For me , web statistics are the lifeblood of your website. It is really the only good way to see how your site is doing. I look forward each day to browsing over my sites stats to see what is doing what. It is also a great tool to find problems with your site such as missing pages, or other errors.

My preferred method of getting web statistics is to download my log files, and process them locally on my own. To do this I use an ftp script I wrote to download the log files each day. Then I use awstats to process the log files into nice readable reports. Awstats works great for me, but it is a little bit more work to setup.

If you are looking for a super-easy way to get stats from your site, try Google Analytics. All you have to do is place a few lines of javascript code onto each page of your website everything else is done for you. Anaytics produces very snazzy graphs, and is simple to use, but I find there is SO much information there it can be hard to get to the basic stats I want to see.

Sometimes, you might think that you will just add stats later on once the site is running a bit, but let me tell you the best time to setup your stats is right there while you are putting your site up for the first time. It can be very hard (or impossible sometimes) to go back and get stats from the past. So just go ahead get it setup right from the get go. You’ll get addicted to your stats real quick.