Adrian Frielinghaus, one of our directors, was recently interviewed by ITWeb about his thoughts on how enterprises should respond to the rise of the new consumer mobile platforms and the intricacies of developing mobile applications for those platforms. Adrian advises enterprises to adopt cross-platform technologies like HTML5 as much as possible, and to only use native code where it is absolutely necessary. Read the full text of the article here.

New mobile app development projects have always gotten our team excited here at Maxxor, and our recent hackathon proved no different. And by hackathon we don’t mean sitting in front of a laptop in a dark, dank room profusely pushing keys to a screen of scrolling green and white numbers that looks like the matrix. Our hackathon was a team building effort, where for 24 hours all staff stopped their existing work to work on a single project together; where we would conceptualise, design and build a product in one day. Challenge? Not for the Maxxor team.

The day kicked off at 9:45am. Objectives were presented and tasks were outlined in order to meet these objectives and get the end product live by 10am the next morning. The brief was to create a native mobile app for Windows Phone 7 within 24 hours, after which the app would be submitted to the Windows Phone Marketplace. We decided to create a mobile location-based application that enables mobile users to find places of interest that are in their radius by pinning their exact geographical location. It was interesting to see the list of original features the team came up with for the app. Unfortunately, quite a few features had to be discarded (for now) in order to realistically meet our deadline of one day.

The teams were provided with snacks throughout the day, to ensure they were well-nourished (and on a sugar high) in order to be wired in. The team was split into four sub-teams based on skills and interests:

1. Product team – This team worked on defining the app, its features and capabilities. They were also involved in the testing phase on completion of development.
2. Design team – The creatives were in charge of establishing the app’s brand identity and bringing to life the ideas that were pinned to the whiteboard earlier that morning.
3. Marketing team – The marketing team would name the app, work with the design team to package it, get the app submitted to the Windows Phone Marketplace and to promote it on relevant media channels.
4. Development team – Using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology alongside other Windows Phone 7 development tools, our developers had their work cut out for them.

By 11:00am we had a fully-fledged indication of what the end product should look like. Or at least, what it should be able to do; we left all branding elements up to the design and marketing teams, who by the end of the first hour had already mocked up a bunch of logos with the product name Sho’t Find. The name is a play on the “sho’t left” and “sho’t right” drop-off instructions heard in our South African minibus taxis on a daily basis.

It was a tough challenge, but by 5:00pm, just before supper was served, we had our final meeting for the day. By then, all the heavyweight work was already done and all that was left to do was fixing minor bugs before the Sho’t Find mobile app was ready for product launch. A special thanks to the guys who sat up until 10pm to finish the last bit of coding. And well done to everyone that made this happen.

You can check out the app in the Windows Phone Marketplace :

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/apps/6642c250-6b94-49c8-bbae-4a411e330388

Published Feb 2012

In terms of sheer consumer growth, nothing matches the rise of tablets like the Apple iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab. According to media reports, US tablet sales took just two years to reach 40 million units, a figure smartphones took seven years to reach. Ninety percent of that is apparently iPads. With the recent launch of the Amazon range of Android tablets, this growth is expected to accelerate even further. Smartphone sales are also accelerating. Half a billion of them were sold in 2011. Most analysts predict that Android will own the winner’s share with up to half the world’s smartphone market.

If Apple and Android are winning, who is losing? One bloodied victim is Nokia’s Symbian platform. From 2007 to 2010, Apple and Android quickly stole away large chunks of the smartphone market from the once pre-eminent Nokia. But today, Nokia is headed up by Stephen Elop, a former Microsoft exec who once commanded Microsoft’s Business Division. The Finnish ice-giant Nokia is now betting its future on being Microsoft’s mobile hardware partner for the rapid and widespread deployment of Windows Phone OS. Gartner expects Microsoft’s Windows Phone to have clawed back nearly 20% of the international market by 2015. Windows Phone’s growth is intimately, perhaps surgically, attached to the business and mobile partnership now forged between Microsoft and Nokia. The latest developments as at the beginning of 2012 have been promising with the Windows Phone-powered Nokia Lumia phones receiving rave reviews.

