Google Shopping has been around for over a decade, previously known as Froogle, Google Products and Google Product Search and since its inception has been a free way to list products that ecommerce retailers have for sale either through uploading individual or bulk listings through Google Base. Google still benefited as it sold Adwords advertising adjacent to these unpaid results. Google Shopping results have been presented to web users in search results in a Shopping Results entry, taking users to listings of products that matched their keyword search whereupon they can compare sellers and prices. For some ecommerce retailers, this may have provided a significant amount of ‘free’ inbound traffic, although quantifying this volume of traffic is difficult unless you have intentionally configured your analytics software to tell you.

In autumn last year, Google Shopping became a paid service in the US and this process starts in the UK on 13^th February 2013 with the full shift to paid only listings by end of Q2 2013. So, fundamentally what was once ‘free’ traffic for an ecommerce retailer will become a paid channel similar to pay per click advertising in which you may already be investing.

Under this new service, products will be displayed based upon relevancy to the keyword search and the maximum cost per click (CPC), with sellers only paying Google should a user click through to their website; clicks through to the Google Shopping space will be free.

To get started, you will need to be able to create these new Product Listing Ads (PLAs) which will require an Adwords account, as this is effectively an extension of Google Adwords and a Merchant Center Account. Furthermore, you will need to provide Google with improved product and inventory data so you will need to ensure that your ecommerce product can create a feed in line with Google’s product feed specification; check with your ecommerce vendor as even sites using leading ecommerce platforms like Magento are affected.

Clearly this is a big change; for retailers with the infrastructure and the ability to manage their Product Listing Ads and bidding this will give them the ability to exercise more control of their visibility in the Google Shopping space and generate more sales. For smaller retailers however, and lower margin products this is likely an unwelcome change, creating more administration and eating into already tight margins.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

However, it is not just the high street that is in jeopardy; over recent months, we have been contacted by a number of businesses running ecommerce sites, some of which have been selling online for a long time, that are struggling.

The fact is that the gap between the quality of ecommerce sites of major players and those of most businesses has widened significantly, and many businesses have just not kept up. So what does make a successful ecommerce site?

Effective content management

When you are selling thousands of products and their variations, you need an effective means of managing your product pages and stock information. If you are still managing your products as a collection of static web pages, then you are wasting time manually editing pages that you could use more productively by investing in an ecommerce platform like Magento or a content management system like Umbraco or WordPress which can be extended to support ecommerce.

Intuitive navigation

Whilst many ecommerce solutions offer effective ways of getting your product database online, often the user interface of the published website leaves a lot to be desired. Many leading online retailers have put significant investment in ensuring that navigation and search tools guide visitors to products through techniques such as autocompletion, surfacing bestselling and related products or allowing visitor to search in new ways, such as on the Kiddicare website where visitors can filter products on the ratings products have been given by users.

Product pages; where the action happens

Selling certain products online is notoriously difficult as visitors do not have the physical artefact in front of them, you are effectively selling with information. This makes the design of product pages key; customers expect to see useful product descriptions and clear images, however sites like Marks and Spencer and Very take this further with multiple product images and videos of products. You also need to drive visitors through to the checkout, so you need prominent calls to action and intuitive controls to add products to the shopping basket.

Social validation

Social media is playing an increasing role in the customer funnel. Firstly, social media channels are used by many retailers for top of funnel activities to generate awareness and interest products. However social content is becoming more influential to the buying process; ratings and customer reviews within product pages are persuasive tools to convince visitors to take buying decisions. Moreover, social media is also being used as a sales support tool to help visitors with questions or as customer relationship management channels for aftersales support in the event of delivery issues or returns.

Simple checkout process

If you have managed to get your visitor through to the checkout process, then it is a shame to have them fall at this final hurdle. For many smaller ecommerce sites, the checkout processes can feel unrefined and purchasers often have to negotiate not only the forms on the retailer’s website, but also payment provider forms, and credit card security checks. Leading websites are putting effort into reducing the effort required by users during the checkout process, for example allowing payment without registration, clearly displaying delivery options, minimising distractions on checkout pages and allowing a range of payment methods.

Added value services

Many major retailers offer added value such as cashback offers through sites like Quidco or convenience such as click and collect, which has been particularly successful for John Lewis over the last Christmas period.

Mobile-friendly

Increasingly, your customers want to access your website on a range of devices, particularly mobile phones and tablet devices. Whilst older template based websites may still render on tablets, they often suffer from poor usability, such as navigation or forms that are difficult to use.  However, rendering a successful ecommerce site on a mobile phone is a more significant challenge, but increasingly important as mobile internet use continues to increase.

Ten years ago, the Internet was a reasonable level playing field, allowing small businesses to sell online for a relatively small investment. However times have changed; just putting your product details online, hooking in a payment system and doing a bit of on-page search engine optimisation is no longer enough. Customers are more sophisticated and will spend money on websites where they are the most informed, most confident and most comfortable; if you want a slice of that ecommerce business you are going to need to evolve or be forced to make some stark choices like your high street compatriots.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

“We removed FB buttons and traffic from Facebook increased. Reason: instead of "liking" articles, readers share it on their timeleine.” @smashingmag

...just little bits of history repeating

Having been involved with website development since the early days can provide a useful perspective on current trends.   There have been discernible movements within the development of the web. Each movement has had a crop of icons and buttons:

• W3C standards. (eg HTML, CSS, WCAG)
• Support for charities, events and campaigns. (eg Blue Ribbon Free speech)
• Web directories. (eg Yahoo, Yell)
• Awards and site of the day/week/month. (eg Yell Awards, Webb Awards)
• Security accreditation for secure certificates. (eg VeriSign)
• Membership of trade and professional bodies, partnerships and other accreditation schemes. (eg Fair Trade, Which? Web Trader)
• Machine translation services. (eg Babel Fish, Google Translate)
• News feeds. (eg RSS, Atom)
• Blog networks. (eg Technorati)
• Social Media. (eg Twitter, Facebook, G+)

Early in a movement they promote awareness of something new and exciting. They suggest a site is forward-looking and connected.

At the peak of a wave, sites can be swamped with a vast number of competing offerings. This can lead to sites covered with other sites’ brands like a Formula 1 racing car. At the peak of the blogging networks, sites with sidebars of fifty or more tiny icons were common. Some try to hide this button soup away with a service like Share this or Add this that bury them away behind a user click. Yet hiding them away makes a user less likely to use them defeating the buttons' purpose.

By the end of a movement, many buttons will have fallen by the wayside as their creators fail to find a way to make money from their idea. A few will have proven their worth and continued in use across sites that found them useful. Others will have fallen out of use entirely.

But you will always find him in the kitchen at parties

The usage of some buttons may also raise questions about the value they bring to a site. Unless you have significant traffic they may attract very few clicks. A couple of minutes on the BBC website will find stories that have never been shared.

Some sites like Smashing Magazine are now saying that removing them increases the likelihood of being shared. If a user really wants to share content, they’ll cut and paste the address and compose their own message to go with it. Web browsers are starting to incorporate social media sharing facilities just as many already include share by email and automatic RSS detection.

This tainted love you’ve given

Buttons, badges and icons can also come with a hidden payload of problems. The button itself may be hosted on sites with poor performance delaying the display of your site. They can be poorly coded, creating delays or accessibility issues that site developers can’t correct. Lurking in a button's code can be an opportunity for a hacker to mount a cross site scripting attack against your site or other security issues.

They may use cookies creating privacy concerns for users. Every button you use dilutes your site's brand with other companies' logos. They can create clutter on your design.

Hit the road Jack and don't you come back no more, no more, no more, no more.

So the lesson we can take from the web's short history is that buttons come and go and that we shouldn’t get too attached to them.

What you need to do is periodically review any and all buttons, badges, social media links, third party widgets and other site elements whilst asking yourself the following questions:

• Can we legitimately include it?
• Will this dilute our brand?
• Will anyone use this?
• Does it impair site performance?
• Does it add value?
• Does it work?

For years search engines have helped you drive relevant traffic to your website through organic search results. Some of you may have reaped great benefit at comparatively low cost, others will have paid significantly more in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), particularly in competitive markets. Over recent years, you have had to evolve traditional SEO techniques and invest in social media and content marketing to keep your search engine positioning.

However, high quality search engines, and other online services that we take for granted do not come for free. Moreover, Google and Bing are businesses; they exist to make money, and the way that they do this is by selling us advertising space.

So far you may have managed to drive sufficient traffic without having to spend money on Pay Per Click advertising like Google Adwords. However, the days of being able to depend upon your natural search results or your Google+ Local (previously Google Places) listings may be numbered.

Paid listings are being prioritised in search engine results

Typically websites in the UK receive between 30% - 50% of their traffic from search engines. In the UK, 91% of searches are from Google (Experian Marketing Services, June 2012); this means that nearly 40% of your traffic could be coming from Google.

If 40% of your traffic comes from Google, then any changes they make can significantly affect your bottom line. We have already talked about how Google Penguin has affected businesses in this blog. However, algorithm changes are not the only changes Google are making.

Recent studies show that search engine results pages (SERPs) are increasingly weighted towards paid listings; in fact a study of Google's results pages using its own browser-size tool illustrated that on some high-value keywords, 60% of users would have to scroll the page before they saw any organic results at all!

Therefore, if you are only investing in Inbound Marketing tactics to influence your organic search engine positioning, you may in the future be at an increasing disadvantage compared to your competitors investing in Pay Per Click. Their paid advertising on the same keywords will have more prominence in the results and your organic visibility will be reduced as a consequence.

How do I know if I am affected?

If you want to understand whether this is affecting you, there are things that you can do.

Perform a SERP visibility check:

1. Identify your list of target keywords that you intend to drive business goals; you can use the Google Analytics Traffic Sources > Search > Organic Report or the Google Webmaster Tools Traffic > Search Queries Report (also available in Google Analytics) to help you
2. Use the Audience > Technology > Browser & OS > Screen Resolution Report in Google Analytics to review which screen resolutions your visitors use for a significant proportion of your visits
3. Using a tool such as setmy.browsersize.com, review the results pages for your target keywords in your desired search engines to check your visibility at these popular resolutions; you will be able to see which of your listings are visible without scrolling, and also where your competitors will be exploiting paid advertising for visibility

Regularly review your SERP visibility:

1. Regularly check your search engine ranking reports or the Google Webmaster Tools Traffic > Search Queries Report to see that you have consistent Impressions for your desired keywords, consistent positioning and the resulting click-through rate (CTR)
2. Where you see falls in click-through rate (CTR) but without corresponding falls in Impressions or Ranking, do a SERP visibility check again

By knowing that these changes are happening and performing these checks, you can evaluate whether you would benefit from using a more considered mix of search engine optimisation, social media and content marketing alongside paid advertising. Alternatively, if you are investing heavily in search engine optimisation, you might get better spend of your online advertising budget by diverting money from SEO activity to Pay Per Click advertising which may be more effective in increasing visibility and resulting visits.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

The last couple of months have been a busy one in the world of search engine optimisation, with many website owners counting the cost of the Google Penguin update. This is the latest change to how Google ranks search engine results that penalises websites that have excessively optimised page content or overtly-optimised inbound links.

