Before I launched this site I setup a free Crazy Egg account to track mouse clicks on the front page. For those who don't know, Crazy Egg provides a service that tracks user's mouse clicks on a particular page to "get a clear picture of where your visitors are clicking."
The heat map is my favorite feature because it clearly shows where people are going on your site. My Mint stats tell a similar tale, but not as clearly as the heat map. Also, the data that Mint collects include a lot of my activity on the administration side of the site. I use it more for unique visitor count, referrals and recent activity (at which it does a superb job).
Currently about 350 clicks have been tracked, and as you can see in Figure 1 the majority (one-third) have been on the link to the Portfolio.
Figure 1: The "warmer" the color the more clicks in that region.The second most clicked element, to my surprise, was the search button. I didn't realize how heavily users rely on the search box to find content.
It is data like this that helps you shape your site to better serve your users. I now know not to regulate the search-results page to a last-minute task thrown together before the launch of a site, but to spend time designing the page to provide the user with clear results.
