the sephone blog

Back in June of last year we published a report of browser market share for some of our most visible sites. As we explained then, these statistics are really helpful for web developers in order to find what people are using to view sites and, in turn, what technologies developers can use to create those sites.

It’s been six months, and we wanted to go back and look how the usage stats in December compared to those in June. As we did in our first report, we looked through our Google Analytics reports for six of the most-visited sites we developed and maintain in real estate, tourism, news, education, and other markets.

Here’s a look at the trends of browsers over the last six months:

And a look at market share by reporting period:

The past six months have seen an overall loss of market share for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and a gain across the board for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. In addition, Internet Explorer 8 usage more than doubled over the last six months on all of the six sites we surveyed. Safari’s spike in market share may be due to the popularity of iPhones, which run a mobile version of the browser. Google released a version of Chrome for Mac and Linux systems which may have contributed to its increase in usage in December. And web developers everywhere can rejoice: in our survey, the Internet Explorer 6 market share we found ranged from 7.0 – 10.3% as compared to 15.3 – 17.1% in June.

We’ve published an introduction to the major web browsers in the past as well as a post about our views on Internet Explorer 6 support. Please consider reading those posts for more information.

Read on to see the full report data with percentages and methods.

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Was a comment on one of my report cards in 1st grade.  It was also followed up with something like,  “…but sometimes her concern for others getting along and cooperating interferes with her own work.”

Who’da thunk it?

My friends, family and business partners can attest for it, but what about in Social Media areas?  How do people know that you REALLY CARE?

Or better yet, “How  do you know who doesn’t and is just pretending to care?”  It seems like these days 60-75% of my work time is dedicated to doing something in Social Media and it is increasing every week.

Social Media brings us together and yet distances us all at the same time. Periodic non-visible online interactions take longer to sort out who is real and who isn’t.

I recently attended a conference where Chris Brogan spoke (it was my first time meeting him and I was sooo excited)  Mike Volpe also made a great presentation.  If you don’t know Chris, he is amazing you should follow him.  He is as real as they come and in person, he can make you laugh so hard that your sides split.

Mike Volpe of Hubspot fame was a lot different than I thought he would be.  I watch their podcasts religiously and read their blogs and I would recommend anyone feeling intimidated about social media and applications you can lurk around on any of these sites and learn a ton.

What did I mean when I said Mike Volpe was different than I thought?  I knew he was smart, I knew he knew his stuff.  His podcast partner Karen Rubin, is mega bubbly.   When I met Mike at the conference, what I met was a kind of shy guy.  Not what I expected.  He puts forth so much confidence on his sites and podcasts, I was a bit intimidated at the idea at the face-to-face.

Chris Brogan has this message that he calls “Be Human”, he has a great post here outlining what this means.  In fact, when you Google the term “be human” his blog entry comes up in the first 5 searches.  Rather than to reiterate what these captains of industry have to say, I included several links here so you can easily find them.

Clients will ask me, “Why do I care if someone’s eating high fibre cereal for breakfast?’ or “That their kids soccer game was a blow out?” Truth is YOU may not care, but one of the thousands of other readers may. If you were one of the people in the battle to fight cancer, you could provide support to many in different situations and stages just by seeing these buzz words.

This makes a “human” connection that is important to an often hard to connect with medium.  Some of us don’t use real photos as profile shots all the time.  Some of us are vague about how to find us.  Maybe our user names aren’t exactly intuitive. The internet is full of great people as well as weirdos.  That doesn’t necessarily make you a “Nervous Nellie,” but if someone is trying to learn about you or your business, you may seem a little less “human.”  What you have to deliver and say becomes that much more important.

First impressions can be misleading.  Establish yourself or your business as the someone you ARE.  Stick with it on blog comments, blog posts, other platforms.  Because after all, the keyboard doesn’t type itself. A HUMAN does!

We’ve had a few of our clients send us a copy of a rather official-looking email they received over the last couple of days. We’ve even gotten a couple of copies of it at our own addresses. So far, we’ve seen subject lines starting with “A new settings file for the…” and “For the owner of the…”

In short, it’s a phishing scam and you shouldn’t click the link. Here’s one version of the email:

Dear user of the example.com mailing service!

We are informing you that because of the security upgrade of the mailing service your mailbox (someone@example.com) settings were changed. In order to apply the new set of settings click on the following link:

http://example.com/owa/service_directory/settings.php?email=someone@example.com&from=example.com&fromname=someone

Best regards, example.com Technical Support.

Again, don’t click the link. Even though the link looks like it points to your company’s site, it will actually bring you to a site that tries to steal your personal information. A quick search brings up some results of similar emails over the last few days sent to people around the world, so don’t be surprised if you see a similar email sent your way.

As always, we’ll never ask for your personal information via email. If you ever have a question about the legitimacy of an email, give us a call or send us a note to check before you decide what to do with it!

The technology community on the web has been abuzz over the last few weeks over a couple of new hacking cases on well-known sites. What’s this mean to you, the everyday user of the web? Well, it serves as a reminder that security online is just as important as locking your door at home.