Why is Google Penguin a good thing?

Whilst this has caused short-term headaches (insert migrane if you prefer) for site owners, this can only be a positive step forward for web users; search engine results will be less cluttered with spammy, keyword-laden content with little unique value, and ultimately the answers to the questions you are searching for.

What should I do if I have been bitten by Penguin?

Everything that Google does evolves, so as Penguin is an evolution to the earlier Panda update that weeded out content farms, it is safe to say that there may be further tweaks to come. This makes giving advice far from cut and dried.

However, if you have seen traffic to your website drop significantly since April (remember to factor in the addition of cookie blocking to comply with the EU e-Privacy Directive), then you need to review your current inbound marketing tactics. Have you invested heavily in article marketing? Or do you have many keyword-optimised links pointing to your website? In which case, you need to review this and particularly look at making your inbound link profile more natural. Note, that you may not be being affected by something that you did recently; you might have websites that have been kicking around for a while that still use some old-school search engine optimisation tactics; read a great example of how this affected a seasoned SEO expert, and how he recovered from it.

Get your social on

It is widely believed that search engines are increasingly using social signals to rank the search engine results pages. Now is the time to start an inbound marketing strategy that incorporates both search engine marketing and social media to create an ecosystem of content will make you less vulnerable to changes like Penguin in the future.

You should particularly look to create content that is sharable;

• Try filming some short videos that demonstrate the benefits of your products or services to your target audiences; as well as being a more interesting way of providing information, rich snippets of your videos increase your visibility in search engines
• Write some thought-provoking blog posts, or if you do not have the time to write new content, try curating resources from elsewhere on the web that will be helpful to your readership on a topic that they need answers to
• Why not share presentations that you have made for a seminar, exhibition or pitch using tools like Slideshare; you could post them on your LinkedIn profile to demonstrate thought leadership and expert knowledge
• Images make a much stronger connection with people. Why not build a Pinterest board, or use image sharing networks such as Instagram to add some vibrancy; they might showcase events that you have run or provide a useful resource to your audience

Your customers expect more than keyword-filled, generic content and they are more empowered than ever before to find it. Provide them with unique content that they value, and they will reward you by sharing it, giving you a strong, natural link profile that will make you less vulnerable to changes to search engines in the future.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

Before devices such as Apple’s iPhone, the mobile web experience was slow and frustrating. Modern smartphones have made this a thing of the past, and through a carefully thought-out mobile presence, you can give your users an engaging experience that is relevant to their needs whilst they are on the move.

There are broadly two ways of having a mobile internet presence; create a mobile application, such as those that are available in the iTunes App or Google Play stores, or create a website that is mobile-ready. Whilst mobile applications can take advantage of native features of smartphones such as location detection or in the future, near field communications, they can be expensive to commission and do not work universally, making them an expensive proposition if you want to cover a range of operating systems.

Therefore, a more sensible approach for many businesses is to make their website adapt for browsers on different mobile devices. This is where Responsive Design comes in, which, in a nutshell is crafting a website so that it dynamically adapts to a user’s device in terms of platform, screen size and orientation.

This can bring notable business benefits. Without a separate site to maintain for each type of device, considerable time and money savings can be made. Your users will benefit from an optimal browsing experience regardless of whether they are using a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop. Furthermore, if your users are more able to interact effectively with your website, this is likely to lead to a greater number of conversions, be that joining your mailing list, requesting a quotation or placing an order.

It is not only mobile users that benefit; putting a spotlight on providing a valid experience to users on a smaller screen, helps focus attention on the site elements that are truly essential to your users, so your desktop visitors will benefit too.

We’re so convinced by the merits of Responsive Web Design that we’re employing this technique in our new Umbraco CMS solutions, to produce user-focused websites that render beautifully on mobile, tablet or desktops.

If you would like to talk to us about the benefits that a responsively-designed website could bring to your business, email us today or call us on 0151 282 4321.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

Getting out of the blocks

The first issue with Google+ is trying to understand what it is in the first place; in terms of social media it is more akin to Twitter, than Facebook. Most people get Facebook, because you have a website you can log in to. Google+ is more a set of social tools than a social network site, in the same way that a lot of the action on Twitter happens through third party websites and applications. However, what is more important with Google+ is that these tools are being embedded across Google’s product range such as Gmail and more notably the Google search engine.

Once you have got past the issue of what Google+ is, the second problem is that it is difficult to see the benefits as a casual user with only a few social contacts; the real benefits come from having a large network of People in your Google Circles.

Widening your Circles

In the same way as you want to attract Followers on Twitter and Fans on Facebook, it is your Circles that are important to you in Google+. If more People add you to one of their Circles, the more likely it is that your Google+ Posts will be seen and engaged with; that is easy to understand, because that is like Twitter and Facebook.

Furthermore, the more People you add to the Circles that you curate, the more likely it is that your Google+ Posts are going to be syndicated to right-minded users, and the larger your Circles, the larger your sphere of influence becomes. This is a bit more tenuous for businesses to buy into, as this represents a more convoluted way to get to an audience.

However, Google+ goes even further, offering a greater ability to target your messages than Twitter, because you can choose who you share content with, whereas with Twitter all your Followers receive everything that you tweet.

Influencing Search

The most recent innovation by Google is Search, plus Your World. This is Google’s social trump card and is what differentiates Google+ from Facebook and Twitter. Google’s key business is Search, and they are constantly looking at ways of delivering more relevant search engine results to its users. As human beings, when we are uncertain about something, we look to other people to guide us; this is known as social validation. We are even more likely to take advice from people that we know.

This is the whole crux of Search, plus Your World (SPYW); once you have performed a keyword search in Google you can personalise your search results which will pull in Posts and +1’ed content from People in your Circles that relate to your search. The intention from Google, is that this social layer of content will add valuable insight and reassurance to you, making the results more useful and relevant to you.

Google’s integration of Google+ with its search engine results is a compelling reason why your business should be looking to Google+ to build audiences that will share your content and advocate your brand to their Circles. Not only will you benefit from social recommendation, but this will increase your visibility, whilst complementing your search engine optimisation and other search marketing activities. Now, do you ‘Get it’?

Authored by Ian Cockayne

The biggest problem that we see for small businesses is their approach to content. Many small business websites have a lumpy approach to content, whereby a lot of effort goes in to content when a website is launched (or re-launched) only for the website to be subsequently updated sporadically. It is for this same reason that many organisations struggle with social media; setting up a social media channel like a Twitter account or a Facebook page is very easy, what is far harder is keeping that channel populated with engaging content on a continual basis, particularly when resources are scarce.

However looking forward into 2012 and beyond, having a content strategy is going to be as important to most organisations as search engine optimisation or pay per click advertising has become. The big reason for this is that the search engines are being adapted to the fast-moving web ecosystem of news, blogs and status updates that we have today. Take the Google Panda update as an example; this update to the Google search engine aimed to lower the rank of “low quality” web presences such as link farms and screen-scraping sites to improve the quality of search engine results. Google does this by using an algorithm that identifies signs of website quality. One of these qualities is recency of publication. Therefore, if you are not actively publishing new content on your website on a regular basis your web pages and website as a whole will have reduced visibility in search engine results over time.

Your search engine optimisation will not necessarily save you either, as more traditional search engine optimisation techniques like on-page tactics carry less weight in influencing search engine ranking.

It may not be just small businesses that may be affected by this; many organisations have the concept of ‘evergreen’ content. Take for example an emergency service, that may have produced content on practical tips on firework safety. This content although seasonably relevant, would fall in the search engine results as it gets older if the content is not subsequently revisited, updated, optimised and socially flagged.

Therefore, if you are going to make one resolution for 2012 to help your business succeed online, set some time aside to put a content strategy in place. Look at simple ways that you can make your website up-to-date, such as sprucing up that News and Events section, planning a press release schedule or publishing a series of short interesting articles that cross-link to your products and services. Get your social channels in hand, selecting the ones you know you can commit to keeping up to date and that you can productively engage with.

Having a plan will help your keep your content production on track, whilst getting your social media in order will increase your visibility through a wealth of channels including social networks, search engine results, apps and mobile devices.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

Two months on, and Google have made another change under the hood and this time both webmasters and search engine optimisers are up in arms. The change this time is that when a signed in Google user visits a website from an organic Google search result, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognise the visit as an “organic” search, but Google will no longer pass the query terms that the user searched with to reach the site to the web analytics service.

This means that if you use a keywords report from your web analytics software to demonstrate the success of search engine optimisation efforts or improve your website, you will in the future be faced with incomplete keyword data. Considering the number of web users that regularly use Google services such as Gmail, Calendar, Reader, browse in Google Chrome or have joined the Google + social network, this is seen by webmasters and search engine specialists as presenting a significant problem.

There has been a lot of commentary in the blogosphere as to why this has been done; after all, its seems like an insane change to make considering how fundamental this information is to many people. The bottom line is that as a website owner or digital marketer you now face a new challenge, so what can you do about it?

1. Don't take this as a snub to your profession

This change does not undermine the importance of search engine optimisation as an industry. Granted traditional on-page SEO has less weight in influencing search engine ranking today. However, we are now publishing more, varied content than ever before, be that web page copy, geographic place information, video and social media campaigns. All of this can be returned in search engine results and all this content has the potential and need to be copywritten and optimised with measurable ends in mind.

2. Change the way you demonstrate results

What will need to change is how webmasters and search engine specialists prove their success. However, aside from a web analytics keywords report there are plenty of tools available; search engine ranking reports produced by tools like Web Position readily provide up-to-date information on how well a website or web page ranks against chosen keywords and demonstrate your search engine visibility or saturation relative to competitors.

Google itself provides Google Webmaster Tools. We have long been advocates of this product, seeing it as the unsung hero of the Google toolkit. For a while it has provided a Google Analytics-style search queries report that shows the volume of search queries for which your site ranks, your average position and your click through rate (CTR). This can be seen as similar to a search engine ranking report, but is also as good, if not even better than the Google Analytics keywords report as you are not only seeing keywords that result in click throughs, but keywords that do not. The good news is that Google Webmaster Tools reports are now available through the new version of Google Analytics, found in Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization; if you already have Webmaster Tools running on a site with a Google Analytics profile, you will simple need to validate the Webmaster Tools profile.

3. Change the way you think about SEO and insight

I can understand the appeal of the keywords report. You can see the number of visitors you are getting as a result of keyword combinations and the conversion rate for visitors using those keywords. Clients new to web analytics are certainly blown away by this when they first see it. However is the use of certain keywords to find your site going to influence whether a visitor converts on your site?

Often visitors come to a website using one set of keywords, only to use different keywords on the site itself. What about if a visitor arrives at your website and the copy does not tell them what they want to know? Or they do not like the price of what they are looking for, or the delivery charge is too steep? Has a visitor seen your email newsletter? Or have they interacted with you on a social platform? Maybe they are pushed for time to look for a product or service? Conversion decisions can be influenced by a wide range of factors, and in today's complex online ecosystem with numerous advertising channels, social media, and mobile and geographic contexts, I would argue that keyword use alone does not give us enough insight.

