Wednesday, April 9, 2003


Quest Software Funnel Web Profiler.

This web analysis and mapping software is interesting to me for 2 reasons:

- it's one of the best values for money (when combined with its companion product FunnelWeb Analyzer) in the web log analysis and site management tools field that I have seen. IMHO it blows products like WebTrends out of the water (note it needs to be used in conjunction with its companion product Analyzer to really be a true comparison). The part of the application that I particularly like is the Webmap - it produces a webmap of your site by crawling it (like many do) but then allows you to overlay your traffic statistics visually on this map - all of a sudden the main paths that people take through you site, where they enter and exit, jump out at you. Extremely powerful for visualizing how people actually use your site. I haven't seen a lot of software in it's price range (we payed under $1000) that does this.

- from a learning perspective, the tutorial that accompanies the 'info map' part of the software is for me a great example of how to communicate abstract concepts using relevant (to that individual user) content. The infomaps present keyword and traffic analyses of your site displayed as contour maps. Instead of using some abstract example that has no meaning to the user, the tutorial helps you understand how to interpret the info map by using the map you just produced on your own site, so that when it  points to the highest peaks and explains these are the most used terms on the site, they are in fact the most used terms on your own site. This is not unimpressive - the tutorial software is intelligent enough to present concepts linked to a dynamic analysis of the map - produce a new map and run the tutorial again, and the examples it uses are from the new map.

Well worth a look - a 30 day free trial is available from there site. - SWL

[EdTechPost]

10:48:55 PM | # |  |





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