Beantin

James Royal-Lawson

Mobile Web

11 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 18-21, 2011)

For your reading pleasure this time, a collection of links (with summaries) including articles related to: web management, UX, cookies, search, UX and search.

Web management, UX, mobile web

10 rules to make a great online bank dashboard – Meniga blog

The headline says “online bank” but these 10 rules are just as good for any website

Going Mobile!

‎”It’s not about making our site work on a mobile device, it is about what our users need when they’re mobile”. A case study from Utah Valley University

New Data: 33% of Facebook Posting is Mobile

Some stats saying that a third of FB updates are from mobile devices. Probably a pretty reasonable statistic – but it was calculated using 70,000 publicly available updates. No idea if that’s a representative selection of FB as a whole. It will of course vary quite dramatically from country to country.

How to improve the usability (and conversion rate) of your forms

Nice little check-list for making better forms.

Intranet

Is your intranet a dinosaur?

Good set of 6 questions to ask yourself about your Intranet and help prioritise activities. Given that most orgs don’t have an intranet strategy, answering these wouldn’t be too bad a gap-filler.

Cookies

The Cookie Law in Sweden – Self regulation committee started by the IAB

From July the 1st, an amended law comes into force, making it effectively illegal to create cookies when someone visits your (Swedish) website without explicit permission (in advance). Exactly how the law should be intepreted is a bit unclear. There is a trade organisation working on a recommendation. This change, driven by the EU, is perhaps excellent news for companies offering hosting outside of the EU…

Information Commissioner’s Office

Countries across europe are starting to implement new laws regarding Cookies. The new Swedish law comes into effect on July 1st, but it’s still unclear exactly what needs to be done. Here though is an example of what the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK has done: a banner on every page asking you to accept cookies

Search & personalisation

Personalization gone too far

Every single service is fighting to give us “exactly what we want”. But is exactly what we want really want we want? or need? Take 10 minutes to have a look at this thought provoking TED talk by Eli Pariser.

Social Search goes global

Google has rolled out search results from your social circle globally. So now everyone will see links shared by their “friends” in their SERPs when Google deems it to be relevant. I’ve been watching this for the a fair while now, and it really affects the order of the search results. This is

Analytics & Tools

Google Analytics’ New Site Speed Report Tracks Page Load Times

You can now get page load data in Google Analytics. It’s only sampled data (you don’t get figures for every page view) and it needs a slight modification to your trackng code – but worth monitoring. Slow page load times causes visitors to give up.

probably the single most significant shake up of SERPs (for an individual) in ages.

URL Shortening Services Compared: Bit.ly Pro and Yourls

I make use of both Yourls and Bit.ly pro. Bit.ly pro is a more convenient in a number of ways – but wth Yourls you own the redirects, you can decide the shortened URL. The power is totally yours.

16 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Weeks 1-2, 2011)

This edition’s collection of links includes posts related to: Intranets, UX, Web design and web development, web strategy and web tactics, Analysis and eye tracking.

Intranet

Round-Up of Intranet Trends for 2011

To save you visiting several blogs to get a grip of what’s hot within the world of Intranets, this article conveniently groups it all together for you in one post.

New BBC Site Search

Just before Christmas the BBC has launched a new enhanced site search. This is a detailed write up of what they’ve done and why. There’s a lot of useful information here that could be applied to intranet and enterprise search solutions.

Thoughts on a mobile phone enhanced intranet

A blog post talking about mobiles, intranet, QR codes, and location based services was bound to get my juices flowing. Kristian outlines a number of interesting possible applications for the enhanced mobile intranet of the not too distant future.

Silo-busting & customization in the digital workplace

Jane starts a discussion about breaking down Silos by using customization. This sparked a great discussion in the comments between Kristian Norling (featured in my previous recommendation above), myself, and Martin Risgaard on how to break down the geographical silo.

User experience, Web design, and web development

RSS Is Dying Being Ignored, and You Should Be Very Worried

Long post about the death of RSS. I don’t agree. Completely. Yes, RSS and the browser is a dying combination – but with tablets and the age of curation, RSS has a healthy future as part of the wiring beneath the scenes. Non-techies/non-curators can blissfully ignore it but still reap the benefits. This week Kroc followed up his post with this constructive reply.

Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It

If you haven’t yet heard about responsive web design, then this article on Smashing Magazine is a good and information-rich place to start. We’re rapidly moving away from the one-size-fits-all website.

.css{user:agent;}

A tiny bit of javascript (less than 2KB) that gives you the possibility to add user-agent based CSS classes to your code. After reading about responsive web design in the article above, you will probably understand the usefulness of this.

QR Codes Improve Web Access

I love this example of QR codes. It’s a wonderful example of an application of technology that benefits everyone involved. The teacher has more time for teaching (rather than just making sure everyone has typed in the right URL), the kids take to it like fish to water. It also gives a use for QR codes without using mobile phones.

Static Footer Bars – Web Navigation Trend

James gives some calm and thoughtful analysis of fixed position footer toolbars from the viewpoint of web navigation.