We know online security can be overwhelming, so in this post we’ll provide you with two simple things you can do to add an extra coat of armor online, right now.

1. Strong passwords are the key (or the lock)

What would you think if the combination to the safe at the bank was ‘12345′? Using your first name, your username, or words like ‘password’ as your password is the online equivalent of a bad safe password. The one most effective step you can take to secure your accounts online is to use secure passwords.

At Sephone, we encourage our customers to use passwords that are at least six characters long and have at least one capital letter and one number. I’ll be honest: some of our clients are frustrated at first when we tell them our policy. Believe us, committing a new password to memory is a lot easier than what can happen if your password is discovered.

Bonus tip: Hopefully your house key, your car key, and your office keys are all different. Make sure your online keychain is the same way by using different passwords on different sites. If a hacker discovers the password on one service and feels like searching, using the same password is an open invitation to explore the landscape.

2. Pick a good secret question

Remember back when hackers managed to find their way into former governor Sarah Palin’s email? Yahoo – the service where her mail was hosted – is one of the many sites online that use a “secret” question feature to help you remember your password if you forget it. Her email hackers found the answers to her “secret” questions online. As more information is posted online (birth dates, death dates, and yes, even mother’s maiden names), these password recovery questions become less secure.

What can you do to prevent this? If the service allows you to type your own question, create a question that only you would know how to answer. (This could be anything from “What make of car did Andy’s father buy from Dad when we were kids?” to “What was the code word to our snow fort?”) If it doesn’t give you space to create your own question, lie with an answer you’d remember. If the question is, “What street did you grow up on?” and the answer is Summer Street, answer Winter Street. The service never checks the validity of your answers, so create an answer that only you will remember.

Online security can be a hassle, but with a few short steps you’ll be much more secure than ever before. What else do you do to beef up your online security?

Photo by Steven Tom, released under Creative Commons.

One of the greatest challenges in web development is the need to cater to a number of different web browsers when developing a site. Although all the major browsers do essentially the same thing, each tends to have its own… well, quirks.

It’s difficult to paint a clear and accurate representation of the browsers people currently use. We can’t very well ask every site visitor, “Hey, you there! What browser are you using?” (Not everyone knows the answer to that question.) It’s important for us to know, though, because it shows us what people use to view our sites and how the trend may be changing over time.

Luckily, Google Analytics, a tool we install on many of our sites, provides a fairly good picture of browser usage. For the sake of transparency, I’ve gone through six of our largest sites and looked at browser usage among them. While this information may not be helpful to you personally, it allows developers make key decisions about the sites they build.

The data below is from six Sephone sites in June 2008 and June 2009. These sites appeal to a general population and include real estate, tourism, news, education, and other markets.

We hope to do this periodically to establish a better perspective of browser trending over time. Developers: are you seeing the same trends? Business owners: have you considered a browser switch?

“Hmmmmm, click, click, click, hmmmmmm, click, click, click…” repeat.  That is the sound of an over excited Marketing person in 2009.

Marketers have always had a tendency to jump on the bandwagon of some latest craze and pound it to death.  I can say that because I am one to the core and with the advent of social media the buzz is louder and the clicking sound is that of a smoking keyboard or cell phone with all of “those people” talking to each other agreeing and singing the praises of the ideas that are exchanged between them.

Sound familiar?  But are the Marketing people the only people “getting it?”  Is this all a fad that will fade away like the Cabbage Patch Doll?

Being from Maine, Maine folks are known for not appreciating a lot of “fluff,” also we adapt to things that most need attending to, like shoveling the driveway, taking a friend to a doctor’s appointment, making sure the bills are being paid.  IMPORTANT stuff.

Right now Social Media, just may not seem that important and it is okay to feel like that, but it is July (almost) and the snow shoveling is a few months away, make part of your summer reading articles in periodicals that can give you the quick info you really need to know!

First take a quick 3 minute look at this video.

Then here are 3 quick things to read that may help you make sense of it:

1. Twitter a 140 character exchange between people from the mundane to the very important.  This article is from the periodical “The Week.”
2. Something  from a “traditional” type media about Twitter is an article in Business Week and its effect on recent events in Iran, certainly one type of media did not change life in Iran, but the fact when used along with “the old fashioned way” of doing things it helps support what was all ready happening.
3. Facebook isn’t necessarily only something your kids use to keep track of their friends whereabouts, it is really creating some unique opportunities for businesses to advertise to “specific” demographics at very reasonable costs.  Business Week has an interesting article here.

We know you don’t have time for this.
We hear this all the time.

If you want to promote your business yourself and not pay for yellow page ads (which are becoming dinosaurs) and daily news papers, (depending on which one you read, readership has declined in some cases nearly 75%).  How do you know someone, the RIGHT someone even sees your ad?  Cash a bit tight these days? Think again about Social Media.