This is why Google have been adding tools like multi-channel funnels to Google Analytics, so you can review the relative importance of all your marketing channels in bringing visitors to your website in the run up to conversion. Just like viewing one metric on its own does not give you insight, looking at one marketing tactic also does not give you the true insight you need.

I am not saying that Google's change is trivial, and it is presenting another challenge in producing reliable information from web analytics reports. However, content optimisation is an activity embedded across all online marketing tactics which is only increasing in importance. What webmasters and search engine specialists need to look at in the light of Google's latest change, is which reports now communicate your success transparently and if you are a Google Analytics user, how you can use the new reporting features to illustrate true insight to clients.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

Recently Google has made a number of improvements to their Google Analytics product. However, in August a significant modification was made; they changed the way Google Analytics records the end of a session from:

• More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor
• At the end of a day
• When a visitor closes their browser

To:

• More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor
• At the end of a day
• When any traffic source value for the user changes. Traffic source information includes:utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, and gclid

When this was announced in the Google Analytics blog, it was estimated that users would see a less than 1% change. However in the days following the release many users were reporting more significant changes in their reports, with the issue being slightly confused due to bugs that were discovered and subsequently fixed.

What does it mean?

Now if you are not a web analytics ‘statto’ or as a busy business owner only have time to give your reports a quick review, then you may not realise the full implications of this change. Modifying the way a session is calculated brings about a fundamental change to the way your website traffic patterns are reported and how much your data is affected will depend upon your online marketing and website usage pattern.

For example, with the close of a browser not ending a session, additional visits will not be recorded in the cases of a user closing the browser or a browser crash and the visitor returning back to your site within 30 minutes. This has the potential effect of reducing the number of visits, whilst increasing time on site and number of pages viewed. This sort of change seems logical and is welcome.

However, a more interesting issue relates to the new way that sessions are closed; when the traffic source information changes. This is particularly going to affect websites using different types of online marketing tactics, such as ecommerce sites and may be exacerbated by users’ browsing tactics. In a tabbed browsing world, it is not uncommon for web users to be looking for products via keyword searches in a search engine in one window, clicking through paid advertising in a second window, whilst reviewing comparison sites in a third window. Each of these means of reaching a website has the potential for changing the traffic source information for a visitor in Google Analytics, potentially signalling multiple visits from one visitor within a 30 minute period. This could increase the number of visits recorded to your site, increase the number of return visitors, and increase the bounce rate whilst decreasing time on site, pages per visit and for the conversion junkies amongst us reduce your conversion rates.

What is the verdict?

It is no wonder then that there were so many complaints when this change occurred, as webmasters found that the data on their traffic patterns had significantly shifted coupled with the subsequent complication of how they are going to accurately compare their current and historical data.

As much as in the immediate term this change in visitor tracking poses challenges, looking forward this change is a valuable one to businesses using Google Analytics. Firstly, it is an attempt by Google to make the data that is recorded about sites more reliable taking into account modern browser usage patterns. Secondly, this change accompanies the introduction of multi-channel funnel reports in the new Google Analytics interface. These reports will help marketers understand the paths that visitors use to visit their website in the run up to conversions and as a result better identify the value marketing tactics have in influencing customer decisions.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

What they do have is a headline in mind and they try to force the numbers to fit.  Here are a three of the variations I’ve seen:

Google+ Fails to beat Facebook – the argument here goes Facebook has 700 billion trillion gazillion users and Google+ has only 20 million.  At no point does the article point out that Google+ launched only weeks ago and is still in beta.

Google Fails because Facebook has more time on site per visit or pageviews – here the mistake is comparing Apples with Oranges.  They’re not comparing Google+ with Facebook – they’re comparing Google (primarily search) with Facebook.  If the time on site for Google was the same as Facebook I’d be concerned.  The point of a search engine is to get you to the good information quickly.  The point of a social network is to interact with your community.  These are two different tasks and the meaningful metrics are radically different.  Once we know how Google+ stacks up against Facebook this would be a valid comparison.

Google+ is just for men - All new social networks tend to be picked up by certain groups ahead of other groups.  Network analysis of social networks has shown that people with an interest tend to invite people with the same interest.  They have also shown that many interests have either lots of men or lots of women involved.  One early mailing list system found that for the first few months most of the lists set up were created by people who were interested in lizards.  Every day new lists for lizard lovers of different types would be added.  Then some amphibian and bird themed lists crept in.  Then they reached pet lovers and at that point lists for all kinds of interests appeared as people with pets and other interests signed up.  Social networks take time to grow and diversify.

While reading about Google+, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Bing, Apple, Microsoft and all the other companies and services beloved of pundits ask the question: Do the Numbers Make Sense?  What would good numbers for Facebook or Google be?

Then think about your site.  What would good numbers for it be?  Are there factors that skew the numbers just like there are factors affecting the big players?  Can you alter some of those factors or do you just have to understand them?  Is a number bad or good in your context?  As otherwise all the numbers are just Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

What is actually playing out is a natural part of the product lifecycle curve, where after rapid growth you then see a period of maturity, followed by a period of decline. Facebook has been phenomenally successful through these introduction and growth phases, and as a result has become a sensible choice for brands when selecting a vehicle to implement their social media strategy. However, if Facebook has reached critical mass and the level of maturity, the product lifecycle model indicates that the only way from this point is down. If that is the case, Facebook is at a critical point in its evolution. What's more, if it does not retain its position as the dominant social platform, where will that leave brands' social media strategies?

On the face of the statistics, you could say that this concern is not well-founded. As I write this, the Facebook statistics page states that the social network has over 750 million active users, so with that many members, you cannot be wrong? Well, if you look at the statistics a bit further, maybe not. They currently state, 50% of active users login on any given day. That is still an impressive number, but did you know that to be classed as an active user, you only need to have logged in once in the past 30 days? Also, much as we have seen with Twitter, activity is skewed by heavy users. The Facebook statistics page claims that there are more than 250 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices; any commuter would believe this figure judging on the amount of Facebook time that is had on public transport. However, it goes on to say that users that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users. This all sounds great if your audience profile includes younger mobile users, however if you are a brand aiming for the more mainstream audience that has now gravitated towards the service, you really need to find out more about its Facebook usage profile and be measuring meaningful engagement and return on investment metrics to understand if Facebook is the right channel for you.

New users is one story, but in the product lifecycle existing users play a big part at the maturity and decline phases. Facebook has other challenges to face up to if it is to stop bleeding existing users. Firstly, there is the issue of privacy, where it has a checkered history, the most recent issue being the implementation of facial recognition software. The younger Generation Y audience is far more accepting of sharing information, but this mindset does change over time, whereas Generation X who is the newcomer to Facebook is more concerned about what information is publicly available about it. Secondly, there is security. Despite Facebook being viewed largely as a walled garden from the perspective of the average user, it has its fair share of problems with applications creating spam and trying to operate malware within its walls. Granted all of this can be reported and policed, but this is not going to inspire confidence amongst less proficient users and encourage greater engagement with Facebook which therefore affects the brands that advertise within it.

Clearly, Facebook is an amazing success story and a big player within the sprawl of social channels available today. However, if you are putting together your social media strategy, take a look behind the headline numbers and understand your audience profile when selecting your platforms for execution. This will give you the confidence that you are engaging with your audience in the right social space whilst minimising the likelihood of having to start it all over again elsewhere.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

All of this can only be a good thing. For a long time, social media has been surrounded by an enormous amount of hype. What businesses and public sector bodies want is to employ social media strategies that generate positive returns and service uptake. The way to do this is to move your thinking away from the brands to thinking about social media strategically.

You can start by asking yourself six key questions:

• What are my business objectives?
• Who am I talking with?
• What is my competition doing?
• What are my resources?
• How do I equip my organisation for social media?
• How am I going to measure success?

Once you have these questions answered, then and only then should you start putting a plan into place which includes choosing the platforms for execution, be that micro-blogging services like Twitter, public social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, content sharing networks like Flickr or Youtube, or more staple tools such as forums or email marketing.

If this still feels like a step into the unknown, there are plenty of social media strategists that can help you. Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz published an excellent post summarising the expertise you should be looking for from a social media expert. As you will see, whilst knowledge about social media platforms and software tools is important, you should also be looking for intelligent insight into tactics, audience psychology and measurement techniques and practical ideas around the type of creative that contributes to successful social media campaigns.

We have already helped a number of our clients dovetail social media into their integrated campaigns through their web presences. If you need help with your social media strategy, why not contact us today to discuss how we can help you? Alternatively, if you want to do it yourself, we also offer a half day Social Media Marketing course to give you practical advice and a toolkit so you can create your own social media strategy. Ninja suit not required.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

When I’m planning a holiday, I now use Google maps to find attractions to see, public transport to get around and cafes for a quick snack. When I’m there, I’ll find Wi-Fi hotspots (my favourite has to be in the Gardens at London’s Natural History Museum) to find things I’d not planned for.

So it’s vital for businesses to get themselves onto the map and public bodies to boost their service uptake by connecting locations to services. It’s also vital that the right places are connected; I once walked for nearly two miles to a nature reserve to find the visitor centre marked on the map was the administration buildings and not the entrance!  The entrance wasn’t on the map - it was on a side road a mile and a half back the way I’d walked.

Here are seven ways to make sure you’re accurately represented in the search engines local index.

Is Your Contact Information Search Engine Friendly?

Check that your key contact details on your website (ideally your home page and contact page) are accessible to search engines. Make sure they are in HTML and not buried in a graphic, Flash or other format. Ideally include your physical location and phone number.

Google Places

Get your free Google Places page. This lets you set your location, contact information, categories and opening times. If you’ve got multiple locations there is a bulk upload facility using a spreadsheet.

Bing Local

Bing may not get as many visits or send as many visitors to your site as Google, but its users are loyal and so if you’re serious about local search you’ll want to get your Bing Local  listing too. To do this you need to go to the 118 Information website and follow the simple steps to find your business there.

Claim your Profiles

There are other local search websites and directories. Some are new including Yelp and Foursquare, while others have been around in some form since before the web like Yell.com and Thomson Local. Not only does being listed on them give you more places where you can be found, it reinforces the information about where you are to other search engines and prevents someone maliciously cybersquatting on your location.

Check your Records

Many offline records, from company registrations to Yellow Pages listings, include your organisation’s contact information. Make sure these are up to date as the search engines may be checking these sources to validate the data they are using. This is especially important if you’ve moved premises as your old address can be listed instead of your current one.

Add a KML File to your Site

KML or Keyhole Markup Language files can be added to your site in a similar way to an XML sitemap. Instead of telling search engines about your web pages, it tells it about your places.  Like an XML sitemap, you can submit it to Google through Google Webmaster Tools.  There are a variety of tools you can use to make a KML file or we can help you with this.

Advanced Markup

To really help the search engines understand where you are, you can use specialist markup. Using the hCard / microformat in your website’s html to mark up locations is probably the best known way of doing this. 

Google, Bing and Yahoo came together recently to launch schemas.org which has many specialist markup formats you can use to make pages more search engine friendly. These include a basic place format along with specialist formats for local businesses, tourist attractions and civic structures from bus stops to zoos.

You can also add downloadable vCards to your website so visitors can easily download contact details to use. With these there is no need to cut and paste contact details from a web page into your contact list in your email or on your smartphone.

