Go back to basics while you’re designing your site. If you’re a business with a storefront, what are your hours, and are you closed on holidays? Restauranteurs, is your full menu available and up-to-date (and bonus: is it viewable on a mobile device in case someone is debating options with their friends at the last minute)? If you have a hotel, what’re your rates (and do you offer club or affiliation discounts)? What’s the best way for someone to reach you if they have a question or problem?

Still having trouble thinking of what to include? Try these tips.

• Make a list of questions your customers have asked you. What are the top ten questions you (or your customer-facing employees or representatives) are asked about your business? Are the answers to those questions easy to find on your site? (This is a great way to come up with ideas for blog or social media posts, too, by the way.)
• Walk through your site with a couple of your best customers. Do you have a good relationship with some of your frequent customers? Sit down with them for a few minutes and ask what they’d like to see on your site. It’ll give you feedback from people who care about your business – and it shows your customers that what they think is important to you!
• Go to a competitor’s site and act like a customer. Pretend you’re going to a similar business for the first time. What information do you want to know? Can you find what you need? Now go to your site and look for the same things. Are they there?

Keeping your users in mind shows that you respect their time and their patronage. Create a design for your site that’s tailored to your shoppers, even if that means explaining the basics of what you do to them. They’ll appreciate the time you take for them!

When we launched our newly-updated event site, eleventary!, we wanted to make it easy for people who organize events to market what they were doing and reach a larger audience. After all, the more people who know about what’s going on, the better chance you’ll have a great event.

Here are a few tips to help you reach a larger audience for events.

• Promote your event online. If you’re not promoting your event on the web, you’re missing out on a huge (and free) opportunity to reach attendees. We hope you’ll use eleventary! to spread the word about your events, of course, but there are plenty of options available. Check your area to find sites focused on your town or region as well.
• Make a Facebook event. In addition to listing on event directories, Facebook events are great because they’re easy to share (and people will see when their friends are going to an event). It also lets you see who plans to attend to an event.
• Tell people details about the event on its page. Is the event family-friendly? Is it open to everyone or does it require membership in an organization? Is registration required or will you have ticket sales at the door?

Advertising your event for free online takes a little more time, but it has the opportunity to really expand your reach. Start today!

I think I have a unique perspective on this. Born, raised and still reside in rural Maine, spend most my free time going to more secluded places in the state. From Mount Katahdin to miles off-shore to Moosehead Lake to the Machias River area to the northwestern corner, I have spend every vacation I have taken but two in this state. Here are few places I go and what I have found for cell service.

Baxter State Park

Here is a general rule of thumb in BSP, if you are above the treeline, your phone will work, but not below it. You can make phone calls and upload photos to facebook from the Baxter summit. In fact, first person to post a photo to facebook of yourself at the sign at the top, has been used to race to top using different trails by many.

On the way to the BSP southern entrance, if you have something important to check on, you should do it shortly after driving under the railroad tracks, because your coverage will start to get spotty and will be gone by the time you get to Ambajejus Lake.

Within 10 Miles of I-95

Your good, 99% of the time. It may give you just a slightly hard time in between Sherman and Island Falls, but normally it works.

North-West of Millinocket

Nearly non-existent. Don’t plan on having coverage of any point that is both north and west of Millinocket. There are just a few spots on the Golden Road and a few spots in Baxter State Park that are the exception here.

Off-shore

Works surprisingly well. I wish I had measured with my gps, but I am going to guess like 10 miles out in most places, your phone will still work.

Washington County

I learned this one the hard way, getting stuck in the mud while smelting. Another story for another day.

If you can mentally picture a square. The left side of the square is route 2, from Lincoln to the Bangor area, then the top of the square is route 6 from Lincoln to Topsfield. The right side of the square is route 1, Topsfield to Calais. The bottom of the square is route 9 from Calais to Eddington (and we need route 178 to make a complete square if are serious about your geometry). If you can mentally see that square, there is coverage on the edges of the square in most places, but nearly no coverage inside the square.

Moosehead Lake

Coverage around Moosehead is pretty weak, but it’s there. Slow internet and repeating your self on the phone is normal.   On the places within a few miles of the lake it’s somewhat acceptable, but step back from the lake a few miles and it gets spotty. On the water coverage is great, which I am grateful for, once was stranded on Sugar Island with a broken boat and a very pregnant wife. Again, another story for another day.

Actually this is true of Rangeley lakes and Flagstaff Lake. Coverage is okay close to water’s edge and on the water.

