And GOOD ones. Pretty easy for Google since they purchased the best (and priciest) web stats app out there back in the early 2000s and then released it for free!
When working on a regular website, these are just another couple of things that waste your time during setup and installation. They should be easy, but they're not.
While trying to set up web fonts, I've ended up with problems like:
- Having to move the Javascript around in the HTML so it loads properly.
- The fonts just don't load sometimes or take forever to appear.
- When you have to copy and paste font names into HTML to get a preview of what your page will look like, it takes a lot more time than just flipping through a menu - I have wasted so much of my clients' money on this!
- Sometimes it just don't work. And you have to look around in the Javascript, try to sort out whether your web server is screwed etc.
And setting up web stats is even worse:
- It takes a few days to tell whether or not it's working, and usually those few days are the first few days that the site has been up, and you really need that data.
- Sometimes it just don't work. And you have to troubleshoot your web server, your page, other scripts, etc.
- It is not easy to show clients how to use. They're like OMG what do you mean I have to login to Google?????? And it just adds yet another online account for them. They've got their hosting, their domain, and their stats. It's kind of unfair.
- It's really not that easy to set webstats to ignore you as a user, so that the project team don't get counted as users during testing. You've got to grab your IP, and your client's IP (which means saying "what's your eye pee" to them, and then launching into this big lecture that you really can't bill for), and then they give you the wrong one. Plus you've gotta get IPs for every location that they might surf from - with the new built-in stats, it's just with each computer. So your client can even bring their laptop into a meeting and you go "can I show you?" and then a minute later it's done and you don't have to explain nothin'!
I think Google is trying to help me save people money. Which I really like. I think these two features cut out about 10% of a project's workload.
What I want now is
- A longer (or dropped-down) font menu so I can see more fonts and with larger previews.
- Contact form widget. Every CMS has its weakness but c'mon. At least an e-mail obfusticator built in. That's a thing that makes your e-mail address copy-and-paste-able but encoded in a weird way so that web address collectors don't recognize it.
- More tag cloud options!