Now, when you attend an event such as this, it is great if you can identify one thing that stands out, that has legs, and this year it is Social CRM.

At this point, some of you are thinking that this is another buzzword thought up by some bright spark in a minimalist new media company which involved taking something that has existed for ages and making it ‘shiny and new’ by sticking the word ‘social’ in front of it. However, this makes sense, and if you have been spending the last couple of years getting stuck into social media you should be looking into it, today.

Social CRM is an evolution of the traditional concept of CRM (that’s Customer Relationship Management, to you and me). However, despite its name, traditional CRM is actually company focussed, it creates a process by which a company can organise its sales, marketing and support functions to target customers with communications in order to leverage more out of their wallet. However, the traditional CRM process is fundamentally one-way.

Your customers now expect collaboration any time, any place, any where, instead of simply having marketing messages pushed to them. Customers expect to talk with brands to solve their specific problems and shape their own relationships with those brands. This is a crucial difference between traditional and Social CRM. The pay-off is that brands that do this well will benefit from customers that act as brand advocates, open to promoting and recommending them through social channels which are an increasingly important marketing tool that can dovetail with other marketing efforts such as search engine optimsation.

The issue for many organisations is that there now needs to be a change in mindset. Many of you reading this will have invested a large amount of time and money building presences on social media sites. However, you now have to move away from Follower counts, Re-tweets and Likes to understand how you are going to manage the online communities that you have created and how you are going to create value from them. Failing to do so will send your social presence in decline and put back the progress you have made; now is the time to realise the CRM value of social media.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

Now the first thing I must say is that it is a beta, so Google has not included all the features that are in the existing version, particularly exports to PDF and emailing reports. You will also not find the much under-used, but very useful In-page Analytics report. That said, there are improvements that you may want to take advantage of, or you may simply want to stay informed about, so you can hit the ground running when this version is officially made available.

Visually, the interface has changed; with efforts to group together similar reports within the Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content and Conversions sections to make navigation more intuitive. You will also notice some re-labelling of the report names, which will be helpful to newcomers to the product in understanding what each report is attempting to tell you.

More importantly, there are significant changes to functionality, which will increase flexibility in working with Google Analytics and notably facilitates further types of reporting.

In the current version of Google Analytics, the Dashboard serves as a one-stop shop where you can place links to the key reports that you want at your finger-tips. However, if you are interested in a lot of reports, or you have different users with different data needs, a single Dashboard is a little restrictive. The new product allows you to have multiple Dashboards, allowing you to group similar reports in one place for example for managers interested in achievement against key performance indicators, webmasters reviewing content usage, and marketers analysing the effectiveness of traffic sources and attributing value to campaigns.

The graphing has also been improved, and you can now quickly plot individual rows of data on your reports, for example if you want to focus on specific keywords or campaigns, or contrast them against overall traffic or segment performance.

The true power of web analytics is the ability to measure performance against website objectives; Google Analytics calls this Goal tracking. In the current version you can track primary, process-driven goals that lead visitors to a specific destination, such as registering for a newsletter or completing a checkout process and engagement goals of time on site or pages visited. Many website owners that have come to our Google Analytics training offer downloadable files on their website, which previously they have had to track with either dummy page views or more recently as Events, however they could never be set as Goals. The new version of Google Analytics now lets you specify Event Goals so that you can report Events as website objectives, and ascribe different Goal Values to different Events if you require; for example you may want to attribute a lower lead value when a free whitepaper is downloaded compared to the lead value for a product brochure. This feature could also be used to demonstrate usage of interactive features as a Goal, such as time spent watching a video, or to track exits from your website to capture referrals and attribute value to those clicks.

The beta version of Google Analytics is gradually being rolled out to all Google Analytics accounts. I recommend taking a look so that you can plan how you can take advantage of this update to get better insights and more value from your website and online marketing efforts.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

However, no matter how thoroughly you refine your email strategy and prune your house list, there is a worrying new trend that email marketers need to face up to that is whittling away at the earning potential of your house list; email usage in certain age groups is dropping, and for some age-groups, dropping like a stone.

Comscore recently released findings from their latest study on year on year change in use of email by age group in the US. This showed significant drops in usage in all age groups under the age of 55, except for the 18-24 age range who largely need an email account for job hunting, banking or other coming of age activities. The drop was described as ‘catastrophic’ in the 12-17 years age range which showed a 59% fall.

The continued surge in Social Media usage has largely been attributed to this trend and it is not just isolated to the US. Recent surveys of UK internet traffic estimate interaction with social networks amounting to as much as 25% of all page views. Facebook is currently responsible for the majority of those interactions. This is coupled with an average visit at Facebook of over 20 minutes. There is also a hard-core of social network users who leave one social network, only to visit another. It is therefore no wonder that we are seeing lower usage of email as a knock-on effect. Many younger internet users communicate solely through the messaging services of these social networks, seeing no need for an ‘old-school’ email account.

In short, these are more compelling reasons why organisations need to take a strategic approach to Social Media. We have already been told that social signals are starting to affect search engines algorithms. With internet users spending increasing time within social networks and migrating from traditional technologies such as email, we need to understand how to engage with our audience in a relevant way, translate this engagement to our business objectives and reduce our reliance on tactics that may be less profitable. For some marketers, managing that house-list might soon be a thing of the past.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

A QR code is a two-dimensional bar code that is readable by software in camera phones. They appear as a pattern of black squares on a white background and can be used to display text to a user, add a contact to a device, join a wireless network or open a web page in a smartphone’s web browser.

QR codes have been popular in Japan for a while, but they are now starting to appear in the UK.  If you are public transport user, you may have noticed the popular free newspaper Metro has started to include quick response codes to direct smartphone users to their online content. Meanwhile film-goers have been directed to mobile content to support the release of 'The Mechanic' through QR codes prominently displayed in display advertising.

Despite this being a new technology to get to grips with, QR codes offer a real opportunity for businesses to:

• Direct visitors to useful online tools or content that offers real value such as a how-to video or white paper
• Encourage smartphone users to check-in to your Foursquare or Facebook Places with the incentive of a discount on a purchase
• Promote your website and social media activities such as your Facebook page or Twitter presence

QR codes are a new technology, but by offering something unique and that has value to your audience, it is more likely that the early adopters will spread the word for you and show their friends and colleagues how to get QR reader software installed on their phones. QR reader software is freely available for all modern smartphones including Apple, Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows 7 devices.

Obviously, you also need to be able to build your QR codes. The good news is that there are plenty of websites available to help you generate a QR code (opens new window). Alternatively, you may already be using services that create QR codes for you. For example, the web address shortening service bit.ly (opens new window) automatically creates a QR code for each shortcode that you make. Remember also to add on tracking code to the end of any web addresses that you promote so that you can track their use in your web analytics software. So what are you waiting for, start your QR code campaign today!

Authored by Ian Cockayne

Fortunately its easy to sign up for Webmaster Tools. Go to the Google Webmaster Tools website (opens new window)  and sign in with your Google Account. Then click on the Add a Site button. Put in the site’s address in and click continue. Next select Link to your Google Analytics account and hit the Verify button.

Not sure why you need Webmaster Tools? Take a look at our older blog posts: Carry on up the Internet: Sitemaps get you found and Don’t Regret Missed Clicks.

As one of the first providers of learndirect in England, Connect Learning Centres have striven to maintain and improve their service, enabling over 25,000 Merseyside learners to gain skills and attain qualifications.

The newly restored Birkenhead library provided an inspiring location to which the guests were welcomed by Colin Charlton, CEO of Connect.

Speakers included The Mayor of Birkenhead, Councillor Alan Jennings and Sue Powell ,Head of Wirral Libraries who congratulated learners.

David Blunkett MP, a supporter of learndirect from its development days, sent a message of support which was read by local Councillor Jean Stapleton,herself a champion of lifelong learning.

A presentation highlighted some amazing learner success stories.

Many Connect learners missed out on educational opportunities first time around and have welcomed the chance to gain marketable skills for the workplace or to improve their confidence in everyday life.

Connect staff work hard at creating a great learning environment which encourages learners to achieve and keep learning for the rest of their lives. Both learners and tutors have been nominated for and won national awards for commitment and progression.

Speeches over, the Mayor blew out the candles and the birthday party commenced.

If you don’t have Google Webmaster Tools, signing up is easy – we’ve put a quick guide together if you’ve already got Google Analytics: Verifying Google Webmaster Tools with Google Analytics.

To see the Searches in Google that have shown links to your pages, log into Webmaster Tools and select the site you’re interested in. Click on Your site on the web then click on Search Queries.

This shows you the Queries that users searched for on Google. Impressions is how often your site was listed by Google for that Query. Clicks is how many people clicked on a link to your site from results for a Query. Avg. position is the average position that your site appeared at in the Google search results for a Query.

Impressions, Clicks and Avg. position all have Change beside them. Change is the change over the most recent period from the previous period. By default the number of days per period is 30. So the change for Impression is the number of impressions in the last 30 days compared to the 30 days before that.

You can limit the list of Queries to searches on Google for Pages, Image, Video or Mobile. You can also focus on one of the local Google search engines you were searched on through the Countries drop down list.

Clicking on a Query gives you more information. It shows you which of your pages were linked to from the keyword. It also breaks down your pages' performance based on their position in the search results for that Query.

As with comparing data from different types of analytics (such as Google Analytics with Web Server logs) there will be differences in the numbers you see between different sources. Google Analytics may show more or less clicks for a given keyword to a given page. Don’t get too hung up on the differences, they will drive you slowly insane.

Now at the moment you’re faced with even more data than you had when you just had Google Analytics. Data is interesting, but you need to make some use of it. With the Search Queries display, you can identify the queries that you would like people to be clicking to visit your website, that aren’t getting you clicks. You can see if the problem is you’re just not getting listed often enough. Maybe your page just isn’t listed high enough up the listing for you to get clicks. Maybe it’s got a high position listing, but you’re not getting clicked on.

If you’re not being listed often enough or high enough up the listings, you may want to check your on-page search engine optimisation or think about some link building. If there isn’t a lot of competition for the search term in Google Ad words, you might want to bid on some advertising for those Queries.

If you’re already listed in a high position for the search term, you want to try and see why you’re not getting click throughs. Have you over optimised your page title and description so that they are excellent for SEO but don’t attract clicks? It could be that the title and description need basic work because they’ve never been look at. It could be your competitors’ have more useful or attractive sounding pages. Maybe one of your competitors is placing adverts in Google that are taking the traffic from all your hard SEO effort.

At least now you’ve got a way of seeing if there is a problem and quantifying it.

Speed is now one of the many ranking factors Google uses. It's not the primary factor, but it is in the mix. Speed isn’t just important for Google ranking, it has also been shown that for ecommerce sites like Amazon, a faster website turns more visits into sales. Faster websites offer an excellent experience for visitors who are able to get information faster and navigate through your website more easily. Speed is something visitors judge a site on. Optimising for speed may also reduce bandwidth requirements and that can reduce hosting costs.

So how do we see how fast our site is?

One easy way if you have Google Webmaster Tools (opens new window) is to see how fast Google thinks it is. You can do this by going to Labs and then Site performance. This is based on the speed data fed to Google by real visitors to your site who have the Google Toolbar installed. This compares the performance of your site against other websites. It is also thought that Google measure your site performance when the Googlebot visits your site to index your web pages.

