Basic use

With a YouTube account you can subscribe to a channel. On your YouTube home page, you can see all the videos that your subscribed channels have upload. Currently I have 44 subscriptions. Some of them are work related, like the Google Webmaster Tools. Others are funny channels, and several others are about things I like to do, like hunting, fishing, camping, canoeing, and bushcrafting. Normally I watch 30 minutes or so of content from YouTube every day.

You can like, dislike, favorite, or comment on a video.  You may also post video responses back to videos that you watch.

As a publisher

As a publisher, if you have a channel, there are several things about YouTube that can help you. People can subscribe to your channel to see when you upload videos. Additionally, it’s a great way to embed videos into your website.

It’s not for everybody

As cool as YouTube is, one thing is paramount to having a channel: you need to have videos to publish. Cameras are getting better and better all the time, and dropping in price. If you have some video content, buy yourself a decent video camera. Some ideas for videos on your channel are periodic specials. Another idea is knowledge about how to use the products you sell. For example, if you are a lumber yard, maybe make a video about building a bird house with your lumber or maybe a tree house.

We at Sephone have a support channel with videos about how to use our products. You can view our channel here.

But let’s look at it this way, from perhaps a more “traditional” approach. If you were to attend ONE business networking event in ONE town on ONE night and you walk into the room, you look around, you don’t know a soul.  And more importantly, EVERYONE else in the room, is engaged with those they know, do business with (or want to).  People are laughing, private jokes shared and the “Hey, I haven’t seen you in ages!” wafts across the room.

You wander over to the buffet table, grab a coffee and perhaps a celery stick.  You’re thinking, “I will give myself something to do, so I can stop feeling invisible.”  At the buffet table, you chat it up with another new face and you though you are feeling a little bit better, you leave after about an hour of little interaction and are disappointed in that you didn’t meet many people and certainly didn’t generate any contacts or business. So why did you waste your time?

Social Media is just another way to network, with more people, more often.  There is no smoke and mirrors here.  Only with Social Media you don’t SEE the people at the party all ready ignoring you.  BUT, it is happening.  If you went back to that “traditional” business face-to-face networking event two or three times, engaged with more people, snooped around and found out who was going to be there, find them at the event and introduced yourself (without being “THAT GUY”), maybe your results would change.

Social Media is the very same, only it is a little trickier, because unless you are using Skype, no one sees you eye to eye in close to real time.   No body language to see that you are a wonderful person that everyone wants to do business with.  When someone asks you a question face to face, you answer it or give it your best shot.

Same again with Social Media.  Someone sends you a tweet with a question, you need to answer them.  It is the polite and right thing to do.

Building an army of FOLLOWERS or FANS is key to defeat the Social Media echo. How can it matter what you have to say, if there is no one listening?  If you haven’t built those online relationships to have people to listen to you or to help them with their questions and YES, even if it is something you don’t sell, ESPECIALLY when it is something you don’t sell.

So plan to building and maintaining your online relationships just like you do your face to face ones.  The results may surprise you!

(*Thank you pheasantlanding.com for the use of your image)

Not Responding to People

Somebody sends you message to your page or writes on your page wall, and they never hear back from you. This is more or less the same as not returning phone calls or emails. Who knows, maybe you just lost some business by your lack of responsiveness.

Facebook has a pretty intensive notification settings system. You can be emailed when people write on your wall or send you a message to your page. Also, I would recommend turning off lots of other facebook notifications so you don’t have to worry about too many false alarms about silly things from facebook.

Post Hibernation

Hibernation is great, if your a ground squirrel, it’s less than ideal if you are a facebook page admin. I am not saying that you need a new facebook status every single day, not in the least. Pages that have not had a status update in 8 months though, can look stale, boring and not interesting enough to like.

Posting Frenzy

Frequently, inside of two post hibernation periods, you will see a posting frenzy, where six posts are made in twenty seconds. It would have been much better to spread those posts out some. Facebook will group those posts together, making it easy to ignore in the news feed. On top of that, people like short status updates, long ones or grouped ones are easy to skip.

Pay it Forward

You can’t talk about your self all the time. Don’t be afraid to talk about your customers. Are you a hardware store? Talk about a local chimney builder that frequents your business. Machine fabrication shop? Mention a lawn care business who you just fixed their trailer. You get the idea.

