Hi! I'm dealing with web design for quite some time now but these few weeks for the first time I plan a serious project. I'm wondering what kind of counters (mostly talking about free ones) are professional sites using? Maybe the most important thing is for me to follow the traffic on every single page on the site. I searched WM-T and found smth about AWStats which sounds great but anyway I want to hear your opinion on that one guys? 10x a bunch

Don't go with a counter. Simply sign up for Google Analytics. It is free and provides better information that AWstats. They will provide you with a small javascript that you place at the bottom of all of your pages.

I totally agree. There is nothing professional about a counter.

Google Analytics looks great (updated only every 24h though). Any idea what kind of analysis software (besides GA) are used most commonly by the top websites on the net?

There are tons of stats packages - the 'big' ones cost a LOT of money. The free ones may not get you all the details you want. So you'll have to do some research to find one you can afford that gives you the details you need.

Yes, I agree with you LadynRed but from the videos that google provide about G Analytics I think that those statistics are far enough for me. Still the one thing that bothers me is the 24h refresh of the numbers. I searched google and found these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ytics_software . Any opinions on them?

Yeah but after the 24 hours has gone by, you can see breakdowns of time. I'm not sure why you would spend that much of your time monitoring it when a change that you make to a site can take much longer than 24 hours for it to go in full effect.

I would def. have to say Google Analytics. Great tracking, as well as other information packed into it.

Have you considered using Open Web Analytics? It's open source and is run on your own web server. It gives you the capabilities to do as much if not more than the so called "professional" analytics out there! In many cases however, most people find that Google Analytics is way more than they will ever need. So be open to that.

i was shocked to see this thread. do they still use counters to track down the visitors. use analytics, that way you will know from which part of the world you are generating maximum traffic

Analytics is the best, there are also gostats, awstats ...