The Webmaster Tools Labs site performance feature gives you a broad view of your speed but it doesn’t really help you improve your site. There are several free tools that can help; two of the most popular are Page Speed and Yslow.

Page Speed (opens new window) is a free, open-source add-on for Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. It looks at the way a page is put together, evaluates the speed and makes suggestions about how to improve the page’s speed.

Yslow (opens new window) from Yahoo! is another free Firefox add-on. Its shows statistics, an evaluation report and makes suggestions on how to make your website faster.

Page Speed or Yslow should be able to make suggestions on how to improve your pages. With them you can make a change and see what impact it has.

Unfortunately no one is visiting it from Google.

All your hard work appears to have been for nothing.

So you take a look in Google and it's there, but it doesn’t really stand out from the other links around it. The title is alright, but the description under it is from the first few lines of the page. Out of context of the full paragraph, it’s a meaningless non sequitur.

The one thing you skipped before going live was writing a meta description of the page. It can be hard to boil a complex page down to a hundred and sixty character description. With the deadline looming for go live it’s an easy job to skip. Unfortunately, if your page is a poorly described page in a sea of poorly described pages your potential visitors may skip to the pages with a good description.

Fortunately you can try to fix this. Just go and add a description to the page.

Provide a compelling description of what a visitor will find on your page. Try to include a call to action in the description to increase your click-throughs. If you can, put important keywords near the beginning of the text to help the SEO. Keep the descriptions under 165 characters. Don’t make it too short, otherwise Google may add some text from your page onto the end.

There is a little caveat. Google don’t guarantee to use your description or to pick up a change in the description. One of the main causes of that appears to be the use of a duplicate description. It’s better to allow Google to create its own (bad) description than to have a duplicate description. Google will detect the duplicates and may assign a lower ranking as it thinks your content is not unique or being automatically generated.

If it’s important to you, monitor the page’s performance and consider revising the description or title in future.

I could nip up to Liverpool Central Library or the Waterstone’s in Liverpool ONE and look in a style guide but by the time it’s been written, edited, printed and shipped to the bookshop its possibly out of date.

As you’ve probably guessed from previous posts I’m not afraid of turning to statistics for the answer to questions. Now I could do a survey to find out what people think but that seems a bit extreme. Instead I’m going to turn to the web for the answer. A quick check on Google Trends (opens new window) for the last 12 months in the UK shows there were 18.2 searches using “website” for every search using “web site”. There were 18.5 times as many searches for “email” compared to “e-mail”.

Let’s take a step back to where we are now.  Web pages are made from HTML and display information.  One web page might hold information about an event run by a government department and another might be a news item about the Computer Engineer Barbie (opens new window).  A computer can make some sense of the pages, enough to list them in a search engine.  However it is going to struggle to make sense of the content of the page.  Pulling lots of unstructured information from a variety of websites together so it can be used in some sort of sensible way would be a lot of hard work.

Now HTML5 will add some semantic replacements for existing bits of HTML.  A computer struggles to separate out those parts of a page which were headers, footers, navigation and article because they weren’t identified clearly in a page’s HTML.  HTML5 will allow a clearer separation of different bits of a page so computers can make more sense of them.  However this only allows a computer a vague idea of the scaffolding not the finer detail.

What RDFa and Microformats do is add finer structure to the information in a page so a computer can read it.  That means an address can be structured so a search engine can understand it and let searchers find the web page when they are looking for information about a particular area.  A product can be set up so it can be listed in specialist searches.  Events from the websites of different organisations in a city can be pulled together into a central site to promote them without anyone having to do anything.  News and reviews about Computer Engineer Barbie can be shared with news sites. 

That’s why, while Microformats (opens new window), HTML5 (opens new window) and RDFa (opens new window) are never going to be sexy, they are going to be useful.  They will be the new glue of the World Wide Web.  Once we’ve done the hard work of setting up a website so it uses the appropriate structure other, good, things can happen without our having to do anything else.

However, the recent changes to Google’s interface to put ‘universal search’ at our fingertips and bring us ‘real time’ information via Google Caffeine coupled with the exponential growth of social media set down a new challenge to businesses in keeping on top of their online marketing.

At this point, some of you will be thinking, “Oh no, not another blog post telling me I should be ‘tweeting’ this and ‘liking’ that”, but before you click away, stop. This post is actually about changes in user search habits.

Those of us who have been using the web for a long time have probably schooled ourselves to use our search engine of choice to look for information, products or services. However, many of us are spending a lot of our online hours on other web properties such as Youtube, Facebook or interacting via Twitter, and it has now been proven that web users are using these tools as search platforms as opposed to what we would conventionally call search engines.

Youtube is a solid example of where a social platform has become a powerful marketing tool and now search platform; gone are the days that Youtube is seen as the place to just see extreme sports fanatics injuring themselves (although it still excels in this area). Youtube is now packed with useful promotional and value-added content which can draw you to in to commercial, branded content. Want to know how to ice a cake, or change your iPod battery? It’s there on Youtube. But from there I can easily click-through to buy cake decoration materials or that money-saving iPod battery kit.

Facebook users are now also following this trend, using the Facebook search feature to look for products and services, when they would previously have used something like Google. There is already talk about social sites like Facebook taking search further and using your Friends’ preferences to customise the results you receive; effectively making them more like personal or tribal recommendations.

Savvy businesses have already boarded these bandwagons for some time, setting up Youtube channels, Facebook Fan pages or similar, to support their existing websites. Going forward, the real winners will be the businesses that understand how different segments of their online audience access and interact with all this different content, derive value from it, and then how it generates income for their business.

Does a search in Google present your tweets and videos? Does your audience search about how to do something with your product via Youtube? Do they find you through a social networking site? If you have not started broadening your online marketing tactics using social tools, then now is the time to start evaluating the best routes for you. If you have been doing this for a while, you now need to evaluate whether your separate presences and aggregators like Google are pulling your content together to best effect.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

The Umbraco CMS plug-in (opens new window) makes it easy for editors or administrators to not only get an overview of visitors, bounce rate and other standard reports, but create their own custom Google Analytics reports. This could be a great way of reporting on standard key performance indicators to authors or technical reporting to a webmaster, without swamping them with unnecessary data such as highly customised campaign tracking.

The WordPress plug-ins not only support website owners, but also allow Google Analytics data to be displayed in your posts.

New applications that may improve your efficiency and help you get more out of Google Analytics are being added all the time, so it is well worth a visit.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

We thought this was worth investigating, so armed with Microsoft Excel and data sets available online we came up with a league table of towns in the UK with highest densities of Twitter users. Interestingly, although London had the highest number of Tweeple, it was actually 10th in the list when population density was factored in, out-performed by many of the UK's media cities including Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Bristol. We have summarised the full results in the figure below (click upon the image for a full-size version):

Circles represent number of people signed up to Twitter with a particular location set per head of population.  Twitter user numbers from Twellowhood (opens new window) with some amalgamation of numbers where multiple spellings of the same place name had significant numbers of users.  Population figures from Wikipedia (opens new window).

"Software patterns that offer well-established solutions to architectural problems in software engineering."

In software engineering, as with any other construction business, I can't stress the importance of applying good architecture and design patterns enough. MVC is one such pattern which has been around for a long time - its origins can be traced back to 1979 and the Smalltalk programming language, yet has recently seen a huge surge in popularity as it has proven to be a natural fit for web-based solutions. I'll try not to bore you with a lengthy discussion of MVC concepts, but a short overview is necessary before I discuss the benefits that the MVC pattern can bring to projects.

What is MVC?

In short, MVC projects consist of at least 3 distinct areas of responsibility:

• Models - Concerned with data modelling and capturing the project's business requirements.
• Views - Presentation / user-interface components. A view generally provides a visual representation of data in the model(s). On a web site, these are usually web pages or HTML snippets.
• Controllers - The engine room. Controllers facilitate the flow of data through the application. A controller will generally respond to some form of user-input, and then pass data to or from the model before handing another view back to the user.

So what does this actually mean? At its simplest level, MVC encourages developers to break their projects down into manageable, independent components with clearly defined lines of responsibility.

Back in the old days of writing Classic ASP or PHP spaghetti code, now often referred to as an anti-pattern (opens new window), it wasn't an uncommon sight for web pages to comprise of a mix of HTML mark-up, database access code and business logic all in one place, which while quick to write would become increasingly difficult to test and maintain during the course of the project's lifespan.

Instead, using the MVC pattern we are encouraged to break apart the tightly coupled dependencies that can exist in typical implementations (e.g. the user interface should not need to know how to access the database), which leads to code that is more modular, easier to maintain, and much more robust.

What are the benefits of MVC?

There are many benefits to using the MVC approach, some of the more tangible ones are:

• MVC's architecture makes it much easier for different team members to work independently on separate aspects of the system. For example, designers can work on the views without needing to understand how the underlying database technology works. Likewise, the programmer with no interest in user-interface design can focus solely on modelling the database and business requirements of the project.
• MVC projects are very easy to test. Developers typically create 'unit tests' which can be run automatically and allows them to quickly verify that each part of their application behaves as expected. Being able to break an application down into the loosely coupled components that MVC encourages is key to being able to create good unit tests.
• MVC projects tend to be modular by nature, which makes it much easier to alter (or even rewrite) one part of the application without it adversely impacting on other areas. MVC makes it very easy to achieve Separation of Concerns (opens new window) - a key principal to writing code that is easy to maintain and refactor.

Where do we use MVC?

We work with plenty of legacy applications written using non-MVC frameworks, such as standard PHP, ASP, and ASP.NET Webforms sites. These all fulfil their purpose and certainly haven't become bad applications overnight! Likewise, we won't be abandoning popular products such as Wordpress any time soon just because they aren't MVC based. However we have been shifting greenfield project development to MVC frameworks. Some of the MVC based solutions that we currently use are ASP.NET MVC, CodeIgniter - a PHP-based MVC framework, Joomla – an MVC-based CMS and Umbraco CMS - moving to ASP.NET MVC for its next release.

Of course, there is no such thing as a silver bullet in the software development world and MVC is no exception. It's possible for a good software developer to craft elegant solutions no matter what architectural pattern or framework is used, just as no amount of 'best practices' is going to save a poor developer from creating buggy, unmanageable code. But by encouraging you to adopt proven design patterns there’s no doubt that MVC empowers and encourages developers to create code that is elegant, reusable and robust - and that can only mean happier clients.

How many hours have you spent in meetings debating which graphic will make your web site make more money?

Maybe I should start with:

Google Website Optimiser takes the guesswork out of making decisions about your website.

Should I use web site or website? Someone just suggested swapping opinion for guesswork as it sounds better in the second sentence? Maybe I should say text instead of graphic in the first sentence? Should I use a two-column design for the page instead of three, or split the text into two columns? Maybe I should change the page round completely. So many choices…

The problem is that choices like these usually come down to guesswork, personal preference or long-held opinion. Sometimes we make the wrong choice for all sorts of reasons. Having lived with a web page for a while, it can feel jaded and stale. There is a natural urge to change it. To a new visitor to the page, the existing page may actually be better than the new page put in its place.

