13 April 2004

VisitorVille

VisitorVille is a service provided to allow you to keep track of your web site visitors.

VisitorVille screenshot VisitorVille screen shot

They do not however, give you a bunch of normal web statistics like you would normally expect. No, instead, they let you see who is visiting your website, in real time, with real animated people, in a little town or city that represents your web site. It looks a bit like The Sims, but the characters are visitors on your site.

Each page on your website (that you choose to include in the stats) is represented by a house, or a building within your town or city. The little people walking around are your visitors, and you can click on them to get more details. You can even chat to them via VisitorVille (I haven't tried this yet to see how it works).

Buses bring people into your site. Buses bring people into your site.

Then there are the buses. These represent referrers such as Google bringing people into your site. They drive visitors to the house/page that is their entry point to the site. Cool yeah?

I have given the free trail a go, and I must admit, I am quite impressed. I really didn't expect it to be this good.

Taxis drive people around your site. Taxis drive people around your site.

One of the things that jumped out to me about this is that it could be used to measure usability of a website. You can monitor visitors of your website, visually, and in real time. This would be to give you a good idea as to whether the User is lost, or finding it hard to get the information they want. Of course it could never beat a real life usability test, but it is still a good opportunity.

I am unsure as to whether I will go past the free trail . I don't think my web site really justifies it. I do think though, that it could become a cool tool to offer clients.

Clients love things that look cool, and this does that. But, also, this could then be used to show clients how their website is being used, and get rid of any ideas they might have about how it is being used.

It could even be used before a big redesign to work out the popular parts of a current website, and the issues the current website has.

So, has anyone else tried it? If so, how did you like it? What do you think of the possibilities a system like this could bring?

Update: I do seem to be having some problems with my system while running VisitorVille The BSOD has shown it's ugly head a few times. I am inclined to believe that it is an issue with my graphics driver, because it has happened while playing games before. However, if anyone experiences problems of their own with VV, then please let me know.

Comments ( 7 )

  1. Phil Baines

    Well, the blue screen got me again, and I am annoyed to be typing this out for a second time.

    After a bit of playing around, I have come to realise that VV is best used on static websites, especially, if you wish for your clients to be able to use it.

    The reason for this is that is will view default.asp and default.asp?id=4 as entirely different pages. And rightly so, since this sort of query string normally pulls specific content from a database, and produces a dynamically different page.

    However, the bad side is that you have to manually add the separate pages in, and I can already imagine this being a major pain. If you want to see the visitors for a specific ID because it is a certain story, then great. But if not, you’re stuck.

    What they really need is the option to be able to add wildcards into the URL's that you wish to monitor. Such as; default.asp?id=*

    Or another alternative would be to have an XML file with the list of links to check again. This file could be produced by what ever CMS is being used, and VV could read it on start up.

    I just know that clients would not use it, if they have to update the list of pages to be scanned everytime they want to use it.
    13 April 2004 at 22:06

  2. Hass

    Craziness! I like the other view, too, skyscrapers that grow and shrink with your traffic flow! Thanks for the humorous post, bro!
    13 April 2004 at 23:55

  3. Phil Baines

    Yeah it is coolness isn't it! And that is why I think that clients will love it. If they can just think about some of the issues that I mention above.
    14 April 2004 at 00:28

  4. Hass

    Hey, off topic...Using the Firefox RSS reader, I don't get notified when you post new items. There's just a question mark, don't know if that makes any sense to you, but I thought you should know.

    "Yeah it is coolness..." Rock!
    ^ ^
    00
    o
    \__/
    14 April 2004 at 04:14

  5. Phil Baines

    For some strange reason, I wasn't putting pubDate into my items. I don't know why, I must have forgotten. Try it now and see what it does.
    14 April 2004 at 09:27

  6. DarkBlue

    That is way too corny for my liking. What the heck is wrong with graphs?
    20 April 2004 at 17:42

  7. Phil Baines

    IMHO, nothing. But as I mentioned before, stakeholders, and other such like people, love corny stuff. So, this might appeal. Personally, I love my graphs. I use
    Deepmatrix Livestats, and they are great.
    20 April 2004 at 21:24

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