the sephone blog

Getting the most bang for your buck is the goal of almost every expenditure that a person or company makes. Web development is no different. One of the keys in working with a development firm is communications. Properly relaying ideas back and forth is very important. Nearly all of the tips below involve some form of communication.

Have a clear idea with distinguishable goals

This means, more or less, knowing what you what. You don’t have to have everything spelled right out, but you should be able to, in a few sentences, say exactly what your project goals are. When thinking about project goals, always think about the end result.

Think about what you want your site/application to do when it’s done. Try to relay the idea of how this helps your business to your developer as well; this may help them have a better understanding of what you want.

Example goals:

1. ‘Our website should list all of our dealers and be searchable by state,’
2. ‘We need to be able to schedule appointments with our clients and collect this information from them,’ or
3. ‘Our web application should track all of our customer inquiries.’

Feedback goes both ways…

Throughout the course of the project, the development team may have questions for you. Be as responsive, informative, and decisive as you can be. This will help the developers know what you want and will allow them to work as effectively as possible. Continually starting and stopping on a project makes it more difficult for developers to stay focused. Be prepared for their feedback as well. Most projects have several check-ups or milestones along the way with decisions to be made before you can move on to the next step.

Ask questions

Don’t be afraid to ask plenty of questions. You should understand what your developer is doing and why. That way, when a development company has a question, you will better understand why they are asking and the context of what they are asking. If you don’t understand what your development company is asking you, then ask them for more detail, so you can make an informed decision. Asking questions and discussing them also helps ensure that everybody is on the same page.

Let developers develop

A lot of times your web development company might have some ideas you hadn’t thought of.  Just like you have experience doing what your business does, web developers work on a lot of sites and might suggest some things they think will make your project better. Clearly communicate the end goals and anything that is crucial for your site to do, and let your development team work out the nuts and bolts of your site/application.  When you see a development version of the site, again, give feedback and ask any questions you have.

Keep it simple

When in doubt, always err on the side of simple. New ideas or features can always be acted upon later. It’s harder to fix a project that is hard to use, out of scope, over time, and over budget, then it is break up a project into several phases. Almost always, it’s better to have half the features fully implemented, than all of the features half-implemented.

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!

You may have just seen an email that was from barracuda_notice@ sephone.com recently.  If so, you are probably wondering what it is.

If you are, well let me share.

Sephone knows that SPAM is the number #1 P.I.T.A.* of all e-mail users.  SPAM stinks.

As a means to fight SPAM, Sephone acquired SPAM Firewalls from Barracuda Networks-  Customers wishing to enhance their SPAM filters from the included services with all our hosting packages are able to subscribe.  There is a small monthly fee per account.
Call or email us support @ Sephone.com for more details.

The service was initiated in early 2008 for a small test group and over the last several months we have been adding new subscribers as they inquire on how they can improve their SPAM filters.  Until now, we have been providing the services to help train the filters- BUT NOW-  all subscribers to the barracuda can have access to their own quarantine lists.

Every day you will get an notice from barracuda_notice@ sephone.com IF you have anything in quarantine.  From the email you can go directly to the account and manage your queue.

• So if you dont get that important email you have been expecting-  login to your quarantine account and see if the message is in there.
• If it is, then mark it as “Not SPAM” and let it be delivered.
• If you see mail in there that is “unknown” , take a few minutes; look at it, if it is SPAM, mark it as such, if it is marked as SPAM and you want it delivered, mark it “WhiteList” Or NotSpam and now when ever email is received- from that sender-  the Barracuda will let it thru instead of quarantining it.  This is also “Training”.

Sephone is pleased to offer this service to help rid you of SPAM.

To learn more about fighting SPAM or to subscribe to this service contact us at support@sephone. com.
To learn more about Barracuda Networks, visit http://www.barracudanetworks.com

Fees are for each email account that you wish to be protected.  Aliases are included.  Additional Domains and associated email accounts are extra.  A small set up fee may apply depending on the number of domains and accounts to be included.

*P.I.T.A = Pain in the A$$   

In the world of the Web, tools known as WYSIWYGs are used to edit large or complex areas of content. A WYSIWYG – a What You See Is What You Get editor – is useful when you need to insert text formatting (like boldface or italics), links, pictures, or other types of special text into whatever you’re writing.

