With the modern style of losing the “www” at the beginning of the website URL you may encounter problems – especially with statistical analysis programs.

I’m not really concerned with the semantics of whether one should or should not use the starting “www” but being of the old school I still tend towards using it.  These days most hosting facilities utilise the dual base directories of “public_html” and “www” where “www”  is the automatic clone of the “public_html” directory so, under normal circumstances, either URL will work fine.
However, I have seen browser cache problems give display problems identifying a difference between them  – i.e. missing favicon images and intermittent flash errors etc.  It took me a long time before I identified where the problem actually lay. Everyone always identifies the standard cache reload fix but not that you may be varying the actual URL (www) search which can happen when using previous saved browser shortcuts or bookmarks.

.htaccess

I always now use a 301 redirect with the following script in my .htaccess file which redirects my incoming URLs to www however this step should only be taken by those who understand that problems could follow if incorrect editing is done. Firstly create a backup copy of your original .htaccess file just in case things get messed up. Now add the following  3 lines of 301 redirection code
(note : aaaaaaaa.bbb is tobe replaced by your website URL i.e.   okikoki.com)

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^aaaaaaaa.bbb
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.aaaaaaaa.bbb/$1 [R=301,L]

Although I’ve written several articles that included examples of positioning, such as “Instant Info” and the “No-Kill Pop Box” series, it occurred to me that I’ve never written an article about how to do the positioning itself.

This is it.

Basically, it’s three steps:

1. Create a DIV tag.

2. Put content within the DIV.

3. Tell the browser where to put the DIV.

What you’re doing is making a layer. I’ll explain those three steps in a moment.

Without the above, text and images can move, and probably will, depending on which browser is displaying your page and the size preferences the user has specified.

That’s not necessarily bad. But if you must have something in an exact position, making a layer and positioning it is a way to do it.

You might want a photograph overlapping another. Or, you might want to place some text so it overlaps an image. Or, perhaps, your logo must be in the exact same place on every web page.

A demonstration page has been prepared consisting of four layers.

The first layer is a photograph of the Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone National Park. The other layers are layered over the first and are composed of text, the word “Old,” the word “Faithful,” and a copyright line (this latter being bordered).

The demonstration page is at
http://willmaster.com/a/21t/pl.pl?art215

Here’s how to do it.

1. Create a DIV tag

Creating a DIV tag creates a layer.

The DIV tag contains a style attribute with positioning information. It might also have border and size information, if appropriate.

Here is the basic DIV tag required for exact positioning:

<div
   style="
      top: 99;
      left: 99;
      position: absolute;
      z-index: 1;
      visibility: show;">
<!-- content will go here -->
</div>

The above creates a layer.

You’ll notice that the style attribute has five different labels. They all relate to positioning the layer and will be addresses in section 3, “Tell the browser where to put the DIV,” below.

2. Put content within the DIV

Putting content between the <div…> and </div> tags is providing content for the layer.

The layer might contain an image tag, a word, paragraphs of text, or combination text and images. The layer can contain anything web pages can contain, including forms.

3. Tell the browser where to put the DIV

Telling the browser where to put the DIV tag is actually telling it where to put the layer and its content.

The “top” and “left” labels –

The 2-dimension positioning is done with the “top” and “left” labels in the style attribute. The number is in pixels. In the example DIV tag in section 1, “Create a DIV tag,” the layer is put 99 pixels from the top edge and 99 pixels from the left edge.

The “position” label –

The top edge of what? The left edge of what?

The “position” label gives the browser the answers to those questions.

If the position label’s value is “absolute,” then the number of pixels is measured from the top of the browser window and from the left of the browser window.

If the label’s value is “relative” however, the position is measured from the position relative to the place in the HTML source code that you have placed the DIV tag. If you’ve placed the DIV tag at the end of a paragraph, the position will be calculated relative to the end of that paragraph. Using the “relative” value does not position elements according to purpose of this article, but it does have its uses in other situations.

The “z-index” label –

This label determines the third dimension of positioning when several layers occupy the same pixel of the user’s screen. The value of the “z-index” label determines which layer will be placed over the other. If two layers vie for the same spot, one has a “z-index” value of “1″ and the other a “z-index” value of “2,” then the “2″ value layer will be placed over the “1″ value layer.

