Time To Check Out

August 23rd, 2010 · Opinion

I had to laugh to myself when I read about the newly launched service from CBS that lets you check-in when you are watching your favourite show, or other media on TV. Just another reminder of this new fad-based economy of calling a status update by anything other than its name.

Whilst Wired bangs on about the death of the net, of which I also have to laugh, it’s clear if anything we are likely to drown it under the barrage of crap that is being produced by useless apps and the attention obsessed pricks that use them.

Before we know it, Amazon is going to produce an app to check you in to a book, and tell your friends, family, acquaintances, fellow country men, and world citizens which page you are on and how fast you read, just so that you can show off to the entire planet that you read the latest Harry Potter in record time!

Privacy issues aside, for that is an entirely different story, it’s a shame that incumbent services are willing to degrade the experience for their users in the long run in order to permit the growth of an eco-system that other service providers can piggy back on. I suppose it is the best way for them to turn single feature enterprises into global household brands in a matter of months and to turn the business into the goose that laid the golden egg. The only problem with that is that in the end, the goose is slain. But who cares right? They made it rich!

Twitter is being overloaded with the same stuff being circulated day in day out, and Facebook is being over-run with the same check-ins being touted on Twitter, FriendFeed and everywhere else. Of course you can always block them, but why? Time to start culling the idiots who use them I suppose.

All I can say is … “I see carnage on the horizon.”

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SiteShrink – Off The Shelf Mobile Sites for Museums

August 19th, 2010 · Development

I have spoken before about why museums and other cultural institutions should spend time developing web apps rather than mobile apps, and how to go about developing for the mobile web, but now Jim Richards and the team at Sumo Design have made their lives even easier.

SiteShrink is a new platform that provides:

“A low cost, high impact solution to make the websites of cultural venues work on mobile phones.”

On the face of it, SiteShrink would seem to take the very real pain out of developing a mobile web strategy for your museum, but how good is it? At £600+ you can’t argue that the starting price doesn’t offer an exceedingly accessible option for even the smallest museums, and with more and more people accessing sites through mobile devices the benefit to them is huge.

Fine-Tuned Mobile Websites

One of the clear benefits of SiteShrink is that it provides clean and well laid out content from the outset, with an initial outline to suit any museum. SiteShrink starts with What’s On, Visit Us, and Social, but has the ability to bolt on any number of desired sections in a totally modular fashion.

To those used to seeing sites in a regular desktop, the SiteShrink’ed mobile sites may seem a little spartan, but they are created with best practices in mind, ensuring low overheads, strong navigation and concise information. SiteShrink works within a very clear remit and it doesn’t bend to the need to be all things to all people, and most certainly isn’t trying to recreate a museums “main” web site for the mobile arena. It may not be pretty or sugar-coated, but it works!

Ring-Fencing Cost & Development Needs

Another beneficial aspect to using SiteShrink is that it minimises the needs of development (time and money). A museum can go from 0-60mph and a matter of seconds and not worry about whether their content displays properly, not just on an iPhone, but on any mobile device. This is because the team at Sumo have taken care of this during the process of developing the SiteShrink product. As is the case for any web development project, the risk of bringing it in house is not only one of cost bloat, but also the technical expense of cross-platform testing and providing full and proper function. SiteShrink helps ring-fence time and cost.

Changing Landscape

With the changing landscape online, from social networks to location services, museums can no longer remain as they were. They really do have to take control of their space online and SiteShrink really helps do that. But let’s not get confused with the overall change in topology of the internet landscape and surfers use of it. Those arriving on mobile devices are far-less likely to be arriving from search and are infinitely more driven, with a single focus and need for information, this is clear in the recent post from the Powerhouse Museum, A Little Mobile Data. SiteShrink itself doesn’t preclude any museum from creating mobile micro-sites, but of course as is clear from the stats and per its obvious design and limited scope, this is not the focus on it either.

Mobile for Museums

There is of course a tiny but growing field of mobile apps and site platforms for museums, and even action groups based round the topic, such as Museums-to-go, with plenty of excellent documentary guidance on the topic. Fore those willing to take the time to customise the experience for users themselves there are themes and plugins for blogs and content management systems such as WordPress, but these all require in-house expertise.

For those less encumbered by the notion of limited access, there is a growing market place of apps as a platform for museums on the iPhone, but as elucidated above SiteShrink really focuses on a more accessible means, and on a more device agnostic approach, something the largest group of mobile users, on the Android installed base, would appreciate I am sure.

Conclusion

All-in-all I think SiteShrink is a decent little offering for museums and cultural institutions wishing to setup a mobile site swiftly. It’s a no-nonsense offering at a more than reasonable starting price based on a “you host it yourself” model. The product shows that mobile WWW setup doesn’t have to be painful, and that you can very easily embrace the brave new world of mobile media, without having to take a serious hit to your budget or worry about the quality of the work accomplished or the accessibility of the content hosted thereon.

