How to Manage Your Web Properties
In this article we discuss what is actually mean by “web properties”. Let me say straightaway that what we don’t mean is advertising your real estate on a website – I guess they are web properties in a literal sense, but they are not the kind of web properties we are talking about here. No, here we are talking about web properties with regard to the Internet.
The term web properties can have several different interpretations. For those of you interested in tracking the performance of a web site, installing Google analytics is a popular method of achieving this end. According to Google, “a web property is the cumulative set of pages on which a particular tracking code is installed.”
In order to set up Google Analytics you must first have a Google account, which is free and quick to set up. Creating an Analytics account is a way to name and organize tracking for one or more web properties. Every Analytics user can access at least one account, and within each account at least one web property (such as a website) is tracked. Once the account is set up, implementing the tracking is simply a matter of copying the code Google generates and pasting it into the code for each page you want tracked.
By tracking, we mean carrying out an analysis of:
how many times the site was visited by people from unique IP addresses (visits)
how many times the page was shown (impressions)
how many times the page was requested from the server (hits)
which page most people entered the site from (entry pages)
which page they left from (exit pages)
the country the visitor came from
the words used most times to access the page (search string)
the kind of browser people were using (user agent) and
how this was broken down over time.
This information can be of great interest to anyone seeking to promote their website and having it appear near the top of search engine results pages.
Another interpretation of web properties could be the properties that HTML editors such as Dreamweaver create. These may include templates, pages, images, other media such as videos, sounds, snippets of code and script, and bits of useful information that Dreamweaver regards as the site’s assets.
When any page is viewed in Dreamweaver, the Properties Inspector window that sits across the bottom of the page gives context sensitive information about any property selected. For example, selecting an image will open a Properties Inspector window specific to the image, and allow you to alter the size, the location, the vertical and horizontal space, the border if any and the alignment and so on. It will also allow you to edit the picture in Fireworks or crop it, add a hotspot to it or link it to another file.
In contrast, when another type of property such as text is selected, the range of options becomes specific to text, so the editing options include things like the font, the font weight, its size, class, alignment and wrapping, whether it is part of an ordered or unordered list, any indentation and other formatting. Dreamweaver automatically adds the site assets to the Assets panel normally located on the tab adjacent to the Files panel, and displayed by choosing the option from the Window menu or by using the keyboard shortcut F11.
This can also be very useful, as in addition to templates and scripts, images and movies Dreamweaver will add all the URLs, any Flash or Shockwave files and all the colours used in the site’s palette.