I was out, now I'm back in

If Lord Goldsmith can change his mind about the legality of going to war in Iraq, I think it's OK for me to change my mind about Twitter.

Some months ago I left Twitter because my account had been hacked and some slimeballs were sending their own scam tweets in my name. I had just left Facebook because I didn't like the extreme openness of umpteen levels of "friends" knowing about me. Not from paranoia but just because I didn't like the lack of control over who sees what. Having my Twitter account hacked meant I was primed to make the instant decision - I'm out!

Despite finding that Twitter can be time-consuming, I did miss the chat, and I did miss the obvious promotional opportunities that arise, such announcing new properties on JustSuffolk.com.

So, when a client asked how she could use the internet more to promote her website and interests, we discussed forums, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.

Rather than try to explain how Twitter works, I decided to demo the service. I also wanted to demo the ability to track clicks from Twitter to websites - I use tr.im.
So I signed up with twitter again.
You can "follow" me through this link to twitter.

Are you getting enough website visitors? Think pips!

Sometimes my website clients ask "will I get enough visitors to my website?" I think to myself "enough, compared with what?" They also ask "will I be number one on page one of Google?" On that question I think "number one out of how many similar sites?". This is not defensive thinking, it's about managing my clients' expectation to a level of reality.

As ever, "enough" depends on many things. Not least, it depends on the number of other similar websites in the same industry in the same geographical area that are attempting to attract the same audience as my client. Perhaps it should more reasonably be asked as "how am I doing compared with similar sites?"

I'll use the holiday accommodation business sector as an example, because there are extremes of website sizes. In the holiday accommodation industry, there are thousands of competing websites and, perhaps more importantly, competing web pages.

There are websites for individual bed and breakfast establishments, or a single holiday home for rent. These start from one-page sites to larger sites that don't usually extend beyond five pages or so. There are also "listing" websites such as JustSuffolk.com, which has over one hundred places to rent, so it has over one hundred pages. Then there are the agencies, with dozens, or hundreds, and sometimes thousands of properties, with a consequently huge number of pages.

It's really not reasonable to compare a five-page single-property site with a site that has hundreds or thousands of pages. It's not reasonable to compare apples with pears, let alone grapes with pomegranates (think pips!).

The bigger the website, the better they are placed for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - just because they will have to mention the key words holiday, accommodation, bed and breakfast, self catering, etc. many times. They are not "cheating" in any way, it's just because of the number of properties they advertise. So, because of their inherent SEO advantage, they usually fare well in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

So when a client with a single property website asks if his visitor numbers, or his position in Google SERPs are good, I explain that it's really not easy (not possible, in some respects) for a single property website with just a few pages, to compete with larger, multiple-page websites.

What is more important to the website owner is that the visitor numbers on his own site are seen to grow, as the website becomes better known, and that the level of enquiries and bookings or sales are good.

Think of these simple comparative statistics for two imaginary websites:
One receives 100,000 visitors, from which the owner has 100 enquiries, which lead to 10 sales. The second receives 10,000 visitors, from which the owner receives 1,000 enquiries, which lead to 100 sales. Which website would you prefer to own?

Although high visitor numbers are a very important part of the success of a website,  they are not the be all and end all. What is far more important than visitor stats, is the success of the business.

Is your spam filter perfect?

No!  Spam filters are not perfect. Some are too weak, or you set them too weak, and a mass of spam is delivered. Some are too strong, and genuine emails, are wrongly identified as spam. And Murphy's law decrees that the one's that get mis-filed as junk are the urgent ones you need now.


And spam filters generally operate in two distinct arenas. Most of us have our spam filtered as it arrives in the inbox, under our control, and have the spam filed in a specially-named folder which we can peruse from time to time to ensure that genuine emails aren't mis-filed. Some of us have access to spam filtering on the mailserver, which means you can remove or "flag" the spam before it arrives in your inbox. Both are under your own control.


If you use BT or Yahoo for your email service, you probably have some of the best spam protection around. But sometimes it might be "too good."  The chances are, you have also experienced the problem where someone claims to have sent you an email but you believe that you have not received it.

The sender says "I definitely sent it to your correct address" and the recipient says "It definitely has not arrived." Before you get into a serious argument with your correspondent, understand that it is quite possible that you are both right!

I have experienced dozens and dozens of cases of this and in every single one, the reason is that the BT and/or Yahoo email spam filtering service has been a little over-zealous. The email has been delivered but it has been hidden from the recipient.

I am not criticising BT/Yahoo or any other ISP who tries to protect us from all the millions of pieces of junk that are sent by email. But it is not such a good idea for them to intercept and hide legitimate emails for you. OK, they don't actually hide them but in the real world, my experience is that plenty of BT/Yahoo customers don't know where or how to find the intercepted emails.

This morning I received rejections from a message I sent to 105 addresses about computer security. Admittedly, the content of my message did repeat selected parts of a "phishing" scam email but of the 105 addressees, only those sent to BT or Yahoo were rejected. That shows that the BT/Yahoo spam filter is doing a great job in protecting their customers from virus or phishing scam emails.


While it's a great idea in principle, there seem to be two flaws in the BT/Yahoo SpamGuard system, or the way it is implemented and/or publicised:

1. It creates too many "false positives"  - identifying legitimate, normal email as unacceptable for various reasons and
2. Customers don't know how to find the intercepted emails.

Although BT/Yahoo have advised their customers how to check their "bulk mail" folders, empirical evidence indicates that very many of them have never even heard of the facility and of those who have, many of them do not know how to use it.

Here's an example of how this can easily occur (and it's based on real events) when the sender sends a perfectly normal,  innocent email to someone who has never previously received an email from that sender:

A BT/Yahoo email user might be interested in holiday accommodation and click on a website email link to send an availability enquiry.

When the holiday company replies, this is the first time the company has ever emailed that BT/Yahoo user. Very often, that email reply will be sent to the "spam" or "bulk mail" folder for no other reason than that the recipient has never received an email from the holiday company before.

The problem is made much worse, in reality, because BT/Yahoo user can only see the Bulk Mail folder if they access their mailbox via webmail. They may not know how to use webmail, or even be aware that exists.

So the sender knows they have sent their reply to the right address, because they used "reply" in their email. And the recipient "knows" the reply has not arrived in their email. It can cause a lot of misunderstanding...

Further information on Yahoo's SpamGuard can be found here...