Imagine you have a web site with two pages, both pages containing text and 3 images.

If someone comes opens the home page, clicks to the second page and then leaves you will have;

1. 1 visit
2. 2 page views
3. 8 Hits

They have visited the website and no matter how many pages they look at, it is one visit until the session is closed. Sessions are usually ended by the user closing the browser or clicking through to another website.

During that visit they viewed two pages, the home page as one and then the second page.

Each page records 4 hits, the 3 images plus the HTML page containing the images and text. The server has produced 4 files in total for the home page, but because they opened the second page that also contains 3 images and another HTML page, that adds another 4 hits.

A website should, again similarly to the real world, initialise the connection to the person viewing in an approachable, but not to overwhelming manner, do the introduction in the form of registration, giving some information as well as request it, and then jump straight into the personalised options for the user. Show them a personalised version of the home page for example.

Once the connection is made between the person and the website, the website needs to than remember that person as best as possible, sometimes you can’t of course. But it should be as easy as, “what was your name again? Oh, that’s right, now I remember! Here’s the stuff we talked about last time”.