Why so Negative

Often times, it’s better to focus on an example of somebody doing it right, rather than doing it wrong. Check out the Bangor-Y for an example of doing it right.

A story about cutting tools

I spend a fair amount of time outside. Many people who do spend time in remote areas often have an affinity for cutting tools (big knives, little knives, axes, saws, etc). These tools help do the things you need to do, prepare food, setup tarps, process fire needs (tinder, kindling, and fuel wood), process game, etc. The list is near endless, any time you are doing something constructive, a cutting tool is going to be used.

Over the years I have used numerous cutting tools. The photo in this post is from a recent canoe trip, and is only the tip of the iceberg as far as how many cutting tools I actually own. Normally each trip I go on, I take at least one cutting tool, most of the time two, and even three sometimes. How many and what ones all depend on the situation, what conditions I think it’s likely that I will encounter. It’s nice to have all these various tools in the bag to select from to use afield in different circumstances.

Tools in Our Bag

Our bag tricks is also growing, meaning we have new technologies we can put into play. Often times we like to talk about these new things on this blog, such as our recent posts about Pagination, QR codes and Pinterest. Even if it’s not something we have blogged about, it seems that nearly weekly there is new stuff in the websphere we are internally talking about.

Please don’t think that once your site is launched, you never have to think about it. There are constantly evolving things on the web, your site should be among them.

As always, we are pretty easy to get in contact with to discuss.

Quality Control

It seems that most of the bugs we fix, show up in the fringe areas of functionality, rather than the core areas. Many times these were feature requests. It makes sense that these bugs are discovered in the less used features.

We really like to polish a lot of the stuff that we do. Like to have it look and work very slick on the way out the door. The problem with feature requests is sometimes they push us out of our normal development cycles. We are more prone to mistakes when working outside our normal model.

Maintainability

The web is a rapidly changing place. Every day it seems there are new techniques, social media outlets, new devices and new things to use. We like to keep it easy to change with it. The more features and functionality there is, the harder it is to stay flexible.

Time and Budget

We love to finish on time and on budget. Often times feature requests can drag a project out. Nearly always they come just before launch when almost everything is done and require looking again at interface and design to fit the functionality in. Rework is very dreaded and run a amuck a good project.

On the other hand

Don’t be afraid to request features though. We implement a lot of them.  Many are great ideas and illuminate our understanding of how people use our stuff. Please don’t stop the feedback. Just understand sometimes why we hesitate on some feature requests.

Story About a Sticker

Last Sunday night, just before I went to bad, I was thinking about my car. The inspection sticker was due to expire at the end of this month. There are several garages in town (that’s Lincoln, Maine for me) that offer this service. While brushing my teeth, I picked up my phone and went to the website of one of the garages that I have used before.

I was greeted with a mobile version of their site. At first I was thinking, yeah this is great. I started clicking around, looking for hours of operation. My thought was, hopefully they open early, and I can get in and out before I need to get to work. Here at Sephone, most of us start our day at 8am. So if they opened early enough, I could get in and out before it was time to start work.

As I navigated around the mobile website, I could not find their hours. I could read company history, phone number, services they offered, etc, but no hours. I tried to get out of the mobile website and get back to the regular full website. No dice, I was constantly redirected to the mobile version.  I knew that they had hours on their normal website, as I had seen it before.

Long story short, I had to get my laptop to get the hours, I showed up just when they opened and they got me in and out. Even though they still won my business, maybe they would not have with another customer having a similar experience.

So what is the moral of the story

So what is the point of this tale?  The point is don’t think of mobile as an after thought. In fact, I almost think it’s better to not have a mobile site than to have a bad one. Many phones will work okay on a decent site. If you are considering doing one, please do it right. There are numerous sayings and proverbs, such “good big or go home”, “Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more”, “The difference between try and triumph is a little umph”, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing right” that really drive home this point.

Tables on the web can be a bit cumbersome at times. They are not always the easiest to work with, but with a WYSIWYG editor they are sometimes the best solution to getting content to look the way you want it to. Today I am going to show you how to insert and modify a table in a datAvenger service website. This process is relatively similar in datAvenger Pro website, so this will be the sole tables management tutorial.

To start I would like to say that tables at their most basic should be used for tabular data, not layout. That being said, there are instances when tables come in handy to display content in a certain way. For instance an image to the right or left of a paragraph on the side of it.

