Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 6 – Design Considerations

Browser Features

Knowing what browsers and platforms your visitors use is helpful, but for design and layout you will need to know much more. Before implementing a site dependent on Java or Cookies, you will want to make sure most of your users support it. When laying out the web pages, you will want to know how much screen real-estate you have to play with and how many colors you can use in images.

Summary’s web analytics can gather and report on this and more information about your visitors’ software and system. In order to generate these reports, however, you need to install some JavaScript on your web site and gather data from it in your log files. The Summary Manual has a section on setting this up. If you have not already done that, you will need to wait a few days or weeks after you have installed it to get a good sampling.

Figure 4. Plugins Installed can help you decide whether to implement a feature dependent on a given plugin, like Flash.

Most web users these days have support for Java and cookies. Nonetheless, it is important to make sure that your particular visitors have that support before building your site to require it. If you add an online store that uses cookies to track baskets, and few of your visitors have cookies enabled, you will not be getting many sales (or return customers). Summary has the Java report and Cookies report to tell you what percent of users have each feature enabled. If you are looking at employing a plugin to provide a service on your site, say you have decided to create a Flash version, you should check the Plugins Installed report, Figure 4, to see what percent of users have it available. For example, in Figure 4, 89.30% of users have Shockware Flash installed.

Screen Real Estate and Colors

Figure 5. The Window Width and Height reports tell you the available screen real estate for your web pages.

When you are working out the layout of your site, you will need to take into account the available space on your users’ screens. Summary’s Screen Size report shows the number and percent of hits for users with each screen size. This is the maximum available space you can design to, useful mainly when you are opening new window’s for the user. You cannot always guarantee, however, that visitors will have their browsers maximized. And there are other elements on the screen and around the browser window that take up space. So for design purposes you will be more interested in the windows size. The Overview : Visitors page lists visitors whose browser window size is at least a certain dimension. This can give you a quick estimate of the 80^th percentile window size. For a deeper look Summary provides the Window Width report, Figure 5, and Window Height report (which is similar). In each report, Summary shows the window width and tells the cumulative number of hits for browsers with windows of that width or wider windows. This means that you can instantly see where the given percentile of width falls. You can do the same with the Window Height report.

Figure 6. The Color Depth Report provides a guideline for color use in your graphics.

When the Web was young, designers had to be concerned about color depth more than they do now. However, it is good to know whether your users can support the colors you are throwing at them. In Figure 6, the Color Depth report tells you the percent of hits that had a given color depth. If many of your users only have 256 colors, then you should make sure that all the color codes you use and all the images you include use the same palette (preferably the 216-color standard palette.) If the majority of your visitors have “Thousands of colors” or “Millions of colors,” then you can generally safely use any combination of palettes and full color images.