In Closing

This is not an exhaustive list, only a summary of common places with iffy coverage in Maine. I have found texting is the last thing to give out too. When voice is not working or too choppy and data has disappeared, texting works right until the very end of coverage. Another hint is elevation. Sounds crazy, but standing on a big rock and holding the phone over your head will sometimes make the difference.

Summer Holidays

Memorial Day is always the third Monday in May, of course the actual DATE in May changes.  The 4th of July is, well the 4th of July, sometimes it is a Monday, Tuesday and this year it is a Thursday.  Labor Day is always the FIRST Monday in September.  Memorial Day and Labor Day dates always fluctuate.  This year both are “early”, or at least feel that way.  At Sephone, as well as many businesses in Maine summer is a time when folks take vacations.  Maine is called VACATIONLAND and many of us that live here feel inundated with relatives and friends coming to spend a long weekend or a week.  We all just HOPE that the weather is going to cooperate.

But what happens when it doesn’t?

Maybe you are in your old hometown or maybe it is your “significant others?”  Perhaps it is in a place you haven’t been before? You had all kinds of plans, whale watch, a hike or a bike ride in a national park but DRAT!  It RAINED!  (And if you are in Maine this weekend, it is going to rain right through until Monday!)

Eleventary! search window on smartphone.

There are only so many movies

Don’t fret about something to do when the weather decides to change your plans.  Sephone updated it’s event App.  We wrote about it last year.   And you can download it to your phone and find everything from sporting events, concerts to museum exhibits.  AND it is FREE to use.

Having your own event?

If you have an event you would like to put in and you would like to have about 100,000 (and counting) eyes on it, for FREE than eleventary is for you!  A benefit, garage sale, you want to let the locals and the tourists know about it – you can and all for FREE.

Eleventary is in the Google Play Store as well as the App Store for iPhone.  (Did I say for FREE?)

Download it today and Nationwide you can see what is fun to do wherever you are!

Registrant Contact

This is the person or business for whom the domain is registered.  For domains that Sephone owns, the Registrant Contact would be:

Sephone Interactive Media
P.O. Box 2357
Bangor, ME 04402

If you registered your domain under your business name, then yours should be your business info.  If you did it under your name, then it should be your name under the Registrant Contact.

Technical Contact

The technical contact is usually the person/company who is in charge of managing your website, or where the domain points.  This information can be yours, or your web hosting companies info, either is usually acceptable.

Administrative Contact

The Administrative (admin) Contact is the person who has access to manage your domain.  This again is usually your or your business’s information.

Most of the time these emails will offer you a way to check you whois information through a link in the email.  Click that and verify the information is correct, if it is, you do not need to do anything.  If something is incorrect, contact the person who has access to manage  your domain and have them update the information.  If their is not way for you to check the whois information from the email you can use the MXToolBox.  To use this tool enter your domain and then click lookup.  Once the results are loaded, click the “whois lookup” link below the results.

Here is an example of what this email might look like:

This is an example from our registrar, Network Solutions.  The email you receive may be similar, but not exact, or may be completely different from what I have presented here.

All logos and trademarks used in this post are those of their respective owners.

You know it, it goes something like “If anything can go wrong, will go wrong at the worst possible moment.”  If you Google it, you will see lots of variations of the saying but the long and short of it is that usually when something bad happens it happens when you have the least amount of time to fix it and as we all know, there often is a string of bad things that happen in a row.

Insurance

You buy insurance for your home, auto or property hoping you don’t need it.  If you do, it is there for you to help you rebuild whatever broke or was destroyed in the first place, right?

Passwords

The last couple weeks we have been hammering away at Passwords and the importance of using good ones that are the hardest to crack by a hacker or some random robot that is trying to get at your information.  This could be personal information like, name, address, etc.  and worse your credit card or bank account.  Some people use very obvious passwords or don’t change the password that was given to them that was meant to be easy so they could go and change it themselves.

Guilty as Charged

There is a groan that comes out of me when my “favorite” or easiest to remember doesn’t fit some website’s rules.  I’ll admit it.  Once you come up with something that satisfied the geeks of the website developer, “How in the world are we to remember it?”

Social Media

In the Social Media class that is taught at the New England School of Communications, part of Husson University , one assignment is to document your Social Graph.  Simply put, a Social Graph is a graphic representation of all the places you go on line,  where you engage in social media (Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, various blogs you may comment on,  etc.) and have a user name and password that is linked to it. This also includes places you shop like Amazon and iTunes.  Your credit card information is stored there.  Keep that in mind.

