Hits are a miss at the Charity Commission's website

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The Charity Commission's website is the focus of this week's site visit in Third Sector magazine.

Andy Ricketts analyses the site, which cost "about £30,000" and was designed by Harlequin Solutions together with some in-house work.

In the first paragraph we read that "the Charity Commission's website had 39 million hits last year". Yes, someone is still using hits as a significant measure of website activity or even success in 2007. I'm not sure if it's Mr Ricketts or the Commission who chooses to use that measure.

It doesn't matter. The figure was arrived at, presumably, by someone at the Commission and included in his published report by Mr Ricketts.

Is the charity sector or even the taxpayers who paid for this site really bothered how many calls the server made to javascript files, CSS files, jpg images, shortcut .ico files, Flash files, plus some genuine HTML/XML web pages? I'm certainly not. UK Fundraising was registering well over one million hits back in 1996, so I daren't wonder how many more the site is achieving now.

But it does not matter. Truly useful basic metrics include number of unique users, unique visits, and page views.