Simpler reports for website activity

by Wes Hooper

21st June 2010

Published in: Updates

After a few weeks of sketching, tweaking and trying it ourselves, we've just put live a new web site visitor reporting section.

We've removed duplicate charts and tables, simplified the navigation, lost a couple of charts that didn't really make sense & organised the reports by month making them easy to compare and spot trends.

Before, the navigation was also quite busy and the sections were fairly ambiguously named:

In total we had 25+ reports before, each taking into account all visitors to your site unless you used a date filter. Besides being a lot of reports (which didn't really get looked at) it made it hard to spot how activity changes.

For example, the report on web browser usage would by default include a breakdown over the past 18 months. With people upgrading web browsers more frequently these days the report would be skewed by older visitors and not reflect the behaviour of current visitors.

The new report simply shows you information for the current month, a simple option to switch to another month and one more report to compare trends for the past 18 months.