Marketing professionals use a variety of techniques to reduce the guesswork. Google Website Optimiser puts two powerful techniques to test variations of web pages to see which variation performs best, into the hands of all website owners. To do that you need to have a specific goal in mind for the page, such as sign ups to a newsletter, adding a product into a shopping cart or visiting a specific page. The page that you’re testing also needs to have enough visitors for you to see which version works best.

There are two types of testing you can do with Google Web Optimiser:

• A/B Split Testing
• Multivariate Testing

A/B Split Testing

A/B Testing is the simpler kind of test. In an A/B test you see how the original, “A”, page performs compared to variant, “B”, pages. There can be more than one B page. A/B testing can be used if the page is fairly low traffic (less than a thousand page views each week). A/B testing allows the testing of pages in which one simple change to the page is made, the overall look of the page changes or parts of the page are moved around.

Multivariate Testing

Multivariate Testing tests different versions of a single page. You can try out several different versions of the parts of the page's text and graphics, to see which results in the most visitors going to your goal. You can vary different parts of the page separately and Google Web Optimiser will work out which combination is the best. To use a multivariate test in a reasonable amount of time, the page needs to have high traffic (over a thousand page views each week).

Both kinds of test can be set up by someone with a bit of technical knowledge by following the step by step process on the Google Web Optimiser website (opens new window). After there have been enough visitors to the page, the tool can tell you which version performs best. It will even knock out underperforming variations so the testing won’t hurt you as it goes on.

This isn’t just a toy for techies though. It offers real business benefits. It allows you to increase your conversion rates, avoid changes that decrease conversions, and do away with those meetings debating which version of a page is best.

For the past couple of years we have been incorporating Google Analytics into our web developments. However, what we don’t see is every client taking up Google Analytics training, and I have been asking myself why?

Good use of website analytics is hard work, and requires an advanced skill set. Statistical analysis is a complex field, requiring a good level of numeracy. Additionally, you need to have a good grasp of web technologies and know how your analytics solution records and presents data. It is not just a case of turning analytics on, looking at a few numbers and then sending off a report by email (well you can, but your email will end up in Deleted Items).

I’ve become more puzzled by this the more I deliver Google Analytics training courses, as I’m constantly surprised by what delegates do not know. I think organisations do not buy analytics training because they think they are getting the best from their analytics (and their analyst!), when they are not. You don’t know, what you don’t know.

Therefore, I have come up with a checklist to help you understand if you are using your analytics well, or whether you would benefit from training. Try the simple health check questionnaire below (which focuses on Google Analytics, but should help with others), and see how you score:

Clearly this is not scientific (nor sometimes is Website Analytics!), but it should give you an insight into how you could improve your use of website analytics. If you have found that you are significantly ‘out of shape’, then maybe a training course (opens new window) is the shot in the arm you need.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

Andrew S. Tannenbaum

…and nowhere is the above quote truer than in the world of web design and development. The open source and democratic nature of the web means that it is a rapidly changing environment with new technologies and standards vying for attention all the time. Barely has one technology become established and supported by software and browsers when the next is already on the horizon and of course this is what makes the web so exciting and vital. These rapid developments fuel the exponential growth and use of the web. The downside of this however is that developers and designers have to be constantly aware of the limitations of the old technologies and conversely careful not to implement code that is too cutting edge and is not widely enough supported, a difficult balancing act perhaps, but one that is absolutely vital to the success of their client’s sites.

The newest kids on the block as far as standards are concerned are HTML 5 (opens new window) and CSS 3 (opens new window) and the hope is that in the next few years they will form the bedrock for web design and mark up. Both have been in development for some years and are only now starting to mature. They could be the perfect pairing, HTML 5 for the content and CSS 3 for presentation, allowing coders to build more stable, faster loading and widely supported sites and designers to create visually rich layouts without clunky workarounds. The key to this of course will be browsers adopting these two standards and users taking up the new versions.

Together these two represent a considerable step forward for the web and above all a potentially significant improvement in the user’s experience.

The other door Buzz faced on launch was the more obvious one, Why do I need yet another social media network? If you already use Twitter and Facebook for communication to your audiences, where would Buzz fit into all this? That is before you start with all the other Social Networks that people may use (MySpace, Digg, Bebo, Last.FM, LinkedIn). Okay, these other networks might be used for other functions such as music, photos and news, but they do account for a user’s time.

So was it Google’s answer to Twitter? Or had they missed the bus?

Buzz is similar to Twitter and Facebook as it is another mechanism to communicate with users via the web; trade statuses, links, images and videos but there are differences. Here are the pros and cons of Google Buzz.

The Pros

Find and follow your contacts

Due to the fact that Google Buzz is integrated into Google Mail, you instantly have your friends to follow in your Google Mail contacts list. They will be able to view your buzzes and vice versa. No need to be introduced or search for your friends using a search mechanism, its automatic.

Social Networks Connection

Google Buzz allows you to import your activity with other social networks automatically. Buzz feeds in your latest photos from Flickr or Picasa, your latest tweets from Twitter, your latest videos from YouTube and your news feeds from Google Reader.

No Character limitation

Where you are limited with Twitter to the 140 Character restriction, Buzz allows for unlimited-length posts.

YouTube auto embedding

Similar to Google Chat, all YouTube videos are automatically embedded into Google Buzz, avoiding you from having to click through to YouTube, thus enabling commenting on a video collaboratively within Buzz.

Conversation Streams

As previously mentioned, Google Buzz allows for the ability to follow communication between individuals and groups of individuals rather than individual posts. This allows for collaboration and conversations to grow, which is especially useful when you consider the ability to embed video, pictures and links.

Google Buzz Map

This is my personal favourite. The Google Buzz Map is viewable to all mobile phones (except Blackberry) via the Google Buzz layer on Google Maps for Mobile. When using a mobile device with a GPS, you can geotag your Buzzes with your current location. This is displayed in Google Maps with the Buzz layer, enabling you to view Buzzes from a location point of view; a new feature to social networking.

The Cons

Now the Cons. in addition to the previously mentioned, privacy issues and the need to interact with yet another social network:

Google Mail Account

This has got to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks for the product. If you already use Google Mail then great, if you don’t then you require one to use Buzz. As well as the issue of most usernames having gone, why would a user require yet another email account to the one they currently use? Simple, they wouldn’t.

Twitter Integration Delay

There is a significant delay in Twitter feeds feeding into your Buzz Account, this negates the whole real-time communication issue.

Overcrowded Buzz streams

If you have a Buzz stream where you are following a ‘Buzzer’ who comments quite regularly, then this can tend to overcrowd your Buzz stream, similar to having a Tweeter who tweets too much. But add to this the fact that they may have lots of followers who then comment on their buzzes, and your stream then becomes theirs very quickly.

Finding Buzzers

Whereas Facebook and Twitter have many different ways to find people you may wish to follow, either by similar interest or subject, Buzz fails to assist in this matter.

Conclusion.

I was lucky enough to be a Gmail user, so the integration of Google Buzz was seamless apart from the fact that it does tend to overcrowd my mail box on some days. After linking in my Twitter account, I really found no need to use Buzz on a regular basis. I do however like the Google Buzz map overlay on Google Maps and use this to view Buzzers who are located nearby.

So overall, Google Buzz is currently only offering technology that is already out there. Its integration with Google Maps for Mobile is its strongest selling point, but Google really needs to come up with the killer innovation that will help Google Buzz stand its ground against the social media big-hitters like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and newcomers like Foursquare.

Before testing any project we draw up a test plan from original project documentation. This can include specifications, statements of requirement, standards the site is designed to comply with and branding guidelines. Without a plan there is a danger that testers will miss areas of a site or functionality that need testing.

When we draw up a test plan we included a number of separate, independent tests that can be performed. Each test confirms if the site complies with one requirement from the specification. Some tests, such as compliance with html standards, are independent of web browsers. Others, like testing site navigation works, need to be carried out across a range of browsers to ensure a feature is available to all visitors. Some are best carried out by testers with specialist expertise, such as a designer checking a site’s styling complies with branding guidelines.

Once we have a test plan testers can carry out the testing. A Pass or Fail is recorded for every test to ensure that every test is run at least once. While carrying out the test plan testers record any issues outside the test plan they comes across. A written explanation for each failure or issue explains what is wrong.

With a detailed audit trail recording outcomes and who carried out each test we can support the conclusions of our testing. This is important as it builds confidence for the client we are testing for and for the site’s creators. A summary list of failures would be quicker to produce and provides a list of issues requiring attention. A summary list doesn’t build confidence in the effectiveness of the testing.

The DCLG testing was based on the site specification and branding guidelines. A list of web browsers the site had to work with was identified by the DCLG. We drew up the list of tests and identified which tests needed to be carried out across different browsers and which were independent of the browsers. The test plan included over 500 separate tests.

With the test plan written we went through it step by step. For each test we decided if the site passed or failed and recorded the outcome. A summary and a report of the test results was compiled and sent to the DCLG the next day.

Impenetrable.

“Multi-agency goldfish bowl facilitated conversation.”

Pardon?

The Local Government Association (LGA) has published the annual list of words that shouldn’t be used by the public sector to talk to the public today. Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s The Today Programme about the use of this kind of language the LGA's chair, Dame Margaret Eaton said:

“What concerns us is this can prevent people accessing very necessary services. We are in a recession and more and more people require help from their local authority and other public bodies. If the material that goes out to the public is so impenetrable then they won’t access the very services that could help them hugely in this time of recession.”

“…we’ve got to remember that all the things provided, particularly by local authorities and most public bodies, come through peoples’ taxation so they have every right for transparency in the communication and to see what is actually provided and when there are challenges as there will be the public have got to be part of the discussion and part of the process with total clarity.”

Choosing the right language is also important if you want your web site to be accessible. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 says:

“Using clear and simple language promotes effective communication. Access to written information can be difficult for people who have cognitive or learning disabilities. Using clear and simple language also benefits people whose first language differs from your own, including those people who communicate primarily in sign language.”

So please read the LGA’s list (opens new window) and drop the Welderly, the Third sector and the Ambassador (at least when you’re public facing) and make your website more accessible and more easily understood by the public.

That’s the problem. There’s so much information in Google Analytics it’s easy to become overwhelmed and give up just looking at the headline numbers on the dashboard sometimes. Are the number of visits and page views increasing? Is your bounce rate and new visits holding steady? Perhaps one day you get an unexpected spike in visits. You want to know where they came from, so you dig through the information till you find out; a footballer with a nose bleed in a bar was the cause of the first inexplicable spike in visitors I ever had to explain.

Doing this you’re not really using the information to improve your web site. You’re just supporting the status quo and reacting to outside forces. Like the alleged fist that may or may not have met with the footballers nose, allegedly. What would be really useful would be some basic, repeatable, reports that can produce actionable information. That’s where the three reports I’m going to describe here come in. Three reports from Google Analytics to identify pages for review and improvement.

The Three Reports

The three reports we’re interested in are the Most Viewed Pages, Entry Pages and Exit Pages Reports. You can find these in Google Analytics by following the instructions below. Make a table for each with the top ten pages for each report. I’ve included examples for a fictional web site for each of the reports.