Before I walk you through the ins and outs of tables there is something you should know. In some cases while building your website we may inadvertently add styles that override the table properties and cause you changes to not display. If you find yourself making table changes that are not reflecting on the site, please let us know and we will try to correct this for you.

Lets get right into it. To add a table you need to click the spot on the page where you want the table to be. If it needs to be in the middle of 2 paragraphs you may have to click at the end of the first paragraph and click enter or shift+enter to bring your cursor to the next line where you can put the table.

Once you cursor is in the proper spot, click the insert table icon in the tool bar. This will open the insert table window where you can set the initial table properties. These table properties consist of:

• rows: the number of rows the table will have (down)
• cols: the number of columns the table will have (across)
• width: the width of the table in percent, pixels or ems.
• fixed width columns: will set all of the columns in the table to be the same width by default. For example if you have a 4 column table, each column will be 25% across the width of the table.
• alignment: will set how the table will show up relative to the text around it. This option should only be used if you want the table to show up next to other text on the page, and will only be visible if the table is less than 100% of the page width.
• border thickness: is how thick of a border the table will have. If you do not want a border, set this option to 0.
• cell spacing: is how much space is between individual cells of the table.
• cell padding: is how much space is between the cell wall and the text in side the cell.

Once you have changed all of the options that you need click okay to insert your table into the page.

By default, if you set the border to 0, you will not be able to see the bounding edges of it and the cells inside of it. Click the toggle borders icon to see a faint grey border. This gives you a guideline of where the table edges are. This border will not show on the front side of your website, it just acts as a guide for you in the editor.

Now that you have a table on your page you can add content to it, images, links, anything that you can within the constraints of the editor.

You may run into instances where you would like to change the properties of a table after you have put it on the page. There are 3 options for editing the table properties after adding to the page.

1. Edit the table as a whole. You do this by clicking in any cell of the table, then right click on the mouse. This will show you a menu where you can choose table properties, which will open the table properties window. The options in the table properties window are as follows:
   • caption: this is like a title for your table. What you enter here will show up above your table in large bold text.
   • summary: this is a summary of what your table consist of. This will not show on the page, but is assigned to your table behind the scenes of the page.
   • float: this will allow you to float your table left or right of other items on the page. If the table is 100% the width of the page you will not notice a difference by setting this attribute.
   • width: lets you set the width of the table in percent, pixels or ems.
   • text align: lets you set the text to left, center, right or justified in the table. This will effect all of the cells in the table.
   • height: lets you set the height of the table in percent, pixels or ems. Rarely is height used. If you are using height it can mess with the size of the table cells, but it is an option you have.
   • vertical align: lets you set the vertical alignment of the text in the cells, top, middle, bottom or baseline.
   • spacing and padding are as we saw them in the original insert table window.
   • borders: this lets you set the width of the border on the table.
   • frames: lets you set how you want the frame of the border to show.
   • rules: lets you set how the rules in between columns and rows will show.
   • background: lets you set a background color or image to the table.
   • fg color: lets you set a foreground color to the table.
   • border: lets you set the color, type and thickness of the border on the table. If you only set this option without the frame and border settings the border will be only on the edges of the table.
   • collapsed borders: sets whether or not the borders in the table will be one solid border or separated borders by cells spacing.
2. Next you can edit the individual rows in a table. Do this by clicking in the row you want to edit, does not matter what cell in that row, then right click and select row properties. This will open the Row Properties window where you have the following options:
   • width: you can set the width of the row, this property generally will not work as most table rows have to stretch the full length of the table.
   • text align: lets you set the alignment of the text in the cells of the row, left, center, right or justified.
   • height: lets you set the height of the row. This option will reflect on the front side of the site if the content in the row is less than the height you give. When working with height it is best to specify pixels to ensure that it is the height you want it to be.
   • vertical align: lets you set the vertical alignment of the items in the row, top, middle, bottom or baseline.
   • background: lets you add a background color or image to the row.
   • fg color: lets you add a foreground color to the row.
   • border: lets you define the border color, type and size for the row.
3. Lastly you can edit the properties of the individual cells for the table. Do this by clicking in the specific cell you want to change, then right click and choose cell properties from the menu. Here you will have all of the same properties as the row properties window, but the settings will only change the specific cell.

