May 5th, 2008

A post over at “The Official Google Blog” points out that unicode is the most widely used character encoding in indexed pages. It’s about time! Read more here.

I suppose website benchmarks are inevitable. They worry me. But everyone wants to know how they “shape up.” If you have benchmarks, people may come to believe a popularly quoted performance measurement is important even if it has nothing to do with their website. And worse, one might believe that a certain achievement level, usually represented by a number and often carried to two decimal places, implies a precision that is simply untrue. Benchmarks worry me.

So it is with some chagrin I found myself partying last Saturday night with Google Analytics and their benchmarking feature which is still in Beta (i.e. pre-release but available to the masses). The quid pro quo deal is if you agree to share your site’s analytics to an anonymous data pool, you’ll have access to a selection of website parameters and data aggregated from other sites in the data pool. And here’s the cool thing – in a web analytics geek kind of cool. You can benchmark your site against any of a selection of other sites that you desire. For a hobby site I manage, I benchmarked it against other Recreation > Outdoor > Hiking & Camping sites of similar size to my site.

Looking at the results for my hobby site against Google’s benchmark performance charts, I felt pretty good about the warm fuzzy green (not red) plus signs & numbers displayed to two decimal places. For a given parameter my results are 134.15% better than the benchmark. And that’s exactly the problem! You have to ask yourself, “So what?” Unless you’re a corporate dweeb who takes pleasure in reporting meaningless numbers to other people who are similarly clueless, benchmarks may lead you toward unearned complacency or needless distress. Benchmarks worry me.

I think the alternative to benchmarks – or perhaps the complement – is two-fold. First, identify the key performance indicators (KPI) that are important to you and to your website’s performance. If the Google Analytics parameters can inform your uniquely defined key performance indicators, then great. Second, think Personal Best. Keep working on your site to improve its performance metrics that you’ve identified to be important. Don’t just be better. Be the best you can be.