I bookmarked this last summer when you wrote it since ignoring web analytics in re-designs is still surprisingly common.

Your arguments for including it are persuasive and I don’t see that it should add significantly to the costs – web analytics data on page popularity, bounce, exits, etc can be merged into the content analysis worksheet in Excel via a VLOOKUP() function.

I’m including your bullets in the update to the Econsultancy guide to Web Design Best Practice with the recommendation that web analytics is a key part of a design agency’s content audit.

BTW – I have a new blog which finally has a blogroll so able to include you there.

We are developing nth generation websites for our clients and in our street-level experience, the first challenge we confront is having meaningful – or any – historic web analytics to reference. Often we must muscle our way past the meaningless “number-of-hits” reports that someone (IT?, ISP?) auto-generates for the client on the pre-text of providing useful information. However, when the good stuff is available and we have direct access to the data source we use it in all cases to inform our decisions for the site re-design

The major discoveries we make are associated with traffic sourcing, keywords and landing pages. What we learn impacts IA, site labels, URL naming conventions and, of course, content development for page, metatags, alt text, Hn headings, etc. As you suggested, we also look at pageviews to see if the content being consumed is consistent with the site objectives. We are keeping an eye on browser types & trends to identify the time when we recommend to a client that a mobile device style sheet (which one?!?), in addition to print and screen, should be specifically developed for the site. There seem to be other goodies that leap out of the analytics that are unique to each client.