You can’t run a website well without paying attention to who uses it and how they use it. One way to collect this information is through usability testing. This takes a few representative users,gives them a few common taks,and then closely observes what works and what doesn’t for those people. It then enables revising the site in order to accomodate those users,on the theory that they represent a larger user base.
An alternative (complement?) to usability testing,however,is log analysis,which involves reading the detailed records kept by web server software,and generating from those records overviews of:duration of visit,top referring websites,mean path analysis (the most frequent routes people take through your site),search terms and phrases,and errors (such as 404 errors encountered by visitors). These data represent the comprehensive vision of a site’s user experience,though it takes some expertise to set up the server to record the proper information,the software to analyze the raw data,and the complexities of the data in order to make sense out of the results.
We have experience with this,having run a variety of software packages for log analysis,and having years’experience in generating useful information from such records. We can take copies of your server logs and generate reports for you,or can install and configure log analysis software on your site,and teach you and your staff how to review these from time to time to notice useful information about how your new media are being used by all your actual visitors.