Developing mobile applications for the Windows Phone platform follows the same route as most other Microsoft technologies. You need Visual Studio plus the Windows Phone SDK. Development happens using either the Silverlight or XNA frameworks (Silverlight for apps and XNA mostly for games). The actual code can be written in any of the Visual Studio supported programming languages (C#, VB.NET, etc.) . Microsoft has made available a free version of their IDE to assist mobile developers with creating apps for their platform: Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone. Once developed, the apps can be published to Microsoft’s app store, called the Windows Phone Marketplace.

While the continued success of Android and iOS is pretty certain and Windows Phone possibly gaining some ground, the future of RIM’s BlackBerry OS is far less certain. Once the champion of state-of-the-art business smartphone “crackberries”, it seems as if RIM also neglected to notice the advancing shadow of Android and iOS. Secure in the bulletproof cladding of RIM’s much-lauded encryption capabilities, the Canadian company took a huge knock when its critical UK-based servers hit an IT-wobbly (politely excused as “a core switch failure”) in October 2011. The downtime sent millions of BlackBerry users offline when BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), email and web-based services all went deaf, dumb and mute for three days. Far more damaging, however, than the offline not-so-smart-phones was RIM’s complete failure to communicate with its users. In the age of instant Twitter and Facebook timeline updates, that has to be the definition of public relations suicide. The long-awaited BlackBerry Playbook tablet device was an embarrassing sales flop and RIM’s renewed hopes seem to rest on the success or failure of its next-generation BBX OS platform. And for amused onlookers, BBX (surprise, surprise) is looking very much like a hybrid mashup of iOS, Android and Windows Phone combined.

How does all of this affect us as mobile developers? Unfortunately, we developers are also on the losing end. The rise of Android and iOS, the new Windows Phone platform and the legacy BlackBerry userbase means that the number of platforms that developers and publishers have to target has proliferated. From an app development perspective, taking a cross-platform mobile application development approach really starts to make sense. Instead of building separately for each platform, you invest in a single development platform (HTML5) and then use platform publishing tools like PhoneGap to create native applications for each of the mobile platforms. Whilst still in its early stages we are already seeing some success with this approach. We’ll report back in future blog posts.

That concludes our three part history of the mobile landscape covering an overview of mobile development platforms, the rise of the iPhone and Android platforms and the mobile winners and losers which we’ve covered in this post.

Maxxor offers mobile development services to help enterprises to successfully communicate with and interact with their consumers. Check out our mobile portfolio or contact us to discuss your mobile development requirements.

The Apple iPhone devices boast a small but impressive range of multimedia, web-enabled smartphones designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The first ground-breaking iPhone was launched with much-anticipated fanfare in January, 2007. The new iPhone functioned as a camera phone, with text messaging and visual voicemail, a portable media player, and an Internet client with web browsing, email, and Wi-Fi connectivity. The user interface was built around the device’s multi-touch screen, and included a virtual keyboard rather than a physical one. Third-party as well as Apple apps became available from the Apple App Store in mid-2008. In mid-February 2012, Apple announced that their store now featured more than 500 000 apps. They also announced a competition where the person who downloads Apple’s 25-billionth app will receive a gift card worth $10,000. And yes, that’s one hell of a lot of $0.99 song downloads from iTunes!

To date, there are four generations of iPhones, accompanied by eagerly-anticipated releases of iOS (formerly known as iPhone OS). The original iPhone set design innovation benchmarks like screen size and central button placement. The iPhone 3G added support for 3G broadband network capabilities and improved location accuracy for handheld satellite navigation. The iPhone 3GS model added an even faster processor, featured a higher-res camera with video capability and an onboard compass. Released in June 2010, the iPhone 4 features two cameras for “FaceTime” video calls and yes, you guessed it, an even higher-res screen display. The latest models also feature a much-appreciated, much-advertised voice-recognition native app called Siri, which allows uses to send messages, dial contacts, and create memo reminders, all by simply speaking in the user’s natural voice.

