16 Counters, Guestbooks, and Stats We've touched before on the uncontrollable urge of most site builders to know exactly who's visiting their sites, when, and what they're doing there. Forms have the advantage of allowing you to collect detailed answers to the questions you put before your site's visitors. Unfortunately, they only provide you with information about those users who take the time to fill them out. Thus, when you collate the results of your Web forms, you might understandably come to the conclusion that everyone who visits your site is quite patient and enjoys as a hobby the laborious filling out of forms. Web-page counters, on the other hand, will tally every visitor, even those impatient types who drop in, glance at your index page, and then dash off for an urgent peek at the latest Pamela Anderson shrine.
Counters are extremely easy to implement, unlike such tedious techniques as forms and cookies.
You can track visits to particular pages, or to your entire site. The text that appears around this code is up to you. The digit that will ultimately be displayed in the counter image reveals the number of hits received since the counter's addition. In the example above, it will display the number of hits to mypage.html. With this coding, you can display stats for a page on any other page, if you so desire.