“Roll Your Own”

Make your own Social Graph.  As I have said in many many posts, it doesn’t have to be fancy and it doesn’t have to be on line or in your computer.  I learned the hard way by storing everything in my “keychain” on my laptop and when it crashed – there went all my stuff. Files, folder and yes my user names and passwords for everything.  I now have an old fashioned “Bob Cratchett” style system (He is from the movie The Scrooge,) with my Social Media Sites listed by name of site along with type of site, audio, video, blogs, networking, shopping sites stored there.  I also have included the user name and passwords there too.

Living Social

You may say, “I don’t use many sites, I don’t need to store that stuff anywhere.”  Last week, Living Social got hacked.  If you didn’t know, it is a site that emails you “the deal of the day” that comes into your inbox with two or three money saving things there.  50 million people were effected, were you one of them?  Do you remember your user name and password from that site or ones like it?  Could it be the same user name and password that you use for all kinds of other sites? Do you even know how many?

Going Forward

Inevitably, your password will be compromised, hacked whatever you want to call it – eventually.  At the worst possible moment.  ”Murphy” is always right about this.

A few tips:

• As you use a site and log in – record it in a notebook or on notecards and put it in a safe place where only you can access it.
• When you go to another site, do the same.
• Consider changing your passwords occasionally.

If you get hacked you can go to your notebook, etc.  and find what you need to change easily and if you use it in multiple places you know where to go to change it.

Often folks call us and they want to start using Social Media to promote their business.  All their other business friends use it, they have a Facebook account so it is time to “make some money” with something “everybody” is using.  Get your business some eyeball time.

A few months ago, I wrote a post about Social Media and having a goal.  Probably I should have written this post first before that one but I didn’t so here goes…

Open House

If you were trying to sell your house, your realtor may suggest an Open House.  You spruce up the place. Clean up the clutter, maybe slap some paint on the doorways or walls.  The tired old place looks pretty nice and it didn’t take much time or money. You are ready for people to come in and see AND BUY!

Your Website or Home Base

The same as an Open House, before you decide to use Social Media or even run a traditional ad, you should check out your website or any other places people may look for you online.  For now, let’s stick with your website.

Attention

Social Media just like traditional advertising calls attention to your business.  If it doesn’t,  you are wasting your money, right?  You want people to know about you.  If your radio ad is on and someone is driving down the road and hears it if they are interested they will call you or look you up on line. Traditional ad mediums are steps away from the potential client learning about you.  They have to stop what they are doing or get where they are going to act on seeking your business out.

When using Social Media you reach the potential client where they can very quickly and easily find out what you are about.  They are in front of their computer or on their smartphone and with a click or two they are on your website.

What Will They See?

Will they see what you want them to see?  Is it up to date?  Does it look like your business is professional?  Are you ready for the Open House or should you do some sprucing up to the old website? What does it look like on a mobile device?

Getting Your Money’s Worth

It is always an interesting conversation when someone explains to me how social media doesn’t work.  I listen intently and throw in  a “When was the last time you updated your website?” or maybe a “What platform are you using?”  Often, they think I am trying to throw my hat into the ring for an update to their website.  And though Sephone is capable and would love to do it, I ask because if someone is woo’ed into checking out your business because of a Facebook post or a Tweet and they see information and design from 2005, why would they call you?

Don’t Blame the Messenger

It isn’t Social Media and perhaps that radio or TV ad campaign didn’t work because of the same reason. You went to the trouble and expense of inviting potential buyers to your “Open House” and when they got there they found a shack.

So ask yourself…“Is my website or blog ready for social media?”

The Sephone Password Policy

We’re beginning to enforce our Sephone Password Policy for user accounts in datAvenger Pro, and we’ll expand these requirements to our other products in the future. Alan covered some of the basics of password security in a post from last year, and our official Sephone policy is very similar to what he suggests in that post. We’ll be enforcing the following requirements for passwords:

• At least 8 characters long
• At least one lower-case letter
• At least one upper-case letter
• At least one number

Of course, you can make your password as long as you like, and you can use special characters like %, #, and * to make your password even more secure. Every user password needs to adhere to at least the rules we’ve listed, though.

Because we already encrypt passwords for user accounts, we’re not able to check to make sure the password you already have meets these rules. When you log into one of our services that includes these new password requirements, you may be prompted to re-enter your password to make sure it’s acceptable.

The reasons behind the change

We know that remembering strong passwords can be tough. You may be asking, “Why can’t I just use the name of my dog?”

