Wednesday Morning Randomness

As I sit here in front of my dual monitors here at work getting ready for my day, I took a quick look over at Google Analytics. Some people will tell you not to look at your statistics for you blog on a daily basis, I agree with them. Why you might ask? Well if you look at your stats every day they won’t look like they are doing much and you might become disappointed and a bit disgruntled towards blogging. I check my states maybe once a week just to see how things are doing. I don’t obsess about them as much as I used to a few months ago.

What did I take a look at this time?

Well as many of you know I LOVE Firefox and if you are not using it I would highly recommend installing it right now. Though in my findings of the good ol’ Browser Wars is that different type of websites draw a different type of browser crowd. Example: Tech-type sites will have a higher amount of Firefox users where as a Business-type site will usually draw a higher amount of MS Internet Explorer visitors, or at least in my experiences.

Here on my blog (and my others actually)  I find that Firefox is ahead of the pack as the most commonly used browser. I find that more “tech-savy” people tend to use browsers such as Firefox, Opera and others who follow the World Wide Web Consortium for Web standards. MS IE likes to be the rebel, though many people have to “hack” their pages to get them to style properly with IE where as Firefox, Opera etc usually render the sites properly. In the corporate world I find that because you do not normally have access to add personal applications, MS IE is the browser people unfortunately still have to use. So many web developers (like myself) still need to ensure our web sites render properly in the MS IE browsers. As you can see from the above screenshot from Google Analytics, Firefox and IE are really close when it comes to the browser wars here. Reminds me I need to look at how my site renders in Safari. I know it looks alright in Safari for the iPhone, but how does it look on an actual Mac that is running Safari?

If you are still using MS IE, why is that? Make the switch! You can import all of your favorite bookmarks too

Visitor Trending

Another statistic I was thinking about recently is visitor tending. When is the peak time people visit my site? Well a quick glance tells me between 9:00AM and 12 Noon is about the average of when people make their visit, the beginning of the work day and during their lunch time.

This time is probably the most effective time when blog posts should go live (or at least here). I have the highest readership around this time. Where as if I were to post during the evening not many people would be exposed to the post until the following morning. If I do write a post in the evening I will usually post-date it until the following morning before the work crowd begins their day. Gotta love WordPress’ schedule post feature!

My next task is to look at trending my visits on a day basis. See which day of the week I get the highest traffic. Some people have told me that Wednesdays are usually the day to get high quality content posted  for the biggest traffic boost. What do you think? Is there a day of the week you like to post your better ideas?

Two other stats that I like to occastionally look at are my visits and pageviews. Both of these continuously grow in the 12-15% range month after month.

Are there any particular statistic on your site you like to follow?