Web 2.0, AJAX, and new ways to measure website volume
Traditionally, pageviews (or impressions, as the advertising industry often refers to as) were the main scope of indicating how much activity and traffic volume a website gets. Also, the value of each visitors were traditionally measured by the ratio between visitors and pageviews. The more the better, was the simple equation. This is still very true to so many websites out there, including Wordpress-driven blogs like this one. To go from one post to another, or to go from the main page to the full post, a click on a link and a page refresh is required.
“So many people argue (or try to argue) using that famous old graph comparing the pageviews between myspace and facebook. But Facebook is a much more intelligent system - each of their pageviews are worth 3 pageviews by Myspace, which means that MySpace is not that far ahead of Facebook, if not already behind.”
The Web 2.0 will slowly (well, in some perspective, quickly) change this, and pretty soon the concept of pageviews will become a vague, immeasurable, and unmeterable unit for activity indication of a website. I’m talking about AJAX, which is a cricitcal factor of this new measure of web design and coding.
If you don’t know what AJAX is, let me put it into simpler terms, once again.
Forget what AJAX stands for - if you don’t know what AJAX is yet, it probably means shit all to you. Think of it this way. When we read books, we need to first grab the book, open it, and read it. When we need to go to another book, we need to close that one, put it away, and then pick up another one. Each new content required a re-grabbing of the appropriate book - a completely new unit. But now, we have computers that store e-books. The computer is what you use primarily to read through, and by ordering the computer what to do, you load the appropriate ebook on the screen. The screen doesn’t change. You don’t need to close your Sony laptop, put it away, and then open your Toshiba laptop to read another e-book - the computer acts as a simple gateway to load it for you. You don’t need to lift the books and put it down. The frame of the computer stays - the screen content changes at your will!
Imagine a webpage doing that for you. Instead of re-loading a whole new webpage to read new content, or process data exchange, the webpage collects the data input, hits a file on your server through a simple header connection, and then the server file returns the result. Now, since the webpage that is already loaded on the user’s computer has the design/framework loaded, this server-side file ONLY returns the simplest results, that can replace an existing part of the webpage that is already loaded. Take a look at the email sign-up form at my client Rhonda Sherwood’s website. When you type in the email address, and click the submit button, the Javascripts sends something similar to this to the server.
http://www.rhondasherwood.com/addemail.php?email=your@email.com
The addemail.php has an if-else statement, that checks to see if your email is already on the database. If it is, it will simply run this line :
echo “Your email address is already registered.”;
And, if the email address is fresh, it will add it to the MySQL database, and run this line :
echo “Thank you for subscribing.”;
The javascript on rhonda’s webpage (the one that already has the design and all done) has a DIV element that has a specific id name.. let’s say it’s titled “emailalert”. I’m too lazy to go check… This is the Javascript that runs AFTER the addemail.php file returns that simple line.
document. getElementById(’emailalert’) .innerHTML=xmlhttpResponseText;
So it partially replaces the specified content within the webpage WITHOUT re-loading the whole page, and you can still do complicated MySQL database queries through the server-side backend file!
Your computer, technically speaking, never touches the addemail.php file - the webpage does.
Other usage of a similar AJAX module, or even a simple Javascript module can be tabbing of a webpage. What used to take individual pageloads to display can now be controlled simply by using the display attribute of CSS, and turning it from “none” to “block” depending on the input using Javascript.
What traditionally used to take 2, 3 or even 4 pageviews can now be done with only 1 pageview, with less bandwidth consumed, and less time wasted, hence eliminating the credibility of the pageview factor. So many people argue (or try to argue) using that famous old graph comparing the pageviews between myspace and facebook. But Facebook is a much more intelligent system - each of their pageviews are worth 3 pageviews by Myspace, which means that MySpace is not that far ahead of Facebook, if not already behind.
Interesting notion. I usually pay closer attention to my uniques.
The problem with uniques is that you can never measure how many of those people actually stayed at your site for more than a second.
One of the major indications of activity is, or used to be, pageviews/visitor. I’m at somewhere between 7~10 pages per user, which is great - that means a lot of people are active. But if your ratio is between 1.0~1.5, you’re in trouble - people are somehow coming to your site by fluke but they are not staying.
Why Facebook is so big already, and perhaps already surpassing MySpace.
Thank You