Your website introduces you to the world, but also the world to you.

We all understand the benefit of having a great website. With it, you can introduce your products or services to your potential customers, wow them with pages that pop, basically show them what you've got.

But this is really just the beginning. Websites can also be smart, and they can tell you a lot about your audience. All websites come with logs that tell you something about the activity that happens on your site, like what are the most popular pages, how are people getting to your site, e.g., from which search engines, and from what countries.

These are definitely useful, but how can you delve in even deeper, to see how people are using your site in particular, how they are navigating through your pages, where they start, where they end, and what they are really looking for.

A transactional process on your site is very helpful, because this is where data is captured. What is a transaction? It can be anything that requests something more from your visitor, like a contact form, a search bar, and best of all, a purchase.

For example, if you could set up a search function on your site, and capture search terms, users, times of day, referring pages, and so on, you can get a good idea about what a particular user is wanting from your site. Each session can be a little story, and this gives you insight into your user base.

When we implemented the MaggieMudd e-commerce solution, we developed a particular functionality that tracked users from Facebook and Twitter updates, through the site, to a final transaction. The order management system would indicate a "Click Stream" which would describe the path the user traveled on their way to buying something. That is what you call insight. Designers and developers who are interested in user interaction would kill for this information.