To make your Web site a 'success', you need to continually attract new visitors. You also need to retain existing ones as well, persuading them to come back again and again. On top of this, you want visitors to spend more time on your site, rather than just passing through with a cursory glance at the content. Good site design is one of the core issues here. However, this book is about techniques—the more down-to-earth aspects of actually making it all work. We don't intend to get deeply involved in design concepts or behavioral psychology.
What we do want to consider is how we measure if our site is achieving whatever aims we have for it. This includes the numbers of visitors, their demographic profile, and the parts of the site they visit. This should help us to adapt and extend our site in line with their requirements or aspirations. And we can get this kind of information from the logging system that we set up in the previous chapter. So what kinds of things should we be considering?