Some other important things to note about editing tables. If you add a table to your page and want to change the width of the columns, you only need to change the width of the first cell in each column for it to take effect. Also important to note that if you are changing the widths you want to make sure the width of the columns adds up to 100% of the table with. So if you have a 100% width table you could have 20%, 20%, 30%, 30% for a 4 column table, or if you are using pixels you could have a 500px wide table and columns that were 100px, 100px 150px, 150px for a 4 column table.

If you want to add and remove rows and columns datAvenger makes it easy to do. There are 2 ways to do this, both involve first clicking in the row or column to the left/right or top/bottom of where you would like to add/remove your row or column. Then you can use the little arrows to the left and top of the cell to add a row/column above/below, or right/left of the row/column your in. You can also click the little “x” in the middle of the arrows to the left and top of the cell your in to remove the row or column. Alternatively, or if you don’t see the arrows, you can right click in the cell and select add/remove row or add/remove column.

People are habitual

People are very habit forming creatures. Most of the time this behavior enables us to quickly and efficiently do simple tasks such as brush our teeth. Our habit forming nature extents into web use. Once we are familiar with a certain website, we form habits of how we use it. The various tasks on that site we perform are somewhat subconsciously programmed, and we can preform them without much thought.

This is why when facebook (or any other populate web app) changes some people resist the change. They have to think and study the site again to reform their habits of how they use the it. If the changes are for the better, many users will be able to see that reforming their custom of use will be beneficial.

Since people form habits, it’s very important to have consistency across your interface. If your edit function is always a gear icon in the upper right, make sure that every page where there is something to edit has a gear icon in the upper right.

Unique Example

One of the sites that sephone does is mooseswap.com. This site is for people that win Maine’s much desired moose lottery tag. Once you get a tag through the lottery, you can’t win again for a two years, no matter what. This means that every year the users are new, this allows us great flexibility in the interface, so we can change it from year to year to tweak it based on our observations from the previous year. In fact, this site has been quite an experiment in user interface for us.

Your app or site

When working with us to develop your user interface, it’s important to think about how users will use the interface. Nearly every site will have tweaks that come up, these changes should be incorporated as an evolution, not as a change of direction if possible. Of course you can’t of every single contingency, and often times making plans that are too far reaching is detrimental to the interface. Trying too hard can result in “analysis paralysis” where decisions are near impossible to make, but careful though should be given to making a clean flexible interface that can grow with you.

I am getting so I hate the term “SOCIAL MEDIA.” Yep, you heard it here first.

Hate it.

Social Media is just another term for communication and/or promotion.  But we see it in Wikipedia as this huge definition. The first sentence is helpful, “Social media includes web-based and mobile technologies used to turn communication into interactive dialogue.”

Communication… huh?  I think that is why marriages break up, we have wars, why Congress doesn’t get along or get things done, pretty simple.

I think that why many people in business fail to embrace it, is because it feels like smoke and mirrors, feels new and untrusted, feels like CHANGE.  (And we know what people think about that!)

When TV and radio were first making the scene, people were unsure about using this medium to “get their message out.” When that was what TV and radio did – report the news, get a message out.  Now commercials are part of our lives.  But these commercials blast non-personalized messages to anyone that will listen, I hear diaper commercials and I have never had children as well as many other messages that are not pertinent to me at all.

On the other hand,  my Facebook page is VERY specific to me.  It knows my hobbies and interests and most of the time, serves up an ad for a product I would actually buy, or at least think of buying.

At first this felt creepy.  It felt like someone was spying on me.  But I got used to it and so is your customer.  Social Media is a new way of finding them where they are with a message that reaches out and touches them.  That makes you (one of my old favorite terms), TOP OF MIND. Memorable.  When it is time to buy, you have more of a chance of that person buying from you.

Rather than to look at Social Media as some alien planet that does mysterious things, it is just the new way to communicate with your customer where they are hanging out.  They have cell phones now, they have computers now and it goes on and on.  Maybe it’s time for you to be there with them?

With smartphone usage quickly growing among all ages and income levels, it may be seductive to think that you should build a mobile phone app.  But before you rush into production mode, consider what you or your customers need.

It takes two things to make a successful cell phone app:

1. a good idea
2. an experienced developer

The best cell phone apps are simple, useful, and convenient.  Notice I didn’t say “complex.”  Some of the most popular apps are extremely simple.  Consider a weather app: it simply pushes weather information to your phone, yet millions use one every day.   My current favorite apps are also simple: a “Dice” app and TurboTax’s “MyTaxRefund” app.  Simple, useful, convenient.

