the sephone blog

If you happen to visit downtown Bangor this weekend, you might notice a few more people than normal buzzing about the streets. This Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday, tens of thousands of people will flock to the Bangor waterfront’s biggest annual event: the American Folk Festival.

With more than twenty performance groups on five stages along the Penobscot, the AFF is a celebration of music and food from around the world that shouldn’t be missed. This year’s festival will feature bluegrass, salsa, Trinidadian steel, and just about everything in between. And better yet, you can come to see all the great music for free (although donations to any of the members of the on-site Bucket Brigade are highly appreciated).

We’re proud to be a sponsor of the festival and to host AmericanFolkFestival.com as a datAvenger site. If you see any of us down on the waterfront this weekend, come over and say hi!

At approximately 3:55 AM this morning, one of our e-mail servers (Havok) experienced an error while updating virus definitions. This prevented addresses on that server from receiving mail sent after 3:55 AM. We were working on updating the server to fix the issue throughout the morning, and as of 2:45 PM mail delivery returned to normal on the server. Most mail sent while we were working on the server (between 3:55 AM and 2:45 PM) should be delivered shortly, and any mail sent from this point on should be received normally.

This delay did not affect all of our customers.  In fact it affected only the customers on one server and we apologize.   Many customers received email as they normally would, so if things seemed normal, they probably were!  Not sure which e-mail server your site uses?  You can often find out by using our MyServer tool.

Thank you for your patience and again we’re sorry about any inconvenience the delivery delays may have caused today. We’re taking steps to make sure that similar delays do not happen in the future. As always, if you have any questions, please e-mail us at support@sephone.com.

When Sephone started about 8 years ago, a “good” or a “well designed” website was about as subjective as if you got a Christmas gift from your mother-in-law and when you reluctantly wore it, people said, “WOW! That looks great on you – you look great in purple!” After several people mention it throughout the day, you realize, “Why have I hated purple all these years?”

What YOU think works and what YOUR customer thinks works could be vastly different. So take the guess work out of it and learn how people behave on your website. Let the numbers tell you what changes to make, or what promotions/ads make people want to know more about you.

If you do not have a way to measure your traffic on your website, (this is NOT a counter,) but a real tool that helps you understand what folks are doing: How long they are on your site, where they come from, where they go to within your site, what words they use to search for you.

Then get on the phone and ask your web designer, “Hey, can I get Google Analytics?”

Google Analytics by no means is the ONLY web traffic analysis tool, but here at Sephone we LOVE Google Analytics. Click here for an audio/video tour that is very helpful!

Here are 4 reasons why we love it:

1. It is FREE to use and unlike lots of other FREE things, this is worth something! It gives you all kinds of information and explanations to what things mean at a simple mouse-over or click. It is web based and you can access it from anywhere.
2. No software to install on your own computer, just a user name and password to remember.
3. It is very easy to install on a website, web developers can do it easily and if you are their customer, shouldn’t charge you to do it. Many folks can figure out how to do it themselves.
4. HEY! It IS GOOGLE!

Google Analytics, isn’t just pretty charts and cool flash maps, it is about showing trends as well as spikes in traffic. If you have a seasonal business, your traffic numbers may be different from someone else’s. For example a white water rafting company should experience a different monthly trend in traffic than a wreath company.

It helps in planning your web marketing campaign as well as your print campaigns – or what changes you should make to the organization of your site or the keywords people use to find you. The money you spend (especially these days), needs to be measured by results and we say, if you need measurements, then it has to be Google Analytics!