You’ve probably heard news about accounts on major online sites being hacked lately. Malicious hackers can use programs that check for commonly-used passwords or passwords that are simply English words (something known as a dictionary attack). Once they’ve been able to log into an account, they can deface a site, or if they’re feeling particularly nasty, they can try to gain access to the server or the contents of the database.

These new, more stringent password rules make it tougher for anyone to crack a password and gain access to your administration area. Combined with some upgrades behind the scenes that make your account even more secure, we’re doing everything we can to make sure your site is safe.

If you’re really struggling to create a new password, try this: think of a sentence or quote that you’ll remember, and use the first letter of each word as your password. If you wanted to use one of my favorite quotes from computer scientist Alan Kay, for instance – “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” – your password could be Tbw2ptfi2ii. (Use a different quote that you’d remember, of course!)

Every spring I would like to propose that in addition to changing the batteries in your smoke detectors- to also take the time to check your online assets.  Specifically your revenue generating assets.  For those that have them, that is!

If you still aren’t following, here we go-

If you have an e-commerce website- a site that collects or processes payment information for your business, then this tip is for you.

This applies for sites, services, apps, or portals where you have your banking info recorded, or collect payment info for products or services you offer your customers.  Payment gateways like PowerPay, Authorize.Net, PayPal, TransFirst….. yadda yadda- there are many!

At a minimum we suggest that you:

1. Change your Passwords to the login areas just because you cannot be too careful
2. Verify that you are accepting the credit and debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex, etc) that you wish to accept
3. Review your processor settings for AVS (Address Verification).  AVS is a Visa service to combat fraudulent activity for non-face-to-face transactions by cross-referencing the cardholder’s address information with the card issuer’s records.Because AVS only verifies the numeric portion of the address, certain anomalies like apartment numbers can cause false declines; however, it is reported to be a rare occurrence.AVS verifies the numeric portions of a cardholder’s billing address. For example, if the address is 101 Main Street, Highland, CA 92346, in the United States, AVS will check 101 and 92346. Sometimes AVS checks additional digits such as an apartment number, other times it does not. Cardholders may receive false negatives, or partial declines for AVS from e-commerce verification systems, which may require manual overrides, voice authorization, or reprogramming of the AVS entries by the card issuing bank.For more info on AVS, check with your specific Payment service provider or visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Verification_System

Just by performing these 3 simple and painless checks you will:

• Be more secure
• Provide a better service to your customers
• Reduce potential fraudulent transactions of your products and services

That way, the revenue you earn, is money to buy some bling! Or re-invest in your business, hire more staff or enhance your website.  But that is another blog post.

Happy Spring!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

References

http://www.superwebzone.com/payment-gateway-integration.html – Merchant Processing graphic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Verification_System  – What is AVS

1. Who’s going to contribute?
2. Why do we think we are experts?
3. What the heck are we going to write about?

“Too busy” is a good one too, but we will leave that one off the list for another day.

Since I am on the road and do a lot of face time with business folks, often we get down to the nitty gritty and they confide in me the challenges that they face and with blogging being a relatively new platform for most of us, it is easy to ask those three questions along with a multitude of others.

Just This Week:

I had the opportunity to hear a presentation from a blogger (quite successful one) named Kristi.  She was natural, funny and full of great information.  It was inspiring really.  Others came away from her presentation feeling the same way. If you clicked the link you will see what she is about for yourself.  I felt fortunate for someone as experienced as she is to come and share with us. One of the things she covered very well and even blogged for us about it is about “Creating Content” and 12 Ideas for us to think about.

1. Who’s going to contribute?

You Need a Bird Dog. Depending on the size and type of company you have or the expertise that your company has you may have several people that provide a healthy “voice” to your blog.  You may also have someone that is wonderful at writing or really enjoys doing it. Just like anything the blog itself has to be one person’s priority to “Bird Dog” those to contribute, be willing to write something themselves when there are time constraints to make sure things are published timely.

Remember this blog isn’t about YOU, it is about YOU engaging with your customers and potential customers. Understandably they have expectations or they will read something from someone else (perhaps your competition)  because it is on the “Top of Mind” and inconsistent blog posts means not being there.

2.  Why do we think we are experts?

We all know, when we are on the internet, we are opening ourselves to the world and there are many folks out there in “our business.”  Many bigger than us, many with more resources.  But do they do it OUR WAY?

Do you have a different “take” on challenges  because of where you are located, your customer base, your relationships?  Is your blog a way your company can address frequently asked questions and you can point your customers to that post so they can use it for a resource?