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Bing Webmaster Tools Are Pretty Much Useless

July 21st, 2010 · Opinion, SEO

It was with very real interest that I signed in today to the newly launched “Bing Webmaster Tools”. That interest was pretty swiftly kicked in the “proverbials” when I found that I had to install Silverlight in order to get the “full experience”.

As a good little boy I followed instructions and dutifully downloaded and installed the browser plugin. Onwards and upwards, I followed yet more instructions, adding the various sites I wanted in the webmaster tools to my account, and verifying them with the simple addition of a meta tag to my web sites’ homepage.

That however is pretty much where it stopped though. Rather shockingly, Webmaster Tools reinforced what I knew already. That the Bing index sucks and that, because I barely touch it, Microsoft and their shiny new search engine has absolutely ZERO information on the domain. How useful is that?

Worse still though the navigation, either in Silverlight or HTML didn’t work at all, and opening the site in IE 8, 7 or even 6 on my virtual machines made no difference. Way to go Bing! Perhaps next time you can do a little better before launching such a useless tool. As the old adage goes: “learn from the BIG boys”, so you might want to check out what Google is up to!

Perhaps you have had better luck. Any thoughts, impressions, reactions?

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Good Design – Building Usable Menus

July 16th, 2010 · Design, Development

After a heated and very public debate about how a menu should work, I figured I would take a moment to do a little research and write up on menus, with some thought and consideration to the environment within which they sit and are used. So without much ado, here it is :

Design and Function Considerations

When putting a menu together you might want to consider some of the following options:

Look – Should the menu look like a button, a list item or something else?
Direction – Whether the menu is horizontal, vertical or both.
Screen size – Available screen/viewport real estate to show the menu within.
Stickiness – Length of time the menu stays open after a click or a hover.
Failover – How the menu works without JS and or CSS.
Device – The device or software through which visitors will access your site.

For the purpose of this article I am going to focus on access your sites through a desktop browser and worry less about the needs and requirements of mobile devices, which could fill a whole other blog post.

So What The Big Boys Do?

Needless to say it makes sense to look at some of the largest sites on the web and figure out what they are doing with menus and what kind of functionality web users will be used to for us to replicate. Sites we can look at with strong menu and navigation offerings include: BBC News, Flickr, GMail, John Lewis, Amazon, and for a side demonstration Windows XP.

Look

In terms of the look of the elements being used for drop menus, in most instances the hit area for the initial menu item is clearly delineated. In no case are menus drawn from strings of text or links, and in every case where drop options are available this is indicated with rightward or downward pointing arrows. Buttons are clearly buttons, with calls to action, whilst list items are obvious categories with highlights for further inspection.

Direction

Concerning the direction in which the navigation and drop menus open it is always downwards, though in certain cases the downward shift contains a horizontal list of columns to maximise use of space, as in the case of the Peter Jones web site. That being said, it seems that there is no consistent or apparent rule for the layout of a menu.

Anything goes, so long as the menu as sure as you ensure that the user can navigate as quickly and as easily as possible through the menu, and interestingly a site like Apple’s uses a heavily stylised conveyor belt mechanism. Ultimately, you has to ask yourself the question: “Can the same navigation mechanism truly be achieved by better means?”

Screen Size

Menus always work “great” when you have enough screen real estate but what about when your user does not? How do you handle what happens? In this scenario you also have to remember that not all visitors are created equal when it comes to pointer devices, with some using a track-pad, some a 2-button mouse and some with a mouse wheel also. In this case you need to handle the worst case scenario, which is the track-pad.

Ok, so notwithstanding the pointer device and how this affects the user interaction in a limited viewport size, how do you handle this scenario? One option is to shift the menu or the sub-menus into view, but this might not be enough. The other is to keep the menu open based on a specific action, with a logical means to close it.

Beyond this, if there just may not be enough space at all, even after scrolling the page, it would be logical to ether provide scroller arrows for the menu items or to identify to the user that content is hidden due to the lack of space such as is the case on the Windows Start Menu. Whatever you do, you want to ensure that the user has clear, easy, and quick access to visible content.

Menu Stickiness

Every menu visited so far, from BBC News to Flickr forces users to click on the header option in order to open the initial menu. In all cases the menu remains open indefinitely as a result. This is inline with more traditional operating system functionality. There are slight deviations from this when hovering over the menu for a sustained period of time will cause the drop menu to hide after a specific action (hovering) is completed or a period of time has elapsed.

Interestingly, it is on the e-commerce related sites and not the service orientated sites that retain menus that auto-close after a period of time. Few of the menus open on hover, responding on click only and closing on mouse out. Of those menus that stay open on mouse out, all of them close when clicking outside of the respective area.

Dynamically applying a setTimeout function to close the menu after a specific time lapse would be once way to ensure the menu doesn’t stay open indefinitely, but at the same time you need to be mindful of the user and their ability to skirt around the page, scroll and do everything else to achieve their intended goal. Sites like Flickr keep menus open indefinitely, so it’s hardly a crime for you to do so also, and let your users decide when in fact they want the menu to close.

