Please don’t show me graphs that place the days in order, in a bar chart.

I know it’s convenient, but it’s useless.

Every week I get a chart like this, and every week Wednesday is after Tuesday (and Tuesday’s on the phone with me). Highlighting web traffic in this way is not helpful. All it tells me is that once again, the weekend was sort of slow.

Or consider this chart, the standard comparison display, from Google Analytics.

This chart is only useful if both months begin on the same day–once every seven months, give or take. Why isn’t the computer smart enough to line the dates up for us?

Week on week and month on month matter a great deal online (and off). Daily charts, on the other hand, just confuse things.