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The companies, technologies and ideas that power the web.
Wednesday 28 February 2007, 7:42 PM
Get indexed by Technorati
The team at ZDNet have recently made some changes to the way the links are constructed which means that your blog posts are now indexable by Technorati. It's a bit fiddly to set up but worthwhile as it drives extra traffic to your blog and improves your visibility in the blogosphere. Here's How: -
1. If you are not already a member, register at Technorati
2. Follow the instructions on the site to claim your blog
3. Cut and paste your Technorati profile code into the end of your next blog post. It should look like mine in my previous post
4. Go back to Technorati and "Ping" the blog to have it indexed.
There are a couple of limitations at the moment: -
1. It will only index the articles that appear on the main blog page so it won't go back and index older content.
2. There isn't an automatic ping so you'll have to go to Technorati and manually ping each time you make a posting.
Apart from that, it seems to work perfectly. It sometimes takes up to 30 minutes or more for the content to appear in the Technorati index so be patient.
Happy blogging!
Tuesday 27 February 2007, 11:23 AM
10 Steps to better web design
I've been musing over the way we've historically designed websites since completing the ZDNet redesign last year. CNET has a great reputation for site design and many years experience but with some of the tools available now for minimal cost, there is so much more data available to make informed decisions. When I was in New York recently, I saw a presentation by clickdensity who run a great service that displays user activity as a heatmap (shown above) on the page.
Unlike the reporting behemoths like Omniture, these guys are focusing purely on where the user clicks, not the underlying mass of reporting data and costs as little as £2.50 per month depending on your traffic levels. There are others out there that do the same kind of thing and it got me thinking about a more structured methodology for web design. So I came up with the following 10 step process: -
1. First, look at the most popular pages across the site by page type. For example, news sites would probably find that story pages are the highest ranking, followed by home, search and then listing pages.
2. Starting with the most popular page, use something like Clickdensity to analyse not just where the users are clicking but also where they are not.
3. Make sure you look at whether the user clicked near to a link which gives you an indication of usability from an image/text link size perspective.
4. Analyse the results - Is the user doing what you want them to at this point?
5. If they are, great, if they are not then you need to look at changing the design to make it easier for the user to do what you want them to.
6. Take away stuff that the user isn't clicking on. Less is more, infinite choice=overwhelming confusion.
7. Go back to step 2 and repeat until you get to the 10th most popular page type.
8. In all likelihood, by now you will have redesigned the parts of the site that are responsible for over 75% of your site traffic.
9. Measure, measure, measure! No two web audiences will be the same. Your site is unique, your users are unique, there is only so much you can learn from the "experts". Make sure that you learn from every change, good or bad.
10. Go back to step 1 and start the whole process again, web design is an iterative process and you'll never finish it.
Good web designers will always be worth their weight in gold but however much you know about design or think you know about user behaviour, the data never lies. One of the challenges for all publishers is that the cost of redesigning an entire site is becoming prohibitive, focusing on the areas where you can make the biggest difference is therefore common sense. The other thing about this is that anyone can afford to be scientific now. You don't need to have expensive analytical tools and eye-tracking focus groups to work out what's going on.
As one of the presenters in New York said "The lab rats are always right". The web allows us to learn faster and make adjustments more easily than ever before so put on your white coats, get into the lab and experiment.
Technorati Profile
Thursday 15 February 2007, 7:25 AM
Googling yourself - fame at last!
You may have seen this post back in November when I first started out with the blog here at ZDNet about how my Google ranking increased dramatically after a few weeks.
Well after steady, methodical posting (at least one post per week) I've finally made it on to page one if you Google "Mike Barrett".!
I hovered tantalisingly around the second page for nearly four weeks, some days at the the top, some at the bottom which was infuriating!
So I've made it, I realise I'm a target now for all those other Mike Barrett's, but I'm determined to try to stay there now...
Saturday 10 February 2007, 9:26 PM
The magic of metrics
Some interesting statistics emerged from the AlwaysOn conference in New York last week with every presentation quoting some factoid for the audience to digest. Here are three completely random stats for you to ponder: -
1. Did you know that if you are searching for information on a truck then you are four times as likely to buy one than if you are simply reading an article.
2. Only 3% of the overall web traffic is search related (anyone not involved in search particularly like this stat)
3. 50% of the companies that are shown as going up in Nielson's Net Ratings are recorded as going down in the equivalent ComScore numbers.
The last point prompted Greg Stuart, ex President, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to observe that on-line measurement statistics in the US are "Damn Unreliable", all a far cry from the measurable on-line world that was predicted when this all started...
Thursday 1 February 2007, 12:47 AM
Open source vs commercial software - is there a third way?
I spoke with some guys at the AlwaysOn show yesterday who have an interesting business model aimed at tech support professionals. Spiceworks have a radically different take on free software. They allow anybody to download their application which monitors devices on the network. It incorporates a ticketing system and also the ability to share experiences in a forum environment with other Spiceworks users.
In return for the software, Spiceworks then serve ads within the application. Shock horror you are thinking! But what's really ingenious about the ad serving part is that it's related to your specific network equipment. Not only that, if a disk is running out of free space, the system will suggest potential local suppliers for a larger one.
Squarely pitched at the SME marketplace where the IT team is 2-5 people supporting up to 250 users and who typically don't have a huge support network, they have only focussed on the US market so far. It's a fascinating mash-up of web 2.0 application, community functionality and adsense type ad serving and it's coming to an IT department near you soon...
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