Tuesday 29 September 2009

Website finally gets Google Analytics

I really hate it when web sites make you wait to read their content because the web page is waiting for an ad server or google analytics server to respond to their request to display an ad or track a visitor. The site owner may view these tools as important to their site, but as a user I do not. I came to their site on the 'promise' of certain content, not to exercise their site's implementation... and if the response is too long (10 seconds or so) I find another web site to get the content from.

This is why I haven't (until now) implemented Google Analytics on my site. A user comes to my site for some content they are interested in, not to enable me to track my user population. So what's change?

I recently finished writing my open source javascript boot scripts (more on that in a later post) which load other resources after the web page has been fully rendered. One such script that is called loads google analytics in the background without affecting the user's experience of the page content. If google's response is slow or fails, the user is never aware of it. I consider this a great improvement to the user experience that respects the user's intentions whilst still meeting the site owner's management needs without alienating their users.

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