Mobile developers build apps for the iPhone and the iPad by writing applications in Objective C (an object-oriented extension of the C programming language). They have to do their coding on a Mac computer. Completed iPhone apps are then submitted to Apple and, if approved, are made available only from the Apple store and nowhere else. Apple is pretty restrictive about what can and can’t be done on their platform. For example, they’ve banned any Flash applications by not allowing a Flash player on their devices. They’ve even banned any applications written using Flash source code even though it is perfectly possible to publish them to a native iOS app.

In direct competition to iPhone and its native iOS software, Android is the mobile OS owned by Google. Branded with a little green happy-smiley robot, it was created by a start-up company who were assimilated by the Google business empire in 2005. Touted as extremely versatile and tweakable for programmers and mobile users alike, Android OS is a multi-platform operating system and is used by a host of tablets, netbooks and mobile smartphones. As of 2012, even high-end TV sets are now being created with Android’s OS, specifically to run Google TV. Android Market is the online software store developed by Google for all devices running the Android operating system. The latest version of Android OS for mobile phones is 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, announced in October 2011.

Android applications are coded in Java. Most mobile developers use an IDE like Eclipse to assist with their development. The Android platform is pretty open. You can create mobile apps and games and place them onto the official Android market; you can publish them to the numerous other 3rd party Android app stores available; or you can even let users download them directly from your site. Generally the Android Market has more free (no-cost) apps compared to the Apple App Store, the negative side for Apple users of their favourite devices being premium-brand ticket items.

A discussion about Apple iPhone, iOS and Android would be red-faced naked without mentioning the huge legal battle still raging as iPhone goes head-to-head with Samsung’s flagship family of smartphones and tablets, running Android OS. The parent companies of these two premium OS offerings have been engaged in an ongoing IP (intellectual property) legal battle dating back to mid-2011. Apple and Samsung have declared a ‘Mobile Device Patent War’ with court litigation for global market access to the mobile communications consumer market. By the beginning of 2011, Apple and Samsung were cat-fighting legal battles in ongoing lawsuits in courts in 10 countries on four continents. The fight started when Apple accused Samsung of infringing Apple’s IP, specifically patents, styling, user interface and trademarks. Directly in Apple’s crosshairs were Samsung’s Android-powered Nexus, Epic, Galaxy S, and the Galaxy Tab. The battle continues as fiercely-loyal users continue to choose sides, each claiming their smartphone choice is the true champion. See for yourself below.

The visual similarity is striking but it's also what's inside that counts in the legal punch up. What really upset the Apple cart is the claim that Samsung’s Galaxy S is a clone of the iPhone. We'd rather not choose sides but we'll let you decide for yourselves.

The oft-neglected irony is that the Samsung electronics company actually provides core components for many of Apple’s iOS devices. In many ways, the Android OS versus iPhone OS battle has been most dynamically illustrated by two smartphones: the Apple iPhone 4S squaring up to the Samsung Galaxy S2. Until the courts decide, mobile app developers and users alike will have to keep guessing which galloping racehorse to back.

In the next and final part of our history of smartphone platforms, we’ll discuss the winners, the losers, the also-rans, and the up-and-coming in the mobile platform wars.

Published Feb 2012

Recent developments in mobile computing have been fast and furious. In this three-part overview of mobile development platforms, we’ll be taking a closer look at this history, starting with a broad overview in this post. Part 2 examines the rise of the iPhone and Android platforms and the final post will look at how this has affected some of the other mobile platforms.

In mobile development terms, what we developers call a “smartphone” is a high-end mobile phone built on some sort of hardware and software platform, created specifically for that family of devices. These types of phones feature more advanced computing ability, media-related features and connectivity options than a basic cellphone (called feature phones), which typically only offer voice calls, text messaging and basic WAP browsing. The first generation of smartphones were personal digital assistant (PDA) devices and included a phone, and sometimes a camera. In the late-90s and early 2000′s, brands like Palm, Handspring, Nokia and Research in Motion (RIM) dominated with operating systems like Palm OS, Nokia’s Symbian OS and RIM’s BlackBerry OS. Those devices typically allowed users to capture and customise information through touchscreen handwriting recognition (with a stylus) or onboard keyboards. RIM’s BlackBerry devices become colloquially known as “Crackberries” because of their owners’ addiction to constantly checking emails.

