Museums and the Web 2005
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More than just papers, MW2005 offers a chance for dialogue.

Oh, the Places they'll go! (Or won't): Learning from web log analysis and traffic data on the SFMOMA Web Site

Johanna Rogers, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA
http://www.sfmoma.org/

Mini-Workshop: Measurement

This paper will report on the knowledge gained and the technical challenges faced at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art while moving from a tracking software package that was installed on our own servers to an hosted, on-demand web tracking service.

We will report on the steps we took to move from trying to infer information from obscure and dense logs to getting highly visual and intuitive web analysis reports we could rely upon to improve the usability and design of the SFMOMA web site and all the steps in between. We will cover the reasons for getting an on-demand web tracking hosted service, the decision to deploy it on our own, the learning curve on how to do it, and the steps it took to modify each web page to send the data to the remote third party server. We will also focus on what has worked for us and what has not, what we have learned from the mistakes we made along the way and the ways we are working on correcting them. And finally, and most importantly, we will report on the way the gathered information about our web traffic will guide changes in how we design the SFMOMA web site, and how we are currently adjusting strategies to drive our users in a particular direction (or at least try).