3.  What the heck are we going to write about?

As I mentioned previously, CreativeKristi  has a great list of ideas.  What we ask our clients is: Have you asked the person that answers your phone or your sales people what people ask most about?  You may find some information. Put it up on a white board in front of your face, discussing content as part of your staff meetings is also a good way to come up with ideas.

You may find it is a lot of fun!

*Thank you David Jones of Strong Kennels, Tivoli, TX for the use of your photo.

Generally, this app will be faster and smoother for pages than the native facebook app. You can use the normal mobile app for your personal facebook page and use the pages app to admin your page. Some features and advantages of this app are

• Quicker to post status update
• Better comment moderation
• Easier to read and reply to private messages
• Quicker to get page notifications
• Insights is directly integrated
• Easier to take a photo with your phone and put on page

Before you decide to ditch some of your social media footprint and move to a different service, stop and take a breath. It’s great that there’s some kind of research in the wild trying to figure out the effectiveness of different kinds of online marketing, but just like the TV vs. newspaper vs. direct mail debate that’s been raging for decades, the mix of social media that works for business isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer.

See what’s happening

Unless you’re part of a huge company, you probably won’t have the luxury of having a presence on every major social media site. Social media accounts often don’t cost any money, but they do take your time – more time if you want to do them well.

Have you heard about a hot new social network? Look at a few users’ profiles and see how people interact. Maybe it’s a good fit for your company. Maybe it’s not. Either way, knowing the landscape can help you make the best choice for your campaigns.

Know your audience

The one part of social media that many of these news studies forget to mention is that not every business is the same. Some businesses fit better with certain kinds of social media networks because of the kinds of stuff they do. Businesses that have a strong visual part of their company – artists, craftspeople, restaurants, and more – might do better on Pinterest than a company like us, for example, since a lot of what we talk about on the blog doesn’t always work as an image. (Code isn’t that interesting.)

Where do the customers you want hang out? Are they business-types who scour LinkedIn every day, or would they be checking YouTube for the latest videos from friends? Figure out where the people you want are and then join them there.

Find your social media role models

Whatever network you choose, find people and companies who inspire you. Who are your role models? Who do you want to emulate? (My favorite social network is Twitter, and I like to follow brands like ThinkGeek, JetBlue, and Maine’s own The Gelato Fiasco for inspiration.)

Here’s the dirty little secret of social media: if a company says a social network isn’t effective, it may not be the fault of the service. Maybe the people at the company haven’t found a way to effectively market to customers on that service, or maybe the customers they want aren’t even there.

The moral of this story is simple. Don’t flock to a network just because a study says it’s the next big thing for business. Instead find the best social media match(es) for your business, go there, and be the best you can be.

There are lots of ways to attract people to your company’s website. You might put it on your business cards. You might add the address to a TV or print ad. But many people will also find your site by searching on a search engine like Google.

Searching is used so often that there’s an entire industry focused on something called SEO, or search engine optimization. People who do SEO make sure that your company’s site has the best chance of appearing when someone searches either for your company’s name or for a word or phrase related to your business.

There are many things you can do to make sure you have the best chance to be one of the first results. (Remember, there are lots of pages on the web competing for those same top spots – there’s no way to guarantee you’ll be #1!) But to understand the basics of how search engines work, we’re going to look at two of the biggest factors: incoming links and keywords.

Incoming links

When you do a search for sites, it’s important that the sites that appear as results are trusted and relevant. Google determines this by the number of other websites that link to your company’s site – and how reputable the sites that link to you are (a huge calculation they call PageRank).

Let’s say for example that your company sells bicycles. One day, someone might take a picture of one of your bikes and post it on their own website. Every link to your site helps! Then the local news does a story about your bikes and links to you from the online story. Since the news is trusted by a lot of people, that helps your site even more. Finally, a national magazine for parents reviews one of your bikes and links to your site. That’s a huge boost to your credibility!

In other words, it’s great to have other sites link to your site. The more links to your site, the better – and if you can attract links from really reputable sites, that’ll help your site move to the top of search results.

(Of course, there are some less-than-reputable people who try to cheat the system by spamming web sites with links or doing other deceitful things. Google recognizes these and can penalize sites if they try to cheat!)

Keywords

How will people find your site? In some cases, they’ll search for your company’s name. There are other cases where finding your site isn’t as straightforward.

Imagine that you run a Mexican restaurant in central Maine. Someone around town has a craving for a meal from south of the border, but they’re new to the area and aren’t sure about their options. What will they do for a search?

