use cgi;
$count=43274112;
print $count . "\n";
$count = $count = $count + 103;
print "ohmigod, I can hardly keep up. " . $count . "\n";
[download]

Joke, of course.

More seriously, scripted counters tend NOT to count visitors very well. For two simple cases, even if one assumes that every visitor enters at the default page, that vistor will be counted twice if s/he leaves and comes back and may (depending on the sophistication of the design of the counter program) be counted if s/he browses from the default page to a sub-page and back again.

You could deal with some of this with cookies (but some users will reject them), and if you have "no clue how to do it" then even with the wealth of nodes here on cookies, you have a serious learning curve to climb. One can hope you will do so, and the Monks will undoubtedly be pleased to help. On asking for help and Perl Monks Approved HTML tags provide many hints on how to ask for that.

And (but NOT as an alternative; rather, as a supplement) You may wish to look at some previous advice on a similar question, at Visitors Counter.

On the other hand, most hosts will provide some sort of stats, often in a directory so named. Some of those will offer (pretty) graphic data: visitors, "unique" (not really) IPs, etc. If the object is merely to get a general idea (and give the boss something to look at), those should suffice.

I second the recommendation of AWStats, which I prefer over webalizer.

It deserves mention that the stats available on the HTTP server are absolutely NOT accurate, and interpretation of them is very subjective. While these statistics packages can give you an indication of what's going on, it's a fuzzy indication at best. (Google Analytics is also quite fuzzy, so this caveat doesn't imply an endorsement of Google Analytics.)

Define "absolutely NOT accurate". Barring server misconfiguration, disk/filesystem failure, or deliberate tampering with the logs, I don't see any way that the web server logs can be any less than absolute in their accuracy regarding which pages were served, at what time, and to which IP addresses.

Referrers and user agents are the only things I can think of off the top of my head which go into my logs and are susceptible to spoofing by users¹ and those shouldn't significantly affect the accuracy of log-based analysis.

Absolutely agreed that it's all in the interpretation, though.

¹ OK, technically users could spoof their IP address as well, but that's a relatively sophisticated technique and they're not going to be able to see the returned page if they do it, so I'm comfortable with ignoring them for these purposes.

Another option is to run a program on the web server log files.

and


Have a look at Google Analytics

If your visitor is like me, FF+NoScript are configured to deny Google Analytics (as well as *.doubleclick.net and others of their ilk). Your logs will give you a much better indication of your visitors without requiring the user to allow JS from other sites.
My attitude on this is that if you want to track me as a visitor that is fine. If others wish to base their income model on something that does not benefit me, they have to stand in line. Therefore, if your site will not allow me to navigate without sending data to external (to your company) sites, you better have something I can't live without.
Just my $0.01 (exchange rate is going to heck) ;-)