The “z-index” label was used to place text over an image on the demonstration page. The image was given a “z-layer” of 1 and the text a “z-layer” of “2.” The demonstration page is at http://willmaster.com/a/21t/pl.pl?art215

The “visibility” label –

Give the “visibility” label a value of “show” so it will be visible. For other purposes, a layer might want to be hidden for a time, in which case the value “hide” or “hidden” would be used.

Special Effects

Supposing the content of the layer is the word “hello,” the above would give us a layer like this:

<div
   style="
      top: 99;
      left: 99;
      position: absolute;
      z-index: 1;
      visibility: show;">
hello
</div>

If you want to give the layer a background color or a border, you’ll also need to specify the size of the layer. It’s done with these labels:

width: 266px;
height: 17px;

(The “px” represents pixels, although other units of measurements may be specified.)

To give the layer a background color of yellow, use this label and value:

background: yellow;

To put a 1-pixel solid black border around the layer, specify these labels and values:

border-color: #000000;
border-style: solid;
border-top-width: 1px;
border-bottom-width: 1px;
border-left-width: 1px;
border-right-width: 1px;

The “border-color” label can have a color name or hexadecimal color value.

The “border-style” label can have other values, such as “dotted” and “dashed,” but some browsers print a solid line nevertheless.

The width of the border can be different for each side.

The copyright line layered over the image on the demonstration page is a demonstration of giving a layer a border. The demonstration page is at http://willmaster.com/a/21t/pl.pl?art215

Note: If you wish to apply other style elements within the layer, such as font size or color, use a SPAN, P, or other tag instead of the DIV tag. A DIV tag within a layer (somewhat like a DIV tag nested within a DIV tag) can confuse some browsers.

When you need to position something on a web page exactly, so it stays in that position regardless of what browser is used to view it, what the browser’s preferences are, or the size of the browser window, you now know how to do it.

The visitor’s browser must be able to render layers, of course, in order to position your content. Most recent browser releases do.

Netscape 4.#, while it does render layers, doesn’t do a good job with more than two layers over each other. If this is a high priority for you, you might develop with Netscape 4.# and then verify your pages render correctly in the later browsers.

Those browsers that don’t render layers will probably place the content in the order it exists in your source code. That may be a consideration when you decide where in the source code to put layer DIV tags.

Will Bontrager

About the Author:

Copyright 2003 Bontrager Connection, LLC
William Bontrager Programmer/Publisher, “WillMaster Possibilities” ezine mailto:possibilities@willmaster.com

The Advanced Google Analytics Tutorial raised more questions than it answered so I have spent this afternoon going through everybody’s comments and trying to answer them.

If you have any more questions please feel free to ask in the comments at the end of this post.

Google has just announced a few new features including the ability (finally) to click on referring url’s and be taken to the referring page.

Michael asked:

Is there a way to see stats based on a specific day? I’d love to be able to see which pages are more popular as I’ve changed my site over time. I might change link position or something for a week and it’d be nice to see stats for that time period only to be able to compare them.

Click on Content > Top Content and then scroll right down to the form that says Find url and type the page you want to view the stats for. In this case I wanted to view stats for users clicking on my outgoing (affiliate) links.

From the chart below we can see that the link outgoing/top (named because it was at the top of the page) has had 1060 clicks in the time period selected.

If you look to the top right of the screen you should see a drop down box containing a data range.

Click on the box and enter your desired date ranges in the boxes (hint: click on the box and then the name of the month at the top of the calendar to highlight the whole month) and then click the “Apply Range” button.

The result should be a graph comparing data from the two date ranges, one range has a blue line and one is shown with a green line.

Hunter asked:

How do we track flash movie plays with google analytics?

Tracking Flash events is the same as tracking JavaScript events, just call the urchinTracker function:

javascript:urchinTracker('/homepage/flashbuttons/button1');

Example Flash Code

on (release) {

// Track with no action

getURL(”javascript:urchinTracker(’/folder/file’);”);

}

on (release) _

//Track with action

getURL(”javascript:urchinTracker(’/folder/file’);”);

_root.gotoAndPlay(3);

myVar = “Flash Track Test”

}
onClipEvent (enterFrame) {

getURL(”javascript:urchinTracker(’/folder/file’);”);

}

More details

LGR asked:

Is there anyway to attach the onclick event handler on a link I want to track without editing the html, perhaps at the bottom of the page? Just wondering if it is possible to separate the HTML from the javascript so it is easier to maintain.

