Remember, you aren't the customer if you embed Google Analytics, Google is.
edit: if you want analytics, honestly just roll your own... you can't trust advertising companies with your users' data
Imagine you are a great speaker and instructor and have an audience. Right now you GIFT it to YouTube, Twitter, etc. and they monetize it for you, give you a tiny percentage, and even constantly direct your audience to competitors and other distractions. In fact YouTube even sells an option to advertise your videos on your competitor’s videos!
I say — opt out. Run your own everything! Your own community software (instead of Discord). Your own videoconferencing, livestreaming, chats, presentations, gated content, accept payments with crypto in addition to PaymentRequest. It’s hard to build an open-source alternative that is good enough (no, Mastodon and Bluesky aren’t — yet).
Which is why (shameless plug warning) I spent 12 years and $1 million dollars with my team to build it. https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Use it — as 1 of hundreds of features, you can have your own analytics on your own database on your own community site. The other features are here: https://qbix.com/features.pdf
PS: Don’t get me wrong. Keep using YouTube to host your content, etc. But relegate it to hosting short form teasers and highlights and testimonials all of which link to your site. People can discover you on the big sites but if they are serious about your long-form content and community they should buy a membership on YOUR site and have a direct relationship — then deplatforming or coersion will be the last of your worries.
Also, the features pdf lists "nodejs" and "php" as features.. I don't mean to be snarky here, but I am simply not sure what this product is?
But all those overlapping screen shots make it look like there's been an explosion at the website factory and the smart thing is for me to run in the other direction.
1/3 of the Youtube videos are just "This video is unavailable".
I couldn't look at it that much longer because the colorful stars falling out of my mouse cursor was so distracting I had to close the tab.
When I visit YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, they seem extremely "busy", overrun with ads, and rather ugly, but we are used to them. I am not sure it's so bad to have a clean layout. But I am open to constructive criticism.
None of what I'm saying is criticism BTW. Just observation.
On desktop, it's pretty easy to open one of the menus on the top and then have it fail to close. Since the site disables the scrollbars while a menu is open, it breaks the site until you figure out the magic spot to move the mouse to make the menu close again. The magic spot doesn't seem to be in the same place every time. Seems buggy. I spent most of my time on this site with one of the menus open, unable to scroll down and see beyond the first page.
The worst part? The links in the menus don't work. A peek in the source code suggests they are supposed to be links, but clicking them doesn't do anything because they're just <div>s (not real <a> links) and the click event handler simply calls preventDefault (QTools.js line 107). That finicky navbar nearly ruins the entire site. I'm almost entirely unable to navigate around. This site is, unfortunately, pretty broken on desktop Chrome. Test your site on desktop in addition to mobile.
I got the site to hit an explicit debugger breakpoint in Q.js line 10293 just by clicking around the top menu buttons. The author of that code didn't bother writing an exception handler, they just had it trigger the debugger.
I do find it offputting; the site definitely has the feel of "a programmer hacked this together without any input from a designer." The massive drop shadow from the embedded videos actually covers up some of the text on desktop. The font is VERY thin--make sure to check your site on Windows and not just macOS. More generally: hire a designer. Programmer designs stick out in a bad way, and users seeing a broken marketing site will assume the product is broken, too. I certainly do.
1. Install Chrome for Windows from the Google website. As of today, that version is 114.0.5735.199 (Official Build) (64-bit). I am testing on Windows 11 and I used a fresh install of Chrome on a machine that has never had Chrome before. This machine has a standard 60Hz display which may matter for my theory at the end.
2. Go to qbix.com.
3. Hover the mouse over "Communities". Now hover over its submenu items. Observe that they do not highlight on rollover like they're supposed to, and clicking on them does not do anything.
4. Now quickly move the mouse outside of the menu. Observe that the mouse escapes the menu, and the menu does not close. Move the mouse around the rest of the page. Observe that the menu continues to stay open. Observe that you can't scroll the page. In this state, the site is unusable.
5. Move the mouse back inside the menu, then slowly move the mouse across the edge of the menu. Observe that now the menu closes.
I have reproduced the same in Edge and Vivaldi; the issues appear to manifest in Chromium-based browsers on Windows. I tested on macOS and iOS and the issue does not show up there. I can provide a screen capture if needed. Without looking deeper, I wonder if this page is trying to use JavaScript to close the menu based on a mouse event that it misses when you move the mouse too fast. I wonder if the entire navbar is implemented in JavaScript instead of a modern CSS-only technique with regular links.
The worst thing is when some users see a heisenbug that you can't seem to reproduce on a similar environment.
Please try creating a fresh cloud Windows instance rather than using your usual computer so you can be sure you are seeing what a fresh user on a new computer would see. I have done so--this reproduces in the preinstalled Edge on a brand new c6a.large Windows Server 2022 instance in AWS. I can provide a click-by-click screen capture starting at the AWS Management Console if desired--I've found this is a good way to prove bug reports to companies and demonstrate that it has nothing to do with my computer.
