-----Original Message-----
When a user clicks the home tab on the Navigation bar on
my websitere, gardless of which page they are currently
viewing this updates the hit counter.
I thought that the hit counter was only updated the first
time a user accesses the site. This obviously has the
effect of skewing my usage figures.
Is this standard? Can it be disabled or do I need to use
hyperlinks instead? Is there another way of determining
numbers of hits
Sorry, hit counters count hits, meaning page deliveries.
What you want is a "session" count, which means repeated
hits by the same visitor, within some time span, count as
one.
The difficulty in collecting session counts lies in
differentiating repeated hits by the same anonymous user
from new hits by different anonymous users. (Everyone is
anonymous, you see.)
If your host runs a statistics programs like WebTrends,
that will give you session counts you want. WebTrends
identifies sessions by means of various fields in the Web
server logs, such as IP address, browser type, and so
forth.
Otherwise, or if you want your counts in real time, you
would have to change your home page filename extension
to .asp, then add some custom code that uses the ASP
Session object to detect new sessions, and increments a
database count whenever it detects a new visitor.
Jim Buyens
Microsoft FrontPage MVP
http://www.interlacken.com
Author of:
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|| Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 Inside Out
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|| Web Database Development Step by Step .NET Edition
|| Microsoft FrontPage Version 2002 Inside Out
|| Faster Smarter Beginning Programming
|| (All from Microsoft Press)
|/---------------------------------------------------
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