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The Basics of Building Web Pages and Sites 1

FIGURE 1-11

comScore is one of the best sources of Internet facts.

Surveying site visitors

When it comes to learning about your particular site’s visitors — or what they like — there’s not

much of a substitute for simply asking them. There are drawbacks, however, to the survey con-

cept. The biggest problem is that people don’t always respond truthfully for a variety of reasons,

sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes out of plain vanity. If you ask people whether

they read tabloids or intellectual magazines, for example, the vast majority of them say that they

don’t read tabloids. While this has proved to be true in many different surveys, tabloids outsell

intellectual magazines by millions of copies, so someone’s not telling the truth. Remember, when

devising your survey questions, that any time you ask people to admit something that’s less than

ﬂattering to his or her self-image, you are asking those people to respond less than truthfully.

This phenomenon is widely recognized in the consumer research ﬁeld, and a common (and sim-

ple) way around it was developed long ago. The trick is to ask other questions that help qualify

the responses. The conﬁrmatory questions should not be close to the sensitive one, but later, and

scattered about within the survey. For example, you might ask visitors to choose their favorite