Every so often, though, you may find that a WYSIWYG editor doesn’t live up to its name, and some content from the editor may look different when you look at it on the site that you’re editing. We find that this happens most often when content is pasted into the editor from desktop editing programs like Microsoft Word.

Behind the scenes of your text: lost in translation

Underneath any document you make with a rich text editor (including Microsoft Word and online WYSIWYGs) is a markup language. The main duty of a markup language is to let the computer know how to display the text you write; it makes the computer able to understand the difference between 36-point text and words that are bold or blue.

But not all markup languages are the same. When a computer copies text from a program like Word into an online WYSIWYG, it does its best to play the role of translator between languages. Once in a while (especially when working with content with a lot of different formatting within it) it isn’t able to correctly figure out how to translate the text from one markup language to the other. Because online WYSIWYGs aren’t as complex as a program like Word, the online text may start to act funny as it finds formatting it doesn’t understand.

What can I do?

When copying text from a program like Word into an online WYSIWYG, we usually suggest two things: wiping and plain texting.

Style wiping (also known as “scrubbing” or “cleaning”) is the easiest way to clean your content of special formatting from external programs. Wipers usually have their own toolbar button (like one of the icons to the right) and will run through your text and remove any formatting the editor doesn’t understand. (Because of this, there is a chance you could lose some formatting in your text after wiping.) Wipers are usually only found in advanced WYSIWYGs that have a lot of formatting options.

The other option for pasting is to convert your text into plain text before pasting it into the online editor. To do this, paste the text into a program like Notepad. After you’ve pasted the text, select all of it and then copy it again. This middle step removes any special formatting and allows text to flow easily into the online editor.

Do you have any other tricks you’ve learned when pasting your content into online editors? Let us know!

Welcome to the first of many datAvenger tips & tricks from the gals in the front office! This week we’ll be going over how to re-order and re-organize navigation points (for datAvenger users only).

Start by clicking on the Architecture tab at the top of your screen. Your pages are organized in a hierarchy. Pages at the top level of the hierarchy are called “Parent pages”, and those one level lower are called “Children pages” or “Child pages”.

Click on a page title to select it, then on the pencil to edit.

To move a page above or below another page at the same level in the hierarchy, use the dropdown next to “Order”. To change the current page’s parent page (the page one level higher in the hierarchy), you’ll first need to click on the plus sign next to “Advanced Information”.

A new section will appear with a dropdown menu called “Parent Page”. Any page can be a parent page. This dropdown contains a list of every page on your website. The page that you select will become the current page’s parent, meaning that the current page will be one level beneath it.

Once you have selected the new parent page, you might need to revisit the “Order” dropdown at the top of the screen if there are multiple “children” pages. When you are done, don’t forget to click on “Save Changes”!

Was this topic helpful to you? Do you have any questions? Feel free to leave us a comment!

How can you keep up on everything these days? With the 24 hour news cycle, your business and personal life (what’s that?) all going full tilt, how do you keep on top of it all?

As a small business owner, the thought of even having to try to learn something new is just mind boggling. EVEN if it means that in the long run you know it is a time saver.

Well, enter a “feed reader.” Rather than go to individual web sites to see what is new about them, like foxnews.com, espn.com, maine.gov, blog.sephone.com, or whatever other sites you are interested in, what if those sites came to you in one location for you to look at there new content.

That’s exactly what a feed does. A “feed” is a way for a website, to get new information to you, without plugging up your email inbox or worse your computer with junkie software.

In your browser (that’s what you look at the Internet with, like Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari), have you ever seen that little orange icon that looks like the one to your right?

That little icon means that the website provides a feed for you. Sometimes you will see abbreviations like ATOM, RSS, or XML, don’t worry about what all of those mean. Sometimes the icon may even appear in your address bar, like it does for my browser.

See below:

Feeds are best delivered through a website that you log into, I prefer GOOGLE READER. It is what they call “web based” and it is FREE!! Enter your email address, put in a password and start grabbing information from sites you look at all ready. The reader just puts them all in one place so no more surfing, no more downloading .pdf’s, etc.