Most Viewed Pages

This report lists the 10 Most Viewed Pages ordered from most viewed to least.

In Google Analytics go to Content, then Top Content and order by Pageviews.

Entry Pages

This time you want to look at the landing pages for your site. For this we want to see the Number of Entrances, Number of Bounces and Percentage Bounces for the top ten entrance pages on your site.

Go to Content then Top Landing Pages and order by Entrances.

Exit Pages

The last report is the pages that most people leave the website from. For this we want to know the Exits, Pageviews and Percentage Exit.

Go to Content, then Top Exit Pages and order by Exits.

Identify Pages of Interest

Now you’ve got three tables make yourself a fourth table that lists all the pages and why each page is of interest.

So now you’ve cut a path through the impenetrable jungle of reports and you’ve got a simple table that tells you between ten and thirty pages to focus your attention on. You’ve also got some basic information about each of the pages.

What to do Next?

Taking a look at the example above, the most important page for review is the site’s home page. It gets a lot of visitors which is good, but the bounce rate seems very high. Maybe it needs a redesign or some search engine optimisation (SEO) work, so that people finding it are the ones who are looking for the site.

There are lots of bounces on the Our Staff and Staff directory pages. A quick look at some other statistics for those pages might show that a staff member has the same name as a celebrity and so visitors to those pages are looking for someone else.

The Contact Us page has a very high exit rate. For the Contact Us page that might not be a bad thing. Visitors who want to know how to get in touch with our fictional company found what they were looking for.

The Our Products page is getting quite a few page views so spending a bit of time making it better could pay dividends. Maybe some nice new pictures or a bit of work polishing the text would be a worthwhile investment of time.

What to do Later?

Now you’ve done this once what can you do later?

If you thought this was useful, you can quickly get the information to do this again if you set up three Custom Reports in Google Analytics (opens new window). Then after a few months you can review the impact of the changes and identify further pages for review.

If you’ve the time and a large web site, you might want to expand the number of pages you look at, or go on to look at the next ten most viewed pages, landing pages or exit pages.

If you’re feeling adventurous you could use Google Website Optimizer (opens new window) to test different variations on a page to see which is the most effective. I’ll come back to that another time.

So what is a Content Management System (CMS)?  Like a Ronnie Corbett monologue (opens new window) I’ll come to that in a minute.  First let’s have a look at how all web sites used to be made (and many still are).  Every page on the site had to be made using an editor like Wordpad on Windows or Vi on Unix.  You had to know how to write HTML markup code and later CSS.  If you added a new page and wanted it to be included in the navigation on every page you had to edit each of the files.  Then you had to use FTP to copy all the files from your computer to your web server.  It was a clumsy process that needed technical training to perform.  When you should have been worrying about the stuff that made up the page, you were worrying about making sure the page didn’t break.

Later software like Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Frontpage came along that made some of this easier.  These still combined working on the site design and the content.  You also still needed to FTP the files to the web server.  Everyday users working on content still had to have special skills or pass content on to people who had those skills.

So what is a Content Management System?  If you look on Wikipedia you’ll see several different things listed under Content Management Systems.  Strictly speaking I’m just talking about a Web Content Management System.  This kind of CMS is computer software that makes running a web site easier.  It automates a lot of the routine work so a user can worry about their content and not worry about other stuff.  Many run as a secure, private part of the web site so an organisation’s staff can work on the site from different offices, home or anywhere else they can access the World Wide Web.

A good CMS makes it easy to add new pages and to edit existing ones.  It will include an editor for writing the content that goes into pages so a user doesn’t need to know HTML or CSS.  It will also automate tasks like making a site’s navigation, producing a sitemap and listing latest news articles on the home page.  It will take care of the look of the site.  It can make the site meets standards for accessibility and the underlying html code.  It can make pages that will work well with search engines.

Other features include the ability to add extra features to the site like video players, interactive maps or feeds from a new site.  They can include delegation and workflow so that different staff can have different levels of authority to work on the web site.  One user might be an author who writes content, another an editor who checks it and a third a publisher who approves it once the editor says it’s ready to go.

So what is a Content Management System?  In a nutshell a CMS lets the people who make the content for your web site, make your web site easily.

(The Goon Show: The Last Goon Show of All, 1972)

I couldn’t come up with a suitable (or should that be unsuitable?) quote from the Carry on Film’s for this post, so I hope you’ll forgive me for picking one from the Goons instead.

Last time in Carry on up the Internet: A bit of an Enigma I talked about how the club’s web site had managed to knock itself out of Google and other search engines using a robots.txt file. Having corrected the problem, they could have sat back and waited for the search engines to add them back in. With a bit of luck they’d be picked up in about a month. They asked if there was any way to speed this up.

In the early days of the web, you could submit yourself to search engines and listings sites (we used to run a service some of you may remember called Signpost that helped you do that). Submitting to search engine and directory sites fell out of favour for a few years.

In the last few years the biggest search engines have brought in a new way to let them know about your site. Funnily part of it involves using a robots.txt file on your site. Back in 2005 Google launched, Google Sitemaps, a way to tell Google about the pages on your site. Since then other big name search engines like Yahoo! and Bing have adopted the standard which is now known as XML Sitemaps.

By adding a file to your web site, usually called sitemap.xml, to your site you can tell the search engines about your pages to make it easier for them to find them. You can add a line to a robots.txt file to say where your sitemap file is to make it easy for the search engines spiders to find. While it is possible to write a sitemap file in a text editor there are several web sites and software that will produce one for you. Many content management systems, like Joomla and Liberato, can automatically make them behind the scenes.

When you update your site you can use websites like Bing’s webmaster tools (link opens new window), Yahoo! Site Explorer (link opens new window) and Google’s webmaster tools (link opens new window). If you're using a content management system, it can send a ping to the search engines to automatically let them know whenever your site changes.

So rather than sitting back and waiting for the search engines to come to you, you can proactively go out there and tell the search engines about your site.

However, this week I have been attracted by something shiny and new for the first time in ages; Google Chrome Beta (opens new window). Now a few of you will be saying “Old news, #fail, move on”, but I did try Chrome when it first came out and it was OK, but I simply did not need another browser in my life at the time. This is particularly after the great Apple Safari for Windows debacle, which “broke” my iTunes when I installed the first version. That was a black day, having to download and re-install more software and more importantly being separated from my tunes.

Anyway, back to the new Chrome Beta. This for me has the following highlights:

• It loads fast; Firefox and Internet Explorer need a kick in the pants and dynamite to get going in comparison
• It is quick to use; page load, working with tabs, configuring, just feels more fluid than its compatriots
• But the best thing of all are the Extensions (opens new window); so I can now get to my Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Wave from one click on the toolbar, and I can tweet from there too
• If you are a Developer there is a Developer tools feature and a Firebug Lite Extension (opens new window) if you hanker for this Extension from Firefox
• Oh, and you can make it look pretty with themes

The more I used Chrome, the more I was impressed. When I considered the volume of tasks I have to complete everyday in the browser window, its simple approach to providing a browser that just works, fast, really counts. I have not had to make time in my life for an extra browser; I have in fact saved time by switching to Chrome Beta and only using the others when I absolutely need to. Try it, I hope you like it too.

There is one “but”, if you do switch to Chrome. Don’t be surprised if you wake up the next day with the realisation of how much time you have wasted using [insert browser of choice] up until now. Then you too may feel a little curmudgeonly.

Authored by Ian Cockayne

(Carry on Doctor, 1967)

Back in Carry on up the Internet: How Big are We? my friend added Google Analytics to the club’s site. A few weeks later I was chatting to them and they said there was something odd with what they were seeing in Google Analytics; they didn’t get any visitors from Google. I took a quick look at the reports and it was worse than that, they didn’t get visitors from Microsoft Live Search (now Microsoft Bing), Yahoo! (soon to be Microsoft Bing), any of the search engines I recognised (soon probably all to be called Microsoft Bing, except of course, Google).

I had a quick look at their site and the Google Analytics code looked right. I tried a few searches for them on Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Bing. Even though their name is quite distinctive they didn’t come back in any of the searches.

So I did a bit more digging and found the problem; a little file on their website called robots.txt. A robots.txt file is a powerful tool for webmasters. It lets you tell Internet bots (sometimes known as web robots or simply bots) what they are allowed to look at on your site. Bots are software that runs tasks automatically on the Internet such as web spiders that are used by search engines to index the web. For example, Googlebot is used by Google to collect the information to build the index for Google’s search. The robots.txt for their site denied access to all bots.

I asked them if they really meant to do that. Someone had told them about botnets and spam bots. They had an image of gangs of leather clad beastly bots rampaging around the Internet laying waste to any web site that crossed their path. Think Tron (soon to be Tron Legacy) meets Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. After a quick bit of research they’d found a simple solution, a virtual ASBO to stop the bad bots in their tracks, using a robot.txt file to ban them from the site.

It sounds good in theory, but unfortunately it wasn’t a real solution. The robots.txt file is more like the polite notice you see by the roadside in picture postcard villages asking you to drive carefully than a checkpoint that stops bots but lets other visitors in. When Googlebot and the other search engines bots visited the site they found it and obeyed the instructions in it and promptly ignored the site. Meanwhile malicious bots would simply carry on regardless.

A simple rewrite of the robots.txt file made it friendlier to good bots and let the search engines back into the site.

Madame Desiree: That doesn't scare me. I've seen bigger ones in my time.
Dick Turpin: That doesn't surprise me.

(Carry on Dick, 1974)

One of the things I’m asked about is from people who have a web site for their business but they can’t tell if they're getting any benefit from it.  Sometimes a customer will say they found their web site or they’ll be contacted through their web site, but if you’re not directly trading online how do you measure how well your web site is performing?

Take the club I mentioned in Carry on up the Internet: You haven’t got Mail.  They had their web site but they didn’t know anything about how well it was working.  They didn’t know how many people visited their web site, which pages they looked at, or anything else about how well their site was doing.  Their web hosting didn’t include any usage statistics or access to log files.  If they’d had access to their web server’s log files they could have used software like AWstats to see how they were doing.

I suggested they could add Google Analytics to find out what was happening on their site.  Google Analytics is a great, free tool that we’ve used successfully with a lot of our clients.  Now for some, a tool which describes itself as “…the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness.” may sound a little bit of overkill.  When I told them it had over 80 different reports I could see the look of fear forming behind their eyes. 

I had a feeling I was about to metamorphose into Michael Winner in an advert for car insurance.  So I took a step back and showed them the Google Analytics dashboard.

One of the great things about Google Analytics is that you can decide how far to dig into it.  If you’re just starting out you can see the most important information for your site on the dashboard.  Straight away you can see how many visitors you’ve had, how many pages they viewed, how much time they spent on the site, where they came from and the top five pages they looked at.  Once you’ve dipped your toe in the water, you can dig deeper into Google Analytics and figure out what else is useful for you.

Adding it to a site is easy if you’re using a templated content management system but if, like the club you are writing each page by hand, copying and pasting the code into a small web site isn’t too difficult either.

Umbraco is a content management system (CMS) that gives you the flexibility, responsiveness and control over your content. It makes it easy for non-technical staff to update and maintain information without requiring expensive technical support resources.