Functionality Failover

Needless to say the BBC’s pure HTML menu survives the fallback test every time, but how about the others? There’s no reason why menus can’t work with pure CSS, a little less finessed perhaps, but working nonetheless. Any menus that rely exclusively on JS to work should degrade such that without JS the menu won’t appear and the navigation on your site shouldn’t be impeded. Exceptions might be possible when working on closed systems, but on public websites you only end up with egg on your face if things don’t work as billed.

Amazon degrades the menu to a long list, having used the JS to compressed it and apply styles to the sub-menus, whilst Facebook removes the drop menus and opts for the traditional click through to a destination page with a differently formatted list of the appropriate content. Flickr, however, opts for a more coercive approach, telling users that they must have JS enabled to use the site properly and leaving buttons in view that do not function at all, even the CSS reacts to hover and other selectors. Apple’s conveyor belts degrade less beautiful, but at least they still work – surely the desired result.

Defining The Purpose

In all of this discussion one has to remember that the real purpose of the menu in all of this is to help your site visitors to get where they need to go in as a few clicks as possible. Excessive menu items is as much a design flaw as shoddy functionality, and divining the right path is up to you.

If you aren’t sure how effective your menu is then you should try out some A/B testing with defined goals, or perform click tracking tests and see how and how often the menu is being used. One thing you definitely shouldn’t do is assume, just because it is there, people will use it, or that the contents of the menu will even make sense to them.

Consider the menu in the context of your global navigation and your search tools, and provide it as a helpful means by which to more easily dig deeper within your site, but not at the expense of other content. Last but not least, and most importantly, make sure it works logically and as expected, in terms of what your site visitors are used to from the sites they might visit most often.

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Can Large Organisations Do SEO?

July 15th, 2010 · SEO

Recent interactions in the realm of SEO have left me wondering if it is actually possible for large companies and organisations to execute an effective search engine optimisation strategy. It’s clear from my point of view that they suffer from some very real road blocks in the optimisation process.

The following are, to my mind, a bunch of reasons where I think organisations fall down in developing a consistent search engine optimisation strategy:

Lack of Strategy - The first and really the most serious point is that there lacks a clear and cohesive strategy based on a coherent approach. Knowing where to start is often the problem, and how to reach the desired goal an offshoot of this.
Too Many Cooks – SEO projects are often plagued with problem of too many stakeholders on the project, not to mention diverging interests. The issue of ‘too many cooks spoiling the broth’ only multiplies out as you increase the global scope of an organisation, thinking about content in a multi-lingual context, and across marketing regions, with heads of this and heads of that doing nothing more than butting their own heads together and taking the project in circles.
Legacy Inertia – Any organisation of size that has been around a long time has legacy systems. These systems will often act as a substantial roadblock to getting websites and content optimised, having been built with zero SEO intent in mind by developers or with no SEO knowledge at all. Changing them simply adds to project bloat and potentially acts as a serious stumbling block.
Large Number of Online Properties – Again the larger the org the more likely the higher the number of web properties to manage. If they can barely manage the strategy for one site, how are they supposed to do the same across multiple properties?. Often a single strategy rides roughshod over finessed and localised strategies, and with multiple leads on various sites, we come full circle tot he issue of multiple stakeholders again.

Ok so I can tell what you are thinking. Surely, not ALL organisations are doing a bad job on the SEO front? Right? And yes, there are those, whose capital investment in a coherent strategy produces large financial gains, or for whom competition is so stiff that without good SEO they would die. So what do they do?

In-House – For companies and organisations where search engine marketing is mission critical, they will, needless to say, make the investment in hiring a crack squad of SEO ninjas to work on everything from content optimisation to PPC. In fact the latter of the two, given the potential high value cost to the business, is usually best kept in house anyhow.
Outsource – For those less willing to guide and manage the process they are more likely to outsource their SEO process. Perhaps a less effective means by which to manage the long term strategy but at least ensure that the chance for in-fighting, miss-management and more are removed, and an initial hit and improvement be acheived.

The route to success of course isn’t only defined by whether or not the process of SEO is retained in-house or outsourced, but it’s a part of the equation. Whatever route chosen by your organisation or enterprise you should try and aim for the following processes to maximise the opportunities for success:

Identify and audience and clear goals for the optimisation process.
Create unique strategy for each online property targeting your chosen audience(s).
Assign the role of implementation to a small nucleus of people, or 1 individual within the team, ensuring decisions are taken based on research and not a whim.
At a higher level, avoid micro-management and problem solving, defer input till after initial implementation, and proceed with further implementation based on results.

So there you have it. Some of my thoughts on where larger companies and organisation fall down in implementing a good strategy for search engine optimisation, and some pointers for side-stepping the issues. Clear in all of this though is the real need for clear direction and focus.