Step 7 - Maintain (Cont.)

Web Log Analysis Software

Web log analysis software is software that will give you information about your site's visitors: activity statistics, accessed files, paths through the site, information about referring pages, search engines, browsers, operating systems, etc.

Web log analysis software allows you to generate useful statistics about your Website and your visitors from your log files.

What are log files? Log files are text files that contain information about Website visitor activity. Log files are created by Web servers automatically. Each time a visitor requests any file (page, image, etc.) from the site information on his/her request is appended to a current log file. Most log files have a text format and each log entry (hit) is saved as a line of text. The following is an example log file format:

Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1;
+ESB{2C9CC323-A671-4ACD-B3FF-B5692FA6BEED};+SV1;
+.NET+CLR+1.0.3705;+.NET+CLR+1.1.4322;+.NET+CLR+2.0.50727) -
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To be able to use Web log analysis software, you must be able to access your log files on your Internet server (host) and download these log files to your PC for analysis.

Web log analysis software can analyse log files of Apache and Internet Information Server, Microsoft's Web server Internet Information Server (IIS) Web servers.

I use WebLog Expert Lite which is a free log analyzer, light-weight version of WebLog Expert. It allows me to quickly and easily analyze my log files and get information about my site's visitors to include:

• Determine if my Website is increasing in popularity or decreasing in popularity.
• Find out what keywords my visitors typed into the search engines that brought them to my site.
• Find out which sections of my site are most popular, and which pages or files consume the most bandwidth.
• Determine the browsers and operating systems used by my visitors.
• Determine if I have any images that are too large and are slowing down my site.
• Determine if I have any broken links or hacker attacks.

Here are sample reports generated by Web Log.

I recived a request to provive information about another Web log analysis software product called AlterWind Log Analyzer-lite. Based on my review of AlterWind Log Analyzer-lite, I found this Web log analysis software generates the traditional reports. It gathers Web server logs (all formats supported) and builds graphically-rich self-explanatory reports on Web site usage statistics, referring sites, traffic flow and search phrases. You can more about this software by visiting Alterwind lite.

The best way you can evaluate your Website's performance is to use a log analysis tool and determine your Website's performance on a periodic basis.

If you are not able to access your log files and download log file data you should investigate installing a counter on your site.

Do You Need Help? Don't be shy, if you have questions or need help creating your Website, just ask me. I work cheap -- free. The only dumb question is the one not asked!

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