Need to see who's been on your website in the last day? Week? Month? Want to monitor your website's traffic without having to read a manual first? Want an elegant web analytics solution that updates in minutes rather than hours and works beautifully on all devices? Maybe you should check out Trends.

Since we first launched LiveStats, our web app for monitoring your website's traffic in real-time, we've been determined to figure out how to store historical data at a large scale. Due to the number of sites we serve, and the speed at which we store data for quick retrieval, it's been a huge challenge but we've finally figured it out.

What is Trends?

Trends is a web app for monitoring your website's historical traffic data. All the information you need is easily readable and quickly scannable with bold graphs and readable lists. There's a separate Widget for every metric (like referrers, visitors or top content), making it easy for the whole team to know what's been popular and what's not on your website.

Open Standards

There's not an ounce of Flash in Trends, or any of GoSquared. We're really proud of the graphing engine behind Trends. Because we haven't used Flash, graphs in Trends display just as well on your desktop as it does on your iPhone or iPad. These are the best charts in a web-based analytics service anywhere on the web.

Customisable Interface

The interface of Trends consists of a series of beautiful, easy-to-use Widgets. You can set up every Widget just as you want - choose the time frame for your stats, whether you want to look at a graph, pie chart, bar chart, or just the figures, and even move the Widgets around. Trends will change to suit you. The whole interface will stay the way you set it when you return - every Widget, every state, every time frame will be remembered so you can jump back in where you left off.

Part of GoSquared

As we wrote recently, Trends may be a separate app, but when you sign up to GoSquared you get both LiveStats and Trends as part of the package. You can sign up for GoSquared for free, or if you need more pageviews there's a series of affordable premium plans starting at just $9.99/month.

Check out the Plans and Pricing now - every plan has a 30 day free trial, and you can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time.

Enjoy!

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

We quietly launched a new web app into beta a few weeks ago called Trends. Trends enables you to monitor your website's trending traffic data from a single dashboard, with a separate widget containing graphs, charts, and tables for every metric that matters.

We've had some great feedback on Trends, and have continued to improve the app over the past weeks while people have been trying it out. Trends works great with LiveStats - which shows you what's happening on your website right now. LiveStats shows every visitor browsing your site, what pages they're on, which referrers have sent them to your site, and how long they're spending on each page, all in real-time.

What's New?

The price. Until now, we've been charging for LiveStats as a web app on its own. Now for the same price, we're giving you a whole new app - Trends, with incredibly accurate data recording, an intuitive and beautiful interface, and redundant data backups.

New Plans

We've also made a few changes to the individual Plans we offer. We've improved every Plan in a multitude of ways including the number of pageviews, and the number of features. Now every Plan comes with unlimited team sharing, SSL page tracking, Event tracking, and Map View with Geolocation monitoring.

We will continue to offer a free plan, and we've doubled the number of pageviews to 10,000 pageviews/month. We've also integrated a single, unobtrusive ad placement on the free plan. We're working with BuySellAds to ensure the ads shown in GoSquared's apps are consistently high quality and have as little impact on your experience as possible.

Already added a website to GoSquared and want to upgrade its Plan? Sign in and head to the Site Manager.

We hope you like the changes we're making at GoSquared. If you have any suggestions or feedback we'd love to hear from you on Twitter, Facebook, or via email.

Your chance to earn money from GoSquared has arrived. Today we announce the release of our Affiliate program, which enables you to earn cash from promoting LiveStats to your audience. Upon referral of a paying customer, you'll receive a cut of up to 50% of the amount paid.

If you're already a member of GoSquared, you're already set up to start earning money. If not, sign up now and you'll be ready to start earning in under 60 seconds. On the Affiliates Dashboard, you're given a unique affiliate URL and a selection of banners we've carefully designed for you to use on your web pages to promote LiveStats to your audience. Every time someone purchases a LiveStats plan, you'll receive a tasty slice of the pie.

