Having a portfolio website is an essential aspect of many designers lives, and optimizing and monitoring your site will benefit you in many ways. If you are seeking freelance work and more recognition then yo will need a to use one or several of these website traffic monitoring methods.
These program will allow you to monitor many different stats such as total visitors, unique visitors, page views, browsers used, location of users, keywords used to find your site, sites that linked to you and much, much more.
All this information is key to growing ones website and freelance career. Most of these programs are very easy to use and install, some are free and the paid ones are still affordable and have great additional features. If you are going to use one or more of these programs, I would recommend at least setting up Google Analytics.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the industry standard when it comes to website traffic monitoring. It is incredibly easy to set up and will start collecting data soon after you implement it. You can track everything you could dream of with Google Analytics and if you are going to use any stat monitoring program, be sure to use this one!
Read More About Google Analytics
2. AWStats
This is another free way to track a good amount of your server’s stats. Its not as in depth as Google Analytics, but it is free and comes with most web hosting packages so ask your hosting provider how to get this working!
3. Mint
Mint is a cool new way to track stats. It costs money to buy but has cool “peppers” that you can add to the program to show more types of stats. People develop these peppers and then you download and install them on your account. Mint takes a bit more work to set up, but the cool part is there is a desktop widget available for Mac users which can allow you to access your stats with the click of a button!
4. Clicky
Clicky is known as the web 2.0 stat monitoring program and has a sleek and clean interface combined with powerful features. Its easy to use and will provide you with all the stats you could possibly dream of, in real time.
5. Site Meter
Site Meter is another popular choice for webmasters. It tracks all kinds of information in real time so you will have a solid idea of who is visiting your site, how they found you, where they came from, what interests them and so on.
What website traffic monitoring methods do you use? let us know which are your favorites in the comments and how they help you run your portfolio site!