A couple of questions

[boysbach]

I have most of my sites hosted with hostgator and obviously there are analysers included. Our shopping site at the moment is hosted with yahoo and we use weblog expert, (trial version) which is excellent. We are looking to move our shopping site to hostgator and wonder do you use the analysers you get with your hosting company or do you use a paid one. Anybody can give me advantages of why it would be worth subscribing to weblog. As I say it is excellent but I am not sure I am seeing anything more with them than the other stuff on hostgator but I could be missing something important. I know for yahoo it gives me data that I dont get on the free but we hope within a short time to move like by the end of the week or next at the longest.

Next problem on our diet site we have a free pdf file and also a free course which is given when someone subscribes. I have just been checking yesterday's logs and find that around 50% was incomplete. I have no idea why this was because checking all the links using 3 different computers are correct. Each time I tried to download it was done with no problems. I have checked some of our subscribers who also said they have no problems getting the files. The other thing was around 10% was showing imcompete for the home page. When you check the 404 file it shows one error and that was for the favicon (which I forgot to add to the site) Anybody have any ideas why this is happening. I don't have this problem on our other sites even though we have some free pdf files on them

Thanks guys
Bev

[kayceee]

Awstats and webalyzer are both very good for displaying info about referring pages and search terms, visitor browsers and OS, spider visits, entry and exit pages, page views, bandwidth, and other daily/hourly/monthly traffic stats.

I think weblog expert (windows only? Hostgator is Linux) breaks down the path each visitor takes through your site? Google Analytics ("Urchin") can also tell you that, and more - for a while, anyone with an adwords account could sign up for free, but I think they had such a huge respose that they changed it to waiting list/invitation only (I managed to squeeze in before they closed the door ). That may have changed ... I haven't checked lately

[boysbach]

Kayceee thanks for that, I know I get not only the path but also the IP and country of each visitor which is great as well. But if I am not going to get that with hostgator because of them not being windows then it wont be worth my while paying for weblog. I just need to get used to hostgator and their stats.

I have now got aweber so thanks for the offer of the form but I will be doing one from there.

Another question for you if you know the answer, I have just got photoshop have been using paint shop any suggestions about where to start? I know as my husband would say read the manual

[kayceee]

AWstats and Webalyzer both show the IP and a summary by country - that's a pretty standard log reporting feature.

Paintshop-Photoshop ... afraid I have to side with your hubby on that . Photoshop has the same features you've seen in Paintshop (and more) but they're accessed from different places with different names and different hotkeys. I started with Paintshop myself and even with a good grasp of the concepts it was a steep learning curve. I picked up a book with a bunch of tutorials and examples on CD (forget the name or author but it was by Adobe press) and just plowed through it chapter by chapter and made a cheat sheet of the keyboard shortcuts I used a lot - that was a big help!

[jkeifer]

I have to agree with kayceee, about the manual. I found, personally that understanding the layers was key to making my life easier in photoshop. Being that you already use paintshop pro, you will probably find similarities, which will give you advantages over a raw beginner. You will discover more and more over time that photoshop was a very worthwhile investment. Also there are lots of free tutorials out there too. I think http://www.good-tutorials.com/ is a pretty cool site, with tons of free tutorials ranging from basic to advanced.
As far as blogs go, I don't have much experience with the other services, so I'm not much help there. I use wordpress, which I integrated into my web template using dreamweaver, for uniformity. Personally, I love the WordPress scripts, but maybe that's just a matter of taste.
Anyway I hope my rambling had some value for you.
-Jack