It’s not easy to tell. Different people will do different searches to find what they want. In our example, they might search for…

• Mexican restaurants in central Maine
• Maine Mexican restaurants
• Mexican food near Bangor
• Mexican dining on the Penobscot River
• best Mexican food in Maine
• burritos in Bangor

Make sure the copy for the pages on your site includes the kinds of words people will use for a search. If someone searches for “Mexican dining” but the word “dining” isn’t on your site, Google might not rank it as highly as a competing restaurant that is an exact match for the search. Just make sure the text on your site sounds natural to your visitors; if you focus on keywords to the point of making your site sound robotic or artificial (something called keyword stuffing), Google may penalize you for trying to cheat.

If you’d like some help with your search engine marketing and optimization, it’s one of the services we offer at Sephone. We’d also be happy to talk more about some of the other things you can do to make Google and other search engines love your site!

Do you have a topic you’d like to see covered in our Very (Very) Basics series? Leave us a comment to let us know!

Responsive design

A website employing responsive design can re-arrange to accommodate a wide range of visitors, from full-size desktop machines to tablets to smart phones. So if your site is www.example.com, and you visit it, no matter from what device, you will see a layout that works for that device.

Mobile websites

A mobile website is an additional website that is specialized for small screens, mainly smart phones. Generally speaking if your website is www.example.com, your mobile site is m.example.com. Again, generally speaking, when mobile devices are detected at www.example.com, they are redirected to m.example.com.

Native apps

Native apps are different than responsive and mobile, in that to use them, you get them from the app area on your smart phone or tablet. For example, Google Play for Android or the Apple App Store for iOS devices. Native apps have the advantage of being able to access things on the phone like the camera or contacts.

Which one is better?

That is the big question and unfortunately the answer is: “it all depends”.

If you site is mostly static content, a mobile website is easiest option. Generally this option will have the greatest compatibility with all mobile browsers and will perform pretty well across the board. The downside is that you now have two sites, which means in some cases, two sites to update if a change is made.

If you update your site somewhat often, responsive design is nice; it’s one site to update. Responsive is often the best option for serious SEO campaigns as well. As far as effort is concerned, generally it’s more effort than a mobile site but less than a native app.

If you need to use the features of the phone, like the camera, accelerometer, or have it download some stuff and work with limited connectivity, this is the ticket. While the most effort of all of these three, it allows the most integration into the phone.

Raw usage data is a really powerful tool that’s often overlooked. One of the great benefits of everything digital is that it’s much, much easier to record different information and patterns compared to how you’d normally collect statistics about customers. In the old days, you might put a sensor on your door to count how many people walked in on a given day, or you might mail out a flyer with a special coupon code and see how many of them were used in your store in order to judge how effective your campaign was.

A few of the many statistics for your sites available in Google Analytics.

Your online presence changes all that. Google Analytics, a free software package we use on many of the sites we build, automatically collects statistics ranging from the operating system and browser your visitors use to how many times they return. Facebook’s Insights for business pages let you see detailed information about how many people have shared each of the posts on your page and even how many people saw them. For custom web and mobile apps, it’s really simple to add almost any sort of usage statistic you’d like to see. Think about how customized reporting could help you find out how your customers use your service!

Data is helpful for us as developers, too, so that we can figure out trends among the visitors to our sites. Last month we posted our biannual State of the Browser report, and among our findings was the amazing statistic that up to one out of every five people visit our sites using a mobile device. This information isn’t really a suprise to us, but it’s helpful to show when we tell friends and customers how important the mobile market really is for their sites.

Have you browsed your site’s usage data lately? Take a look around to see if there’s anything that can help you learn what your visitors want and what you can provide to help them even more.

This blog post aims to clear out confusion about some of the most used terms in our industry. Many of you will know what these are already.

Definitions

So here we go with some simple definitions.

Network
A network is series of computers connected together to be able to communicate with each other.

Internet
The internet is a large series of networks that connects cities, states, nations, and continents. This network allows people to use the web wide web, email, voice communications and data transfer. Although the internet is physically all network hardware, people may refer to things such as, “I found it on the internet”, they mean they found something that the internet enabled them to find, often times on the web.

Internet Access
This is a service people general pay for that provides them a network connection to the internet.

World Wide Web
The World Wide Web has a few different names. They include World Wide Web, often abbreviated with www, which is in turn often pronounced, dub-dub-dub. Sometimes people don’t want to say World Wide Web, so they just say web, these terms are one in the same. The Web is a series of documents, html and images, linked to together by links.

For example, this page you are looking at is an html document, and I can link to another html document like this.