Motorcycle Guy asked :

Surely there is javascript to add that javascript to every external link? it seems dumb to have to rewrite your whole application.

I don’t think there is an easy way to do this. The best way would be to make your site database driven and append some automatic variables to the events you want to track.

Another solution would be to give each of your links an id parameter and then to track clicks on each id and register the event that way.

If anybody has any better suggestions please post in the comments.

f4rrest commented:

There are some things still only available in the old UI though, such as graphing country-specific visitors.

Clicking on Visitors > Map Overlay and then the Country detail level and finally selecting the graph view I was able to create the chart below. Is this what you were looking for? I suspect you wanted to see how traffic from a certain country changed over time but this isn’t possible unfortunately.

Slides asked:

Can GA be used to track registered users and their activity on site?

I don’t think GA is the right solution to track individual user sessions and activity on a website. Depending on the data you want to track it sounds like a php application would be best.

darnit commented:

I would love to know how to view the pages sending traffic in the referring information statistics. Not just the domain but a link to the actual page sending traffic.

Clicking on Traffic Sources > Referring Sites and then clicking on del.icio.us (or any of the other sites on the list) you can see a list of the referring pages as well as build a pie chart to visualise the data. Click the “Views” icons to view the pie chart.

This method falls down on sites where the referring page is site.com/page.php?id=12345 as Google strips the id parameter off. It works fine for most blogs as they tend to use a folder structure rather than dynamic urls.

Any more questions feel free to ask

Since Google Analytics was launched in 2005 it has become one of the top analytics packages for small to medium sized websites. Growth was initially slow due to the frustrating waiting list system initiated by Google to avoid over stretching their servers. Now that the waiting list has been removed anybody can sign up to use this great service.

The user interface had a major redesign in May 2007 and a lot of the features we love have become hard to find. This guide should help you find your way around the new system.

I see a lot of comments on the forums asking whether Analytics can do X, Y and Z. In most cases it can do it but people just don’t realise it. As webmaster of several large sites I have been using GA for around a year now to track a huge number of variables. In this post I will go through a few of the more obscure interactions that GA can tack on your site.

Tracking exit clicks, banner clicks and RSS feed subscribers

Have you ever wanted to know how many people clicked on a particular link or banner on your site? You may wish to find out how many people click on an affiliate link, how many people from a certain country click on your banner advert or even the number of visitors from Digg that clicked to sign up to your RSS feed.

GA can track this for you quite easily by simply adding an onClick event to your hyperlink code.

<a href="http://www.example.co.uk" onClick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/outgoing/rssfeed'); ">

Every time somebody clicks on the link above GA will register a page view on the page www.yoursite.com/outgoing/rssfeed. To view the stats for the link you will need to follow the directions below:

In your GA account visit Content > Top Content and you will see the most popular pages on your site. Enter the term “outgoing” into the filter box as shown below and you will see a list of all the pages on your site with “outgoing” in the url. Normally this will just show exit clicks unless you happen to have real pages with “outgoing” as part of the url.

To drill down into the data simply click on the url you are interested in and you will see a snapshot of data like the image below.

(screenshot courtesy of Gas Fires Galore) If you want to drill down further by clicking on the “Segment:” drop down menu you can see details such as the source of the visitors, the keywords they were searching for and the landing page they arrived on.

This data is extremely valuable to webmasters who are not selling products. Sites selling products can measure ROI accurately by looking at the profits made on a particular sale compared to the cost of obtaining the visitor whether by SEO or Pay Per Click marketing. If you don’t sell products you need to place a value on other aspects of your site. How much are you willing to pay to acquire another blog subscriber? Was the $5000 you spent on link bait worthwhile?

All these actions can be tracked using the onClick event in Google Analytics.

More information at the Google Help Section.

How do I track downloads?

Downloads can be tracked again using the onClick event as above:

<a href="http://www.example.co.uk/files/map.pdf" onClick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/downloads/map'); ">

More details

Tracking ecommerce revenue

Tracking where your visitors come from is very important. Tracking where your actual customers came from is even more important. If you knew that people searching for your keywords on MSN Live were twice as likely to buy your product as people searching on Google you can happily bid far more for your Adcenter clicks as your Adwords clicks.

