This site is a complement to the book we wrote for O’Reilly called Complete Web Monitoring. It is also our company blog.
Watching Websites is a boutique consulting firm focusing on early stage startups/products and non-profits as they emerge and mature in the respective niches. We also help Fortune 1000 companies as they struggle to implement the process of analytics in existing and burgeoning projects. In short, we are a startup accelerator – we help companies come to market more quickly, with a complete understanding of their products.
Complete Web Monitoring
The problem statement: If you’re running a website and aren’t using analytics, you’re flying blind. It helps to know what your users are doing, whether they could get there, if they had a good time, if they’d come back, and what they’re saying to their friends about you.
The book covers every possible way that one can measure a website, including traditional web analytics, web interaction analytics (ie – heatmaps & overlays), voice of the customer/surveying, web performance monitoring including synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring and finally, social media & its listening platforms. Since social computing is a nascent field, we took the time to differentiate between the major archetypes before we dove into the metrics and analytics considerations for each.
Some book facts (they make us weep): 187,049 words, 670 pages, 428 Figures and 365 days from start (proposal submission) to finish. We dedicated three months to research and administrative tasks, nine months to writing & researching.
Alistair Croll
Alistair covers emerging web technologies, networking, and online applications.Prior to Bitcurrent, Alistair co-founded Coradiant, a leader in online user monitoring, as well as research firm Networkshop. He has held product management positions with 3Com Corporation, Primary Access, and Eicon Technology. Alistair contributes to industry events such as Interop and Web2Expo, and writes for a variety of online publications including GigaOm. He is the author of numerous articles on Internet performance and security, and co-author of Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Applications from Prentice-Hall.
Sean Power
Sean Power is a consultant, analyst, author and speaker. He is the co-founder of Watching Websites, a boutique consulting firm focusing on early stage startups, products and non-profits as they emerge and mature in their niches. He has built professional services organizations and traveled across North America delivering engagements to Fortune 1000 companies. He helps executives understand their competitive landscape and the future of their industry. He has done technical edition for Troubleshooting Linux Firewall for Addison-Wesley and co-authored Complete Web Monitoring for O’Reilly media with Alistair Croll.
Sean has had first-hand experience creating and implemented social computing strategies with larger companies like MTV and smaller startups like Akoha. He is active in the social computing space, using Twitter and blogs as his communication platforms of choice. He often speaks on the subject of product acceleration, measurement or social computing in clinics, workshops, presentations and one-on-one training.
You can find out more about him at www.watchingwebsites.com, on Linkedin and on Twitter as @seanpower.
