In computer news this week, 04/19/2000

You've got to count on your counter - Web Counters and how they work

One of the things you come across on a lot of web pages is a counter, usually on the bottom of the main website page. The counter in theory shows how many people have visited this web page; the hits. When the web first started, most of the pages had counters on them, as it seemed to legitimize the fact that people were actually using the internet. Now, with millions of people online, so you don't see quite so many counters on pages, particularly on those that obviously have a lot of traffic. The microsoft site doesn't really need a counter to show that millions of people access - or try to access it - everyday.

But counters are very important to many websites. A counter with a respectable count shows that the page is popular, whereas a page with a counter that says 13 means that the page is unpopular. Particularly if you go back to this page in a couple weeks and then the count says 14. So a counter with a respectable count actually equates to bragging rights; a lot of people visit this site and so should you. If you remember past Raw Bytes shows, a lot of Ecommerce is based on mouse clicks, page hits, and commissions paid for referrals and page visits. So the counter is very important.

Unfortunately, it is easy to lie with counters also. Most counters will let you either start from zero, or start counting from any number you choose. A lot of people opt to start from say 10,000 rather than zero, and there's no way you can determine this. False advertising? Definitely. Are the Internet Police going to clamp down on this? What internet police?

To have a counter on your web page, you have to have special counter software. Some ISP's and online services provide this, but many people opt to use one of the free counter services on the internet. These are referred to as Hosted Web Counters. The counter program actually resides on some web server computer somewhere, and you put a link to it on your page. They assign you an id number and password, and provide the software to run your counter. You can get information on the various counters available by going to counterguide.com and reading the material there. You will find a listing and evaluation of all the free and pay counters, as well as source code to cgi and other language counters, should you want to brew your own.

Generally the counter service will provide you with the exact html code you need to make their counter work on your page, and you can easily cut and paste this into your page. Then you have a nice professional counter that shows the number of hits or people who have visited your page, and you're all set up.

Until, of course, your counter stops working, as happened recently to KPBX Movie Critic Bob Glatzer on his Movies101.com website. We had been using a free counter from thecounter.com for almost a year, and it worked perfectly until the company was sold to another ecommerce company about a month ago. Then the problems started; the counter wouldn't load; the page would freeze, and people would surf off somewhere else. When your counter doesn't work like this, you lose customers.

This is a really big problem on the internet - your page has to load fast because the web surfers have the patience and attention span of a 3 year old. The problem was that the server at thecounter.com was either overloaded or was having software problems. Regardless, it wasn't working, and emails to their tech support resulted in non-helpful replies or were not answered.

We even tried regenerating the counter code and re-pasting back into the movies101.com page, but that didn't work either. Finally we decided we had to find a new counter, which is how we happened upon the counterguide.. We picked a new free counter hosted by webtracker.com, and so far are happy with it. It works, which makes us the happiest, and we were able to truthfully transfer over our historic count figure and go forth from there.

But that's not the end of the counter story, and next week I'll tell you what interesting statistics the counter software can tell you about the people that visit your site.

For Raw Bytes, this is Frank Delaney

POB 222

Spangle, WA 99031

(509) 245-3736

fdspokane@aol.com