Next, you need someone who can build it.  Not just someone who can write code, but someone who understands the nuances of both the Android and iOS cell phone platforms.  The developer must also be knowledgeable about, and experienced in, submitting an app to the app stores (trust me, that is not simple).

Sephone and I recently collaborated on a simple app called the “BAT Community Connector,” which provides information about riding public bus system in the greater Bangor area.  I came up with the idea; they had the expertise and experience to make it happen.  The app couldn’t possibly be successful without both.

Don’t just build an app to build an app.  Make sure your idea fills a gap, provides a service, or adds a convenience.  Once you’ve got that, team up with a company that will make it happen.  Personally, I recommend Sephone.  I can’t imagine I could have had a better experience working with anyone else.

Just show me a pie chart

Ok

Further Break Down

Verizon is the biggest provider by far, at 55%, US Cellular is second at 14%, Sprint is third at 11.07%, Sea Mobile is fourth 10.7%, T-Mobile is fifth at 7%. The rest are all under 5%.

Two things surprised me, one is how much Verizon has of an install base, but I guess it makes sense, since they took over unicel a few years ago. Sea Mobile surprised me as well. If you don’t know, they make satellites for RV’s, off road vehicles and boats that are out of conventional cellular service areas.

A couple of months ago, our friend Jennifer Hooper came to us with an idea for a mobile app to act as a guide for the Community Connector buses. We thought it was a great opportunity to help the community and add to a techy option alongside the paper rider’s guides that are available on the buses.

The first version includes complete schedule information for all the Community Connector routes. It also gives you the option to see the closest stops to your current location. We’ll be releasing updates and adding more features in the coming months.

If you spend any time along Bangor’s major routes, there’s a good chance you’ll see one of the red buses. Bangor’s bus system – known as “the BAT” to many – covers over a hundred miles of roadway in Bangor, Brewer, Hampden, Veazie, Orono, and Old Town, and provided almost 900,000 rides for area residents in 2010. Starting on Monday, April 2, the system is adding a new Odlin Road route.

I remember seeing the buses drive by while I was growing up in Hampden (they were just called “The Bus” back then), and I feel really fortunate that we have such a great and growing bus system right here in Bangor. If you’ve never used the Community Connector, give it a try! We hope the app will show more people around Bangor that the bus can be smart, convenient, and easy, all while saving money on gas.

Download the app and tell us what you think. Head to communityconnector.sephone.com or scan the QR code below with your phone to download it for free!

The app is available for free on Google’s new Google Play store and on the App Store for iPhone.

University of Maine graduate student Jennifer Hooper approached Sephone Interactive Media with the idea of a mobile application to make bus information more accessible. “When I started riding the bus from Bangor to Orono in September, I found it slow to navigate to the online bus schedule from my phone, and I kept misplacing my printed schedules. So I created a prototype for the app in one of my classes. Sephone transformed my ideas into a real app that benefits the Bangor community. That’s the best part.”

“This first version of the Community Connector app puts information about our area’s great buses at your fingertips,” says Justin Russell, a developer at Sephone and graduate of the University of Maine. “We really liked Jennifer’s idea, and we wanted to help the community by building a tool to promote the Bangor region’s growing bus system.”

Increasing ridership is important to the expansion of the Community Connector system. Easier access to schedule and route information, combined with higher gas prices forecasted for this summer, may make the Community Connector an attractive option for more Bangor area residents. The new app helps potential riders understand more about the system, including how economical of a choice it can be.

Joe DiStefano, president of Sephone, said, “What we wanted to do was to help those that were already using the bus as well as to encourage those that haven’t used it very much (or not at all), as well as to  make it easy for more people to use public transportation. With gas prices on the rise is making this a huge incentive.”

Russell adds, “We love developing these kinds of tools for businesses and the region as a whole. We’re excited to add new features as more people use the Community Connector app, and we can’t wait to work on more projects like it in the future.”

To download the app for an Android phone or iPhone, visit the app’s web site at http://communityconnector.sephone.com .

Sephone Interactive Media is a Bangor-based web and application development company, helping businesses and people use technology to grow and increase efficiency.

