Archive for 2006

This is the most amazing way to show products/crafts added over a period of time. Drag and throw the ones you aren’t interested in. Scroll with your mouse wheel to go back and forward or just sit back and let it go. I doubt we will see it on ebay but its a great method of visualising.

Etsy time machine

People who find it difficult to use a computer keyboard and mouse, can turn to other devices to navigate the internet, but if the site has not been designed with accessibility in mind, using the web can prove to be a frustrating experience.

Read more from the recent BBC article

The same photographer who did a 720 megapixel photo of Sydney earlier this year has now done a 1500 megapixel photo of Machu Picchu. The level of details is amazing – you can zoom in so far you can see the expressions on peoples faces!

http://www.docbert.org/MP/

Tag clouds are a great way to show word density and are most commonly found on blog websites or search engines. The larger the font the more often a word has been used and are good way to see the trends over a certain period of time.

See what happens when tag clouds are used to visualise the public speeches of every American president since John Adams in 1797.
As you would expect the density of certain words change over the years to match the situation of their times. The word communist is used a lot during the 50′s and 60′s whilst the word Terrorist is a more recent addition and is used a lot by George W Bush.

http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags/

What is your website doing for you business?

Having a website for your business is one thing, but is it working hard for the business, or just squatting in cyberspace? The answer, surprisingly, is that many companies do not know. You could be seriously underestimating its value to the business. Or you might be failing to make the best use of your website, or worse still, actually damaging your company’s business and brand. It might look slick, but without measuring website performance, you’ll never know what is going on under the bonnet.

A majority of companies still do not carry out any web analytics at all. We’ve seen any number of companies over the years spend tens of thousands of pounds on a costly re-design because of a vague feeling their website doesn’t work – and then repeat the same mistakes because they don’t carry out analytics first to find out what the problems are. Some of the companies that do limited analytics do not fully understand what they are looking at. Many people still talk about the numbers of hits their website receives mistakenly believing that these are the same as either page impressions, or worse, website visitors. Sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Carrying out proper web analytics is vital to determining the true value of your website to your business. There are many aspects to analytics in assessing website performance, such as using Key Performance Indicators. The bottom line though is to try and calculate its value to the business as a whole – the website Return On Investment (ROI).

For an e-commerce website, this might look fairly straightforward. Determining revenue through direct sales and the lifetime value of repeat customers gives the income stream. Whilst your website might not generate income directly, tracking the conversion rate of enquiries made by email or telephone calls to sales (and the average sale value) will give you a cash value for those enquiries.

Similarly, whilst some websites are technically information-only, they play a part in the sales process by referring leads to partner websites that handle sales. Tracking those leads by using redirect pages and then working with your partners to determine leads to sales conversion rates and average sales value also provides a monetary value attributable to your website.

Cost avoidance is another area where your website could be helping your business without you realising it. If your website can reduce the number of enquiries made to a call centre it could save you a fortune. IBM claim to save $2 billion a year in call centre costs with their online support website. Even for a small business, with limited human resources, key personnel could by using their time more profitably than answering questions that could be answered, for example, in a Frequently Asked Questions section of the website. Calculating average costs for a phone call, email and a help page request – which will vary from company to company – should enable you to calculate savings. A word of warning though – because a customer reads a help page, doesn’t mean an issue is resolved to their satisfaction. Making help resources available that are both effective and cheaper is an art form.

For e-commerce and information-only websites alike, there are also more imaginative ways of determining website ROI. Take, for example making white papers, annual reports or product catalogues available to download. The baseline cost of printing and posting an annual report might be £5. The cost of downloading the same document will be far less, say 25p to reformat the document and server costs. 500 downloads a month would equal an annual saving of £28,500.

So if you are still thinking in terms of the number of hits your website attracts, then you are missing out on the information that will help you calculate the true value of your website to the business. But it is never too late to start; your competitors probably don’t know the value of their website either, so you can still gain a competitive advantage by beginning a program of web analytics.

Better website ROI

Calculating Return on Investment is the starting point, not the final goal. Once you know what you have an initial figure, you want to look at ways to better website ROI.

Web analytics can help you to identify any weak points in your website offering that undermines your conversion rates. Are people abandoning shopping carts? Are visitors emailing you in appropriate numbers? Are visitors abandoning the website at specific pages? Onceyou have that information you can address the problems, and start to improve website ROI.

