Posts Tagged website
Give a Free Website to Your Favorite Church or Non-profit!
Posted by admin in church, Company & Product Profiles, Email, Free Stuff, fun, Internet, joomla, mobile, news, productivity, Simplicity, Technology & Gadgets, Timesavers, tips, Tools, Tricks & Hacks, Web, Web Applications, Website Development, wordpress on September 1, 2011
Here at Allyte, we’re big supporters of local churches and non-profit organizations. This month, Allyte is giving away a website (through our new product, called Speak) and 1 year of hosting to one church or non-profit organization. Winner to be announced September 17, 2011.
How to Understand Google Analytics – Part 3 of 3
Posted by admin in Company & Product Profiles, Email, File and Data Sharing, google docs, how to, Instruction, Internet, joomla, mobile, news, productivity, Simplicity, Technology & Gadgets, Timesavers, tips, Tools, Tricks & Hacks, Web, Web Applications, Website Development, wordpress on June 9, 2011
Read part 1 of “How to Understand Google Analytics Reports” here.
Read part 2 of “How to Understand Google Analytics Reports” here.
The last part of this 3-part series on understanding Google Analytics covers the last five pages of the sample report [download it here]. Let’s start with the map overlay.
The map overlay section is a breakdown of the countries your website’s traffic is coming from. In the sample report, the majority of the traffic came from the United States. The numbers that follow show the amount of visitors from each country, the average time they spent on the website, what percentage of the visitors were new, and their bounce rate. You’ll also see the comparison to last month in the sample report.
This information is somewhat helpful in understanding where traffic comes from, but a customized report that drills down to a more local level would be more beneficial. The report can be configured to show this data, but it isn’t configured in the default Google Analytics report, as demonstrated in the example.
The next section down is titled “Content Overview”. This is one of my favorite sections of the report because it shows the most popular pages for the website. There is also a term here that we haven’t defined yet – “Unique Views”. Google defines unique views as “pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique view represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.” [source]
For this site, the home page is the most frequently viewed page on the site, which I suspect will be the case for the majority of websites. The report shows the number of pageviews for each page down the list, and the percentage of total pageviews this number represents. It is also compared to the last month’s pageviews to contrast traffic to the previous month.
Lastly, the “New vs. Returning” section breaks down visitor types by numbers. As you can see in this sample report, new visitors outweight returning visitors by a margin of only 54. In the previous month, however, new visitors took the title. If goals are configured in your Google Analytics dashboard, these numbers will also appear here. Google has a great article about getting these setup for your Analytics account.
The sample report we used as an outline for this series of articles is the default report available from Google Analytics. Analytics users can configure customized reports that offer information that is helpful for their specific website. The online dashboard for Analytics allows for interactive reporting, drilling down through the site to display numbers that are helpful in determining how to optimize your website. As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series. The information found in these reports needs to be interpreted for the purposes and goals of your website.
Thanks for reading through the series – and happy number crunching!
How to Understand Google Analytics Reports – Part 2 of 3
Posted by brandon in Company & Product Profiles, File and Data Sharing, Free Stuff, google docs, how to, Instruction, Internet, joomla, productivity, Security, Simplicity, Technology & Gadgets, Timesavers, tips, Tools, Tricks & Hacks, Web, Web Applications, Website Development, wordpress on June 7, 2011
Read part 1 of the “How to Understand Google Analytics Reports” series here.
Your Google Analytics report contains great information about visitors to your website that can assist in optimizing your site for the end-user. Let’s jump straight in. If you downloaded the Google Analytics Sample Report, we’re looking at page 3, titled “Visitors Overview”.
Again, the report includes a line graph to visualize the visitor breakdown by day and a contrasting color comparison to the previous month. It’s very similar to the line graph on page 1.
Below this graph is the breakdown of visitors to the site with a comparison to the previous month. Much of this information is duplicated from the previous 2 pages, but I want to make a point about absolute unique visitors.
We defined “visits” in part 1 of this series, but the next statistic down is “absolute unique visitors”. Here’s the meaning of the term, as defined by Google:
Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies.
This represents, possibly more accurately, the number of devices that have accessed your device, rather than the actual number of people. It can be assumed that a single individual will access the same sites from a work computer as they would a home computer or mobile device. Each of these devices is registered as an “absolute unique visitor” according to Google’s definition.
Below this absolute unique visitors statistic is a summary of the usage of your site, most of which was outlined in Part 1 of this series.
Next down the line is the Technical Profile section. This is where you’ll find numbers about the internet browsers and connection speeds being used to access your site. This information is important because if most of your users are using Internet Explorer to access your website (and I suspect they are), you’ll need to test the website using Internet Explorer for compatibility and display issues. The connection speed can also have an impact on the end-user’s experience of your website. If most users are on a dial-up connection, a flash-intensive or graphics-heavy website is not going to offer a good user experience, and will likely cause your bounce rate to decrease.