As Umbraco is web-based there is no software to install. The system is accessed via a web-browser, so that your staff can update your site wherever there is Internet access and a PC.

Umbraco gives your staff the appropriate control over information, whilst delivering real cost savings by reducing long-term maintenance costs.

You can check out three Umbraco-based web sites below (all links open a new window):

• Health and Safety Laboratory
• Central Manchester University Hospitals Genetic Medicine
• NHS South West Essex Community Services

(Carry on Sergeant, 1958)

In the second of this erratic series of posts about web site problems, I want to take a look at a problem which I’m going to call the Curse of Gerald Scarfe.

We were reviewing a companies existing web site before developing a new, content managed site.  The existing site wasn’t bad, a little out of date, a slightly dated design and hard to maintain because it didn’t have a content management system.  However something wasn’t quite right.  The site was illustrated with high quality images of business people at work.  There was something slightly unnatural about them, as though they had been taken from the odd angles that were trendy in Reportage in the late ‘80s.  The images' proportions had been distorted when they’d been added to the site, not far enough to be really noticeable but enough to have an effect.  Unfortunately the result wasn’t a Gerald Scarfe cartoon but rather off-putting, long-faced people.

Fortunately one of the benefits of using a CMS for their new site was that the image sizes were automatically included by the system. So the Curse of Gerald Scarfe (opens new window) couldn’t creep back into their new site.

Topping the list of local luminaries were the Mayor of Ellesmere Port, Councillor Tony Sherlock and Colin Charlton, our CEO. Sipping coffee and munching chocolate biscuits were some of the brilliant learners who we have helped take advantage of free government funding to become more employable. They impressed the Mayor and Mayoress with their learning and skills.

Our Area Managers were there too; ready to begin interviewing local candidates with Colin for a new post in the Centre.  Colin explained to the Mayor that we endeavour to employ local people and proudly introduced a glowing Debra Smith, one of the first learners through the doors of our new centre, now an assessor for our NVQ programme.

At 10.30, the Mayor departed, leaving the washing up but assuring us that he would be back to take a computer course when his term of office ended next year.

While writing this post, I’ve read quite a few articles about password security.  Many of them open with one of two pitches.  The first is that passwords are annoying.  The second is that you need to be really paranoid about your security online.  Now the first is true and the second probably doesn’t hurt, but both are distractions from what a password should be.  A good password should be like having a good lock on a door.  It’s the difference between a good, solid five lever deadbolt lock and something that can be opened with a credit card.

Passwords are a good, cheap form of security.  Just as you can fit a door with security systems from the next Tom Cruise Mission Impossible blockbuster, you can, in principle, fit a website with a variety of gadgets for authentication, like the card readers available from some banks.  In most cases, the cost of the extra security will outweigh the benefit if the passwords used are strong.

While passwords are used in lots of places, I’m specifically interested in protecting content management, ecommerce and other systems and services that make up websites.  These passwords may be used to access your site’s CMS or might be protecting services hosted elsewhere like Google Analytics or Twitter that you use for your business.

Password Cracking

If a hacker can find where to log in to a site’s administration system, they can attempt to break into it by guessing or obtaining a password.  There are two basic ways they can do this: guessing and social engineering.

If a password is really bad; say a password of “password”, “12345” or “qwerty”; a hacker may be able to guess it and try it manually.  If they are a little more determined, they may resort to using software to try a list of commonly used passwords.  An automated software attack might try a dozen passwords or it might try many thousands of possible combinations.

Social engineering relies on some of the skills a con artist uses to take money from the unwary and a variety of investigative skills.  They persuade you to give up your password, they work it out from information they can find out about you, they go through your rubbish for scraps of paper you’ve thrown out and they gain access to where you’ve got the password written down on a post-it note by a variety of ruses.

Bad Passwords

There are a range of things you can do to make it hard to guess or break passwords by an automated attack.

To make it hard for them to crack or guess using easy to discover information about you, don’t use:

• Dictionary words
• Names or other proper nouns
• Foreign words

Avoid personal information like:

• Phone numbers
• Birthdays
• Car registration
• Postcodes
• Children, spouses or other relatives names

Don’t use business information such as:

• Business names
• Business address
• Web site address or name
• Product name

Don’t try to make a bad password good by, for example, using a backwards version of a bad password, or obvious substitutions like 3 for E or K for C.

Good Passwords

Good passwords are usually longer.  They should be at least 6 characters long.  They should include a variety of characters not just A to Z.  Good passwords should include special characters (like @, + and #) and numbers.  Many systems will let you use uppercase as well as lowercase letters or spaces.  Some systems may allow Alt characters to be used.  Specific systems may have specific security features you need to be aware of.

Keeping it Safe

Once you’ve got a good password you need to keep it safe.

Don’t give out passwords, especially not to requests by e-mail or phone.  If a researcher offers you chocolate for your password when you get off the bus, do tell them a fake one.  You shouldn’t be denied chocolate in the name of security.

Don’t share passwords with other people.  If you can have separate accounts, make sure everyone has their own account.  Shut accounts for users who have left.  Not just because someone who has left may not care as much about your security anymore but because an unused account is a tempting target for an attacker.

Don’t use the same password on multiple systems.  Especially don’t use the same password for personal and work systems.  That way if one of them is breached you are only worrying about problems at work or home, not both at once.

If you need to keep a record of an important password, which cannot be recovered or automatically reset, put it somewhere secure.  Ideally put it in a sealed envelope with a signature over the seal and put it in a safe or a secure, locked container.  When you change a password, destroy any record of it by shredding it.

Avoid putting them on post-it notes or under your keyboard. This is the equivalent of putting a key under the plant pot by your front door.

It’s also a good idea to change your passwords every few months.

Passwords for New Users

Many systems require an administrator to create accounts for new users and allow them to set up the user’s starting password.  Avoid using weak passwords when giving them out to new users as a shockingly large number of them will never change them, especially if they are easy to remember.  Also don’t use the same one for several users.

Going a bit Further

There are a wide variety of other measures you can consider in addition to using good passwords which won’t cost you the earth.  We are very happy to work with our clients to discuss ways in which they can help improve security.

This creative element is the differentiator of success and failure, the ability to break from the norm, from a designer’s point of view, the ability to meet all client requirements and still deliver an innovative and engaging design.

During the design process, there is a sliding scale, with structured and practical at one end, flexible, and aesthetic on the other. The first step for a designer is to gauge where your client wishes to be on this scale. This is identified by the various elements you can gather from the client’s design brief or in a discovery discussion with your client.

Each time you establish your client’s direction on elements such as target audience, industry sector, stakeholders and scope, the opportunity for creativity moves back and forth along the scale. For instance, public sector clients adhering to e-government guidelines and/or Accessibility Level AAA guidelines will require a design scope within which practicality and usability will be key requirements.

Once you understand where along the scale your client sits, you can then start to become creative. The real skill at this point of the creative process is working in and around the boundaries of the structured and the practical; taking what designers often see as restrictions, and being imaginative, in spite of the challenges set by the design brief.

Each client will have a set of objectives, the project mandate as you were, and the reason for the job in the first place. These objectives often translate into website features, processes a user must go through to reach a client’s goal. These ideas should be driven by function, delivering the technical features required to meet the client’s objectives and that will be suitable for the target audience.

Yet, this functionality still benefits from creativity, to deliver these functions in an interactive, exciting and engaging manner, which reflects innovation and originality, while considering the client’s sector, stakeholders and adherence to guidelines and good practice. A designer’s ability to brainstorm new creative ideas to deliver functionality that you see on websites everyday, can set apart your design from the rest or in a client perspective, its competitors.

A successful website is the result of this measured blend of the creative and the technical, the aesthetic and the practical. Only the correct balance will produce a successful project with the client’s objectives and brief answered and fully considered, harmonised with the originality that differentiates a website from its competition.

Sir Bernard Cutting: Yes, I am! And I can prove it, d'you hear! Prove it!

(Carry on Matron, 1972)

Doctors get asked at parties about people’s random ailments.  Mechanics get asked about strange noises friends’ cars are making.  So it’s not really surprising Web Developers get asked about problems with web sites.  Well, we get asked about all sorts of computer and Internet problems, there’s a better chance we know the answer to the ones about web sites.  I’ll take IT problems over ills any day of the week.

I was asked if I’d have a glance over a web site for a small club.  They didn’t seem to ever get new members because of the web site.  One of the most obvious problems was the lack of any way to contact them.  They were so worried about being swamped with spam emails that they’d not included an email address on the site.  Nor had they included an address, phone number or any other way of getting in touch anywhere on the site.  Even if someone came to the site and wanted to join or attend a meeting, they had no way to get in touch.

An easy fix for this was to set up an email address just for use on the web site.  They were also able to arrange with the hall they meet in for their post to be sent there.  Then all that they needed to do was update their web site to include the contact details.

Often, though, it's the little things that make all the difference to deciding which software is suitable for managing your web site. Take, for example, running a site using Joomla. A content manager needs to find articles in order to edit them, a standard task in most CMS's. A few versions back in Joomla you could filter a list of articles to get a set of articles to work on, but once you'd worked on one, the filters had gone and you were back to where you started. Changing a set of articles quickly became a bit of a slog as each article had to be found before it could be changed.

Then a new version of Joomla was released that changed how the lists worked: now the list keeps the filtering until you change or reset it. It's not a headline grabbing new feature. It's a small improvement that's a big time saver when working to make changes across a set of pages.  It's the kind of improvement that eases the chore of content management so a user is going to want to keep using Joomla. It's the kind of improvement we only appreciate because we're working with the software regularly.

5^th May 2009 saw the launch of Windows 7 Release Candidate and along with it a rush of PC users downloading, installing, then blogging and tweeting their opinions to the world, and do you know what, the feedback is looking pretty good.

So what are we getting? Windows 7 is Windows Vista refined according to Steve Balmer, Microsoft CEO, so we should be looking forward to Vista with less of the bad stuff and then some improvements.

Out go:

• Classic Start Menu interface
• Memory hogging Sidebar
• Ancillary programs like Calendar, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker and Mail, which lets face it, you probably have elsewhere

Highlights of new features (opens new window):

• Cleaner interface with improved Taskbar and Jump Lists
• Tweaks to the desktop to make finding the file or window you need easier
• Streamlined device management for the plethora of devices we want to use with our PCs
• Simplified networking and file and printer sharing
• Improved power management to improve laptop and netbook battery life
• Less intrusive security and maintenance messages with the Control Panel Action Center
• Integration with Windows Live
• New Windows Media Center and Windows Virtual PC

One thing that has not changed is the specification of the machine that you will need to run Windows 7. That is the same as Windows Vista and was one of the biggest reasons why users did not upgrade to Vista. However, if you take the view that many of us will have updated our machine or will update soon, then chances are you are good to go with this new version.

Obviously it is early days but we are pretty excited about Windows 7 here, particularly with the benefits that it can bring to businesses coupled with Windows Server 2008. To help you get to grips with this new release we are running a 2 day Windows 7 technology overview, which will highlight the new features of this software and demonstrate the links to Windows Vista to give you a headstart if you intend to migrate from Windows XP. See the course details on the Connect Training website (opens new window).

Authored by Ian Cockayne