Whether it was a classroom raffle or a county fair, one of my favorite games was to count the beans. A jar full of beans is set on a counter and people ask you to guess how many beans are in the jar. The closest person wins the prize. It was always a challenge to try to figure out how deep and wide the jar was, and guess how many beans could fit in there. Sometimes website managers play the same game trying to determine the effectiveness of their site. We no longer need to do that as Web tool makers have given us a number of great ways to count the people who come through our electronic door.
Creative counters
Web links offer many types of counters from ones that look like small digital outputs at the bottom of the screen to those that are shaped like soccer balls or cupcakes or any other image that matches the site. Counters are useful not only to know how many people have visited your web site but also to show others how many folks see your page. This practice is particularly good for sales sites. Counters also serve a purpose for the Web designers to conceive if a change in Web design is creating an increase in traffic. Either way you look at it, a counter is a...