Sales reports by traffic sources can be found under the “Traffic Sources > All Traffic Sources” section of the menu.

Before explaining how to track your transactions lets look at the data that GA can provide on this subject. These figures are for April 2007. Some details are blocked out for privacy reasons.

Lets drill down into the stats for Google (keywords removed):

From the chart above we can see that some keywords earn £31.52 per visit whereas some only earn £5.72 per visit. This data is hugely valuable as you can adjust your PPC bids on high and low paying keywords to maximise your profits.

GA also lets you drill down to see stats such as the number of people who bought product A after searching Google for Product B.

Now we know why we need to see these stats it makes the task of enabling the tracking slightly more appealing.

How to track Sales

To track your sales you will need to use some server side script on your confirmation page (the page people see after they complete a transaction on your site) to populate a form in the following format:

<body onLoad="javascript:__utmSetTrans()">
<form style="display:none;" name="utmform">
<textarea id="utmtrans">UTM:T|[order-id]|[affiliation]|
[total]|[tax]| [shipping]|[city]|[state]|[country] UTM:I|[order-id]|[sku/code]|[productname]|[category]|[price]|
[quantity] </textarea>
</form>

Example

UTM:T|34535|Main Store|111108.06|8467.06|10.00|San Diego|CA|USA

UTM:I|34535|XF-1024|Urchin T-Shirt|Shirts|11399.00|9

UTM:I|34535|CU-3424|Urchin Drink Holder|Accessories|20.00|2

Once you have populated the form GA will start tracking your sales right away.

The Google Help Section has a good reference guide for this topic.

Tracking 404 errors

Google Analytics makes the process of tracking your 404 errors fairly straightforward. Simply add the code below to your error page and GA will tell you the source of the traffic that is generating the error.

Make sure you replace the xxxxx-x with your GA account number!

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "xxxxx-x";
urchinTracker("/404.html?page=" + _udl.pathname + _udl.search);
</script>

But it’s 2007. Most of my traffic comes from modern browsers, and quite frankly, most of my users are fairly tech-savvy. I don’t want to slow everyone else down because somebody is chugging along on IE 4.0 on Windows 95. Google and Yahoo use gzip compression. A modern browser is needed to enjoy modern web content and modern web speed — so gzip encoding it is. Here’s how to set it up.

Wait, wait, wait: Why are we doing this?

Before we start I should explain what content encoding is. When you request a file like http://www.yahoo.com/index.html, your browser talks to a web server. The conversation goes a little like this:

1. Browser: Hey, GET me /index.html
2. Server: Ok, let me see if index.html is lying around…
3. Server: Found it! Here’s your response code (200 OK) and I’m sending the file.
4. Browser: 100KB? Ouch… waiting, waiting… ok, it’s loaded.

Of course, the actual headers and protocols are much more formal (monitor them with Live HTTP Headers if you’re so inclined).

But it worked, and you got your file.

So what’s the problem?

Well, the system works, but it’s not that efficient. 100KB is a lot of text, and frankly, HTML is redundant. Every <html>, <table> and <div> tag has a closing tag that’s almost the same. Words are repeated throughout the document. Any way you slice it, HTML (and its beefy cousin, XML) is not lean.

And what’s the plan when a file’s too big? Zip it!

If we could send a .zip file to the browser (index.html.zip) instead of plain old index.html, we’d save on bandwidth and download time. The browser could download the zipped file, extract it, and then show it to user, who’s in a good mood because the page loaded quickly. The browser-server conversation might look like this:

1. Browser: Hey, can I GET index.html? I’ll take a compressed version if you’ve got it.
2. Server: Let me find the file… yep, it’s here. And you’ll take a compressed version? Awesome.
3. Server: Ok, I’ve found index.html (200 OK), am zipping it and sending it over.
4. Browser: Great! It’s only 10KB. I’ll unzip it and show the user.

The formula is simple: Smaller file = faster download = happy user.

Don’t believe me? The HTML portion of the yahoo home page goes from 101kb to 15kb after compression:

The (not so) hairy details

The tricky part of this exchange is the browser and server knowing it’s ok to send a zipped file over. The agreement has two parts

• The browser sends a header telling the server it accepts compressed content (gzip and deflate are two compression schemes): Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

• The server sends a response if the content is actually compressed: Content-Encoding: gzip

If the server doesn’t send the content-encoding response header, it means the file is not compressed (the default on many servers). The “Accept-encoding” header is just a request by the browser, not a demand. If the server doesn’t want to send back compressed content, the browser has to make do with the heavy regular version.

