The 8 Alarm Blog

The time came to change 8 Alarm Marketing’s Web host, a task I did not relish.  There are thousands of hosting companies out there, and discerning the differences seems nearly impossible.  For me, the most important factor for a hosting decision is reliability.  The Website must stay up, and support must be reasonably responsive.  I don’t have time to cajole remote support personnel into providing a complete and accurate answer or to push the provider to acknowledge and fix and issue.  Web hosting is not rocket science.  I need a provider who will just get it done.

In my research, I discovered a new differentiator to consider:  going green.  In my career in marketing communications, I have killed well more than my fair share of trees.  Even in the Web and PDF world we live in now, I am notorious for printing and printing and printing anything longer than a page that I want to read.  It’s just hard to read on screen.  So when I ran across BounceWeb, the green factor was an interesting benefit.  Once I determined that all other factors were equal or better at BounceWeb, the green hosting benefit was a differentiator that helped with the decision.

According to BounceWeb:

• Datacenters use four percent of the world’s electricity.
• Global warming is a concern for 90 percent of  the population.
• Only three percent of all Web hosting companies are going green.

And despite the fact that BounceWeb says going green is 31 percent more expensive to do, their servers use 41 percent less electricity.  What’s more, the data center is wind powered!  No kidding.  All this social responsibility, and BounceWeb’s prices are quite affordable and competitive.

So when you are visiting the 8 Alarm Marketing Website or reading this blog, you can feel better knowing that the datacenter supporting it is designed to minimize its carbon footprint.  Social responsibility:  done.

Social bookmarking services like Delicious, Digg and others can be a life-saver for those who depend on the Web as a business tool, in addition to the convenience they add for personal surfing.  I prefer Delicious for personal and professional bookmarking.  It works better for me as a bookmarking tool that mimics a browser’s bookmarking features but adds the value of accessibility across browsers. (I use two or three browsers–often at the same time.)  I view Digg as a news-sharing tool, appropriate for topical and time-sensitive bookmarks, while Delicious is a longer-term reference tool.  I also find the shared bookmarks from other Delicious users to be very valuable–in fact as on-target and often more so that Google search results.  So Delicious it is.

Yet I find the service lacking in some ways.  I strongly dislike the “space-separated” approach to tagging.  As a copywriter, my hands move automatically across the keyboard.  Spacing is automatic and unconscious for me.  It’s kind of like breathing.  When I’m in a hurry, I tend to bookmark with spaces, which results in inaccurate and nonsensical tags.

Another pet peeve is the somewhat non-intuitive approach to accessing your tags while you’re bookmarking.  The pop-up suggestions and lists of tags don’t seem to be a complete look at my tag inventory.  So I end up with multiple variations on a tag, making it awkward to get a comprehensive look at my bookmarks when I go back to find something. Youtube uses space-delimited tagging as well, and it just makes me nuts.  Is it just me?  Isn’t comma separation a more natural approach?  Why can’t all these services standardize on comma-separated tagging?

After such a long time on Delicious, with literally hundreds of bookmarks and thousands of tags, I finally gave up in frustration and decided to start over this week.  Perhaps it seems counterintuitive, but there were so many bookmarks over so many, many months that I could no longer make sense of it.  So I started a completely new Delicious account, and am trying to be more careful and consistent with how I bookmark.  At some point, I’ll go back to my old account and try to transfer over the most important and relevent bookmarks.  I’m hoping that a fresh start will save me from drowning in my own Web surfing.

Feel free to take a look at my bookmarks and follow along as I tag, tag, tag the Web.

Putting together weekly Web reports for clients can be a cumbersome exercise of importing, exporting, mixing and matching data from analytics solutions like Google Analytics.  The “out-of-the-box” reports never seem to quite combine the precise view that would help marketers monitor and analyze Web traffic.  Plus, it’s difficult for an agency like 8 Alarm Marketing to give clients direct access to data they can review without exposing all the Websites I track via Google Analytics, which only allows access to all Websites I manage, not access by campaign or site.  In a moment of “there’s gotta be a better way,” I Googled “web analytics dashboards” and discovered a souped-up Excel 2007 spreadsheet by Stephane Hamel, a veteran Web analytics professional and member of the Web Analytics Association.

Hamel has released a free Excel Web Analytics Dashboard template that at first glance looks very exciting.  Hamel notes a number of ways to use the spreadsheet that could prove to make life much easier for marketing executives who want to report on Website traffic with more flexibility and precision.  For example:

• Control the information being distributed
• Publish the information in a format people are used to (in either Excel or PDF)
• Avoid granting access to the web analytics tool itself
• Include other sources of data
• Ease “month to month” and “year to year” analysis
• Ease analysis of major segments (such as two countries, two sites, etc.)
• Include the analyst’s comments and evaluation

I’m going to give Hamel’s spreadsheet a spin with high hopes that it may solve a number of the issues of reporting on what is happening on client Websites.