Web strategy and web tactics

Future Integrated Communication From A Digital Perspectiv

Yet more wise words from Johan. Even though there are many of us that bang on about how a web site needs to be focused and task based, the corporate world at large is a number of years behind in it’s thinking. We’ll get there. I’d expand upon Johan’s recommendation of moving 10% of your media budget to content by clarifying “content” to include web management – you content needs to be lovingly dealt with.

How does content strategy differ from corporate communications strategy?

Detailed post from Diana, and especially worth reading on the back of Johan’s post above on integrated communication.

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium

Niche walled gardened channels are forming – from Apps to Gaming worlds – but one thing will remain – the web is where people will go to complain.

8 things every marketing technologist should know

I often try to explain to people that the web isn’t simple. Yes, some tools make aspects of the web accessible and easy – but building and running a successfull web presence involves a huge list of competences. There’s hardly a discipline that isn’t touched. This post features a (non-exhausive) list and diagram of skills needed for a marketing technologist (you can switch that term for your web-title of preference)

Därför blir ditt företags webbplats aldrig färdig

Why your company’s website will never be finished. Something worth saving and remembering from this Swedish post is Magnus’s three focus areas he recommends spitting idea’s up into: improvements that bring more visitors, improvements that convert more visits, improvements to your products and services.

What’s the Future of Mobile Search and SEO?

Mobile search is another aspect that we need to consider and work with. Here are some trends from SEOmoz. Don’t agree with the “single set of SERPs” claim. I don’t see, and I don’t see it being a trend either. Quite the opposite.

Analysis and eye tracking

Mouse Eye Tracking – How useful is it?

If any of you have heard me talk about usability testing with eye tracking, you may also have heard me say how worthless mouse tracking is as a substitute for real eye tracking. Here’s an article that backs that up.

Did the mobile web reach tipping point?

A year ago I said that 2010 would be the year that the mobile web reached tipping point. The question is, did it?

There are many ways you could measure it and we could argue all day about what is the best way to measure it. Mobile page views? smartphone devices sold? Mobile web bandwidth use?

Visits and Pageviews

I’m going to use figures for pageviews and visits from a client’s website in this article to help illustrate how much mobile web use has grown in 2010. I’m going to leave the site anonymous, but I will give you a few background details.

The site is based in Sweden and it’s visits are predominately from the Stockholm area. It’s visited by a full cross-section of Internet users from all generations. There is no mobile adjusted site available – all visitors use the same, full, desktop version. The number of pageviews a month is around 45,000.

600% increase

number of mobile visits rising during 2010 with a jump in July and year end

Up to November 2009 the site had received no visits from mobile devices. In the three months from December 2009 to February 2010 this increased to 1.7% of visits. In December 2009 only 1.1% of pageviews were served to mobiles with most being to iPhones. (Note that I’m including the following devices in the statistics for “mobiles”: iPad, iPod, iPhone, Android, Symbian).

In December 2010, this figure had increased to 6.5% of page views and 8.5% of visits. The iPhone still dominates, with the iPad and Android devices sitting pretty and fighting over 2nd place.

Mobile pageviews: iPhone most with 59.49%

Tipping point reached

The tipping point for this web site came at the end of July 2010. The end of July saw the launch of the iPhone 4 here in Sweden. Once people returned to work after the traditional summer break the number of pageviews served to mobile devices pretty much doubled and hasn’t looked back since.

It would also appear that plenty of people got an iThing for Christmas judging by the spike of pageviews since then. It is, of course, too early to know for sure if this new doubling of mobile visits will be sustained, but so far it hasn’t dropped back.

Bear in mind that all of these figures are for a website that has made no attempt to attract mobile and handheld visitors, and has made no adjustments to cater for them either. These visitors are the people who are deciding to use the site regardless of the limitations – presumably because accessing websites via their handheld device has become a standard form of behaviour for them.

As big as Chrome

Given that the total number of mobile pageviews is over three times as many as for IE6, and pretty much the same percentage as pageviews served to visitors using Google’s Chrome browser – It’s crucial that you regularly check your website on mobile and handheld devices.

You need to check your site regularly, not only during development development or design projects. Just as it has been standard practice for many years to check a range of web browsers, it is now standard practice to check a range of handheld devices too.

19 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Weeks 46-49, 2010)

A whopping 20 article post this time covering 4 weeks of articles spotted on my web-travels. Enjoy!

I’m not anti-SharePoint

Perhaps it’s not SharePoint thats rubbish, but the way it was implemented in your organisation?

Building Tomorrow’s Organization – without today’s IT?

You get the chance to start from scratch – how would you build your company’s IT organisation? Throw IT into the cloud! A provocative but insightful article.

Global Intranet Trends for 2011 – Sample

Last month the Global Intranet Trends report for this year was released. An executive summary and a some sample pages are included.

