Charles Flaum inquired about what Internet access counters actually
count:

> Are sure that was 6000 visits or was it 6000 hits.  It's very hard to
> determine the actual number of visits since one visitor can easily be
> counted as 10 hits depending upon how they cruise around your site.

The Web server itself counts every single item that it retrieves from
storage.  A fairly ordinary page might have some text, a photo, a couple
of GIF rules or dividers, and maybe a couple of fancy icon buttons --
that's 6 separate items that have to be retrieved in order to display the
page.  If you have 10 such pages, and folk browse them all, you could
easily clock up 60 "hits" per "visit".  ISPs sometimes display these
counts as a weekly Server Usage graph - 60,000 hits per week looks great,
but it's probably only about 1000 actual "visits".

Most of the "page access counters" are separate programs that run on the
server and count the number of times a specific item is retrieved, e.g.,
the text of your home page.  You still need to be careful, as Charles
says, depending on how you have set up navigation around your pages.  If
folk have to keep returning to your home page in order to go elsewhere,
the apparent number of "visits" will be inflated.

Either way, there's no doubt that the World Wide Web and the Visa card
have made an incredible difference to the ease of doing business,
especially for those of us who don't happen to live in the USA.

John Wolff, Australia