Showcasing the usage of FusionCharts in SeeTheStats

We have always wanted to showcase innovative uses of FusionCharts. Firstly, to get you all excited about our product (and increase our sales) and secondly, to inspire you to explore the power of FusionCharts (and to increase our sales). We started off with the new Case Studies section on the website for this purpose, and now we would like to do this on the blog as well. In this post, we will check out the usage of FusionCharts in a newly launched web service called SeeTheStats. It is a service that makes Google Analytics stats available to the public in a fast, simple and free way.

The idea behind SeeTheStats

“There are two shortcomings in Google Analytics,” says Krzysztof Jurczyk, co-owner of the service, when asked why he decided to come up with SeeTheStats. “If you want to share your stats in Google Analytics with someone, the other person must have a Google account. More importantly, you will have to share all the stats. If you want to share only the number of unique visitors, but do not want to show your best keywords, you just cannot do that with Google Analytics. So when you need to show selected stats to potential customers and advertisers and get their attention, SeeTheStats is the way to go.”

The FusionCharts advantage

“Reporting plays a crucial role in a service dealing with analytics. So we spent quite some time looking for charting solutions but finally decided to go with FusionCharts because of the excellent look and feel. All the other solutions look simple plain boring compared to it,” adds Jurczyk. Apart from the look and feel, the SeeTheStats team were pleased with the included PHP and JavaScript classes, which they have used extensively. “Import from database (addDataFromDatabase), generation of XML files based on defined chart parameters (getXML), export to JPG files on server side (FC_Rendered together with a customized myCallBackFunction found on FusionCharts forum) — all these are included by default in FusionCharts classes and saved us a lot of time during development.” Another unique feature of the reporting is the Zoom feature that they have incorporated using Scroll Charts. The scroll charts are fed with the same data as the normal chart, but with the scroll chart users can see stats for a particular date range in more details.

Concluding remarks

“The FusionCharts Forum was the most valuable source of technical information about FusionCharts. Whether we had a problem with JavaScript, chart attributes or with UTF-8 characters, we found quick and efficient solutions in the forum.” SeeTheStats development team is looking at enhancing the reporting functionalities in the future. “We are looking to add trend lines to make data visualization even more meaningful, and also allow comparison of several sites on a single chart (as Alexa does).” We at FusionCharts will definitely be keeping an eye out for that.