FMI contact:
Kelly H. Cotiaux, Partner and Marketing Maven, Sephone Interactive Media 207.262.5040
blog.sephone.com ~ sephone.com , Twitter: ladyotrout ~ sephone, Facebook

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How to Identify True Professionals

I have never thought that web services were any different than any other service industry. Though it’s a new industry, lots of the principals from other business to business service industries apply.  Say you wanted to renovate your office space, and had a few general contractor/carpenters to choose from. You would probably want to see other commercial properties they have worked on (or at least pictures) and maybe talk with a few of their other clients to see what they had to say.

It’s really no different in the web world. You should look at portfolios for similar work to what you are looking for. Ask for references, a good firm will be very willing to give them. Same is true in mobile development. If you are looking to an app developed, use a few apps that the company has previously developed. The goal is to pick a firm that has demonstrated they can meet all your needs.

Our Portfolio

Sephone has a portfolio site that have added a small sample of projects to it. We are constantly adding them. Check out portfolio.sephone.com to see them and keep your eyes peeled over the next couple of weeks for some new and exciting ones.

A Truly Wild Example

This is a crazy example, but one that I think illustrates why it’s important to partner with the proper people.

I enjoy many outdoor activities and have a great interest in the animals of this state, so one of the things I like to do is maintain a small network of trailcams. Trailcams are cameras normally attached to trees that take photos when they detect motion.  With a little work and a bit of luck, you can get beautiful photos of wildlife. Recently I captured a series of photos of a wildcat.

Several photos of this cat were uploaded and discussed about on facebook.  I was not completely sure if the animal was a lynx or a bobcat. Many people stated that the animal in question was a lynx. Others stated it was a hybrid animal, half mountain lion, half lynx.  So many of comments claimed a type of expert knowledge, such as “my husband is a guide”, “I live in northern CA, and see wild cats all the time”, “bobcats are not that big” and “Look at that tail, clearly not a bobcat”. After dozens of comments I was nearly willing to accept that it was a lynx. Not one comment stating the animal was a bobcat. An email to qualified people (one a long time professional taxidermist, another a biologist, real experts), and they both confirmed, the animal is a normal healthy bobcat. Along with informing me of how to tell the difference, they settled the debate.

In this particular example, people claiming expert knowledge, as well as the consensus of the group of comments was wrong. Had I just emailed the true expects up front, it would have been easier.

Reasons to do Pagination

There is a large number of reasons to do pagination. One is that it may take the server a long time to load the whole dataset and the user will not want to wait. So you load a small subset of the data and display that to the user.  Another is to have acceptable scrolling. If the page is huge, the scroll bar may so touchy, that even moving the scrollbar a small amount renders a large movement in the content area. A third reason is to make it easier on the browser. If a page is very very large, it can make the browser get very slow, due to having to put so many things in the memory.

Then again, lots of times it’s okay to show all of the items, as long as it’s fast and renders an acceptable user experience. It’s frequently getting more acceptable to the user a large dataset, due to larger screens and faster computers.

Types of Pagination

Enumerated pagination is about the most common. If you have used google, you have seen this type of pagination. The pages are labeled in sequential order. Below is a picture of it.

A newer type of pagination, is called endless scrolling. How it works, is when you get to the end of your current page, more stuff is inserted into the page making it larger. This is commonly used to get the initial page to load quickly. It’s hard to show a screen shot of this, but I am sure that you have seen it in use places like twitter and facebook. You can see it in action over at NEScom’s Hire Me application. Go to hireme.nescom.edu/search, and as you scroll to the bottom of the page, you will see new candidates get added to the page automatically.

SEO and Pagination

Google (and others) generally will treat each page within the pagination set as a separate entity. That was until recently. Lately, they have been some developments in HTML5 and crawling styles. If the page is using proper markup convention, search engines will now understand when they see a paginated set and have really improved how they render those for people searching for your information on Google and the like.

If you are using endless scrolling, special care needs to be taken to ensure that search engines can find the results properly. Things like an xml sitemap become critical.

The Internet has always had a pretty shaky relationship with copyright law. Pinterest isn’t the first site to bump up against copyright concerns (remember Napster?), and it won’t be the last. The bigger issue here is that content creators (that’s you!) need to let the world know how – or if – they’d like their stuff to be shared.

