it. Not all early adopters realize some of the things that Google has built into Chrome to track what you're doing online. And the even bigger concern, what will Google do once they continue to gain market share.  All of these privacy concerns can be attributed to helping to improve the user experience and providing better search results, but the information can definitely be used for more than that.

A good alternative to Chrome, is Iron, another free browser that is built off of the same underlying rendering engine that Chrome uses without any of the privacy concerns. In some initial tests, the speed and overall performance seem to be just as good as Chrome. The interface is simple and does not get in the way and browsing a multitude of sites has yielded excellent rendering results with no major issues with any sites I have visisted. So if security is a concern, you might want to take a look at Iron as a good alternative to Chrome. Here are some of the privacy concerns to be aware of with Chrome courtesy of the Iron website:

• Chrome creates a unique ID through which a user can be theoretically identified.
• Chrome remembers up to the second exactly when the software was installed. 
• Depending on the configuration, each time you put something in the address line,this information is sent to Google to provide suggestions. 
• Depending on the configuration, if you have typed a false address in the adress bar, this is sent to Google and you get an error message from Google's servers. 
• Depending on the configuration, details about crashes or failures are sent Google's servers. 
• Chrome transmits information in encoded form to Google, for example, when and where Chrome has been downloaded.
• Chrome installs an updater, which loads at every Windows startup, in the background.
• It calls, depending on the configuration, five seconds after launch the Google homepage and opens it in the background.