Setting up the server

The “good news” is that we can’t control the browser. It either sends the Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate header or it doesn’t.

Our job is to configure the server so it returns zipped content if the browser can handle it, saving bandwidth for everyone (and giving us a happy user).

In Apache, enabling output compression is fairly straightforward. Add the following to your .htaccess file:

# compress all text & html:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

# Or, compress certain file types by extension:
<Files *.html>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</Files>

Apache actually has two compression options:

• mod_deflate is easier to set up and is standard.
• mod_gzip seems more powerful: you can pre-compress content.

Deflate is quick and works, so I use it; use mod_gzip if that floats your boat. In either case, Apache checks if the browser sent the “Accept-encoding” header and returns the compressed or regular version of the file. However, some older browsers may have trouble (more below) and there are special directives you can add to correct this.

If you can’t change your .htaccess file, you can use PHP to return compressed content. Give your HTML file a .php extension and add this code to the top:

In PHP:
<?php if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start(); ?>

We check the “Accept-encoding” header and return a gzipped version of the file (otherwise the regular version). This is almost like building your own webserver (what fun!). But really, try to use Apache to compress your output if you can help it. You don’t want to monkey with your files.

Verify Your Compression

Once you’ve configured your server, check to make sure you’re actually serving up compressed content.

• Online: Use the online gzip test to check whether your page is compressed.
• In your browser: Use Web Developer Toolbar > Information > View Document Size (like I did for Yahoo, above) to see whether the page is compressed.
• View the headers: Use Live HTTP Headers to examine the response. Look for a line that says “Content-encoding: gzip”.

Be prepared to marvel at the results. The instacalc homepage shrunk from 36k to 10k, a 75% reduction in size.

Try Some Examples

I’ve set up some pages and a downloadable example:

• index.html – No explicit compression (on this server, I am using compression by default ).
• index.htm – Explicitly compressed with Apache .htaccess using *.htm as a rule
• index.php – Explicitly compressed using the PHP header

Feel free to download the files, put them on your server and tweak the settings.

Caveats

As exciting as it may appear, HTTP Compression isn’t all fun and games. Here’s what to watch out for:

• Older browsers: Yes, some browsers still may have trouble with compressed content (they say they can accept it, but really they can’t). If your site absolutely must work with Netscape 1.0 on Windows 95, you may not want to use HTTP Compression. Apache mod_deflate has some rules to avoid compression for older browsers.
• Already-compressed content: Most images, music and videos are already compressed. Don’t waste time compressing them again. In fact, you probably only need to compress the “big 3″ (HTML, CSS and Javascript).
• CPU-load: Compressing content on-the-fly uses CPU time and saves bandwidth. Usually this is a great tradeoff given the speed of compression. There are ways to pre-compress static content and send over the compressed versions. This requires more configuration; even if it’s not possible, compressing output may still be a net win. Using CPU cycles for a faster user experience is well worth it, given the short attention spans on the web.

Enabling compression is one of the fastest ways to improve your site’s performance. Go forth, set it up, and let your users enjoy the benefits.

This article was taken with thanks from” BetterExplained Learn Right, Not Rote.”
http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-optimize-your-site-with-gzip-compression/

In every HTML page, the words starting with < and ending with > are called HTML tags. These tags allow the web browser to display the web page properly.

Most HTML tags have two parts: an opening tag, to indicate where a piece of text begins, and a closing tag, to show where the piece of text ends. Closing tags start with a / (forward slash) just after the < symbol.

For example, the <body> tag tells the web browser where the actual body of text begins and the </body> indicates where it ends. Everything between the <body> and </body> tags will appear in the main display area of hte web browser window.

By 1993, almost 100 computers throughout the world were equipped to serve up HTML pages. Those interlinked pages were called the World Wide Web (WWW) and several web browser programs had been written to allow people to view Web pages. One of the programmers to develop a browser was Marc Andreesen who later became rich and famous for his creation of Netscape Navigator (which is now the world’s most popular web browser.)

In short, HTML is everywhere. There are four versions of HTML that have been developed over the years and I will use the 4.0 version to reference in this blog.