ClickHeat

On CSSJuice, we cover a lot of design ideas. We talk about how to make Web 2.0 effects using just CSS. Having an attractive website is very nice, but how do you know if your site’s layout is working? You can have a survey on your site. This can be effective, but are there other methods? Yes, there are other methods that can be more effective. ClickHeat is one of those methods. Unlike surveys, with ClickHeat the user does not have the option to not use it.

So what is ClickHeat? Well ClickHeat is a small PHP and JavaScript web app that tracks where visitors click on your website. Then ClickHeat allows the collected stats to be shown as a heatmap. For those of you who don’t know, a heatmap is a map that shows areas based on activity using colors based on heat. If an activity happens in a given area very often the color area is red, if it is not then that area is blue. In between there are yellows, green and orange colors based on how often an activity happens. With ClickHeat, the heatmap is based off of how often a user clicks in areas on your site.

ClickHeat is very easy to use. After the installation, which is a wizard based installation like other popular web applications, you go to yourdomain.com/clickheat, then log in. At this point you will have a screen that is split into two areas. At the top is your navigation, where you can choose to look at the heatmap for your site on a daily, weekly or monthly view. There are also filters that allow you to see the heatmap based on the browser used, and screen size. The only other option that you are given is how transparent you would like the heat map to be on top of the page you are looking at.

When looking at the heatmap with your site below it, you can see how ClickHeat can be a powerful tool. At this point you can actually see where people are clicking on the site. This can help you arrange links on your site, and give you areas you can target. If you have a feature that you want to visitors to use more often then you can arrange it around where people are clicking. If you see that one feature is doing really well, you may then promote that feature. The feedback that you get from the heatmap is very valuable and can assist with helping your site grow.

To run ClickHeat all you have to have is a host that supports PHP, JavaScript, and the GD2 library. The official site states that it should work with Apache or Lighttpd web servers, and states that other webservers may work fine. This means that most hosting companies will be able to support ClickHeat. The site also states that it has been tested on Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Konqueror, and Firefox 2.0. The demo for the software also has Opera, Safari, and K-meleon as options in the browser filter.

One of the nice things about ClickHeat is that it is free. This is the data that most websites have a hard time collecting and spend a lot of money on surveys just to get some feedback. ClickHeat alone will not solve all your website problems, but it can help you design a better interface.