WATCHING:
The Pianist
Roman Polanski

Well, this is not your feel-good movie of the year, that’s for certain.

While a certain amount of gravity and declaration of seriousness goes with a Holocaust story such as this, this movie earns the accolades it did receive. One of the better movies I’ve seen in the last few years; Brody is impressive and the history lesson compelling.

My one nit to pick is the message – in reviews and on the Blockbuster box – that it was the protagonist’s (a famous pianist) love of music that helped get him through this terrible time. I just didn’t get that from the movie – yes, he loved music, and his celebrity as a musician got him some breaks, but this movie is – to me – simply a tale of survival in horrific times.

All movies

OK, we’ve moved beyond Phase I of the Web – presence.

I’ve been telling people for years to reserve that domain name, it’s cheap and you can always do something with it later, but please get the name.

Others have apparently gotten and heeded the same advice; you can pretty much hit a Web site for any given company/organization with only a couple of URL guesses (www.company.com or www.companycorp.com and so on).

That’s Phase I – presence.

Phase II is the “now what do we do?” phase.

Or, what do we do with what we have done phase.

And this is where tools play a key role.

To illustrate, let’s use an example of a corporate Web site. Half-dozen pages. The site was launched because the sales team insisted that clients/journalists kept clamoring for a Web site with contact info and an easy way to request ad rates, media kits and so on.

Now we are in the phase where we can – we should – mine the data that is associated with this Phase I presence site. For example, we (the Royal we) should do the following:

• Keep track of site page views (not raw hits; that’s sooo Phase I) and set up tools to track trends (page view by day of week, by day/week following press release/trade show/product introduction…)
• Check referrers. Where is traffic coming from and – more importantly – run this list against known/potential clients/vendors and so on. Is the target audience actually hitting the site or just random Google results?
• What pages are erroring? Why? (bad ad server, missing images, 404, what?) Fix immediately
• What pages get the most views; what trends can one see? The index page will probably get the most view, but is the press page or new products page most popular? From there, who is hitting those pages? Current clients? Potential clients? Competitors? The data is there, mine it

This is just a small example of what one can do; the data is there, the trick is to see what it tells you. Tools help uncover the patterns embedded in the data.

Leverage tools to add value to a site, in ways that can then be analyzed via the list above:

• Play what-if: Example: Furniture site that shows it’s newest product on the index page. What if this page rotated randomly through the three most recent introductions, or random viewing of one of two pictures of the new intro? Does this increase traffic?
• Take suggestions from departments and add pet pages: Measure their successes; does the “contact us” page add value?
• Add Featured Product: Does this continual update of given page increase the page view?
• Try something new: Add a Flash intro to one section. Do page views/time on page go up/down/stay same? If change (+ or -), why?

And so on.

Tools can help add some of the new functionality; tools can help identity the results.

All the preceding examples are very low-tech ways to use tools to either change the user experience and/or to measure user change via log analysis. This is the tip of the tool iceberg, obviously, but it gets the point across.

COMING UP: Automation Via Tools