2011 Intranet Predictions

And once you’ve read the sample report from the Global Intranet Trends, why not compare and contrast its findings with these 10 predictions for 2011 from the Internet Benchmark Forum.

Building the Intranet Experience

Carolyn gives a few quick tips on how you can build a better intranet and then finishes off the post with a fine list of Intranet Twitter people.

Raising the Bar

It’s a people centric world, individuals are catching up quicker than businesses. Employees are circumnavigating policies and restrictions in the way they work in order to get the job done. Michael gives some suggestions of how you can act from both customer and employee perspectives.

Information flow part 4: Search statistics for our enterprise search

Kristian’s excellent series of posts continues with a look at how his organisation gathers and acts upon the search statistics that they gather on their intranet.

Internal comms at IBM shift from creation to curation

Insights into how the intranet and collaboration works at IBM. With over 400,000 employees IBM is like a small country. The sheer volume of content has forced IBM to embrace employee generated content and curation.

Why Joe Client Doesn’t Care About Standards

Selling web standards is no easy task. Clients need sites that are effective, but it’s our job as web professionals to bake web standards into our work – the client doesn’t really need to know the dirty details, just how (more) effective their website is.

Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People

A wiki filled with examples of user interfaces (web sites) that are designed to trick people. Forget Wikileaks, this is the naming and shaming you should be reading. Educating and enlightening.

Thumbnail based web design?

Google Preview has the potential to make quite an impact in how people decide to click on a result in SERPs. Just now I suspect previews are not widely seen – but it’s wise to put a bit of thought into how your pages look in it – and an important web management task to check your preview thumbnails.

FAQ: Instant Previews

For anyone managing a website, you should read this FAQ. It pretty much explains everything you need to know about how Google collects, generates and uses the preview thumbnails. Many sites will need some tweaking – and right now i’m not talking about design tweaks, but under the hood stuff.

Web Designer’s Guide to PNG Image Format

The PNG image format has become the de facto standard in web design. This is probably the best guide and explanation i’ve read about PNG.

CSS Vocabulary

Pseudo-classes? Child-selectors? Descendant Combinator? Ever struggled to remember what all these odd sounding CSS terms mean? well now you’ve got an easy to read reference to help you out.

Content Strategy, IA, UX or SEO: What’s My Problem?

There are numerous aspects and angles to managing an effective web site and web presence. In this post Dan details some example scenarios and describes some possible solutions.

Becoming a Storyteller

A well researched and well written blog post by Andreas. My dumb-ass executive summary: Storytelling is da shit.

Social Media. It’s There To Give Your Brand A Body

Johan drums a similar drum sometimes in his posts, but it’s a drum that’s worth beating. He has my permission to keep writing this kind of blog post until the majority of companies have heeded his advice.

Mobile OS usage splits the world

As I highlighted in my blog post almost a year ago, the world-wide distribution of smartphone usage and Mobile OS usage is not uniform. The picture in India and Asia is vastly different to North America and Europe. It’s not all iPhone and Android y’know.

We Will Eye Track Almost Anything!!! (Part 3!)

And finally… More “Will it eye track” fun from the Acuity ETS blog. This time they show off some eye tracking data gathered from abseiling down a hotel. Pointless fun – well, almost pointless – it was for charity…

7 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 44-45, 2010)

Photos as Web Content

Anyone who has done any eye tracking tests knows how true this Alertbox article from Nielsen is. Visitors to your site only pay attention to images that are relevant to their task, other pictures used to “make the page pretty” (and indeed banner ads) are ignored. Flash film on start page? ha!

Google Instant Previews – Eye tracking shows it’s game changing

Some eye tracking testing of Google’s new Previews feature. It basically supports what I’ve suspected. Once a user has learnt that the preview feature exists, it’s a game changer. How your site looks in this preview is going to become crucial, and another thing to check as part of your regular routines.

New data proves your mobile marketing strategy must include Android

Gone is the time when you could make an iPhone app and consider your mobile strategy done and dusted. Ignoring Android is becoming the modern-day equivalent of making a web site “Internet Explorer Only”.

Intranet strategy – planning a successful intranet

Do you have an intranet strategy? Far too few organisations actually do. Toby Ward outlines a strategy, offers a methodology and even a model. Must be Christmas!

Intranets in 2011: a turning point

Extended “highlights” by Jane McConnell from the soon to be released Global Intranet Trends 2011 report. Highlights of the highlights: Governance more important than ever, employee generated content and collaboration are essential, people focused, accessible, real-time.

Could Yammer be the death of your organisation?

An alarmist title to this article, but it does have a good message – Enterprise collaboration is here, you can’t ignore it, and you need to have suitable policies in place. What the article doesn’t do though is give you much advice regarding governence of networks like Yammer. I’ve got a blog post brewing about that.

The Art and Science of SEO Site Audits

Nice overview of SEO Audits from Search Engine Watch – Even for the non-expert this is useful to show just how many factors are involved in auditing a site, and also a reminder of how important it is to take care of your SEO (even more so during redesigns!)

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