If you have a rainy day (which so far this summer, it seems like all we have had is rainy days), go to YouTube.COM and search for “How To” or use other keywords to learn about things you may have questions about.  YouTube isn’t just a collection of senseless videos, there really are great things there – and if your business wants to produce something that you want the world to know about, here is your free way to promote it.

Also, looking for something to talk about with your nieces and nephews, or grandchildren?  Ask them about their facebook page or about how they text to keep in touch with their friends.  You may be surprised what you can learn and where you can learn it!

In today’s online world, search is essential. How many times per day do you head to Google to find something on the web? Google’s reign on the search market is pretty clear: the site handles roughly 75-80% of U.S. search traffic. But is Google always the answer?

Over the last couple of months, the search landscape has really caught on fire. New services are trying to chip away at Google’s lead by offering a different set of results for search queries. Here’s a brief look at three of these sites that may help you find the information you need more quickly.

Bing

Microsoft recently launched a massive rebranding campaign for its Live Search, renaming the engine to bing.com. Bing follows in the footsteps of other mainstream search engines of Internet past; in addition to general web results, Bing also provides local, image, and refined links based on your search. Microsoft has held one of the top three search spots for quite a while, and Bing is the corporation’s latest attempt to grab a bigger slice of the pie. Here’s a search for Maine on Bing.

Twitter Search

Looking for something a little more recent? Twitter Search may be what you need. A Twitter search will yield results posted by Twitter users over the last month or so. It’s a great way to know what people are saying about something in an up-to-the-minute way. We’ve previously offered some Twitter searching tips if you’d like to try a search or two. Here’s a search for Maine on Twitter search.

Wolfram Alpha

If you’re looking for data, check out Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha will give very context-sensitive results: everything from statistics to graphs to maps, depending on your query. Here’s a search for Maine on Wolfram Alpha.

What are your favorite ways to search the current landscape of the web?

Technorati Profile

Although we spend a lot of our time on our site management applications (datAvenger lite, datAvenger, Hula, etc.), we also do quite a bit of custom application work – projects for a specific client that allow them to do a specific task for their company. The web apps we build often replace a process that’s been used by a business for years: maybe a complicated paper trail, a messy bulletin board in someone’s office, or a manual transcription from paper forms into Excel.

We often hear from our clients that these applications save a lot of time in their daily routine, but sometimes there’s a learning curve as the business transitions to a new system. We completely understand this; after all, we’re used to providing businesses and organizations with improved ways to do a core part of their work.

When we develop an application for a company, we’ll often provide a version of the product for the company to use prior to its actual launch. These versions might not have every feature that’s planned for the final release, but they’re usually used by one or two people to help understand how the product works before it’s actually switched on and used by everyone. The product testing periods are a great time for you to give us your feedback about the application. If something doesn’t make sense to you, we can discuss what changes we could make before the product’s final launch.

As we often say here, nobody knows how your business works better than you do. We want to help your business succeed, and your feedback is valuable as you use your application. When the final version of your application launches, we want it to save your company time and money.

Photo by Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch, released under Creative Commons.

Have you ever wondered if people are talking about you on twitter.  There is a relatively simple way to tell.  Search.twitter.com is the place to go.

To put it very simply, search.twitter.com is like google for twitter and works much the same.

One of the very covenant features of this search is that the results can be tracked via a feed.   Once I have this twitter search in my feed reader, any time somebody mentions me on twitter, I see it.  This feed is available near the top right hand side of the search results.  It’s the RSS icon, that says “Feed for this query” right next to it.  For those of you who don’t know much about feeds, go back and read our feed reader article.

To really get the most of the this functional I recommend you use the plus and minus signs.  Plus means that the search must contain that word and minus means that the search results must not contain that word.  For example say I wanted to search for tweets that had  ‘cream’ but not ‘ice’, then I would search from “-ice +cream“.

At Sephone we like to think of ourselves more than just the people who build your site. For many businesses and organizations, a site is a key part of the business’s identity for both new and existing customers. We want to be a partner as you develop your business or organization online, and we’ll always do our best to help you represent yourself on the web.

At the end of the day, though, nobody knows your business or organization better than you do. While we’re discussing your site – whether it’s a brand new project or changes to your existing presence online – we’ll do all we can to understand what’s important to your business and what you want to achieve online. While we’re talking, don’t ever be afraid to bring your experience and vision for your business to the table. We’ve always found that we do our best work when we have a really good grasp of the business behind a site.

Here are a few ways you can help us understand your business better.

• If you have a mission or vision statement, let us take a look at it.
• Bring in some sales flyers, reports, or press releases so that we can have a better idea about how you communicate with your customers.
• If you’ve seen features on other sites you’d like to incorporate into yours, bring Web addresses or screenshots so that we can see them.
• Let us know about the goals of your project. This goes deeper than “I want the business to make money” or “we should attract more customers.” How will your site compliment what you’re doing with the other parts of your business?

For more ideas on how to optimize your communication with us, be sure to read Alan’s previous post, “How to get the most from your web development company.”