Web Browser
This is a piece of software you use to navigate the Web. The name really gives it away, you use one to browser things on the web. We wrote about Web Browsers before.

More than likely you are looking at this post in a browser. Common browsers include.

• Apple Safari
• Google Chrome
• Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox

Thanks to Alex756 for sharing the photo in this post with a GNU Free Document License!

Quality

When creating content for your website a common mistake is to want to try and optimize this content for the search engines to make it easier of them to rank you high in their results.  Though in some cases this may work, it is important to remember who you are trying to attract, people, customers, users, not search engines.  Knowing the market that you are trying to reach and tailoring your content for that market is key in helping your site rank well.  Quality content is what gets linked to most on the web, and when your site is linked to it helps you to gain traction in the search results, which in turn helps to increase the traffic to your site.

A lot of times companies will hire a copywriter or another company to generate the content for their site, or even pay for fill content from a content aggregator so that they do not need to come up with the content themselves.  While this will often provide you with highly keyworded and fancy sounding content, it is not always the best approach.  These companies do not know your business like you do and thus cannot tailor the content on your site to your market and your customers.  It is important when generating content for your site that you take part in the process to come up with the best content for you business and your market.

A great example of a site with quality content is Trenton Bridge Lobster Pound.  This site gives its visitors what they are looking for, from information about them, to their products, and relevant information that may come in handy to the website visitor like recipes and customer reviews.

Quantity

Though having a lot of content and information on your site give the search engines many avenues to grab onto your site, if you have too much it can really diminish the quality and overall value of your site.  There are some websites that lend themselves well to large amounts of content, for example a blog or a news station.  These formats are great for large quantities of content because it is constantly changing, there is always new stuff for people to see, which keeps the visitors coming back.  New content is also great because it gives an opportunity for other sites to link to your fresh content, helping to increase traffic, and building your credibility with the search engines.  Remember links from highly pronounced websites will help to build you credibility fast than links from other sites.

A couple of examples of high quantity websites that work well are WABI TV and TutsPlus.  WABI TV is a local news network that is constantly updating their content with relevant news that keeps their site visitors coming back.  TutsPlus is an industry targeted blog network that seeks to inform and educate their audience.  With this platform they are able to keep their audience engaged and constantly returning to learn more.

Why is the sky blue?

If you really care to know. The light from the sun is not necessarily yellow from it’s source. It’s all colors. As this light hits the atmosphere, light is scattered in all directions.  Blue light has the smallest and shortest waves, so the blue light waves get scattered around the most. Simple math, blue light has the shortest wave length, therefore is scattered the most.

Why are links blue?

If you look at most web sites, you will find that the links are blue a lot of the time. A link is the thing you click on to go from web page to page. Like this is a link to the main sephone site.

Not every web page is styled with blue links, there are all kinds of colors now. Around half of sites site still use the traditional blue link. The original color of the link was this shade of blue.

The answer to this question is equally easy to why the sky is blue. Because Sir Timothy Berners-Lee said so. Tim Berners-Lee is guy from England, he came up with the idea for http servers and clients, and the basics of html (and continues to oversee). These are the things underneath your browser that make the web work. He had 16 colors to pick from, and seemly at random picked blue. He wanted a dark color, but not black, so blue it was.

Example of a Browser

What is a web browser?

Lets start with the basics. A web browser is a piece of software that is meant to fetch information from the web (a.k.a. the world wide web). Most can do other things to, but that is the main purpose, interacting with the world wide web.

What are the common browsers?

The most common browsers are:

• Chrome (from Google)
• Firefox (from Mozilla)
• Internet Explorer (from Microsoft)
• Safari (from Apple)

Here is a brief overview of each browser.

Chrome
Google released the first version of Chrome in late 2008. It is the third most popular browser as far as user base, but many consider it the most popular when measured in time spent using it.

Most of Chrome is open source; the core rendering engine is WebKit, which is open source. Google has released most of the source code of Chrome as open source under the name Chromium.

It’s available on Windows (XP SP2 and later), Linux, Mac OS X, Android, and iOS.

Chrome has many strengths as well, it’s fast, I would say, the fastest browser in this list. It’s very secure, protects its users well, it’s tied in with a blacklist service from Google, as well as “sandboxing” websites you are using. Chrome is great at supporting browser standards, which help people like us make websites.

Chrome also has a syncing feature, meaning you sign to a Google account in your browser, and then your history and bookmarks are synced on two or more machines. I use this feature often when switching from desktop to laptop.

