wordpress

7 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 35-36, 2010)

2010-09-11
By: James Royal-Lawson

Finding the Balance: Users’ Needs Vs. Clients’ Wants

A another look at the classic user v client dilemma. One of the key things to finding a good balance is stakeholder buy-in and inclusion.

Surprise, surprise! Having no secure icon on a page increased conversions by 400%

An split testing case where removing a green “secure” icon from the page made a vast improvement – their conclusion: “Make each page designed to get the user to do one thing, and try to focus all of their attention on that one thing”.

Putting people at the centre: social staff directories

Alex Manchester in this article from Step Two explores the potential of people search and staff profiles and their role as the very heart of intranet. He also gives examples of people-related concepts in use within organisations today.

Facebook As A Company Intranet Is A Nightmare Waiting To Happen

Building your entire intranet using Facebook would be an utter nightmare! But let’s not forget the relevance of Facebook as part of internal communication and collaboration. Colleagues who are friends with each other will almost certainly use it to communicate in some way at some point – even if it’s just a “running late for 9am meeting” or “working from home today”. Organisations should consider ways to take advantage of that.

New guidelines for (Swedish) public bodies and companies who want to be present on Facebook

Swedish guidelines published by The Swedish Data Inspection Board recommending how you should deal with communication channels with user generated content, such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube in order to be compliant with Swedish law.

WordPress Fat-Loss Diet to Speed Up & Ease Load

If you are using wordpress for a business site you might want to consider some of the following tweaks – or bring someone in to do them for you.

Google Instant – a Reminder that Google is not equal to SEO

reality check from Jesper. Yes Google is really important, but it’s not the whole picture. YouTube, Facebook, Intranets, on-site search – Search is a lot more than Google, but it’s all about serving up what people want when they want it.

WordPress plugin: Measuring browser viewport size

2010-08-04
By: James Royal-Lawson

Previously I’ve written about the importance of browser viewport size, and also explained how you can measure the browser viewport of your visitors and store the result in Google Analytics as events.

Given the 25 million sites out there running WordPress, I decided to invest a bit of time into creating a WordPress plugin to track viewport size. It uses exactly the same technique as described in my earlier post but conveniently wrapped up as an easy to install WordPress plugin.

Download the plugin

You can download the Measure Viewport Size plugin from the WordPress plugin directory. Or you can install it directly from your WordPress site by searching for “Measure Viewport Size” from the “add plugin” page.

There are a few prerequisites; you will need to have Google Analytics installed on your site (the asynchronous “_gaq” version). I’ve tested the plugin with Google Analytics for WordPress and it works fine. You will also need to make sure that your theme supports the body_class trigger. The body tag in header.php wthin your active theme should look something like the following:

<body <?php body_class(); ?>>

How does it work?

The plugin uses a javascript function to obtain the width and height of the viewport of the browser window your website visitor is using to view your site. It then sends three “events” to your Google Analytics account. One for the width, one for the height, and one with a text label containing the full dimensions.

You can then view the events that have been recorded as people visit your site in Google Analytics under Content -> Event Tracking. It can take a day or so for the events to be processed and to appear in your GA reports, so be patient!

Why bother?

Monitoring and analysing the browser viewport size is a crucial part of designing and maintaining a successful website.

50 pixels fewer in available height for content could be the difference between your call to action being visible or disappearing below the fold. That could have a noticeable impact on your conversions and goals.

The browser viewport is the window in to your world. Your visitor sees everything through it. So why drive blind when you can quite easily gather and analyse a bit of data?