We've been busy

We've been working hard behind the scenes for the past few months, making countless improvements and feature additions to the underlying infrastructure of our system. Our improvements to infrastructure have been largely focused around increasing performance and developing a more scalable platform to build upon. The front-end changes have been subtle, but we're starting to roll out better navigation within GoSquared Account screens and between GoSquared apps such as LiveStats and Site Manager.

Map View for the Masses

Until now, Map View was only available to Standard and Pro users. Starting today, all LiveStats users will be able to experience the power of LiveStats' real-time geolocation panel first hand. Observe exactly where your visitors are browsing from, in the context of time of day, by navigating the beautiful interactive world map.

Dramatically Improved Performance

In our minds, performance is the key. That's why we always design our applications and the engines powering them with performance as a top priority. Recently we've made a bunch of tweaks under the hood to make LiveStats more streamlined. Now you can enjoy faster loading times as the LiveStats loading bar slices swiftly across your screen when the application starts up.

New and Improved Signup Process

We've redesigned the way new users get started with LiveStats. Implementing that tracking code can be a tricky business, so we do our best to guide them through the process in a clear and concise way when they first run the application. First impressions are the most important.

Check out the sign up and welcome process for yourself - sign up for LiveStats now.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sign up and start using LiveStats in 3 easy steps. Try it now.

We're really proud of our latest update to the LiveStats sign-up process - signing up is now a really simple 3 step process that's a joy to use.

This is also the first appearance of the new LiveStats radar icon - it'll be showing up more from now on. Those dots that show up when the radar screen goes green? They’re the locations of real visitors on your site. Rad.

The whole team has worked really hard on this pretty complex process to make it seem really simple.

Also, you might like to know - we've brought Map View to all plans. Whether you're paying $99.99/month or just trying LiveStats out on the free plan, now you can see where your visitors are on the most beautiful world map you've ever laid your eyes on.

Enjoy,

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

Here's some stuff we've been saying on Twitter, some of our favourite links, and some nice things people have been saying about us.

Don't design for early adopters - brilliant piece by @chockenberry: http://bit.ly/cCSbkq

Apple seems to be as leaky as a sinking ship right now - at this rate we'll be able to write Steve's WWDC keynote for him.

Seth Godin at his best - The last 10%, that's what people pay for: http://bit.ly/d9wFia

When the question being asked is "Windows XP or 7" you know Microsoft screwed up horribly somewhere in between. (via @mattpat)

Facebook redesigns privacy centre: http://bit.ly/diyz2p

Another beautiful site using #LiveStats: http://thebrandingfarm.com/ Welcome on board @thebrandingfarm!

MobileMe Mail Beta, a Visual Walkthrough by @spiralstairs - beautiful: http://bit.ly/c1FHYs

It's reassuring to see that even Steve Jobs has to deal with these kinds of email rants: http://bit.ly/cC9Zzn (via @sophiestication)

Loving how this modern software company have integrated Twitter into their sexy website: http://bit.ly/cJ3kuD (via @leigh & @Si)

New on Smashing - CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 Help Cheat Sheets (PDF): http://bit.ly/bA7Sx6 (That's us! Thanks again @smashingmag)

"http://www.gosquared.com/ #canofawesome" - thanks so much @th3hamburgler!

An absolute abundance of quality, free vectors for download on @lovevectorfree: http://www.lovevectorfree.com/

Developing with #Wordpress? Get this awesome Help Sheet-as-a-wallpaper by @quicklycode: http://bit.ly/ax6Crw

Really liking the Lobster font by @pabloimpallari: http://www.impallari.com/lobster/

Beautiful piece of writing by @zeldman: http://www.zeldman.com/2010/05/11/life-is-beautiful

Follow us

@GoSquared
@JamesJGill
@TheDeveloper
@Floopily

We're pleased to bring you the 3rd version of the GoSquared CSS Help Sheet, and a brand new CSS3 Help Sheet.