The Traffic Sources Overview section of the report provides information about how people find your website. Google defines traffic sources in three ways:
- Direct traffic – the visitor has typed your website address into the address bar of their browser.
- Referring sites – the visitor clicked on a link from a third-party website to access yours.
- Search engines – the visitor searched for a certain term or terms and found your website in the results.
The report even includes a nice little pie chart to visualize this data.
Below this visualization on the left side are the numbers for the most popular traffic sources for your site. Depending on how you want people to find your website, these numbers are helpful for optimizing the website’s performance on search engines or advertising platforms. If your only form of marketing is handing out business cards with the web address, then direct traffic may be your top source. On the other hand, if your website is real estate, you’ll probably want great results with search engines.
Speaking of search engines, the right side column of pages 5 and 6 are the search terms visitors have used to search and find your website. This information is helpful in determining if people are actually finding what they are searching for when they arrive at your website. For example, let’s say you own Pisa Pizza, an online retailer that sells pizza kits. The keywords you want to see in this list are “Pisa Pizza”, “pizza”, and “pizza kit”. If people aren’t finding your website through these search terms, it’s time to improve your website’s search engine optimization.
That’s it for part 2 of “How to Understand Google Analytics”. Part 3 will come later this week.
All Church Camp Websites
This week is All Church Camp in rural Helena, Arkansas. On the agenda this week is teaching a group of 12 teens how to develop a website using WordPress. A few pictures have been posted on Twitter – via @robmcbryde and @brandon_moore.
Here are the websites they’ve been building:
How to Secure Your Windows PC – Part 3
Posted by admin in Company & Product Profiles, Downloads, Email, File and Data Sharing, Free Stuff, home, how to, Instruction, Internet, productivity, Security, Spam, Technology & Gadgets, tips, Tools, Tricks & Hacks, Web on June 3, 2010
In “How to Secure Your Windows PC – Part 1“, we established that Windows PCs are often targeted because of their large market share and that the brand of your computer makes no difference because viruses, spyware and malware occur at the software level.
In “How to Secure Your Windows PC – Part 2“, we considered browsing and clicking habits that can be harmful for your computer and your privacy.
Let’s look at two different types of software that can help protect your computer.
Internet Security Suite
There are some tools available that can help secure your Windows PC as well. A question that is often asked of me is, “Which antivirus software is the best?“. My answer is always, “I can recommend a certain product, but you need to know that no security software is bulletproof. They will all let some things get through.”
It’s important to understand that antivirus software offers only a certain type of protection. So if you go to download one of the free anti-virus software packages (AVG, Avast!, and Avira are all popular), they will offer anti-virus only protection. In order to get a quality level of comprehensive protection from a single piece of software, you’ll need to pay for it.
PC Magazine has a good run-down of the best software for 2010 here. They rate Norton and McAfee above the rest of the suites in this particular review. On more than one occasion, however, I have had major software issues with both McAfee and Norton, so I typically recommend another software package.
In my experience, Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 offers the best value, features and pricing. I use this software with many of my clients and have had good results without inhibiting the computer’s performance. It’s around $80, which covers three computers for a full year. Contact me to get this software installed on your computer.
Consistent Environment Software
Wouldn’t it be great if your computer was exactly the same every time you turned it on? One software package makes that happen.
Windows Steady State, developed by Microsoft allows a computer’s administrator to configure other users for a consistent environment on every login. It’s free and compatible with Windows XP and Vista (sorry, Windows 7 users!).
Basically, here’s how it works: a user can login, browse the internet, download files and even adjust settings just like usual. Then when they log out, all the settings revert back to the way they were before the person logged in. This software is very useful on a computer that a family with children may use, or in my case, a computer lab with multiple users.
Other helpful features of this software are timed logouts, software restrictions, and user permissions. If these sounds fancy, I assure you that Windows Steady State makes it very easy to understand and adjust these settings.
With a little common sense and the right software, your Windows PC should operate smoothly without much effort on the part of the user. It may not be bulletproof, but the overall experience will be better than if no protection or safeguards were put in place.
There is one option still to consider when using a PC. We’ll take a look at that in Part 4.
How to Secure Your Windows PC – Part 2
Posted by admin in Downloads, Email, File and Data Sharing, Free Stuff, how to, Instruction, Internet, productivity, Security, Technology & Gadgets, Timesavers, tips, Tricks & Hacks, Web on June 2, 2010
In “How to Secure Your Windows PC – Part 1“, we established that Windows PCs are often targeted because of their large market share and that the brand of your computer makes no difference because viruses, spyware and malware occur at the software level.
