Western Folklife Center: Joomla 1.5
Published May 17, 2011 | 
Western Folklife Center is a long-time client. When they first approached us in 2007, they were working with a store system that couldn’t handle their orders, using a content management solution that didn’t work for their needs and had trouble making any edits to their site.
We helped them evaluate open-source alternatives, plan a project to update their web site of over 900 pages, and migrated their web management system to Joomla 1.0 with VirtueMart for their store solution. Since then, we have updated their site to Joomla 1.5 and added a wide range of resources including Google Analytics, custom web forms and custom templates for both their main and their Cowboy Poetry Gathering microsite.
The Western Folklife Center site is a good size site; over 850 pages, multiple integrated systems, 3 custom templates, photo galleries, forms systems and VirtueMart. Also, a microsite within Joomla that uses Joomla’s multiple template capabilities.
Western Folklife Center is a really cool non-profit organization; they help archive, celebrate and store the folklore of the western United States. Their site includes cowboy poetry, exhibits, artwork, podcasts, radio shows and more. Go check ‘em out! They are one of our on-going clients who has a contract with us for maintenance and management.
Posted in Portfolio | 
Google Analytics, Joomla, Web Marketing, Website Analytics, Website Tracking | 
Leave a commentReading Analytics
Published July 27, 2010 | We talked about marketing basics; know your audience, what you offer and say it clearly in a way that your audience understands. In the future we will go deeper into online marketing strategy.
Bottom line: unless you can read the analytic information that tells you who is coming to your site and what they are doing, you are flying blind on any marketing effort you use to try and drive traffic to your site.
There are analytics besides Google analytics, but GA is free, easy to integrate and gives most of the data you want, so we will use Google Analytics as a basis. If you want help with other packages, contact me or wait until I have a chance to cover them.
First, log in to your analytics account at analytics.google.com. If you haven’t created one, see the previous post about getting started
You will see an overview of all accounts that gives basic information:
Once you open your reports, you will see the dashboard specific to that site.
Lets talk about what is on that page, a lot of it is self-explanatory, but some of it uses some terms that may be unfamiliar to those not involved in the web industry specifically.
- In the upper left are buttons to export or email the report
- On the upper right is the date range. You can change this by clicking on it and selecting a start and end date.
- The first graph shows your visits during the date range selected.
- Next row are some summary stats. I will discuss these below.
- After the stats we have some summary charts. Again, below.
First, lets talk about some terminology:
- Visits: The number of people who came to your site. Google Analytics tries to track “visits” which is a single user, instead of “hits” which could be multiple connections from one user.
- Bounce Rate: A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There’s no standard formula for “bounces” – the concept is that it represents someone who came in and said “whoops, this isn’t for me.”
- Page Views: The number of times a “visitor” loads your pages. Page views represents the pages that people looked at on your site.
- Avg Time on Site: This one is fairly self-explanatory. It means what it sounds like it means. The time someone spent before leaving.
- Pages / Visit: An approximation of how many pages a visitor looked at while wandering your site.
- % New Visits: The percentage of the “visits” that are from new, unique web addresses.
Google Analytics does its best to track actual visits, and its one of the applications on-line that uses cookies, a unique numerical value that gets assigned to a browser when someone connects to your site. So, if a user with a cookie comes back in a day or two, that’s not new. We’re not after understanding the deep technical concepts behind these terms, just the basics of how you might interpret them related to your web traffic.
So, if you launch a new program, and your visits goes up, and the % New Visits shows 35%, that is a good thing.
Now lets talk about those graphs:
- Visitors Overview: This shows the number of visitors per unit of time (since you can change the time scope, the unit might change from day to week, to month). If you mouse over the small points, they will show you how many visitors per unit.
- Map Overlay: Shows you where in the world your visitors are from. Darker colors mean more visitors.
- Traffic Sources Overview: YES! This is what we want to get into, and its our next blog post. This shows where your visitors are coming from. Direct Traffic is when they type in your address, that’s most informative to find out who’s trying to get to you without any other resource, these are people who already know you and type in your address. Referring sites are places that mention you online, like partnership sites that mention yours. Search Engines refer to places that people search for key phrases, like Yahoo or Google. If you are working hard to run a key phrase improvement campaign, this is really important. As we get more into Traffic Analysis we will talk about sources in more detail.
- Content Overview: Shows the content that various visitors to your site loaded. Again, future posts will talk more about what this means to you.
That’s it to get us started. Go install Google Analytics on your site, start collecting some data, take a look, and come back here in future weeks for other posts!
Thanks! Please feel free to comment and make suggestions.
Google Analytics: Getting Started
Published June 25, 2010 | Google Analytics provides a wealth of information about website traffic; how many visitors are coming, where they comes from, and what they do while on a site. We will set-up Google Analytics, show how to install trackign code into a page, Wordpress or Joomla, and talk about how to read the information.
First, you need a Google Account. Analytics is accessed through a Google Account, so if you don’t have one, sign-up for one.
To start with Google Analytics, log-in to http://analytics.google.com with your Google Account. If this is your first Google Analytics account, you’ll see the sign-up screen:
Click on the “Sign Up” button. Fill in the address of your website, name your account (you can call it whatever you like) and pick the appropriate time-zone (make sure you do, so the reports are properly configured).
The next few steps are pretty straight-forward; contact name, country, agree to the terms of service…and then you get your tracking code:
<script type="text/javascript">
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-17149732-1']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
</script>
You want to keep that code. I would suggest selecting it, and pasting it into a notepad text file or an email to yourself (not a word doc, do not use word to store web code). At the bottom there is a button “Save and Finish” click that and you are done creating the account.
Now, to add this code to your website, either you use a text or html editor and paste this code right over the tag that says </head> in your html file, as suggested by the instructions Google provides. Or, you install a Word-Press or Joomla plugin and put just the account number into the plugin.
The part you need for that out of the code above is the account number that starts “UA” – so this; “UA-17149732-1″ – everything else is standard code, so your WordPress or Joomla plugin will create the code for you. I have a favorite WordPress plugin but there are a great many, if you search for “Google Analytics” on either extensions.joomla.org or within the plugins section of your WordPress interface, you will find many options.
As usual, if you have trouble, you can contact Techivity for help. Next up; getting into Google Analytics, the basic information.
Posted in Strategy, Tech Notes | Web Stats, Website Analytics, Website Strategy, Website Tracking | 2 Comments