This page has been accessed 12143 times.

A 'hit counter' is quite simple to add to web pages - however, the information a hit counter provides is suspect at best.

Such counters are incremented each time a page is reloaded. This can mean that a seemingly popular page could actually be on a slow server (how many times have you hit 'stop' and 'reload' on a page that had apparently stopped loading?) You might want to hit your own browser's 'reload' button to see the effect of this - the counter on this page will go up by one each time you do so.

Experienced users of the Internet know the value shown on the counter can easily be 'doctored' to provide a false impression to visitors. There are a number of ways to do this; the easiest (and most obvious) is to start the count at a value other than '0'. This page started off with a value of 1000 - unless we admitted that, you would have been none the wiser. However, if the count is honest and the first person to arrive at your site sees the low counter value you still are in danger of giving the wrong impression.

The number of accesses a page receives is not so important; for one thing there are many indexing programs (known as 'spiders' and 'robots') used by Search Engines which will access a page and increase its hits. What is important is the number of different people - the number of living, breathing individuals - with an interest in what you have to say, that visit your Web Site.

Ultimately, the success of a commercial site is not measured in inconclusive 'hits', but in qualified sales leads.

If you really want a page counter, well, we can provide that - but if you want meaningful information, we can help you with that, too.

Further reading on the subject of interpreting web statistics:

• Interpreting WWW Statistics by Doug Linder
• How the web works by Stephen Turner

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