Who are you, and where did you come from? [documentation Web sites]

One of the big challenges of technical writing is to gather feedback to help make decisions. Traditionally, feedback is scarce and mostly negative. The Web offers the possibility to draw lessons from actual usage patterns on a documentation site, with information about success as well as failure, and a large sample size. This paper discusses the implementation and findings from a database-backed Web site that collects such usage information. The site offers technical documentation and is used by a wide variety of product customers. We use the data to help improve the web site and underlying information. The paper discusses how to collect usage data, what data to collect, and presents examples of data and associated conclusions drawn from our Web site