How do you measure the usefulness of your web site? Do you track and analyze your web stats? Do you have a tracker on the site, but never look at it?
Just yesterday, when showing a client how to navigate their newly installed web stats, I was reminded of the importance of metrics. It seems that if someone is aware of search engine optimization metrics and stats are important to them. No business that I have encountered believes that return on investment is not important, especially on the web. It seems like more of a blind-spot or just an unawareness of how much data is slipping through their fingers every day by not tracking stats.
If I don’t get to you first, drop me a line so we can talk about how to measure and then improve your web traffic.
A couple of times per week, a group of WSG staff goes out to dinner, and then returns to the office to work late. The venue for dinner varies, but usually includes sushi of some sort. Being the hard-core truth-seekers that we are, there is always a desire to find and then consume the best sushi available to us.
It seems like we’ve found the best stuff in the area at Koto’s, which is located at 260 Wolf Road in Latham. We went there tonight, and had a delicious mix of yellow-tail, salmon, tuna and something quite remarkable called the “Jim Roll” which seems to be named after our Vice President Jim Gile. We’re big fans of the special wasabi, which was powerful enough to engulf my entire head in spicy goodness.
How is sushi related to technology services, web design, network support or any other WSG staple? Good question. You may have to become one of our clients to find out.
Looking at sites like the business tech page on cnet, InfoWorld’s blogs, or this map of the web brings to mind how much there is to know about information technology, web design, software programming, security and privacy, and all the hardware that drives it. It also brings to mind how fortunate our firm is to have so many legitimate gurus, which is why we’re able to provide a wide variety of solutions. This depth of knowledge helped us land our latest client, about which we are very excited. I haven’t asked permission to mention them by name in our blog, so they will remain mysterious for now. They mentioned our depth of abilities as one of the reasons they chose to do business with us. As I told them, it’s nice to know the business model works.
The Web Worker Daily blog recently detailed fifteen ways to make use of a wiki. I’m happy to report that we use our company wiki for at least eight of those. As our company grew, it meant more people and more client information to keep track of. Searching for information on a shared network drive became too time consuming and frustrating. We had no effective way to compile, store, access and edit our most important information. Client histories, guidelines on writing .php code, design preferences, employee handbooks, phone lists, ongoing projects and the like were just not as available as we needed them to be.
Enter the GWiki.
In early May of this year, our CIO Paul Kulp used Media Wiki, the same open-source software originally created for Wikipedia, to create ours. The G in GWiki pays homage to the family name of our parent – the Gile Companies. The main sections in our ever expanding database are:
Within those categories lies a wide variety of data; it drills down pretty far. We do our best to add content as we go along, locating information and either adding it to the wiki, or referencing where to find it. Since new pages can be created and edited on the fly, it is an ideal tool for a fast-moving organization.
It can be a bit of a hurdle to change people’s thinking from post-it notes and network drives to saving data in the wiki, but over time it yields results. For example, I no longer have a company phone list taped to the wall near my desk, just a toolbar bookmark that takes me to the company-wide phone list. On this list is found phone extensions, emails, instant messenger handles, and links to each employee’s individual page. There you will find a photo and whatever information that person wants you to know about themselves.
Even more useful are the descriptions of internal procedures, client histories, explanations of the specific preferences held by our Creative Director Danielle McMahon, a digital suggestion box, results of usability studies and on and on.
Posted by Justin Cresswell, Director of Client Relations
We are apparently not alone in thinking that the communications security firm Postini offers high-quality products and services. WSG has been converting our network support clients over to Postini’s spam filtering service with excellent results.
Google showered the California-based company with serious love today, announcing their plans to acquire Postini for $625 million in cash. Postini joins YouTube and DoubleClick in Google’s portfolio of 2007 acquisitions, and will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the search-engine giant. The agreement is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close by the end of the third quarter 2007.
In addition to using soon-to-be Google property Postini’s spam filtering tool, WSG also employs Google Analytics to track our internal web site traffic as well as client sites, and I use many of Google’s free on-line applications.
I switched my personal email from Yahoo! to Gmail about a year ago, and have also been very happy with Google Calendar. The ability to create multiple calendars, and color code them is very useful. I have general entries, like client meetings and work obligations colored blue, personal items as orange, sales and marketing activities as green, and all US holidays as red. The calendar allows users to check and uncheck which calendars appear at any given time. It’s a very easy way to keep all of my events in one place, while also maintaining the necessary separation between roles and responsibilities.
WSG is pleased to welcome Wade Prather of Grafton, NY as a Systems Engineer, and Chris Clemente of Albany, NY as a Graphic Designer.
Wade comes to us from his post as a systems administrator with Computer Sciences Corporation. He has twice earned Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer status, and boasts a broad range of support experience from small, local companies as well as large Fortune 500 corporate networks. For the last 12 years Wade has been providing Windows networking support primarily in the manufacturing and financial sectors.
Wade has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is where he first met WSG President Michael Gile, CIO Paul Kulp and Systems Engineer Kevin Ware.
Chris received a bachelor’s degree in Information Studies from the University at Albany. He was most recently an IT Specialist at the New York State Education Department, a position he earned after a successful internship with the Department. Chris has also worked as a freelance web and graphic designer, both in the Capital Region and in his native Long Island.
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