Today’s generation of smartphones also serve to combine the functions of portable media players, compact digital cameras, mini video cameras, and GPS navigation units. Modern smartphones typically also include high-resolution touchscreens, full web browsers to access and properly display standard web pages rather than just mobile-optimised sites, and high-speed data access via Wi-Fi and mobile 3G broadband.

The most common mobile operating systems used by current smartphones are Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows Phone and RIM’s BlackBerry OS. These operating systems are installed on many different models, sometimes from different manufacturers. A defining feature of smartphones is that you can update the underlying operating system yourself by downloading and installing the latest release from the manufacturer. Some tinkerers even compile and install their own versions of Android if they are not happy with the speed at which their manufacturer issues updates.

Smartphone manufacturers are ramping up their release cycles. New phones with faster processors and new features are being released at a blistering rate. A running joke is that the moment a new smartphone hits the market, it’s already being replaced at the factory. All in all, this makes for an industry evolving at a breakneck pace with mobile developers and content publishers struggling to keep pace with the products being placed into the hands of consumers.

Newer smartphones also offer application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs) for third party developers to build and distribute apps that extend the features and abilities of the phone. With each smartphone platform, there comes a host of supported apps, which are either free or paid-for and which are available through web-based virtual stores. The original iTunes music store for Apple has grown to offer hundreds of thousands of mobile phone apps as well. The same is true for apps on the Android Market and RIM’s BlackBerry App World. It seems that users are always hungry for more phone apps, be they for dedicated business tasks like email and reading documents or for sheer recreation like the famous Angry Birds game. Falling in between are countless app variants offering access to social media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn or using the smartphone’s onboard GPS for apps like FourSquare, geo-tagged photographs, star gazing and even calculating the distance to a specific golf course’s hole.

The running challenge for mobile app developers is to try and stay ahead of the curve, getting a sense of what smartphone users want and writing tailor-made apps to satisfy their fickle demands. Since about 2010, the rise of tablets (like the iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab) and dedicated E-readers (like the Kindle and Nook) have increased the need for mobile developers to consider these additional mobile platforms when planning the reach of their products. Overlaid on top of this is the problem of platform proliferation. Which platforms should you invest your time and money in? And how do you reach the widest possible audience without breaking the bank? We’ll return to this point in a future blog post on cross-platform mobile development.

In the next part of our history of smartphone platforms, we’ll discuss the rise of the iPhone and Android platforms.

During this time we’ve also learned a great deal about MXit users. What stands out the most is that they’re an incredibly active bunch of people, who get really excited and enthusiastic about new Mxit apps to engage with. Moonbase still adds more than 1,000 new users every day, and the app generates about 8-million daily page impressions, without us spending a cent on marketing!

One of the things we’re asking ourselves is, “What apps, besides games, do MXit users want?” So we ran a survey amongst our players and received an overwhelming response – almost 30,000 people completed a 30-question survey. Thirty questions? You heard it right! That must be some kind of world record for mobile research, and the results offered us some unique insights we’d like to share with you.

First off, who is our audience on MXit? Given we’re a mobile gaming operator, our demographic leans quite heavily towards male (about 75%), which is quite different to the overall MXit user base (that’s closer to a 50/50 gender split). Our players are also a little younger than the MXit average, most of them are between 14 and 21. Yet although often perceived as a youth market, our MXit kids are now growing up fast and they continue to use MXit as they enter university and the job market. Like the MXit audience overall, almost all our players are from South Africa.

What phones are they using? As you might expect, Nokia and Samsung handsets rule the roost, but it is interesting to note that 11% of our MXit users are BlackBerry owners. This flies in the face of some speculation that BBM growth has been at MXit’s expense. Go figure!

What phones do MXit users use?

