The agenda for this chapter was simple enough. In Chapter 8 we created an automated log file management system that records and summarizes all kinds of information about our visitors. In this chapter, we simply took the information from that database, and presented it to the viewer.
However, we also took some time out at the start of the chapter to consider what we might be looking to find in all this data. We talked about the ways we can use it to monitor the performance of our site, and how it can also help us to plan future site development and expansion.
In any business, monitoring your progress and performance in the market is a prime task, and the Web is no different. In fact, you can often get to know a lot more about 'virtual' visitors to your Web site than you ever could about 'physical' visitors that walked into your main street store and browsed the shelves. We looked at the kinds of things we can measure, and the inferences we can make from the results.
Then we moved on to look at some of the ways we can construct reports that use the data we're collecting week in and week out. We saw text-based tabular reports and graphical charts, simple compact reports and long listings, and ways that we can apply criteria to these reports to help narrow down the search for specific items of information. Overall, the chapter covered:
In the final chapter, we have some loose ends to tie up. Throughout the book, we've glanced briefly at topics that we didn’t have the space to cover in depth. For completeness, we've gathered these together and presented them as a 'cook-book' chapter that you can dip into, and extract useful pages and snippets of code as you wish.