Monday

All classes will work on Fireworks tutorials today. Some of you have a lot of experience with Fireworks, and some of you have none. This is sandbox time; play around for awhile.

I will start class with some demonstrations of Fireworks.

If you need to "catch-up" with some assignments please do so today.

Also, please check out this story about iTunes and accessibility from the NY Times. I hope our Introductory Unit provides some context for this article. The effort to provide accessibility is a constant battle. Notice why they must do this---they are losing sales!!

Check out this Electoral Map from CNN. Websites must be interactive now. The bar has been raised from even two years ago. For the last election CNN would have provided a static picture of the map. With this map you control how you view the content. You can even edit what the map looks like (you can click on a state and change it from undecided to McCain or Obama). Play with it. How can you incorporate these design ideas into your websites?

Now it's easier to delete accounts

In the past, you couldn't delete your account from, well, within your account. Getting rid of a duplicate or test account required you to send in a formal request, and you were limited to deleting only profiles in your account. Now, you can delete an account with a click of a button in the "Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings" page. If you're the administrator of the account, and the account is not linked to any other Analytics or AdWords accounts, deleting your account is easy. (If you want to delete a linked Analytics account, please either unlink your accounts first or contact us.) Also, if you have many account administrators on your account, don't worry - they will receive an email notifying them of the account deletion. But they should let the other non-admin account users know that the account is deleted to avoid any confusion.

One last thing - please remove the tracking code from your site after you delete your account. Remember, there's no "undo" once you delete your account, so before you delete your account forever, we'll ask you to confirm that this is really what you want to do before you delete it.

We hope this feature makes it easier for you to manage your accounts! (Click the image below for a larger view.)



Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team

Friday Quiz

You should all finish your assignments and then:

Internet Literacy:

• Create a webpage that displays your schedule in a three column table (period, class, teacher). Use TH for the headings and TD for the data.
• Utilize a yellow background and black text for the webpage.

Web 2:

• Add a form to your Ansonia website. This form should be a sign-up for PSATs (what information will you need?).
• Link to the form from your index. Link back to the index from your form.
• Use the same background, color, and text layout as your other pages.
• Have the form post to email (anyone@anywhere.com).

Wednesday

Today we will continue to work on our technological operations and concepts . For each class this should complete the most basic ideas for creating a webpage. When you learn how to use new tools remember to ask for help if you need it. First ask your partner, then ask me. But also start using your other sources more (blog, HTML tutorials, etc...). Ask a question on your blog and look for a response.

Internet Literacy:

• Complete the project for Chapter 3 on tables. Click here for extra help on tables. I will send you the files needed to make this project. You should make a folder called "Project 3" in your class folder.

Web 2:

• You will work on Project 5: Forms. This is not a complicated chapter, but there are A LOT of buttons to use so I though it would be prudent to go through the chapter. There will be a few moments where the book does not quite match the software as the book is for an older version. Be patient. Click here for extra help on tables.

Web 3:

• You will continue to work on making things roll, bounce, and explode.

You Cut Quite a Profile

Editor's Note: This post is the first of a regular series of guest-authored posts with our Google Analytics Authorized Consultants, who are certified by Google to offer support and consultation to Google Analytics customers.

This first post is written by LunaMetrics in Pittsburgh. Learn how to use Google Analytics from set-up to analysis at their one-day training, "Getting ahead with Google Analytics," on October 3 in Washington, D.C. Sign up here, and read on to learn a useful technique for seeing segments of traffic.

In Google Analytics, it's easy to isolate segments of your traffic such as paid traffic, or organic traffic, new visitors or returning, Firefox users or Safari users using a specific report (such as New vs. Returning) or the Dimension drop down menu within reports. Obviously, you want to see how different visitors behave and how your online campaigns and search engine optimization efforts are paying off. But sometimes, you may want to really be able to inspect this data easily within all Google Analytics reports for a website. You may have a question that Google Analytics answers for the whole site, but you want to know it for only a specific segment. In that case, set up a few profiles which filter down to these segments for your site.

For starters, what does setting up duplicate profiles mean? After you set up your Google Analytics, you can go into the Analytic Settings and choose Add Website Profile. You get the choice of adding a profile for a new domain, or for an existing domain. If you choose "existing," you don't have to do any additional work to your site, but you now have a second place to look at the exact same data, and you can play with it any way you want.

