decent website hit counter?

[Steve_W]

Apologies up front - I'm no computer whizz, so this may be obvious/easy. I searched PH but didn't find anything relevant (search term may be wrong?)

Our little parish has an existing website for "local people". The kind local chap who used to host it for free on his company server has moved away so it's now on Go Daddy.

I've volunteered to look after it - add the odd update in Notepad++ kind of thing - but am no web designer/developer.

What I don't know, is if anyone actually reads/uses it! Is there a simple way of tracking hits? I'm still waiting to hear back from Go Daddy if they can do this.

Small parish so not loads of cash spare to pay for some whizzy solution. A quick Google shows lots of adverts but no idea which ones are decent, and which might be dodgy/require loads of adverts/cost a fortune for nowt.

Looking at the associated email account, we get a few "For not much dollar I can please improve your sales through yor website" emails so someone/something is at least reading/harvesting the email address!

Thanks,
Steve

[jardinec]

Sign up for Google analytics for free, add a simple tracking code into each page (or better into a template file or file that is common to all pages), then login occasionally to see the visitor numbers and other useful info.

[Penelope Stopit]

http://www.simplehitcounter.com/

[thebraketester]

Do you have access to the control panel? If you do then that will give you all the stats.

[Steve_W]

thebraketester said:

Do you have access to the control panel? If you do then that will give you all the stats.

I've got the Go Daddy login info so I guess so. All I've done is go in and use the file manager to upload revised pages so far.
May have to have a poke around and see if I can work out what I'm looking at!

[Steve_W]

jardinec said:

Sign up for Google analytics for free, add a simple tracking code into each page (or better into a template file or file that is common to all pages), then login occasionally to see the visitor numbers and other useful info.

Thanks, will see if I can watch some YouTube videos on the "How to", unless it's dead simple to use.

[Derek Smith]

Google's good. I recommend it.

[CzechItOut]

Steve_W said:

Thanks, will see if I can watch some YouTube videos on the "How to", unless it's dead simple to use.

It is dead simply. You just copy and paste the code onto every page.

If you have a component which is on every page, such as a footer, you can simply put the code there.

Do you know what technology the site is built with?

[Baldchap]

Google analytics is amazing. Fantastic breadth of information.