With the VI Help Sheet we released last week, we redesigned our Help Sheets for a much better result when printed on paper, while ensuring they still don't look too shabby on the screen of your Mac, PC, iPhone or iPad.

We've put together a Help Sheet specifically for CSS3. We've covered most of the basic options now possible with CSS3, but there's a ton more we couldn't fit in, so we've linked to a couple of handy articles such as this post by 456 Berea Street on CSS Selectors, and this piece by Paul Irish on Font-Face.

So what are you waiting for? Download them. Print them. Stick 'em on the wall and get creative!

New to GoSquared?

For those of you new to GoSquared - we design and engineer web applications for site owners to monitor their traffic and earn more money from their Site. We run Liquidicity, the blog on design & technology to share our thoughts and content with wonderful people like you in the hope that one day you'll use our products.

As always, if you find any errors or typos or anything like that, please drop us a note in the comments.

Get the CSS2 Help Sheet PDF (230KB)

Get the CSS3 Help Sheet PDF (221KB)

Read the rest of this entry »

It's been too long since we gave away anything on Liquidicity, so here's a few icons we've been working on.

Unlike our previous icons, these aren't vector. Don't cry yet. They're pixel perfect and were made using an app I've been using and learning for many months now called DrawIt. The main benefit to making icons at the size you need them (not as vectors) is that from the start you can ensure the icons look great and are crystal clear at the size they need to be displayed.

Apple Wired Keyboard

Apple wired keyboard icon - PNG without shadow, PNG with shadow, and original DrawIt file download.

Apple Wireless Keyboard

Apple wireless keyboard icon - PNG without shadow, PNG with shadow, and original DrawIt file download.

Apple MacBook-Style Keyboard

Apple MacBook-style keyboard icon. This product doesn't actually exist, but we made it anyway. PNG without shadow, PNG with shadow, and original DrawIt file download.

Apple MacBook Pro

Apple MacBook Pro 15" icon. A whole MacBook Pro, free to download. PNG without shadow, PNG with shadow, and original DrawIt file download.

I'm using DrawIt more and more for interface work on our LiveStats application. I highly recommend the app if you do a lot of user interface design and need your icons, buttons, and other elements to be pixel perfect. Pieter Omvlee is a fantastic developer and provides fantastic support. Something Adobe will never, ever, EVER give.

We hope you like the icons.

Today we're incredibly excited to announce an entirely new product from GoSquared - FutureStats.

We've been working on our second app for many many months, and we think you're gonna love the features we've been sweating over. FutureStats is the ideal companion to anyone already using LiveStats.

Spike Prediction

One of the most challenging issues of the web 2.0 era - the traffic spike. Until now it's been impossible to predict when you're going to receive your next flood of traffic from Digg, a Fireball, or Twitter. Worry no more.

Twitter Reaction Forecast

Worried that what you're writing will be controversial, poorly received, or simply just ignored? Find out in advance how the Twitterverse will react to your Site's content, even if you haven't written it yet.

Member Prediction

Accurately predict the number of new users you'll receive tomorrow, next week, or next month. Even find out their names and emails before they ever signed up. All you need is FutureStats.

PredictionEngine

Patent Pending technology to predict the future of your Site's Stats with 100% Accuracy.

As you may know, dividing by zero can have dangerous, dramatic, and undesirable effects. Don't believe us? Go and try it out, but don't write to us if your computer explodes and destroys your entire neighbourhood). At GoSquared we discovered that if we divided by zero under specially controlled conditions, we could create a small but effective wormhole in the fabric of time and space. By maintaining this wormhole in a high-energy plasma state we are able to pass electrical signals between here and any time in the future we wish. And by ensuring that the other end of the wormhole is continuously connected to a high-speed internet connection, we are able to retrieve browsing data for websites at any time in the future.

