Having control of your website is key to your organization's success, and datAvenger™ - sephone's own family of content management solutions — can give you the control you need.
Selling online? Hula bridges the gap between the overly simplified and the overly complex; it's a powerful, full-featured eCommerce solution that is incredibly easy to manage.
For Digital Media based content, Broadcaster is a Sephone built application geared specifically to deliver media based content - Priced competitively to the other solutions, and full of rich and robust features to make any station a star!
terrace is the latest version of RESource MLS a highly effective, affordable solution to have currently available MLS™ properties incorporated into your real estate website, branded in your style.
If your marketing team doesn't have the time or if you're not working with an agency, sephone's talented design team can create a website that looks good and works great.
People are talking about you, your business and your competition. You cannot stop that, but you can learn from it and set the record straight — be part of the conversation. Control your message.
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Often times I think the mobile version of a website gets less attention then it should. There are some times that your mobile site may be even more important than your regular version.
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.
Alan has been creating websites since CompuServe was huge. Today he still is developing websites using technologies such as CSS3, HTML5, jQuery and CakePHP.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Brady is the voice on the other end of the phone line when you call Sephone. He graduated from the New England School of Communications in 2009 and assists Sephone in building and maintaining our sites.
Every now and again, facebook will change it’s interface. Of course, they are trying to make their user experience better, but every time several thousands users protest the change. Sometimes the same happens with twitter. I have even heard people complaining about the recent changes to weather.com. The interface of any site or app needs to be thought on very careful.
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.
Alan has been creating websites since CompuServe was huge. Today he still is developing websites using technologies such as CSS3, HTML5, jQuery and CakePHP.
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), TOPOF 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?
Kelly's been known as the Marketing Maven since before the term was hip. (That means she's old.) She loves to get people together and help when she can to bring resources to the table and solve problems!
This post was submitted by our guest, Jennifer Hooper.
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:
a good idea
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.
Jennifer is a full-time graduate student at the University of Maine pursuing an Intermedia MFA. She is also a writer, emerging artist, and luminous juju advocate.
We have published several mobile apps over the last six months. Thought it would be neat to see what cellular providers are the most popular in our install base. Going to focus on three apps that are based in central Maine, have a decent install base, and are free. The three we are going to focus on are Community Connector, My Maine and The American Folk Festival App.
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.
Alan has been creating websites since CompuServe was huge. Today he still is developing websites using technologies such as CSS3, HTML5, jQuery and CakePHP.
Today we’re thrilled to announce our latest launch: a free mobile guide for the Community Connector bus system here in Bangor, Maine. It’s available today for Android and iPhone.
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!
Justin is one of the developers at Sephone. He's interested in user-driven design, social media, and web services. He also enjoys learning and exploring new ways for businesses and people to use the web.
A local business has released a new smartphone app aimed to help Bangor area bus riders. The Community Connector app features complete route and schedule information, and it even shows the nearest stops from a user’s current location.
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.”
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
Kelly's been known as the Marketing Maven since before the term was hip. (That means she's old.) She loves to get people together and help when she can to bring resources to the table and solve problems!
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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.
