Monitoring website traffic?

Building a website for my boss, and he's asked me for a counter for his website. I hate counters, I think they're ugly and tacky, I basically refuse to put one on a website that I build as it also reflects my work along with their needs.

I tried my friend Google, and came up with some analytics programs/software, but that seems a bit much for what he's asking for. I was wondering if there's anything that can monitor website traffic, and provide me with a counter that's not visible to the customers of the web site. Thanks in advance for the help.

Depending on your hosting environment, there might already be a traffic analysis tool available to you. Do you have access to your servers managment console/control panel?

In any case, the art/science of discerning traffic is fuzzy, at best. A simple page counter can be completely misleading. Most folks put those things on their sites for the benefit of users, not owners.

Well he insists on being able to see how much traffic he receives from the site, he wants to know how much of a difference this website is making for his company because he plans to invest more money into it if the potential is there.

The site is hosted through Godaddy, and yes, I'm able to access everything on the console/control panel, as he wants nothing to do with it because he knows nothing about it. I browsed through their website, but never preformed a search about it because I assumed that it would just be easier to find a 3rd party developer.

Well, there are two problems here.

1) If he doesn't have previous stats on traffic, how will he compare whatever new information he gets?

2) A page counter is, for all intents and purposes, useless information. I can't stress that enough.

I've never used GoDaddy's hosting services, so I can't know what tools are available. However, I can't imagine how it would be easier to acquire, install and use something instead of using what is already there.

Maybe someone else can give you a better solution. Sorry.

It's no problem. I appreciate the help you have given me. I do understand that a counter is pretty much useless as friends/family can view the site which increases the counter and basically makes it pointless. He's just stuck in his ways.

He's a long time family friend so I already know he's hard headed and wants his ways, so I think rather than agree to it, I'll have to break it down into what he can understand. Having your post to show him might also help, as another web-designer saying the same thing I am might actually get to him. I was just trying to look into options to please him.