Stephan A. Miller
Nilesh R. Mohite
Nilesh R. Mohite
About the Author
Stephan A. Miller is a web and app developer, SEO expert, and blogger who lives in Kansas City, Missouri. He was head developer at All About Doors and Windows in Kansas City for six years and was a freelance developer and SEO expert for eight years.
In his career, he has worked with Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, osCommerce, ZenCart, and many other online applications, as well as developing sites from scratch in PHP and MySQL or using the Lithium PHP framework. But this is not all. Because his business was at times a one man show, he knows Linux, Apache, and Nginx well and has developed desktop applications in Python where PHP just won't work. He also knows search engine optimization techniques, web analytics software, and search engine marketing which he uses to promote his own handful of sites. He blogs semi-regularly at http://www.stephanmiller.com about his work.
I would like to thank Usha Iyer for contacting me with the idea for this book; Matthieu Aubry, the Project Leader at Piwik.org, for providing input on the book and the necessary screenshots I was missing and helping me with the Piwik Zen Cart plugin; Maarten Vonz for contributing and working with me on the open source project for the Piwik Zen Cart plugin; and Ruud Hein of Search Engine People, who published a post on Piwik for me. I would also like to thank all of my technical reviewers for making sure the book turned out as well as it did.
About the Reviewers
Amir Shaked is an R&D manager by day and software developer by night. He is proficient in several technologies, such as C#, WPF, PHP, Python, Java Script, Data Systems, Networks, and more.
In recent years, he has been working on several open source projects for Windows (including eLibrary: openelibrary.org), Android, and web applications. Through his work on open source and websites he discovered Piwik, and has since used, tweaked, and customized it for several projects.
He blogs on his website amirshk.com on various technical issues.
Deepak Vohra is a consultant and a principal member of the NuBean.com software company. He is a Sun Certified Java Programmer and Web Component Developer, and has worked in the fields of XML and Java programming and J2EE for over five years. He is the co-author of Pro XML Development with Java Technology , Apress and was the technical reviewer for WebLogic: The Definitive Guide , O'Reilly . He was also the technical reviewer for Ruby Programming for the Absolute Beginner , Thomson Course Technology PTR , and the technical editor for Prototype and Scriptaculous in Action , Manning Publications . He is also the author of JDBC 4.0 and Oracle JDeveloper for J2EE Development , Packt Publishing , Processing XML documents with Oracle JDeveloper 11g, Packt Publishing , and EJB 3.0 Database Persistence with Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, Packt Publishing .
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I dedicate this book to my best friend Erin, who convinced me that I should write this book and for putting up with me while I did, and to my kidsJared and Maddiewho I hope find even bigger dreams come true for them in their lives
Preface
Web analytics is a necessity if you have a website. More and more websites are being constructed. Small niches have hundreds of competing sites. And those sites that won't listen to what their traffic is telling them will soon disappear or be buried in the search results under sites that do pay attention to their traffic. And that is why anyone who has any type of website needs web analytics software such as Piwik to help them hear what their visitors are saying.
Web analytics began as simple log parsing to determine how many hits a website would get in a day, and has evolved into a complex science that can give you minute details on the people and bots that visit your site. And while there are many third-party, open source solutions for tracking and analyzing your web traffic, Piwik stands at the forefront as the open source alternative to Google analytics.
Unlike third-party solutions, Piwik gives you total control of your code, the server it runs on, and the privacy settings of your tracking. Piwik can be downloaded and installed on your server in five minutes for free and Piwik has the same advanced features as other third-party analytics services.