Slow Notes
How to boost your page reach on Facebook
Your Facebook page's post views are declining. According to data from last spring the organic reach was around 6% for a typical Facebook page. That means basically only 6 of your 100 page likers see your posts. That's not good, is it? And the views amount has been declining so fast the percentage could be now even less. This is why there's a huge surge of posts like this all over the web. Posts telling you how to make your Facebook page updates show up more. The reason why I'm chipping in is that those posts are generally written for very popular, huge pages and I'm now talking about pages o...
Online advertisement and the measurement issue
Online advertisement has a big problem: It's rather easily monitored and it appears that numbers of clicks, views and even other details can be created just like that. The reason this is a problem is because online advertisement has bigger expectations. Unlike other more traditional ways of advertisement online must produce clear numbers. Let's take television as an example. It's said to be the most influential medium of advertisement. But what do we really know about its influence? Of course there has been a lot more time for collecting the data for television than for Internet. Decades mor...
The human factor in analytics
It's the beginning of a new year. Your website has had a bad bunch of weeks, your sales are low and you are getting very little contacts about your services. You panic and ask if you are in trouble. Maybe you should shut your site down, make some changes or hey, perhaps you had made some changes and now nothing's working. Yeah, you got to change things back to how they were. If you are a blogger you know how easy it is to get too involved with the measurements. You look at the bounce rate and misunderstand it terribly, you compare your success to yesterday, day before that, or the previous...
Twitter and hashtags
Hashtags are commonly used to get involved with a certain conversations on Twitter and increasingly on other platforms. The whole idea of hashtags appears to have been inherited from IRC where channels, sort of discussion forums, where usually prefixed with #-sign. On Twitter they were at first used as an unofficial way to tag conversations. Now what we call hashtags have their own life and are part of how Twitter works. For example different events may have their own hashtags to round up all the Tweets about and around them. They help interested parties to follow the subject and search for in...
Choosing colours for a website
One big part of web design and web based branding is the colour palette of the site. I see lots of "web designers" creating websites for their clients using the same theme: White background, black text, simple black and white logo and maybe one accent colour. They probably use a (bought) WordPress theme as a base and just slap the design elements on it without really doing any design work. This results to a huge bunch of websites which look the same, feel the same and generally don't really stand up from the crowd. Colours are an easy way to set a website apart, at least when they are used tho...
Quick SEO tips for bloggers
Search Engine Optimisation is the thing. Half of bloggers seem to think they are SEO experts and the other half want to be better with it. Since before googling became something we do when we search for things online we were already playing the game of trying to get our sites on the top of certain searches. Then it was easy. Only using a word or expression on your site was close to sure way to get it to the top of the searches. But things have changed. Now there are multitudes of websites and they have tons of articles and pages on them. The search engines are now "smarter" and they use comp...
About 404 error pages
One of the most overlooked aspect of website design and development are the error pages. Common errors on otherwise working websites are 403 and 404. The first one happens when a website visitor tries to get into a page to which they have no permissions. It's a status code 403 Forbidden, which the server sends to the web page. For instance they could try and access a page in the administration area without being logged in to the administration. Or perhaps they have logged in, but don't have the required access to certain parts of the administration. The latter error, 404 or Not Found...