What do MXit users do with their phones when they’re not on MXit? Well, not surprisingly, they surf the web on their phones. A lot! Almost 75% of our surveyed users access the web at least once a day and nearly half are browsing on their phones several times a day. MXit is no longer the “walled garden” it used to be, able to keep its users captive for long periods of time. MXit has now become one more part of a wider internet experience for mobile phone users.

By contrast, mobile email doesn’t seem to have caught on in a big way. Even though MXit offers a free email service as part of its core application, 34% of respondents never use email on their phones at all, and only 21% do so more than once a day. Email is clearly not the preferred tool for mobile communication compared to the way it has evolved for PC internet users.

How often do MXit users browse and read emails on their phones?

The $64,000 question is: what apps do MXit users want? Although we explored this question in detail, the high-level findings can be presented quite simply:

What new apps do MXit users want?

Amazingly, as our survey shows, MXit users don’t really care what is happening in the world. What they do care about is: hooking up, having fun, and finding out what their fave celeb had for breakfast. Thankfully, a handful of them do have an interest in getting an education. But to appeal to this unique market, you’ve got to have something that amuses, entertains, and finds them some love. And as our parents used to say about us, “Oh the youth of today…”

The good news about MXit users is: they don’t mind paying for apps as long as you give them exactly what they want. And sometimes that means teaching them exactly what they need. In our experience, a significantly higher percentage of players actually pay for games on MXit compared to other mobile social networks. This is precisely because MXit has spent years carefully grooming its users to buy virtual goods with virtual currency, which is made even easier by easily converting mobile phone airtime into virtual currency. However, it is still interesting to note that when we asked how users would “prefer” to pay for mobile apps, 40% said they wanted “something other than airtime” (but only a meagre 1.6% want to use credit cards). Hint: can anyone spell the word “opportunity”?

How do MXit users want to pay for apps?

As passionate and dedicated developers of MXit apps, Maxxor’s experience so far has been very positive. Our audience is extremely active and wide open to new ideas and challenges. It seems the signs are crystal clear as to what sorts of MXit experiences they want to see emerging from the skunkworks. The road ahead for us is also clear – it’s time to get coding.

Email newsletters are a great way to stay in closer contact with your customers and prospects. By keeping you and your brand top-of-mind, your email newsletter will increase your chances of getting repeat business from your existing customers. Prospective customers can also be brought closer to doing business with you through targeted promotional offers. Based on research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association in the US, email marketing is predicted to return an incredible $43.52 for every dollar spent on it in 2009. That’s a fantastic return on investment.

To start using an email newsletter as part of your marketing activities, you need a list of recipients. Don’t be seduced into taking the easy way out and purchasing a contact database. This is one of the easiest ways to damage your brand. You want your contacts to all have agreed to receive communications from you. First seed the database with your existing customers. Then add a newsletter sign-up form to your website so that prospects can add themselves to your newsletter recipient list.

Now that you have a database of contacts, you need a visually appealing newsletter template. A professional-looking newsletter will immediately give your recipients a good impression of your company and brand. A poorly-designed or amateur-looking newsletter will do irreparable damage to your brand. The best approach is to use a reputable design agency to create a custom newsletter template for your organisation. They will also be able to recommend a good newsletter system to use. A well-designed newsletter template together with fully-featured email newsletter software should allow you to have a template designed once and then to easily re-use that template over and over again with new content each time you send out a newsletter.

Now you need to decide what information to include in your newsletter. An email newsletter should firstly contain some informative content that your target audience will find useful. You should try to include tips and advice from your area of expertise. Or you can outline the features and benefits of one of your products and services. Remember that you are trying to sell something. Don’t be shy about it. Make sure your newsletter prominently displays the sales or marketing message you want to communicate. You should have one or more calls-to-action that are aimed at catching the reader’s attention. They can be a request to click on a link to view more information about your featured product or an invitation to visit your website or to sign up for your service. Lastly you should always include an automatic unsubscribe link or an explanation of how to unsubscribe from your newsletter.

Before sending out your newsletter, always do extensive testing to ensure that the newsletter displays correctly and that all links go to the right places. Send the newsletter to several different email programs and check that they display correctly in each. If you are happy with the testing, then you are ready to send out your newsletter to your contact database.

