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Matching Business Organization
In any business or organization, people are given domains of control and
responsibility. By sharing the work and not interfering with each other’s
areas of expertise, people can accomplish more than any one of them could do on
his or her own. This applies to the “business” of building and
running a web site as it does to any other. Because each person or department
has a distinct area or subset of the web site that she or he is interested in,
you can make the reports more useful by providing subreports that pertain to
each particular area of interest.
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/index.html
/
/press/*
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Figure 3. A sample request filter
for a news division in a company. |
We talked about this briefly in Lesson 8 - Examining
Subsets of Traffic when discussing Content Filters. In essence, you can
create a subreport that filters by request to assign certain groups of files to
each departments that is responsible for them. If you have press releases in the
/press/ directory on your web site and list news on your home page,
you might set up a subreport with a request filter like Figure 3 for the division
of your company responsible for news and press releases. You can make similar
divisions for departments responsible for any subset of pages withing the
site.
/store/*
*.cgi
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Figure 4. A request filter
for the site developers. |
You might also consider dividing content based on file type. The
widgetmanager.com site has some dynamic sections: an online store at
/store/ and several CGI scripts that are used for collecting
customer information, registering new users, user login, and similar tasks. The
developers at widgetmanager.com do not work much with the HTML pages, but are
responsible for developing and maintaining these dynamic sections of the site.
Figure 4 shows a possible set of request filters that could be used to create a
subreport to give the developers specific information about the parts of the
site they work on.
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Figure 5. The Content Groups report can provide
a comparative review of different site sections. |
If your business is small or everyone is involved, in some way, in several
areas of the site, you might want to use Summary’s groups feature instead
of creating subreports. Rather than separating the reports into distinct
subsets, the Groups feature will maintain reports for the whole site but allow
you to use the Content Groups report to compare
traffic in each individual domain of responsibility. For each Group, Summary
allows you to define a set of request patterns (like the filters above) and
assign a name to that. So Figure 5 shows an example of what a Content Group
report might look like for a company with several common divisions.
Whether you build subreports or use Groups, you can take this specialization
to any level you want. It might be perfectly reasonable to create specific
subreports for particular individuals in the company. If a software developer is
responsible for one particular function on the site, then you can give him a
subreport that includes only requests to his code. You can also combine the
subreport and Group features by creating department-specific subreports and,
within each subreport, defining Groups of requests for each individual in the
department.
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Web Server Configuration