To protect your Windows computer, the first and best rule of protection is to use your head and be pro-active in your browsing and clicking habits. This typically means two things:
- Only visit websites that you know can be trusted
- Use caution when clicking on links in e-mail that are unsolicited
Let’s look a little closer at #1:
How do you know which websites can be trusted? There is a difficult tension here – if you visit only the sites you already know, there are many useful and informational websites out there that you will miss in an effort to be cautiuos. But, if you go out willy-nilly and click on every site that comes up in the search results, your computer will get infected with malicious software sooner or later.
So the answer lies somewhere in between. More experienced users can take a little more liberty in clicking on unknown sites, but naive or less experienced users will need to be more careful when visiting unknown websites.
The truth is that malicious websites will do their best to look like a legitimate, reputable website. But these same sites will do damage to your computer that can be difficult to recover from.
Let’s look a little closer at #2:
E-mail is also a popular way to direct people to websites that are harmful not only to your computer, but to your privacy. If you get an e-mail from a financial institution, never click on the link in the e-mail. Instead, go to your browser to access the institution’s site directly.
It is very possible that the legitimate-looking e-mail you just received will direct you to a “phishing” site that will extract your login information and allow someone else to access your accounts and information.
In Part 3, we’ll consider two types of software that can help protect your computer from viruses and spyware.
Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofit Organizations Can Use Social Media to Power Social Networks for Change
Posted by admin in church, college, Company & Product Profiles, environment, Free Stuff, Instruction, Internet, news, Simplicity, Technology & Gadgets, Web on February 24, 2010
Beth’s Blog is one of the more popular resources for non-profits and socially-conscious organizations. The blog offers practical information and real-life stories about using social media for social change Beth Kanter, the author of the blog, is the CEO of Zoetica, a communication organization intent on “Connecting Organizations with their Networks”.
If you’re responsible for social media in a non-profit or socially-conscious organization, Beth’s Blog is worth adding to your feed reader or checking in on a regular basis.
DimDim Creates a Totally Free Meeting Space Online
Posted by admin in Company & Product Profiles, File and Data Sharing, Free Stuff, how to, images, Instruction, Internet, Simplicity, Technology & Gadgets, Timesavers, tips, Tools, Tricks & Hacks, Web, Web Applications on February 24, 2010
If you’re looking for some space online to meet, look no further than DimDim. This free web service with a funny name offers a comprehensive package for meeting online.
Here are a few highlights:
- No software installation necessary – DimDim runs completely in your browser
- Desktop Sharing
- Use your webcams and microphones for video and conversation
- Record and embed meetings
- Social media integration
A complete run-down of the feature set is available here.
As mentioned above, a free version is available that allows up to 20 users and 1 webcam. Premium, paid packages are available, too. Here is a full-comparison of the packages.
DialMyCalls Makes Automated Phone Calls For You
Posted by admin in Company & Product Profiles, File and Data Sharing, Free Stuff, how to, Instruction, Internet, news, productivity, Simplicity, Technology & Gadgets, Timesavers, tips, Tools, Tricks & Hacks, Web, Web Applications on February 23, 2010
Need to get a message out to a group of people through a phone message? You could spend several hours making the calls yourself. You could pay someone to do it for you. Or you could use DialMyCalls.com.
DialMyCalls offers a free subscription that will make 1 call per day to a maximum of 25 people. The message is limited to 30 seconds or less in length and will be branded with a DialMyCalls message. A premium subscription is available with fewer restrictions and no branding.
It’s an easy service to use, with only 3 steps required to make a phone call:
- Create a new message
- Setup your list of people to call (an address book feature is available too)
- Select your call options and schedule it to call.
That’s all it takes to make automated phone calls to the people you need to contact. Give DialMyCalls.com a try the next time you need to call a group of people.
Two More Photo Resize Tools
Posted by admin in Free Stuff, how to, Instruction, Internet, joomla, productivity on January 22, 2010
I wrote about some photo resize tools not too long ago, but I learned of another tool you should know (and use!) through one of my favorite blogs. A reader also wrote to suggest another popular resource that I’d like to toss out there.
- Shrink Pic [via Lifehacker] is perhaps one of the most handy picture resizing tools when working with online mediums, such as websites and social media sites. It’s the most handy because you don’t have to think about it. ShrinkPic automatically resizes pictures you’re uploading to the web. This does a few things: 1) it decreases the amount of time it takes for your file to transfer, 2) it ensures you have an optimal (or close to it) size for web use, and 3) it conserves server storage space.Go ahead, install ShrinkPic. Your website administrator will love you for it.
- IrfanView is a very popular program that allows you to resize pictures and perform a ton of other operations on images (it even plays videos). It’s free for download at http://www.irfanview.com/, where you can also find a full list of features.