Web Site Statistics

Last year I transferred a company's web site from a hosting service to an in-house server using Windows 2003 Small Business Server. So far the switch seems to have been very beneficial, but there haven't been any statistics generated since the site launched mainly because Microsoft's Internet Information Server doesn't come with a web-based statistics reporting tool. After some research, I found a very nice program called AWStats that uses the the very raw traffic logs to produce a series of graphs and charts. It's a free tool so setting it up isn't quite a slam dunk, but it's not as horrific as other Open Source programs I've used in the past. Within one day I had it installed, configured, tweaked and secured.

I found out that Google has a similar service called Google Analytics that seems to be most excellent for reporting website traffic and the most effective search keywords. Unfortunately, it's on an invitation basis that I think only Google hands out. I signed up to receive an invitation code as soon as their capacity increases. If anyone has a good words to say about Google Analytics, I'd love to hear it.

AWStats is built with Perl and now I'm intrigued. I think a little code-dabbling might be in order.