Good email newsletter software will give you detailed reports to track the progress and success of your newsletter. Check on the click-throughs to see what content people were interested in. Check on bounces and ensure that they are removed from future mailings. Once you have built up a history, you can compare the current email newsletter to previous newsletters to figure out what worked and what did not. This will allow you to tailor your future newsletters so that they deliver the maximum results.

EeZeeMailer is our powerful online email newsletter system that allows you to create professional-looking email newsletters to stay in contact with your customers, prospects or members. Test-drive the system by signing up for your free account today.

You have limited budget

Even big businesses have budget constraints and need to be able to make do with less. For smaller businesses, doing things the cheapest way possible is a matter of survival.    If you are struggling with a limited budget or if you want to save more money, it pays to consider outsourced software development. For one, you’ll be converting a permanent fixed cost (monthly salaries) into a variable cost (project fees or retainer fees). Typically, the cost of outsourcing is less than the cost of maintaining an internal development team. You can probably negotiate harder to get an even better price but squeezing your provider is not a good way of ensuring you get top-quality service and results.

You also do not need to spend money on training and infrastructure. It is the responsibility of the outsourced partner to come up with the necessary hardware, software and training for his team. By the time provider offers their services to clients like you, they will have already made a massive investment in infrastructure and people. You get to leverage that investment without having to incur the cost yourself.

There is a shortage of skills

South African is experiencing a massive skills shortage in the ICT space. If your recruitment process is stalled for lack of quality candidates or, if your project requires specialist skills which you do not have in-house, then it is definitely time to think about outsourcing.

Just because you are using an outsourced software development company, it does not mean that their resources will automatically be better-skilled than your internal software development team. You need to be diligent when it comes to selecting your provider. If you are outsourcing a project, you need to ask for client references and details about their previous projects to determine their level of skill and expertise. If you are getting dedicated resources you should ask for detailed CV’s and a skills report for each candidate.

You are running at full-capacity

Outsourcing doesn’t have to be an all or nothing endeavour. There are situations where it makes sense to outsource whilst still maintaining your own software development capability. If your own software development team is overloaded with projects and is busy building up a backlog of development requests, you should consider outsourcing your less critical projects. This allows your internal team to focus on those projects that will have the biggest impact on your bottom line.

You need faster delivery

In today’s fast-changing business environment, it’s sometimes necessary to get things done faster than your internal team would normally be able to do. Whilst it is not possible to rush a complex software development job, an outsource provider can typically throw more bodies at less complex projects to try to get them done faster. Of course, getting things done quicker comes at a cost and this is likely to negate any possible cost savings from outsourcing.

Conclusion

All in all, outsourcing your software development and focusing on your core business is a successful strategy that should be considered when the right circumstances dictate.

If you have any type of web presence or you do any type of Internet marketing you need to track your website traffic as well as measure the success or failure of your various marketing efforts. Big content websites use rating agencies like Nielsens to track their website traffic. For smaller sites, standard web statistics tools, such as Google Analytics, AWStats, or Webalizer will usually suffice. Let’s say you’ve decided to use Google Analytics as well as AWStats (since most web hosting companies offer AWStats as part of their hosting packages). After doing all the necessary setup and collecting data for a few days, you were probably pretty confident that you were going to get, at the very least, similar figures between the two packages. What you’ll find instead is a significant difference between the numbers reported by the two programs. What gives?

Log file analyzers vs tracking code

Though both Google Analytis and AWStats show website statistics, they are actually completely different in terms of how they operate. AWStats is hosted on your web server. To access the data, you normally log into the server’s web-based control panel (for shared servers) or you log into AWStats directly (if you installed it on your dedicated server). Your web server generates and stores a log for every visit to each site that is hosted on the server. AWStats then processes these log files to generate its reports. That is why it is called a log file analyzer.

Google Analytics, on the other hand, requires specific code to be loaded onto every page of your website. This code, which uses a combination of Javascript and cookies, notifies Google each time one of your pages is visited. To access your site’s statistic you then log into Google Analytics console online at http://www.analytics.google.com.

