There are several things that designers often leave out of their projects… often, security, privacy, administrative interfaces and monitoring are things that are addressed later, if ever. That’s a very bad position to be in when you’re designing network protocols - if the protocol is implemented by more than one organization, or if it’s widely successful, it can be very difficult to get an update out which addresses these areas. Compatibility issues can also be a killer problem.

Web sites often have the same issues. Sometimes the administrative interface to a web site is simply an admin typing SQL commands to its database. Quite often security is almost an afterthought and there’s little consideration paid to it beyond requiring users to login with a password that’s likely stored in cleartext in the site’s database.

If you want your web site to be successful, you really need to know who your users are and how they’re using it. From a very basic perspective, if you’re designing the site with the assumption that everyone will have 1024×768 resolution or better and it turns out that 80% of your users are still at 800×600, you’ve made a grievous error and you’re likely not to have a clue why 80% of your users never come back unless you keep track of this information.

You may want to collect information to help with the design of your web pages and you may it for marketing purposes as well. Tracking things like users’ geographic locations, where inbound links are coming from, resolution and color depth of users’ displays, the browsers and platforms users are using, and how long users spend on the site and which pages they look at, can be extremely useful in deciding where to invest your development and marketing resources.

Your web server likely tracks some of it in its logs, and if you have access to the logs and to tools like awstats, you may be able to get some information on your users - and for some people this is a fine and appropriate solution. A simpler solution for everyone else is to use a tool like Google Analytics.
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I use two computers for development - a portable (MacBook Pro) and a desktop (Mac Pro). It’s helpful having the two different environments, and it’s helpful having a backup in case one of them has a problem. It does open up all sorts of issues about keeping things in sync.

I primarily use Firefox as my development web browser, for reasons I’ll get into in another article. I keep a set of bookmarks in Firefox for all the blogs and web sites I’m working with, as well as other online tools that I use (Google AdSense, Google Analytics, LinkShare…), and Firefox remembers login information for all my accounts.

It’s a pain in the ass duplicating things across instances of Firefox.

That’s where Google comes in. Google has provided a free Firefox extension which will synchronize Firefox’s bookmarks, cookies, passwords, history and even open tabs and windows, across instances of Firefox.
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