makaveev.com

I hate web counters. Statistics is totally different thing.

Why I hate counters? So many reasons, I can say. Here are a few:

• custom web counters - if the site administrator has access to the database(or the file) in which the total website visits are saved, he can easily change the numbers to whatever he wants(so, after that, the website users will see that the website was visited by 10,000 visitors in the last 24 hours)
• free web counters - most(or maybe all...) of the free counters on the Internet are producing invalid markup(I saw even <font> tags) which markup can't be changed because the counter will stop working
• sometimes, if the web counter provider's website is down(or slower than average), this affects to the loading of the website which uses a counter from this provider(so, some of the users maybe will think that something from this website is not loaded yet, which is almost true...)

But all we(the web designers and developers) know that the client is king! So, if the client wants a web counter, you can read him the above list and then you can tell him that he already have a counter(on statistics pages; more beautiful than the one he saw yesterday on .com).

And one last thing - if the counter produces invalid markup, you can be sure that your website will not pass the W3C validator test for valid markup.
But after all - this is your choice!