Verification and validation keys for steering

Moving in open source web development spaces is moving in a world of change and agility. Grounding for web publishing and portal development can be found in measurements and observations about actions and outcomes.

We have used and are using long term metrics for our own web publishing contexts serving to sell our services:

The business volume we get from our websites
The level of activity on our websites, and paths taken by visitors

When you are building an intranet/internet portal, you will probably also need some measurements to answer questions on:

Internal internet and intranet usage
Managing E-mail related traffic as a (re)useful resource instead of as a tyrant taking away time and focus.
File sizes and volumes
Visitor demographics into categories depending on overall activity level across all other categories

And when fitting business portals to an individual context, for agile development verification and validation:

Mean time to install and configure or develop your site, a story, a change to your site or one of its pages.
Ease of navigation, ease of use, and the error arrival rate, defect threshold, security breaches and mean time to repair/upgrade
Cost per story to develop, cost per site to maintain/own/operate
Incremental cost to attract more visitors; incremental cost to increase business volume.