Set your rules for sharing

As a business and site owner, make sure you’re letting your visitors know how you want the information on your site shared. Here are a few simple ways to give an OK:

• Add buttons from social networks on any page you’d like people to share with their friends. Most of the popular social networks have buttons available.
• Use a service like ShareThis to let people share your content with any of dozens of social networks.
• Mix some of your own content in with the other content you post on your Facebook, Twitter, or other social network accounts. This gives your fans an easy way to share the things you post. (Interested in a Pinterest account? We have you covered.)
• Add links to your own accounts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other networks on your site.

These tell the people who visit your site, “Don’t worry, I’d love it if you’d share this page with your friends!”

If for whatever reason you don’t want your content shared, make that clear, too. Say you’re an artist who feels a little unsure about letting your work spread around the web. Tell that to your visitors, but try to be human about it; include a “this work is protected by U.S. and international copyright law” notice if you like, but also try to explain why you’d rather keep your work on your site. It will make it easier for your visitors to understand your views.

Other sharing options

Social media isn’t the only place to share your content. If you share what you make with a Creative Commons license, you can let other people use or adapt your work – and you’ll get credit for it in return. You can also try to find other people or businesses on the web who will partner with you or let you guest post on their blog. There are plenty of opportunities!

Social media is a great opportunity to share your products and content. Make sure you let your visitors know that you’d like it to be spread!

Communications

A massive part of using the web to better your business is communications. Your site needs to very effectively communicate what goods or services that you offer.  This means a few things, it means that your site itself needs to be found easily. This means making sure that you at least follow some basic SEO guidelines. Your site should also be very easy to navigate and find the information that the end user seeks.

Copy is the text that is on website. I have seen beautiful websites with bad copy, and ugly websites with great copy. This is very important. Quality and not quantity is crucial here.  There is an old adage in the web development community: “Content is King”

Secondary Reasons

In our post, Do you really need a site we wrote about some of the other reasons to have a site. Some of these include being found on search engines, credibility, and the 24/7 availability of a site.

In conclusion, we working with your developer, remember to stay focused on the end goal, of ultimately a website will help you do more and/or better business.

How to setup timeline

It’s really easy. On the top of every page, there is a note about it, and a preview button. Hitting this preview button will allow to see the new page and make a few edits, then publish when you like it.

Things to be aware of

New Things

• Cover Photo: A new photo that is very large and the first thing a viewer will see when looking at your page.
• Timeline: You can mark things like milestones and the founding of your company to provide a true “timeline”
• Pinning: This is where you can put really important announcements on the top of your page and make them full width

Things Going Away

• Profile Photo: While not going away, it is getting smaller and made into a square.
• Tabs: If your page uses a lot of tabs, that is changing, now tabs are under the cover photo and less prominent.
• Landing Pages: You can no longer have a special page for people who are not yet fans of your company.

Facebook can do it for you

If you wait, facebook will just do it for you, this may or may not be what you want to do. Our suggestion is to do it now, while you can edit the page before you publish it, before facebook does it for you. We did ours already.

For the answer to that question, read Kelly’s post about listening. There’s a good chance that people are talking about your business on social media; they may be raving about it, they may be complaining, or they may be recommending you to their friends. Social media gives you the opportunity to engage directly with people who are mentioning your business online.

Still, though, keeping up with all these networks takes time. We want to give you a tool to help.

Today we’re launching the Sephone Social Searcher. It’s a lot easier to use the Searcher than it is to say its name: just enter your business name, location, or site address, and the Searcher will give you a launching point to search for mentions of your business on about a dozen social networks. It lets you search for posts, reviews, photos, and more. You can even bookmark your customized dashboard to access it quickly if you’d like to check often.

Let us know what you think about the Sephone Social Searcher. We believe that you should take some time to see what people are saying about your business online – and we want to make it as easy as possible. How’d we do?

Tweaks you can make

We have written about keeping your site fresh before, in “Four 10 minute changes” and “When was your last website refresh“. These posts are still relevant.

Tweaks we can make

Professional horseback guides (dude-wranglers) take great care with fitting horses, saddles and riders. They know the importance of everything fitting right. The wrong fit can cause sores and lameness for both horse and rider. If we (or another dev shop) developed an app for you, and something is not quite right, it can also cause sores and lameness. Contact us, these little updates can make something much more smooth.

New stuff

Maybe it’s just time to add a new component. Many times adding something new is not that hard and does not require a complete rewrite. It could be some new SEO stuff, mobile site, or adding a directory of listings. It’s easier than you think.

Thanks to United States Forces – Iraq for sharing the photo in this post with a Creative Commons license!