We would like you to subscribe to blog.sephone.com so you can look at our updates. AND we are not trying to sell you anything! Just as a Sephone client, as we learn, you can learn with us! Also the others, you won’t have to remember all the sites you like. The headlines are on your screen and you can manage them when you are able to catch up on the news!

Feeds are only going to grow and you can eliminate all those “newsletters” to your mailbox!

Below is a simple screencast of adding maine.gov news feed to my Google Reader.

With the growing features of Google Maps and the interest it is generating, we have been asked “How to get added?”- Here are the instructions, straight from the mouth of Google!

We gather business information from numerous websites, Yellow Pages directories, and other sources to populate Google Maps search results. If you’d like to be included, you can easily enter your information into our online Local Business Center for free. Here’s how:

• Visit the Local Business Center.
• If you already have a Google Account, sign in with your email and password.
• If you don’t have a Google Account, click Sign up for an account now.
• Follow the instructions to create a listing.

Please remember these points:

• The street address you enter will be shown in the Google Maps search results.
• If you already have an AdWords login address and password, you can use it to log in to the Local Business Center.
• Once you’ve submitted your business information, you’ll need to verify the listing before it goes live. You can verify using a touch-tone phone, SMS, or a PIN that will be sent via regular mail to your business address. Once the listing is verified, your information will normally appear in our results within six weeks.
• You must be able to receive regular mail at your business address if you are unable to verify by phone or SMS. A post office box can be used to register. The address you enter in the Google Local Business Center will be the address to which your PIN mailer is sent, and it will also be the address displayed in Google Maps results.

Want to add more than 10 business locations? You’re welcome to submit your information as a bulk upload through the Local Business Center. For information on creating a bulk upload, please select ‘Upload a Data File’ in your Local Business Center account and then follow our bulk upload instructions.

• The Google Local Business Center is currently available only for businesses in the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, China, and Japan.
• For information about adding your website to Google, please review the Webmaster Help Center.
• There’s no charge for Local Business Center listings. Google doesn’t accept payment to include listings or sites in our search results. However, we do offer locally-targeted advertising through our AdWords program. With AdWords, you can run your paid ads near our unpaid search results, and your ads will be clearly marked as sponsored advertising.

One of the easy ways to change how your site appears in search engine results is to change the metadata for your site’s pages. Sephone’s content management systems (datAvenger and datAvenger lite) allow you to change this information for any page on your site.

There are three main pieces of metadata for every page: the title, the description, and the keywords.

The page’s title is what appears in your browser’s title bar when you visit the page, and it also appears as the default title if you create a bookmark for the site. In the search engine world, the page’s title is what appears as the link to your site in the search results.

The page’s description is a short summary of what visitors would find on the page. This is often the text that appears underneath the page’s title in search engine results pages.

The keywords are a set of comma-separated words that describe the content of the page. Keywords used to play a major role in where your site appeared within search engine results, but now search engines rarely (if ever) look at keywords when visiting a page.

Setting meta data in datAvenger

datAvenger 4 gives you complete control over sitewide and page-specific metadata. To change the metadata on any page, edit the page in the Architecture tab and then click on the + button next to “Metadata”. datAvenger automatically generates a page title for you, but you’re free to change this if you like. You can also add keywords and a description in this space.

You also have the ability to specify sitewide meta data for any pages that do not have page-specific meta information. In the Globals tab, click on the blue META tab. Here you can specify a default title or a sitewide title prefix or suffix. datAvenger will show you a live preview of how your title will appear as you change these fields. You’re also able to change default keywords or the default description in this section.

Unless you’ve been given meta data from an external service, you can leave the “Custom Tags” field blank. This field is for advanced users who receive HTML meta data tags, and it can cause your page to display incorrectly if it is not entered in the right way!

Setting meta data in datAvenger lite

datAvenger lite 3.5 gives you the ability to edit meta data for any of your pages. Click on the <M> button after selecting any page in the Content tab. You’ll then have the option to specify a title, keywords, or a description. Like in datAvenger, leave the “Custom” box empty unless you’ve been given HTML meta data tags to enter!