| Re: [phoenix-dev] First steps towards a better eclipse.org website |
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Nick, Yes, I have - in fact, I'm using Google Analytics on the /projects/ pages right now to track visitor behavior. However, I think that basing an improved website on the Analytics data is like writing tests based on the current code: it allows one to optimize for the current behavior, but it doesn't verify that the current behavior is the desired behavior. Good unit test design involves writing the tests from use-cases and writing the tests first, then writing the code to achieve those tests. The same applies to our website: I don't want us to tailor our website to how it being used now - I want us to tailor it to what we want to accomplish as a community/Foundation. (For example, if we had tailored Eclipse based on how it was being used at first, we wouldn't have CDT, PHP, RCP, RAP, RT, ... - those didn't exist at the time, so if we had "perfected" Eclipse for the existing uses, we would have made those things nigh impossible to do.) So to me the first step is deciding _what_ we want the website to do for us THEN measuring what our current website _is_ doing for us, and then figuring out how to improve the current website to move towards what we want. And deciding what we want from the website includes figure out what conversions to measure. Having said all that, of course, I'm a big fan of Google Analytics: very easy to use, very easy to read the results. Perhaps we should change the Phoenix skin to include the Google Analytics tag I'm already using into all the pages? - Bjorn Have you ever used Google Analytics? It's meant to track conversion rates for ad campaigns, but I've used it to see what the traffic patterns are on sites I've built -- entry points, exit points, click tracks (# pages in a trail & visit duration), and of course the usual stuff like # of visitors, # of page hits & geoIP data. --
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