Don't forget!

It's that time of year again in Dominica - storm season - and though it's been mostly quiet so far, let's not forget to always unplug our DSL modems from the phone line whenever it's not in use, in case of a lightning strike!

Community Involvement

Delphis Ltd. is pleased to annouce that is has become a Corporate Sponsor of iRie ECO Summer Camp 2007.
iRie ECO is a newly formed organisation (soon to be non-profit) that will be holding a Summer Camp at the Dominica Club from July 2nd to August 31st, 2007. The programme encompasses three age groups: 1 to 3 years, 3 to 6 years, and 6 to 10 years of age. The activities will cover art, science, cooking, circus, gardening, maths, language arts, and life skills. Tutoring is also available.

The Educational themes for this summer are:

• Eco-Education
• Healthy Living
• Science: Rainbows, Ocean, Rainforest
  

The children will learn through art, singing, drama and other hands-on activities.

For more info about the organisers, teachers, pricing, and programme details, email irieeco@yahoo.com.

Counting Web Traffic

A couple of old 'web traffic' chestnuts cropped-up today.

First, hits are no valid way of counting real traffic to your website. Sure, they are always the highest of web metrics - being the total of all files (pages, images etc) accessed in a given time period - and as such, there's always the temptation to say "we've had 250,000 hits this week". What this really means is, we've had a total of 250,000 files accessed, it could be 50 people or it could be 5,000 people, but we like 250,000 because it's way way more impressive than 5,000. Hits tells you so very little about your website traffic. Instead, unique visitors are the true test of web traffic. For each unique visitor there will be one or more page views, and since each page is usually composed of several files such as images, one visitor will generate several page views each one of which will generate several file hits. And the total in bytes of all these files is the bandwidth usage.

And this leads on to the second chestnut of the day: (graphical) page counters. Don't use them. They tell your visitor nothing useful, and provide you with no useful information at all.

e-mail checklist

Our e-marketing seminars emphasise the need to make sure basic criteria are followed when you start to using e-mail for marketing in a serious way. The points you need to check are

• •Do you have a strong signature, including your URL?
• •Meaningful identity (‘From:’)?
• •Professional address?
• •Timely response?
• •Think before you reply!
• •Is your system date correct?
• Don't dilute the message with poor visuals
  
• •Hide multiple recipients

Regarding the last point, no-one wants to have to scroll through a long list of other recipients (besides, it might make people feel special if they think the e-mail's just to them!).

If you're e-mailing to anything more than just a couple of people, send the e-mail to yourself (or one address), but BCC to the multiple e-mail addresses.

Did you know...?

...the Chinese internet market is the second largest in the world, and it's only a whisker behind the US, with 150 million users (the US has 154 million). But the US has 68% penetration. That 150 million represents about 10% of the Chinese market. At full saturation, the Chinese market will be almost 7 times as large as the US...

The importance of web analytics

Just to emphasise how critical checking your site traffic using a package like Google Analytics is, I reproduce an abridged version of the following Reasons Why You Do NOT Need Web Analytics

"If you believe Web Analytics is overrated and your business could succeed without Web Analytics, then you're absolutely correct. Below are reasons why you don't Web Analytics integrated into your online campaign.

• You don’t want to know where your visitors are coming from.


• You don't care how much time visitors spend on your website.


• Tracking hits is perfectly sufficient.


• Dead Content? There can't be any dead content on your site.


• Bounce rate sounds like a make believe metric.


• Your time is better spent elsewhere rather than crunching data in order to measure the performance of our website.


• You love the plateau in your website's traffic because concentrating on branded keywords is good enough.


• Podcasts are the hippest thing, if you record they will come, so why measure the number of downloads.


• Your development team should be adding enhancements not implementing web analytics.


• Top Exit pages is a non-issue for your website, once visitors arrive they are going to purchase.


• Who cares what paths visitors take or the length of their paths, as I said earlier, once they arrive, they are going to purchase.


• Everyone understands English so it doesn't matter what country your visitors originate from.
  
  
• Your site's probably not going to have repeat visitors anyways because they'll find everything they need the first time around.


• You know that a PPC campaign's success is completely based upon click-throughs and impressions.


• Internal Search? That's just there for show.

Traffic

Our recent workshop emphasised in part the importance of a website owner examining their site's traffic. And equally, when someone makes a claim they are #1 in whatever niche they claim to be (so as to get your advertising dollar), ask them for proof of this.

Here's a look at the last year's traffic on News-Dominica.com:
The averages are: 726,646 page views a month, 85,000 visits a month.

If your website is your shopfront...

... then the text, especially spelling is important! I recently saw a local company's website. Their tag line was 'Integrity and Excelence'...

Riding the Pirate wave

Many Dominica sites are tapping-into the present pirate wave. The new CBS reality show 'Pirate Master' was filmed in Dominica, and there's a growing interest in Dominica because of this.

Sites that have created content related to pirates & Pirate Master in particular are seeing a substantial increase in traffic. Our PiratesDominica.com was created prior to Pirates of the Caribbean 2, so it's been well-positioned for quite some time, and we've seen growth in traffic around the time of both Pirates 2, 3 and of course Pirate Master - see graph!

This all goes to show that anticipating traffic trends is an important aspect of Search Engine Optimisation!

e-Marketing workshop

Last week Thursday we held a very well-attended 'Introduction to e-marketing' seminar, in association with the Dominica Hotel & Tourism Association. Though it was an introduction, we covered a lot of ground. We got lots of great feedback, and I'm already seeing people who attended taking up our suggestion to 'get a blog'. I'll link to them soon!

Welcome

Welcome to the Delphis Ltd corporate blog.

Delphis Ltd. is a Dominica-based web development and e-marketing company. And since we've been talking about the power of blogs as part of our e-marketing focus, it's high time we had a corporate one!

We hope to share some of our experience via this medium. Or just use it to share some of our cool images of Dominica...