The biggest difference between the two is how they report page views. If you are using both AWStats and Google Analytics, you will soon notice that Awastats will reflect more page views than Google Analytics. For many websites we’ve worked on, Google Analytics will sometimes reflect only about a third of the number you see in AWStats.

How the number differ

One source of the difference is the number of non-human visitors to your site (web crawlers or spiders). AWStats is a log file analyzer and relies on the web server logs for its info. These logs also record the visits coming from these non-human visitors. AWStats will try to identify and exclude these visits but can’t do so with 100% accuracy. Google Analytics on the other hand doesn’t register these visits since most crawlers and spiders don’t run Javascript code.

Secondly, browsers will sometimes cache pages for display to the user. These cached pages do not make requests to the web server, so they are not tracked in the server logs, and therefore won’t appear in AWStats.

Google Analytics makes use of Javascript instead of processing log files. Since it is possible for an Internet user to disable cookies and/or Javascript in their browsers, Google’s code sometimes does not get run and therefore those visits are not counted. Luckily, very few users browse with cookies and Javascript disabled.

A more recent source of difference is that modern websites utilize AJAX to pull information from different scripts into one page. AWStats is not able to accurately record these requests. It will view all the scripts as several page views instead of one. Gooogle Analytics is more accurate in this respect and will count this as one page view.

What to do

We’ve shown several reasons why Google Analytics will differ from a log file analyzer like AWStats. Instead of focusing on the specific numbers, rather look at trends over time. If your AWStats numbers are moving upwards, your Google Analytics numbers will probably also be doing the same. If one particular page is more popular than others, this will probably reflect in both systems. Try to identify the trends and use this information to make decisions about your site. If you _have_ to choose between the two, you should pay more attention to the information you obtain from Google Analytics because its metrics are probably more dependable.

What is AJAX

AJAX is short for “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML”. It is a group of technologies and techniques employed during the website development process to make a site more interactive and respond faster. It’s a key tool in designing websites with better user interfaces.

The way AJAX works is very simple. An AJAX call is triggered by a pre-defined event. The browser then connects to a server-side script written in a server-side language like ASP.NET or PHP. The server-side script then performs whatever action needs to be taken on the server-side, whether it is some kind of validation or even something that needs to be saved or retrieved from a database. Once the required action is taken, the server-side script again sends the data back to the client-side webpage. A JavaScript function known as the callback function updates the page by displaying that data.

As an example, let’s look at a normal website form we come across almost everyday on the Net. In the pre-AJAX days, a user would have to fill out the form, submit it and then wait for the page to refresh to see if everything was OK with the information that was submitted (we are ignoring client-side validation since that is generally limited). If there were any problems, the new page would load and display any errors. With AJAX, the browser form fields can speak directly to the server-side validation scripts and display any errors without the page having to refresh. So, for example, you can check username availability before submitting the form itself!

When to use AJAX

You can improve the usability of a website using AJAX. Some common uses for AJAX are:

Login Forms: Some sites require a user to login before they can perform certain tasks. AJAX can allow the login to be performed and updated within the same page instead of a user going to the login page and then coming back to the requested page.

Auto –Complete: Whenever a site auto-completes a form field on your behalf (like the Google Seach box), AJAX is being used behind the scenes.

Real-Time User Content Updating: Sites like Facebook use AJAX extensively to update the user’s various feeds to show recently added content.

Form Validations: Validation is a must on any web form and AJAX plays an important role in ensuring real-time validation.

Instant Messaging & Chats: Gone are the days when you could only chat if you had a chat messenger program running on your PC. Nowadays chats can run in browsers and that is handled by AJAX components.

Animations: AJAX libraries like jQuery are starting to replace the need for using Flash in creating animations for websites.

All-in-all, AJAX provides for cleaner, slicker user interfaces allowing the user to take in quite a lot within a single page. Besides making the web application easier on the eye, it also reduces the number of page reloads which cuts down the amount of time the user has to wait for data to be displayed. So, you should ask your web developer to consider some AJAX components to improve your next website project.