Here is the screen capture. This video shows the creation of a fresh Windows instance in AWS EC2 and then the reproduction of all of the above issues in that fresh instance. Follow my exact clicks and you will see it, too.
It would definitely be more appealing to the masses if it was brought more in line with a more minimalist 2023 aesthetic, IMO.
- There's a confetti effect following my cursor around - There are constant animations playing everywhere, even over video embeds - A lot of the spacing is uncomfortably tight - Shadow effects overlap other content - There are some 30 menu options, buttons everywhere, many video embeds that I'm supposed to listen to?
None of this is enticing me to consume any content on your website. I'm feeling uncomfortable even trying to browse the site to find out what your product is. I've learned that a significant portion of the web runs on PHP and that you have an app and a token of some sort? And you're looking for investors? I'm sure there's very cool ideas in here, but I'm lost in the vast amount of information with inscrutable organisation.
All that aside, there's a big reason that a lot of landing pages look similar: it works. First impressions count for a lot.
It’s actually about 55% for YouTube. Creators are in demand and it’s competitive to keep them.
How much of that one million dollars dollars went to creating the confetti effect following the mouse cursor around on https://qbix.com/ ?
That's far more useful than hoping that people have JS enabled or tracking stuff blocked.
(I.e. Can see that they visited an order page, then back to FAQ's, then clicked on a "whats is x" link - so should probably update the content on the order page to explain what X is)
Obviously it depends on what data you actually need, but that gets me most of the way there without gathering a load of data that isn't needed
I usually describe the cost of GA as "subsidized by your customers' data".
(With caveats: This is a toy pipeline. More work required to make it robust and probably not a great option for any site with reasonable traffic. But easy to get started and play.)
[1] https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo-nginx/blob/master/sites...
But, host your own is definitely recommended IMO; a lot of the GDPR issues are resolved if you just host your own, because no data is shared to a 3rd party. Then you only need to worry about getting some approval and data retention. I'm sure data retention is a non-issue if you process raw analytics data (that can be traced back to a user) into generalized statistics, too.
Why does anyone need all that?
Useful information is more like, what users clicked, what platform did they use, how much time they spent on the website and things like that. Those aren't that hard to just track yourself.
With that being said, I don't make everything myself, but just the thought that I'm not obliged to use the best-practice standard solution to the problem is liberating to me and it makes me so much more productive in actually doing stuff.
When I research about programming languages I'm always amazed how almost every feature existed in the 70s as well, just no one bothered to use it.
But I am coming around to the idea that self hosted(atleast partially) might be cheaper and better if you are a single dev/a small team.
The learning curve on the tools/hosting providers out there is has become very steep. Plus the costs are unclear with a lot of cloud providers and monthly subscription charges across the services you need can quickly stack up or the prices can suddenly change.
I tried deploying an app to AWS a few months back. You get a year's worth of credit when you start out. But the database I used was not covered(I did not realize all the database options were not covered). I got charged a pretty penny(Luckily it was not life shattering, but it was a shock. I hate to imagine what would have happened if I did this for a bigger app)
Tried Google Analytics a few times over the last few years. But again it has become complex, so I would had to spend a ton of time learning it to even just get started.
Had a few SAAS providers suddenly hike up prices or change pricing models or just shut down.
We have been using dedicated servers of late. A single server seems to be able to handle multiple client apps along with hobby/test apps for a fixed price. Yes it is not as easy as putting in an email and credit card and using a service. But the price and peace of mind has been worth it. Plus we just write a few scripts to automate things. In case the work load becomes too much we can hire a person to do that and 1 person will do. Compared to having to hire a specialist for each major cloud service we use.
AWS is a toolbox you can use to construct your app deployment/hosting environment. Unless you know or want to know how to (for example) setup routing on VPCs, it may be better to go with someone actually hosting apps rather than infrastructure.
My go to 'cloud' path is just a digital ocean droplet, using docker containers to spool up whatever you need and connect it all on a docker network.
A single server (2-4 cores) running quite literally ANY modern backend framework (node, go, C#) should be able to handle _thousands_ of requests per second, I'm not sure where or when this idea has disappeared, it seems like everyone automatically assumes their small SaaS or webshop needs an autoscaling kubernetes 20 rack workhorse of a server. Not the case at all!!!!
Scale when you need to - if you're getting the kind of traffic where you need to, by then you won't need to worry about the added cost to do the actual scaling / upgrading.
Sorry for the winded / ranty answer, I've done this like 20+ times at this point and always had to battle against the "let's put it on AWS with kubectl and 2349023 redundant instances!", when in the long run it was never needed...