This article has been written on behalf of the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) and has been cross posted on The Web Standards Project, Lachy’s Log, Molly.com, 456 Berea Street. and igoo

There’s been a lot of discussion about the W3C’s recent decision to continue the development of HTML around the web lately. Blog posts, and messages sent to mailing lists and posted on forums, revealed many questions and misconceptions about the future of HTML (including HTML 5 and XHTML 2), the WHATWG and the W3C’s new HTML Working Group.

Some people asked for new features; others were wondering if formerly deprecated elements would return; some had comments and criticisms about the decision itself, the WHATWG or W3C process; and a few raised concerns about the WHATWG and W3C ignoring the needs of particular groups. The WHATWG, who are in the process of developing the next version of HTML (called HTML 5), feel that it’s important to not only listen to all of this feedback, but to actively seek it out and respond so that we can develop a language that meets your needs.

There are many ways in which you can participate. The most direct approach is to make your voice heard by subscribing to the mailing list. However, not everyone has the time to participate or keep up with the high volume of messages sent to that list. Some people feel that the current drafts of HTML5 (Web Applications and Web Forms) are rather daunting. Others feel that because they can’t afford the substantial W3C membership fees, they wouldn’t be listened to anyway.

If, for any reason, you feel that you either cannot participate, or would be uncomfortable in doing so, that certainly doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be heard. The WHATWG needs to hear from you and wants to know what you think about HTML.

• Are there any limitations with HTML that you would like to see fixed?
• Do you have any ideas for new features?
• Is there anything you can do now in HTML, but would like to see improved?
• Do you have any concerns about the development process?
• Do you have any feedback about the new features in the current drafts?
• Do you have any questions about HTML 5?

Any questions, comments, criticisms, complaints or feature requests are welcome. Now is the time to speak up. No comment is too dumb; no question is too hard or too simple; no criticism is too harsh. If you have anything at all to say, we are listening.

Please leave a comment or post a link to an article you have written. You will be heard and we will try to respond.

The British Standards Institution’s Publicly Available Specification “Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites” is now available free of charge and for nothing from the Disability Rights Commission. Yay!

im glad to see andpartners creative process is so straightforward. I for one wish i has the freedom to materialise every single idea on a whim, with nothing more than the length of a pale blue arrow standing in my way.

I believe in simplicity of communication as much as the next standards obsessed designer but i wonder what a client would say if they inquired about the design process and were shown this?

The internet is an endless bag of distractions, with over 100 million of us at its mercy at any one time. Staying connected has become a way of life to an immeasurable amount of people, all of which rely on the internet as an integral part of their working life. But in a recent entry at the 37signals blog Matt tries to emphasise the importance of having time away from a computer (or more specifically, the internet).

See, there’s an inherent problem with always being online: you’re too connected. You wind up in the role of passive observer. Things come to you. You react instead of act… When you go offline, that equation changes. You have to be active. Since you can’t input, you output. If you don’t do something, nothing happens.

I like the definitive comparison drawn between input and output. Its all too easy to fall into the trap of reading articles, wathcing youtube clips, or doing all those things which give the illusion of organisation (like marking emails as ‘read’). Being offline occasionally ensures you aren’t stifling your creativity too much. Sometimes staring at a blank piece of paper with a biro in your hand is the perfect respite.

HTML is W3C’s earliest specification, and it has been almost 7 years since it has been updated. It has served as the arena for the on-going browser wars which have been raging for as long as the specification has existed.

In the blog post Reinventing HTML, W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee acknowledges that HTML needs to be kept up to date and evolved incrementally. He goes on to address the shortcomings of XML:

The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn’t work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn’t complain.

The plan is for a new group to be formed which will work on improving the current specification incementally:

The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group. Unlike the previous one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to HTML, as also in parallel xHTML. It will have a different chair and staff contact. It will work on HTML and xHTML together. We have strong support for this group, from many people we have talked to, including browser makers.

This group will work in parallel to the group working on the draft XHTML2 which the old “HTML working group” was working on, and there will be no dependency of HTML work on the XHTML2 work.

It’s nice to hear the grandad of the internet say that he wants is to hear what the web development community wants, but i hope we dont fall into the trap of development for developments sake. Despite the specification being untouched for nearly 7 years people are still acomplishing amazing things with it everyday. If theres been little need for it to be altered in almost a decade then doesnt that tell you somthing? Maybe its just resistance to change on my part but i think theres beauty in its simplicity and i hope that new ‘menu’ or ‘column’ tags are not introduced to offer new semantic shortcuts.