I just discovered StatCounter.com — easily the most interesting and useful stats counter/compiler/display that I’ve found. In the past, I’ve used the stats from W3 Schools, but their results are skewed heavily toward computer/developer/ programmer geeks, since those results are based on traffic to the W3 Schools site.
At StatCounter, you can filter results by time period and geographic region. You can specify what type of stat you’re looking for: browser type, operating system, screeen resolution, mobile vs. desktop, search engine and more. Here’s the complete list:
This data is incredibly important for web designers: knowing what size of screen your end users will be using and what browsers your site does (or doesn’t) need to work on can help you design more intelligently.
Of course, the statistics for web traffic vary with every site, and the best data, if you can get it, is the statistics for your particular website. But if that’s not available, this is the next best thing.
And if you need to share your data from StatCounter, you can export it as a jpg or a csv, like this:
Or you can grab the embed code to display it on your web page. (Works on wordpress.org sites, but not wordpress.com sites.)
To put things in perspective, though, I’ll end with a quote attributed to Mark Twain:
There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Jana Snyder 