I first put my website on the internet in May 1996 on Geocities. I used to get the occasional e-mail from people who had visited it but I never really knew how people found it or what they found interesting when did find it. Over the years I tried various ways of encouraging people to come to my pages and I also tried various ways of finding out where the visitors had come from and what parts of my site they went to. You might be interested to know what I found.

I have five general ways of attracting visitors. (1) I registered my pages with the main search engines and directories; I found that doing this by hand produced much better results than using an automatic submission system. (2) I joined many webrings; I found that TheRail was far and away the best although the newer, waterway-specific, UKWaterways is also very good. (3) I e-mailed the webmasters of well-known sites with themes related to my home page and politely asked for a reciprocal link; this was very successful. (4) I joined membership lists, especially where a member-search facility was provided, (5) I included my URL in my e-mail signature files.

There are many banner exchange schemes but I have found these to be very unsuccessful. The highest 'click-through' rate you can expect on a well-designed banner is about 1:50 and you get one banner for every two banners you display. This means the most it can do is increase your traffic by about 1%. The banners slow down your page loading significantly and I think you lose more visitors because of that than you gain from the extra exposure of your banner.

Monitoring visitors

To find out more information about my visitors, I arranged things so that I can be sent an e-mail every time someone opens a new page (that's why the main links sometimes appear as buttons). I do this using the FORMS feature of HTML and the special cgi scripts that some ISPs (Tripod and Geocities for example) provide. When traffic is low, it's rather nice to watch, in real time, as visitors wander from page to page.

The FORMS-based system cannot tell me who the visitor is or what their e-mail address is, but it does allow me to see what pages they looked at and how long they spent looking at each page. Recently, however, I have had to disconnect this because the traffic became too much to cope with. I also had to remove my e-mail address from the front page because I got too many e-mails and I make it a point to always answer e-mails.

Having found out what pages people go to it's then nice to find out where they have come from. I have two ways of doing this. At first, I used many different gateway pages. The contents of the gateway pages are the same, except for the file-name and a hidden identifier in the FORMS code. Each publicity method is connected to a different gateway. For example, if you find me on Lycos you will be linked to my index_lycos.html page and when you press a button on that page I get an e-mail saying which page you went to and also that you went there from index_lycos. A problem with this is that some clever search engines index all the gateways thus confusing the method.

Lately I have adopted another way of finding out where my visitors were coming from. I use a Java script that inserts a line into the FORMS part of the html so that the referring website is also notified to me. I can also find out their workstation name and IP address by this technique but it slows things down a little. One specially useful feature of this method is that you can see what search keywords people were using when they found your site. If the visitor uses a bookmark or types in the URL then you get no information about where they came from.

A simple counter such as ILE Fastcounter will tell you how many times your page has been loaded, and you can make it invisible to the user if you want by shrinking the image to a point as I do. The Fastcounter can be set to e-mail you the totals each week. However, it does not give very detailed information. There are more elaborate counters, for example Superstats that give more information, but you must display an advertising banner which slows down your page loading. Some webrings (such as ukwaterways.net) give you page loading statistics.

Using the counter, webring and the FORMS button information I now know (a) how many people load the main page, (b) what else (if anything) they look at, (c) where they came from. The % distribution of where people came from who visited my homepage in October 1998 is given below.

The table below shows what pages people load once they have found the site. These figuees are for July 1999 when there were about 2400 page loadings. The data came from the ukwaterways webring pabel. Of the people who found the (small) index page nearly half pressed the "set aboard" button and found the home page with its detailed contents list. Most then left but about one third went on to read pages deeper in the site.

Improving page loading speed

Personally, I find one of the most irritating things about many websites is slow loading time caused by pointless graphics. If I have to sit for minutes watching banners and fancy animations slowly coming up I get fed up and leave without ever seeing the page's real content.

I want my pages to load as quickly as possible. I therfore use mostly black and white jpeg images and I compress them heavily. I found that black and white images can be compressed much further than colour ones can before any loss of quality is evident. In addition, I specify the image size in the HTML so that the text can load and be read while the images are loading. I don't use fancy borders, backgrounds or fonts or anything else that needs to be downloaded.