Hope you’re all enjoying the new site. I just wanted to clarify that this is NOT the “big update” that is coming down the pipeline. Yesterday’s update is purely cosmetic. Other than the logo and the color of the graphs, nothing much has changed other than some backend code, but that’s not very exciting for you.
I am much happier with the new look. I did like our old logo, but it had started to feel a bit gloomy, and I wanted the site to feel much more 2.0 style. The graphs are also much easier on the eye now, much easier to read, in my opinion. Especially now that the weekend days are colored slightly differently – that really helps out.
There was a bug that was affecting Safari and causing it to ignore our style sheet, which basically is what tells your browser what to make the site look like. Thanks to a few astute readers, I was notified of the problem fairly quickly and able to solve it without too much effort. Sorry about that! Unfortunately, I don’t have easy access to a Mac, so I was unaware of the problem until it was affecting all of you. If you are using Safari and the site looks weird still, try emptying your cache and refreshing.
Seems like lots of news in the analytics arena recently. Google came out with version 2 of their Analytics offering a few days ago. I haven’t gotten a chance to use it yet, but I will be honest and say it’s an impressive update. Much cleaner interface and all that, although it still looks plenty complicated to get the data you want out of it. I wonder how many engineering hours went into this update, and what Clicky could do if we had the same man power. 🙂
Here’s the thing though. GA is still VERY geared towards business and high traffic sites. You’ll notice that our comparison chart hasn’t changed one bit. Clicky still has TONS of features that GA doesn’t offer (RSS, Spy, outbound links, download tracking, real time stats, FeedBurner, Google maps, API [coming soon], real referal backlinks, etc), and that gap will continue to widen as we introduce more and more features.
Our target market is bloggers and low traffic sites because they are so neglected in the stats area. If you have a small blog that gets maybe 20 or 30 people a day, and you view your traffic with GA, you will have no idea what’s happening on your site, as it just reports overall trends. I’m not saying trends aren’t useful, but you need a good sample size before they’re worth anything. Clicky is amazing for low traffic sites, as you can see your individual visitors and what each one of them is doing. As well, it’s so easy to see all your visitors that are from a certain country, or came from a certain site, or searched for a certain word, and from there see what each of them have done.
Point being, we’re not worried about the Big Bad Google. 🙂 I love Google and use a lot of their products for day to day stuff – but it is a bit daunting to compete with a company of their size and respect. Luckily, however, our target markets are completely opposite. Like I said, we’re not worried. We have lots of Aces up our sleeves, stay tuned.