Coolbox Home Page as seen by Site Overlay
We’ve been using the Site Overlay tool within Google Analytics recently to help us learn more about how users are interacting with our site and which areas are most popular with readers (and which aren’t). Of course, statistics about most visited pages have been available for longer than I’d care to mention, but Site Overlay really brings them to life within a visual context, as the screenshot illustrates.
…Well the perfect product module that is.
Myself and Rob have recently been rebuilding the backend of our CMS (Content Management System). We were finding that we were making lots of changes to the core files each time we wrote a site for a client, and since the big benefits of using a CMS for us is confidence in the integrity of the code (as we can run unit tests against the core files), as well as speed of writing a new site by using existing modules.
Therefore, we decided we needed to go back to the start and make each of the modules as generic as we possibly could to cope with every eventuality. For the most part this is proving fairly straight forward. For a news module for example you will want a title, the date it is published, and the story, whilst with a Frequently Asked Questions module you will want a question and an answer.
But the products module wasn’t so easy…
Our story begins in the salubrious surroundings of the shared bin store below my flat. (Not the greatest setting I know, but please bear with me!)
Now I’m never usually one to get wound up by residential issues, but lately I’ve been quite bothered by the fact that people keep putting green bags of recyclable waste into the silver wheely bins which are intended for ordinary black bags. So much so, that I’ve actually been moving green bags to their rightful receptacles myself.