Oi! What are you looking at? … or how to find out who is looking at your web page

Posted on 28th November 20165th July 2017 by admin

Tracking your internet presence is one of the most important jobs to do in a business. Without online tracking of all your social media and websites you may not be able to fully understand your target market. With Google Analytics and Social Media tracking it can never be simpler to see what is happening with your social media technology.

Here are the main features of Google Analytics which tracks your website and Facebook Insights along with Twitter Analytics:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics tracks everything to do with the website. This includes location of the viewer, what web browser they are using and what operating system. This is a very powerful tool and tells you basically everything about who is viewing your site and how they got there. There is also a section which lets you create custom reports of all your tracking statistics. This is very good for telling you where people are spending most of their time on your site.

You can see more advanced statistics such as their IP address, which internet provider they are using and what type of connection is being used to get onto the internet. You can see which organisation is viewing the website and how they got there; for example, was it a direct URL entry or did they search through Google?

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights tracks your Facebook Business page. It is not so in-depth; it shows the page views, page likes and post engagements in that week. You can see where the people are in the world who liked your page and posts. You can also see which city they are from. It has individual data for each post you make public. It tells you who you shared it with, how much organic and paid views received and how many post clicks. And that is practically it!

Twitter Analytics

Twitter Analytics tracks the activity on your Twitter page and is basically the same as Facebook Insights – just for Twitter. It tells you about how many tweets you have tweeted, how many visits your profile has, how many mentions you have and the number of followers. It also tells you what your top tweet is and your top mention. It gives you month by month summaries about how good or bad your month was regarding followers, tweets etc.

As you can see, using these tools with your company website you can track and analyse your audience; Useful information for your marketing and guiding your marketing strategy to generate more business.

Why not give us a call to see how we can help you implement them on your website?

Where does West March Systems get its name from?

Posted on 7th November 20165th July 2017 by admin

If you ever wondered where West March Systems came by its name read on….

It’s mid-November, harvest-time has been and gone; the leaves are browning and the first real storm will strip the branches bare beckoning forth colder, shorter, foggier days; Winter is coming. In times past this would have been the middle of reiving time, roughly between Lammas Tide (1st August) and Candlemas (2nd February). All along the borderlands between England and Scotland in late-afternoon, with the light fading and the misty gloom gathering, groups rode forth to steal (reive) and bereave in cross-border raids before returning to their homes along little known moorland paths with their plunder.

Before the Union of the English and Scottish Crowns in 1603, and even before the border between England and Scotland was largely agreed in 1237, the area between England and Scotland was a lawless land with raids and retaliation taking place largely with impunity.

Something had to be done to ring the area to heel and in 1249 the two crowns agreed to establish Marches Law which was to apply on the occasions that England and Scotland were not at war with each other.

Along with the new law new areas were created where the law would apply, three on either side, and so the East, West and Middle Marches were conceived. Each March had a warden appointed whose main job was supposed to enforce Marches law along with the normal laws of the land; Common law in England and Scots law in Scotland. In practice the wardens applied it as they saw fit and to their own best advantage so nothing really changed and the raiding carried on for the next 350 years or so.

And the name? All the directors were born in Cumberland, soon to be Cumbria, and the March on our side of the border was controlled from Carlisle Castle. We wanted a company name that had some local and personal meaning without necessarily seeming to be local. As you may have guessed by now, the English March for our part of the border was the West March and hence the name.

Helpfully unhelpful help from the internet…

Posted on 1st November 20165th July 2017 by admin

Occasionally, there are times when we don’t know the answer to something straightaway, and that is when the internet can be a potentially useful tool to search for information. Sometime those answers are not helpful but paradoxical:

Trying to help a customer get the on-screen keyboard (OSK) to appear on their generic Windows 8.1 tablet device the official line from Microsoft on getting the OSK to appear is as follows:

swipe in from the right-side of the screen and press search
type “on-screen keyboard” into the search box

… point 2 is slightly problematic when there isn’t an on-screen keyboard available to type into the search box.