Firefox
Firefox has its roots going way back. First released by name in 2004, its roots are deeper. Mosaic was the first real web browser going back to 1992. Shortly after that, many of the people that wrote Mosaic, would form their own company, called Netscape. Netscape was a totally new project, but was remarkable similar to Mosaic. Netscape would release an open source version of their browser called Mozilla. Mozilla would grow and grow, until it was so bloated many people were frustrated with it. Some Mozilla developers were upset with the bloat, they stripped out many features of Mozilla and called it Firefox. So Firefox, in a sense is the new Netscape. Not as far as the company is concerned, but as far as the product is concerned.

Now it’s available on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, and Android. It also has the privilege of being available in more languages than any other browser. Additionally, it stands only in this list as a true open source project. It’s commonly considered the second most popular browser in the world as well.

Firefox has a “live bookmarking” feature, where you can see the latest content from blogs in your bookmark, pretty neat. Firefox also does pretty decent at supporting browser standards, does pretty decent security as well. Normally it’s middle of the road in speed of rendering pages.

Firefox has an incredibility store of add-ons for the browser, one of the most customizable, extendable pieces of software to come along.

Internet Explorer
Like Firefox, IE has roots in the Mosaic browser. The first version of IE, back in 1994, was built from software from a company called Spyglass. This company, Spyglass, licensed the Mosaic source code and built their browser from it. Shortly after launch, Microsoft would bring all IE development in house.

Generally considered the most popular browser in the world, certainly it is in English speaking countries, while Chrome and Firefox tend to be in non-English speaking counties.

IE has released versions for many operating systems over the years, modern day versions are only released for Windows.

Generally, IE does not do well at supporting web standards, although, the latest versions do better than they ever have, still though, it does not do nearly as well as the others. IE has had some major security issues in the past, but generally speaking, modern versions are much better. It’s integration into the Windows desktop is stellar, a very fluid interface with the OS.

Generally speaking, it’s the slowest browser mentioned in this post, although for some reason it’s wicked fast with flash, like on youtube.

Safari
Safari was first released in 2003. At the time, Mac OS X browser options were poor, and Safari was a breath of fresh air for Mac users. Safari is WebKit based, like Chrome. And also, like Chrome, is part open source. It’s available for Mac OS X and iOS. In the past, Windows versions have been available.

Safari does not have a huge market share overall, it does have a strong hold on Mac OS X, but it’s nearly unstoppable on the mobile front. Some estimates exceed 60% of mobile web access is done with Safari.

Some of its features include, a feed reader to see updates on your favorite sites and an awesome address field. It searches through your history, bookmarks, does web searches, very neat feature.

What one do we recommend?

Well, as long as you are on the current version of any of these browsers, you should be all set. All of the browsers in this post are used by Sephone team members, and recent versions of these browsers are supported by Sephone products and services.

If you were to closely scrutinize Sephone team members browser habits, I think you would find, Chrome and Firefox used more than the rest.

I’ve been playing around with Graph Search for about a day, and I’ve found it’s a great chance to find not only personal connections, but connections for business as well. Here are a few ideas.

Find friends at a new client

Are you approaching a new business, or have you just signed a deal with one? Try searching for “My friends who work at Widgets, Inc.” (replacing “Widgets, Inc.” with a real company). If you’re not familiar with the business, your friends who work there might be able to help you reach out to the right people. It’s also a great way to show that you have a personal connection to the business.

Find people for lunch

When you do business online, you find that many of the people who follow your business aren’t local. If you’re spending some time away from home, it’s a great chance to meet some of the people you wouldn’t normally see day-to-day. Graph Search is a great way to find them.

Type “People who like [your company] who live near [the place you're visiting]” into Graph Search. This will find people you know and people you don’t who’ve said they like your business in a certain place. Inviting someone out to lunch or coffee can be a good way to develop a deeper connection.

Find photos

Try searching for “Photos taken at [your company]” if you’re a brick-and-mortar shop with a place listing on Facebook. If you’re a popular hangout, change it to “Photos in this month taken at [your company]“. That’s a new view of what’s happening at your company, and it might be a good chance to share something taken from the people who frequent your business (though you may want to ask permission first).

There’s one last thing – and this is a pretty big last thing. As with everything in social media, don’t be annoying, bothersome, or creepy. Don’t just fire off messages to everyone you see in a list; it’s not good to be known as “that company that always pesters me”. (That’s why people hate telemarketers.) Use social media to your advantage in creative ways that will benefit you, your current customers, and your potential customers. That’s the best way to be remembered.

Graph Search is rolling out to everyone soon, so start thinking about how you want to use it now!