With the advent of server side scripting such as Active Server Pages (ASP) and then Parser Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), tracking all that comes with a hit was becoming possible.
I particularly remember working with the global.asa session variables in order to start tracking entry point, referrer URL, IP address, User Agent, search engines being used and most importantly keywords that led to your website - that was circa 1999.
At the time it was merely for development optimization purposes, IE 6 had not been released yet (way before 2002) and Netscape Navigator was still the browser for many corporations! The W3C had already started battling against discrepancies in rendering the web but we wanted to make sure our web pages were not broken the top browsers.
One of the early insights I clearly remember was for a music site that was getting a lot of visits from Italy. It led to the localization of its forum which was also set for the Romance language.
Crunching logs with Sawmill
Sawmill 6 to be more precise! We were running our websites off Netscape Enterprise server – version 3.6 if I remember right. So at the beginning of each month, we had an intern downloading access logs to crunch the files with Sawmill 6, that I remember! It was taking a fair amount of time, our websites were quite popular in the UK. The reports were important then even if they were only used for their advertising value. This was the only way to monetize the company’s web presence at the time. I wish I had reports somewhere, I will ask the intern, am sure she does!
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Back in the days
I started working on the internet back in 1997. Working might be an overstatement, experimenting would be more appropriate. Eventually though a homepage on the intranet of the high school were I was employed saw the light. I think I built it with Microsoft FrontPage and it all came very naturally, so much so I decided to build web pages for a living. A couple of years later and freshly certified with Adobe ACE on GoLive 4, I became a freelance web designer. The internet was like the new frontier, the general public was a bit skeptical about it and businesses contended themselves with online brochures. It’s funny when you think about it, traffic was mainly publicized through web counters. Some of the more astute businesses were checking their log files already and this is how I got introduced to what is now called the science of Web Analytics.
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