A previous post on this blog, Experiment using different profiles, detailed how to create duplicate profiles for your data manipulation enjoyment. Go crazy with filters! :-) Since you can create 50 profiles in a Google Analytics account, multiple profiles are a good way to view your data through different lenses and isolate certain segments.

Once you've learned to use multiple profiles and see data this way, you have the ability to learn more from your analytics. For example, you can create a profile that only shows paid traffic and you know that the Map Overlay report is only showing that visitor segment. In another example, you might need to know how visitors from a certain campaign reacted to the steps you set up in one of your funnels. Create another profile, filtering in only the campaign you care about, and looking at the Defined Funnel Navigation report.

This is semi-advanced stuff, but just remember to leave at least one "real" profile where you don't filter at all. That way, you can work on the others without making mistakes on the data that you are relying on to guide your website decisions. Not sure if that Regular Expression or filter are going to capture exactly the right data? Set them up on your sandbox profile and see if they work. Some of the other Google Analytics Authorized Consultants told us they set up a sandbox profile for every "real" profile whenever they configure a new customer's account, so that both profiles have the same data history.

Profiles enable you to test theories. Maybe you don't understand why your visitors are behaving in a certain way that shows up in your "real" profile -- but have five potential answers. Set up a profile that includes only yourself, using filters. Then try all the strange things your customers may have done and see if your sandbox profile will duplicate the real profile.

Here at LunaMetrics, there are 10 profiles that we set up for almost every client website right off the bat. You can see them below in an example which uses www.googlestore.com (you'll need to customize and troubleshoot the filters mentioned at the bottom to your own campaigns and site):

And here they are in detail. Most of the filters are custom include filters:

1. No Filters: Profile with zero filters. Use this for troubleshooting.
2. Only Direct: Include filter for the field "Campaign Source" only equaling the pattern "direct" visitors
3. Only Internal: Use an include filter which will include only traffic from internal IP ranges on IP address.
4. Only New Visitors: Include filter on the field "Visitor Type" equal to "new"
5. Only Organic: Include filter where the filter field is on "Campaign Medium" and the pattern is "organic"
6. Only Paid Search: Include filter on "Campaign Medium" equaling the pattern "ppc|cpc"
7. Only Referral: Include filter on "Campaign Medium" equaling "referral"
8. Only Returning Visitors: Include filter on "Visitor Type" equaling "returning"
9. Organic And Paid: Include filter combining the above two filters for "Only Organic" and "Only Paid Search" to include all search engine traffic
10. Overall: All traffic except filter out internal IP ranges using the "Exclude all traffic from an IP address filter."

Here's a screenshot of the filter for the "Only New Visitors" profile mentioned above.

Many of you are probably only managing one website, and can quickly set these profiles up manually. We were doing this manually at first but as we added more and more clients, we created an iMacros script to actually set up these profiles and filters automatically. If you're interested in learning about it, feel free to contact us or attend the training in Washington, D.C. on October 3.

Written by Robbin Steif and John Henson, LunaMetrics, with Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics team

Typing and Clustrmap

Todays assignments:

First you will complete the typing test. Put your score in your blog (be honest!) and see if it improves later. Don't say "I took a typing test". Say "I took a typing test". Demonstrate that you know how to code a link.

You will then learn how to put a clustrmap on your blog. Communication and Collaboration
is our 2nd standard. We use the clustrmap to collect data about how well our message gets out.

• Go to the Get One page.
• Complete the form. Be sure to use the correct address for your blog. If you do not have an email to submit this will not work.
• The password will come to your email.
• Submit password on clustrmap page. They will then give you a long code that you copy.
• Go to your blog, log-in and open the control panel. Paste the long code in the About Me section.
• Submit new code. Wait for me to approve it.

You can also check out meez if you want to add an avatar to your site (which seems to be blocked at school right now...). You could also try voki.com. What image do you want to portray to the world?

New Story and Grading

Please make a blog entry about the top news story of the day. To determine what the top story is you can visit:

Newsmap
New York Times
Connecticut Post

Your blog summary of the news should:

• Be short: no more than 50 words that summarize the story.
• Include a link to the story you read.
• Have an appropriate title for the entry that matches the story.

Here is an example:

For the final time a baseball game was played at Yankee Stadium last night. With one final victory the team wrapped up over eight decades in the historic ballpark. Next year will begin a new era across the street in a brand new stadium.

After the warm-up:
Web 1: Finish all coding.
Web 2: Finish Ansonia High website quiz and two cases.
Web 3: Refine walking animation. Do this practice animation by the same author.