Where Ya' From??
by Gary Woods

For those of us who run our own websites it's important to know where the traffic to our site comes from. One way of viewing this traffic is called Visitorville and was inspired by video games reminding me of SimCity.

On one level, it presents all the statistical information that standard Web-site traffic-analysis packages do, but it translates the statistical information into visual metaphors. Instead of looking at numbers and charts, you see buildings, buses, crowds, lights and other graphical representations of what's going. The neighborhood you look at in Visitorville is a game-like view of all the pages in your Web site, and it gives a visceral feel for what the events going on at them are like.

A bus labeled "Google" may pull up to one of the buildings, letting you know who is coming to your site from that search engine. You can quickly drill down from there to what search terms the visitor used to get to you site. Behind that bus, you may see one labeled Yahoo! Visitors are represented as avatars, and ones arriving from dot-com sites appear in suits, while visitors from university sites with dot-edu suffixes are dressed as students.

The service is subscription based and the price is determined by how many visitors you have. For a small site that gets 50 visitors per day the price would be $4.95. An enterprise site with millions of visitors pays about $1,500 per year.

If you have any suggestions or questions for me please drop me a note at garyandlaury@santabarbaraproperties.com or see my column on the Internet at http://www.santabarbaraproperties.com or call me at (805) 729-0910