In order to cover our energy costs, however, we are not able to enter the product into a free beta to begin with*. From today we are introducing a basic plan (two weeks into the future) which starts at $50,000/month, scaling up to our unlimited plan (watch your browsing stats right up to the end of the universe), priced at just $1337bn**.

Update

This, in case you didn't pick up on it and were blown away by our sudden ability to predict the future, was an April Fools joke. We'll keep the page online, though, for the memories.

We don't often write about other sites, but this month on Elite by Design, there's a series of interviews that are simply too good to miss. So to ensure you check them out - we thought we'd dedicate a post to them.

There's a massive collection of interviews from some of the greatest, more influential designers in our industry right now including:

Elliot Jay Stocks
Adelle Charles
Jonathan Snook
Jon Hicks
Fabio Sasso

and over 50 more awesome designers.

Some of my favourites so far are the interview with Fabio for his advice on how to establish yourself as a designer, David Appleyard for letting us in on how he manages so many sites at once, and Jacob Gube for talking about his experience writing a book on Moo Tools while also managing the Six Revisions blog.

I don't think enough people realise how much effort has been put into organising so many interviews with so many inspiring members of the design community. It's like getting the top 50 music acts in the chart right now to perform live on your own radio station. Go visit Elite by Design and read a couple of these wonderful interviews - learn from their success stories and their mistakes and take all the free advice they're willing to share.

LiveStats 2 is here.

We're thrilled today to announce the all new LiveStats 2 - real-time analytics completely rebuilt from the ground up for faster performance, more accurate results, and a more powerful interface.

Here's the press release we sent out this morning:

LiveStats 2 pushes the innovations made in the first version to the next level. This update introduces second-by-second live monitoring of all visitors so there’s no guess work left in discovering whether people are on your Site, actively reading your content, or just have it open in the background.

By monitoring your Site’s traffic in absolute real-time, LiveStats can detect whether a visitor is actively focused on any page on your Site, and whether they have more than one page of your Site open at the same time in separate tabs and windows. You can even see which of the pages the visitor is looking at, gaining an insight into their habits by watching as they jump from page to page in real-time. No other analytics package, real-time or otherwise, offers the ability to view a user as they travel through your Site like this. The experience puts you in the observation tower, while enabling you to observe details that would otherwise only have been achievable by looking over a visitor’s shoulder.

Understanding where your visitors are coming from is easier than ever with the new Map View. As soon as a visitor loads a page on your Site, LiveStats will pinpoint their location to city level accuracy on a beautiful full screen map. We’ve even built in a dynamic daylight line so you can see how your visitors browse your Site at different times of the day in different regions.

The interface of LiveStats is built entirely in open web technologies. We’ve embraced jQuery and Raphaël javascript libraries to build a user experience that many have assumed was Flash based. The simplicity and ease of use of the LiveStats interface completely belies the power and information that can be gained from it.

We believe LiveStats is the best way to find out what’s happening and who’s on your Site right now.

LiveStats is available to everyone and does not require a download. You can sign up for a basic plan to try out the service for free. Premium plans that offer some of the great features of LiveStats 2 such as Map View and Event Tracking start at just $5.99 per month. The ideal plan for most small to medium sized website owners is available for $9.99 per month while there is a professional plan for larger websites and corporate clients for $49.99. These are aggressively priced plans for a service that outclasses our rivals in the real-time analytics market.

As a note to you, our wonderful existing members who have enjoyed LiveStats for free up until now - we will not automatically start charging you. All existing Accounts will remain free for the next 30 days on an unlimited plan, but at the end of these 30 days, if you haven't upgraded to a paid plan, all Sites in your Account will automatically be downgraded to the free LiveStats plan that tracks 5,000 pageviews per month. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time and there are no nasty contracts.

We'll write again this week to explain in more detail how LiveStats 2 is a giant leap forward from version 1. We're really proud of how far we've come, and we believe that this latest release pushes us even further ahead in the real-time web analytics industry.

Enjoy.

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team