Our new home... wemakewebsites.com

Some of you may have noticed that we have a new home… wemakewebsites.com (though you may not have noticed because all the pages on our old domain at wemakewebsites.info forward on to here).

WeMakeWebsites' data centre migration is a success!

We’ve recently completed the migration of our clients’ websites to a new data centre maintained by Rackspace UK. We spent a lot of time deciding where to host our sites and decided on Rackspace due to their impressive support, quick response times and worldwide technology infrastructure.

The migration was a success with minimal disruption to service.

The improved hardware will mean that our clients’ websites will run faster than ever, which is beneficial for both visitor experience and search engine rankings.

As part of the migration, we’ve also improved how we monitor our websites. This means we can respond quicker to outages and will have a team on call 24 hours to deal with hardware issues.

Thanks to all our clients for their help with the migration, particularly where third parties were involved.

Right, must go - time to cracking on some exciting new websites we’ll be launching soon. I bid you all an indulgent Saturday.

How Visitor Analytics Can Help Your Business

Figuring out who your customers are is an important element of market research. With a website, you are able to access all sorts of metrics on who your site visitors are and how they found your site. This information can be useful in managing the direction of your website, or maybe even the direction of your business.

At WeMakeWebsites, we integrate all our client websites with GoogleAnalytics, which gives them access to in-depth visitor metrics. For example, you can see the popularity of your site over time:

One of the key metrics available is the source of your traffic. In GoogleAnalytics, these traffic sources are broken down in to three categories:

• Direct links: those that typed in your url directly
• Referers: those that found a link to your website on another website
• Google: those that found your site via google

For each category, you can drill down in to more detail. In this example, we can see that the website is getting traffic from all three categories pretty much evenly.

You can also view what search terms people typed in to Google to find your site. This is useful in determining what it is that brings people to your site.

GoogleAnalytics can also tell you from where in the world your visitors came. This might be useful for focusing your content, for example, if you only sell your products in the UK but are getting a lot of international traffic then maybe your site content should focus more on the local aspect of your work. Or you may even use this information as a starting point for researching what other countries your product is popular in.

One other section we’ll talk about is the Content breakdown, from which you can see the pages on your website that are most popular. They are grouped by section, so below, you can see that the gallery section of this website is the most popular.

By drilling down further you can see the individuals images. If you have a product catalogue on your site, this information could be used to determine which products are popular and hence investing time in.

We hope this quick introduction will have given you some insight in to the useful metrics that your website can provide. If you haven’t already got a website, you’re in the right place - get in touch and we can discuss your requirements.