I was speaking to a friend whom swears by hitcounters.<br /><br />
I, personally, never haved liked hit counters. I see them as tacky and irrelevant to the information a user comes to a site to view. But what does everyone else think?
Is it possible to place a hit counter on a page without it looking out of place? lol<!--content-->In general, Hit counters that do nothing else hold little use for me, however, if the counter is also capturing traffic data then that is useful.<br /><br />
For example, I have a counter on one of my pages that doesn't display the count (by preference), but it does capture what type of browser they are using, what area of the world they were at, what the referring address was, etc.<br />
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This information is good because it allows me a view into the user base that could support the need to build my site for old browsers, or include a translation choice, etc.<!--content-->What's the point of a web site? To display important content to the user. In all honesty, only the site owner cares about those stats. I know I don't because I don't really even check my own site stats although I should.<br />
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The only real use of a counter is to show the site owner something that their subpar webhost should have been doing in the first place.<!--content-->frontpage 98's (i think, still might be the same) "hitcounter" only counted hits for the user. ie. if i had visited the site 7 times, it would say 7. Now thats what i call useful
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I think hit counters are pointless, why do i want to know how many hits a site gets?<!--content-->rofl!<!--content-->I'd say a site's stats are valuable to three people (or groups of people).
- you, the developer<br />
the site owner<br />
competitors
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[/list=1]<!--content-->Not really very important<br />
I tried one (<!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.zcounter.com">www.zcounter.com</a><!-- w -->)<br />
Everytime I went onto the page with the counter to see how some html looked, it gave me a hit. It ended up at like 10000 but I never had near thar much. I gave up on counters.
<!--content-->Well, that's just the thing about counters; they increment even when the user refreshes. Unless, I guess, you do something like jugernaut and code it so that if the user is using the same ip within like 10 minutes it wouldn't count it.<br />
'Course, that's a lot of trouble, I would just rather keep a hit count in a database rather than keeping a counter updated on the site, far less trouble in my opinion.
<!--content-->many hit counters also allow the developer to edit the number, or start it off at a high number, so you cant trust them and it defeats the object.<!--content-->I know what you're talking about. Frontpage counters allow that. (umm... not that I code in fronpage
)lol<!--content-->It depends upon the quality of the hit counter in question; a visitor counter is probably a better bet albeit they nearly all tend to relay upon an image being loaded first which is less than ideal.<br />
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Generally it is better to make your own or get a professional service which tell you more, e.g. IBM Research happen to be my largest visitor this month - though that is because they are data mining to glean information about XHTML usage.<!--content-->Well, the poll shows interesting results, I think. Just as many ppl voted "worthless" as "useful when done correctly". So, undoubtably, web pros have mixed feelings on this subject; my mind is made up. I will stay away from counters unless they offer me something other than "this many ppl were here, or someone refreshed 10 or 12 times, I'm just really guesing", lol
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