it’s obviously too early to say if the latest round of economic woes in the banking sector will hit sales directly, but the distraction appears to have had an immediate effect on visitor numbers. Visitors to selfcateringhols.com are extremely cyclical: Monday is our busiest day of the week declining to a week low on Saturday. Sunday leads to Monday and so on. For the first time this year we saw more visitors on Sunday 16th March than we did on Monday 17th. It’s difficult to make a direct comparison because we were expecting a moderate increase due to marketing efforts during the week. As such Sunday saw a 3.22% increase on the previous Sunday, while Monday showed a 7.52% drop. No great surprise, it remains to be seen what the longer term effects will be.
March 19, 2008
March 10, 2008
Monday morning Spam count
Inbox: 594 new messages, of which 498 were Spam
Spam folder: first thing it was at 2579; by the time I worked through my Inbox it was at 2654; by the time I’d got to the bottom of the list it was at 2667. There were 2 false positives, about average.
It used to send my eyes funny scrolling through the Spam folder so have a technique I use now which makes it less onerous:
- start at the top of the list (if ordered so that most recent messages come in at the bottom)
- have the ‘preview’ option turned off, so you just see the titles
- use the arrow keys to work down the first page; when at the bottom, press ‘page down’ and then ‘page up’.
- repeat the process till you get to the bottom of the list
- empty the Spam folder
In this way your eyes do not have to cope with scrolling, you can take your time as any new messages come in a the bottom so they will be checked last anyway.
March 7, 2008
March 1, 2008
I wish email would hurry up and die
Today I received an email from an owner, here’s an extract:
“we have used several web holiday agency sites over the years and this year we have tried out some new ones, some with enormous success. of the new ones we tried to get going two have been marked by a complete failire. yours is one of those sites.”
This is terrible news, what could have caused such a complete failure?
The reason was that the owner was experiencing technical problems and “despite emailing you about this problem we have had no assitance to resolve the problem.”
It has become cliché to hear ‘your call is important to us’ and similar whilst on the end of a never ending telephone queue, but without wanting to sound cliché: all enquiries are important to us, which is why we have invested a lot to ensure that ALL emails, messages and calls received are answered in a timely fashion.
So why did this owner not receive a response? Because we can only answer emails that we receive, but email being email there is no guarantee that it will ever be read by the recipient – In this case we simply did not get the owners’ email.
Because of the levels of Spam received we now auto delete any email sent to a non-existent selfcateringhols email address, so any typo and we will not get it.
Of the emails sent to legitimate email addresses, we get approximately 1,000 Spam emails a day. We go through all of these on a daily basis, but it is not exact and there is always the potential for a legitimate email to get deleted along with the Spam.
Email used to be great, but it now has severe limitations and the main problem is that people do not always understand these. We have been using now our own site based messaging system for a number of years which gets around this problem: contact us via the site and we are guaranteed to receive it, which means you are sure to get a response.
There has always been a certain resistance to using it for one reason or another, but a recent report by hitwise showed that there is a trend now to send email via social networking sites rather than normal email.
This I think is positive as it will help people get used to the concept of internal site messages. Email has had it’s day, the levels of Spam means people (or the companies that manage your email) have thrown up all sorts of obstacles to receiving emails, thus making it relatively unusable.
To make communication workable the obstacles need to be removed, so guaranteeing receipt, whilst avoiding the ensuing avalanche of Spam. Site based communication does this, the sooner that people get used to it the better.
We will continue to make every effort to ensure all emails are dealt with as effectively as possible but to be sure of getting a response PLEASE send us a message via the site.
Spammy results in google
The search results in Google now are typically VERY good, which is why I was so surprised to see a bad Spammy site at number 1 in the search results. Going back a few years there was a period of time when the results were plagued with this kind of stuff but I haven’t seen anything so bad ranking so well for a long time.
See the search results page
The number one result leads to a site which has a load of other links. Of the links I clicked a high proportion were ‘under construction’, error 404 pages or went to a site laden with sponsored links disguised to look like real (i.e. contextual) links. Surely there’s a better result to display than this?