Blog Design Blog

The other day I was looking through Google Analytics and combing it to understand my website better in order to improve it. In the past, I never looked at the figures/statistics/analytics from any of my websites so critically, but I recently read a book that brought me to the attention of its amazing power in helping people improve their websites. I had run into it by chance when looking at a different book on Amazon and before I knew it I found myself looking at a book named “Google Analytics 2.0″ by Jerri L. Ledford and Mary E. Tyler. My first reaction was how could they write a whole book on a free feature that Google gave away. It piqued my interest greatly so the next time I found myself at a bookstore I immediately picked it up and skimmed through it before buying it.

All I can say is it was an awesome read and really got me interested in using Google Analytics to its full power in order to help build my website further. I can actually read the more complicated and detailed numbers while actually understanding what they mean and how to use it to make my website better. I digress though, perhaps I will write something in more detail later about it.

Back to the main heading, is beauty on the inside or outside of websites? Well the reason I asked is when i combed through Google Analytics I saw a site referring me visitors called cssmess The first thought that came to my head was that it didn’t sound like I won anything good. When I saw the description of the website, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing.

CSS MESS is a gallery highlighting the most wonderfully design and most ugly designed websites on the web.

And here I was thinking to myself I got away with it cause the outside product turned out so sweet. I have to admit, my markup is my weakness and it is a bit ugly; it could definitely be refined more. I started making some small patches that seemed to escalate and turned into this uncontrollable mess. I thank cssmess for bringing it out to the public, while not something any web designer would like to be known for I understand that it is a weakness of mines and this helps by giving me a greater incentive to use cleaner markup.

I think if they had gone into more detail of why certain code is ugly and how it could be improved that it would add a lot more value to the gallery. Thanks for the reality check.