Making Democracy Work
What tools can I use to with my web site?
Click the "View Access Statistics" link near the top of your site generation home page. You will then be directed to the newest report which gives details about accesses to your website.
About 3:30 a.m. Pacific time, we capture the "log data" of accesses. Your report will not include any accesses made after the time of this capture.Check "Analyzed requests from" under the title of the report to verify the time period of the report. The time period is usually from the first day your web site went live until the previous night.
Overall statistics:
Request Report - for each page, how many times has the page been transferred from the LEW computer during the time period of the report. If there is no page named, then it refers to your home page (index.html).
- Successful requests for pages: the number of requests made to pages in your website during the time period of this report. The number in parenthesis tells you the number of requests made in the last seven days. A "page" includes your PDF files, if any.
- Distinct hosts served: this is not an accurate number but can be used to get a feeling of how many different people are coming to your website during the time period of this report.
Referrer Report - which pages from other websites linked to one of your pages. You can click on these pages and look for the link. Note that they may have changed their page since we captured the fact of the link so you won't find a link.
Failure Report - which links were made to pages on your website that were not found. This could indicate that you have a link that is incorrect or that a person simply typed an invalid page name. Several "failures" are expected so don't worry about: home.html, robots.txt, favicon.ico, and mailto&, for example. Learn more.
The total requests counts all the files which have been requested, including pages, graphics, etc. (Some people call this the number of "hits"). The requests for pages only counts pages and is the most important number to use. The number of "requests" should always be greater than or equal to the number of "pages".
Send a request to support@lwvnet.org (include your League URL). We can make a special run for you. We will also use this request to determine how important it is for us to give you the capability of getting this report yourself.
In addition to looking at the Referrer Report, you can use search engines to see a list, on demand, of which sites link to you. For example, using Bing.com, place into the search word box: lwvyourname.org -site:lwvyourname.org. This should find the sites that link to you, excluding all links to yourself. Warning: it looks like it also finds sites that might like to sell services.
It might indicate a bad link that could be corrected.The file names are listed because:
The only ones in the list of failures you could think about are the filenames that end in .html or .pdf or .jpg. They could indicate misspelled internal references or links from other sites that are in error.
- There is a link or reference to the named file from another web page or PDF file on your site or from any other site or,
- Someone typed in a full name and misspelled it. Or weird people are "fishing" to see if they can find something (e.g. files that end in .php names could be this). Don't worry about these.
- They didn't wait for the file to load. This could happen for a PDF file that is very long.
Two files are very often at the top of the list and can be ignored:
Note: all of the numbers are for the time period of the report: probably since your web site went live. You can tell if you have a current problem by waiting some amount of time (weeks?), then look at the newest stats report and see if the count goes up from the previous one. If it's the same, it is most likely of no concern.
- robots.txt is a file that some web sites have to tell search engines exactly what they do NOT want searched. Since we want them to search all of your pages, the file does not even exist.
- favicon.ico now exists -- it was added in 2012.
Services like the ones you ask about offer you the ability to build interactive services on their web site and then give you code you can use to embed their form on one your web pages. League Easy Web allows any HTML to be embedded on one of your web pages.We have produced a two page flyer that describes this kind of capability and gives you hints and examples for many services. See Webmaster Notes flyer with detailed instructions about embedding widgets.
See also embedding any HTML.
There are four things you can do to tell search engines about the content on your pages. The more clearly you can describe the content with words that people doing searches might use, the more likely your site will appear high on the list of search engine results.
- Choose good descriptive words for your Page Title
- Use the "Home Page Search Description" area in your League registration data to succinctly tell people about your web site. These words will then be placed in the search engine result list.
- For any page other than your home page, fill out the "Description in Table of Contents" area with succinct words describing the content of the page. Check the box next to "The page description should be used as search meta-description". Then when someone uses words that find this page, they will read this description. Note: if there is any HTML in this area, then nothing will be given to the search engines even if you check the box.
- Use the "Index Keywords" box on a page that is not your home page. Think of words that people might type into a search engine if they are looking for the content you have on this page. Separate words or phrases by a comma.
For more information, see flyer for Webmasters (page two).
Display one of your pages in your browser. Then find the command to view the source code behind the page. For example, with Firefox, click on the Firefox menu in the upper left of the window. Then click on "Web Developer" then "Page Source". This is the code that browsers read to display your web page. And it is the code that search engines read to index this page. Look for:<meta name="keywords" content="....." /> <meta name="description" content="....." />
The first line came from the "Index Keywords" area. The second comes from the "Description in Table of Contents".
There may be several existing services to accomplish this, but one way is to use the free Google Docs or Drive service. You need to have a Google account. Conceptually you define a spreadsheet using this service, then add a "form" associated with it. Google will give the form coding which you can then copy and paste into a LEW page.We have used this service to ask you whether you would help us at a past convention in the Wares Market. Please see Wares Market
You can use a free tool to do that. Among others, Link Sleuth will check all pages on your site starting with the page you give it. You download it and install it on your computer, then enter your site's web address. It checks every link on the first page for a "not found", then loops for each of the linked pages which are on the same web site as the initial page. When it finishes, you might want to rerun the report a few times (File -> Retry Broken Links) to be sure it had time to find all links. Then when asked, do request a report. Reply "cancel" when asked if you want an "orphan check". The formatted report will show all broken links, all redirected links (you might change your links to use the newer ones), a site map, broken local links (anchors or internal page links), and some more.
We recommend you use a browser that will underlined misspelled words in red as you type. Chrome and Firefox do this for you. Right-click on an underlined word and they'll give you other spelling options.
All browsers allow you to Save each page individually (find something like "Save as..."). We recommend that you create a folder and download all desired pages to that folder using the option to include all images. Then you can open the home page with your browser and click on links to other pages without problem.However, if your site is large, that could take some time. You could use a tool that will download all pages in a site, like http://www.httrack.com -- completely and quickly.