Web Logs Finally Meet Sim City 218
l0rd writes "A good piece on wired says :
A few games of Roller Coaster Tycoon don't usually translate into productive work, but for one developer the diversion planted the seed for making website analysis more intuitive.
Several years after playing those inspirational games, Robert Savage came up with VisitorVille, a website-traffic analysis package that essentially crosses the DNA of SimCity with that of the traditional chart- and graph-centric tools businesses have long been using.
Screenshots included."
Free Trial (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What I'd like to know... (Score:3, Insightful)
Useless? Keep an open mind - this is a tool that can help smaller web sites and less experienced webmasters analyze their web traffic and make better decisions based off that information. True, these folk may not fit your ideals b/c they can't grep their own logs, but alas, even your underlings deserve consideration.
Uninstall? (Score:3, Insightful)
Where is the data being generated stored?
Is the creator's website storing it all for me?
How secure is their site?
Most importantly (for those who care about their code)
If I choose to uninstall the product, will it rip all of its code off of my pages?
Re:Best Replacement for Brick and Mortar Customers (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess I don't see how this is anything but eye candy for people with websites. Maybe that's the point.... I don't always understand the point behind everything. For instance, those segway things....
Re:Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, the lowest package is $30/month, that's very expensive for a personal site. Second, like you said, even if you cancel, they keep 10% of the fee you paid.
I see it more as a toy than anything else. For any more serious stats, you would use a log analyzer. A $30/month toy is out of my reach.
Re:open source alternatives? (Score:2, Insightful)
But the notion of visit and visitor is always subject to discussion - what you see (in your server logfiles) is not always what you get (people viewing your content through proxy caches etc.)
Re:Picture (Score:3, Insightful)
If it works anything like all of the other 3rd party tracking tags I have implemented over the years you specify params in the request, so you pass one of the identifying post vars with the page name.
On another note, they do have an "Enterprise" version that you can license to run on a server you have control over. No mention of price without requesting a quote, maybe when the hammering it's getting slows down.
Re:I like it (Score:4, Insightful)
Things like this from their pricing page.
If you want to use VisitorVille for Windows on up to three personal computers -- office, laptop, home -- then the optional Power User plan is for you. Note that this is not a multi-user option, but rather a way for you to exercise your single-user license on more than one personal computer
Its licenses like this that made me stop upgrading Webtrends as well. (The 'we can audit you at any time' in the webtrends 3.5 license did it for me)
Re:May I help you? (Score:2, Insightful)
Otto... (Score:2, Insightful)
I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me...
Sean D.
interesting, creative, & mostly counterproduct (Score:2, Insightful)
Do we really need web site traffic represented as little people wandering around?
This to me seems ultimately as useful as Microsoft's stupid talking paperclip. Yea, it's amusing for the first few days, then it becomes an inefficient, time-wasting distraction. In other words, corporate America will probably love it.
A heretical notion (Score:5, Insightful)
As Edward Tufte [edwardtufte.com] points out in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explanations, the meaningful display of information is about removing visual clutter, not introducing it.
Just as a PowerPoint presentation doesn't really increase our ability to grok the quarterly sales figures, the visual fluff of metaphorical buildings and busses doesn't help us understand traffic data. Simple bar graphs do not introduce the distortion of perspective. They're not sexy, but they do not make it more difficult to discern relationships between data elements, the way a 3d urban representation does.
I'm also reminded of good old Microsoft Bob [pmt.org], and some of the more antiquated websites from the 1990s that forced a metaphor onto something that didn't need one in the first place. Back in those days, Web designers felt that people wanted an "experience" when what they really wanted was an attractive and clean interface to information, organized in a way that would be useful.
Professional web developers and marketers (I know, they're all stupid, they all want dumbed-down visual information, blah blah blah) need information they can drill down into quickly and easily without a lot of superflous distraction. There are already several good tools, like Summary [summary.net] and FunnelWeb [funnelwebcentral.com], on the market. I don't think this experiment will make it in an already saturated market.
Wrong metaphore, wrong emphasis (Score:3, Insightful)
Judging by the screen shots, the primary way of representing site activity is skyscrapers in a rectangular city grid.
The city-grid metaphor fails to capture the essential hierarchical structure of a Web site
In addition, showing page popularity by the height of buildings favours pages that are designed primarily to route users to other pages. For instance, the home page would typically get the most hits.
However, the objective of a home page is to route users to pages that provide some information specific to their interest. These pages are inherently less popular but what the site manager needs to know is whether people who go to the home page are ultimately getting to the less popular pages that interest them further down the hierarchy.
In effect, it's the traffic between pages that's more interesting than the hits on the page. The service does provide [visitorville.com] this information but in a more conventional form of percentages and lists.
A pinball machine metaphore might be more useful with visitors represented by the pinball. The pinball should get through the maze of bumpers with as few rebounds as possible before exiting the game. If users spend a lot of time bouncing around, the site is failing to get them to the pages that interest them quickly.