Can I use a site counter?

Almost without fail every new customer asks if they can add a counter at the bottom of their pages and I always tell them NO.

Not because we don't have them, because we do have an extensive gallery of page counters available for all of our customers and they are simple to add to any page.

But why would you want anyone else to know how many people came to your website?

When I tell people that are just building a website they should not show people that they are new, or that the have only had 20 visitors they ask if the can change the counter to like 1 million or something.

One, that would be fraud.

Two, people will see you are at 1,000,000 when they visit and next week the will see you are at 1,000,005 and they are going to wonder how you had so many visitors when nobody is visiting your website since the last time they were there.

Now these counters were very popular back in the 90's when the Internet was mad up of a bunch of sloppy home pages with very little content and substance. But today the landscape has changed and counters don't look professional and tend to make your site look a bit dated.

More importantly it is not information you should share.

Do you run around telling everyone how much money your business earns? In many cases if you did, nobody would buy from you when they realize how little you make.

You always try to hide your weaknesses and highlight your strengths.

One of the problems with posting visitors is that nobody really understand what that means.

If a store has 100 visitors a day, that is good but some people think on the Internet you should get 10,000.

Everyone thinks this is easy and with all the TV ads for get rick quick scams they have skewed the perception of the masses. So even though you are very proud that you had 50 customers this week and earned $2000.00 other people think you are nothing and you should be earning $2000 a minute.

So it is never a good idea to share too much information with anyone.

When they see your business they don't know if you sold one product or 1,000 and they will just assume that you are successful if you have a nice website.

Why tell them otherwise or even give them information that might change their opinion?

I know everyone is excited to get their first website and use all the cool stuff the have seen over the years, but it is the modern age. We don't start our cars with cranks and we don't use counters on our websites.

It is funny when you look back at what web design was in 1997 compared to 2007 or 2014. Thinks are more refined, more tailored and more complex. Counters are out, chat rooms are out, guest books are out.

But ecommerce is in and so are more insightful programs like shopping carts, blog and content management systems.

Yahoo is out and Bing is in, google is old and young people are looking for something new. Facebook is out and phone apps are in.

So while you are still trying to figure out what Myspace is, everyone else has already forgotten that it even existed.

So lets bury those page counters and evolve to using the comprehensive website stats that pageBuzz offers our customers.