Starting a new, personal project in PHP, I wanted to try out a new framework for the fun of it. After doing a bit of review on many available frameworks, and ruling out the ones I have already used (Zend and OpenAvanti), I settled on CakePHP.more
I've been sorting through Google Analytics today to see which of our clients are getting mobile traffic. Not surprisingly, they're all getting it. I'd say relative to the overall traffic, the mobile slice of the pie is similar on all sites. What's not similar, though, is the the bounce rate, which is the amount of people staying on that site and the amount of people leaving without doing anything. On a lot of our sites, the bounce rate for the normal site hovers around 30%-40%, where the mobile sites are closer to 60-70%. It makes sense. Most of these people are accessing a regular site on their mobile phone, so it's not surprising that the bounce rate is a lot higher. It's just harder to use. So I compared this to a few of the mobile sites we've developed and noticed that just having that mobile friendly homepage in place seems to really level out the bounce rate. It brings it right back down to that 30-40% range, similar to the desktop site.more
Why do people click on the search results when and where they do? Why aren’t paid search campaigns as successful as they used to be? Are people even looking at your display ads? Eye tracking is understanding how users look at your website or search results - there are many software programs available. Important for any business, eye tracking studies have a lot to do with what the page looks like - keeping it usable, engaging and easy to take in visually. Still, it has a lot more to do with users' eye patterns on the screen. When it comes to search results, we know that top organic rankings are the best. Why? Well, look at the charts below. One shows click positions, while the other shows cursor movement.more
You’re excited to begin working on your new website, and you’ve got it all figured out. Photos to be used, general ideas of copy, videos and overall layout and site map have been approved by the Web managers. All you have to do is execute your ideas. Easy peasy, right? Thinking of ideas is the easy part, implementing them is another (more complicated) story. How can you make sure your content is as great as possible once your website is ready for launch?more
How far ahead are you looking in your business? Here we are, two days past Halloween. I walked through the store yesterday and saw all of the Halloween decorations, costumes, etc., marked half off or more. Then I saw the aisles and aisles of Christmas and holiday decorations: stockings, ornaments, wrapping paper, and much, much more! Already?!more
Keeping in theme with my last post, Transforming in the Digital Age, I think it’s interesting and entertaining to look back at early uses of the Internet and Web technologies and the changes over time - it provides comic relief and demonstrates how Web technology has evolved from user demands and feedback. Today the Internet is about content and providing a valuable user experience, but it wasn’t always that way - remember silly “splash” homepages and animated flash sites with elevator music? Back in the day website functionality was not only trendy, it was an adventure. I thought it would be fun to compile a list of these hilarious out-of-date features. From the early days of the Web to Web 2.0, a list of the silliest and most obnoxious website features from the past:more
It’s no question that things change quickly, faster now than ever before. We’re both blessed and cursed with the pace of change, the impact of technology on our ability to do more with less - and do it faster, often finding distractions and efficiencies in the same tools. My three year anniversary at MINDSCAPE at Hanon McKendry is coming up, so I wanted to share a few things I’ve learned.....more
Over the past few weeks I have been blessed with a plethora of Web analytic data to mine and analyze. Although some of you may want to stop reading here, I promise this is not about data mining, but more about a typically missed listening channel. While scanning through endless analytic accounts, I started to notice a trend of a piece of data missing in each site’s analytic data. This is where the data analysis guys/gals typically start to throw up their arms and walk out the door. So instead of doing that, I decided to sit down and write this article with the hopes of helping you gain lost insights and a better perspective of what your visitors are telling you.more
Link tagging is one ninja-like feature built into Google Analytics is surprisingly powerful and rarely used outside of AdWords campaigns. Link tagging allows you to tag nearly any link with some special values to gain some interesting insights into your traffic sources. To Tag or Not To Tag So, why on earth would someone want to use link tagging? Well, link tagging allows us to see visitors from a particular email campaign. It would help us to identify visitors from a specific tweet or Facebook post. It’s really a very simple thing to do, it’s easy to get started and it can provide a lot of insight into your traffic sources. The first thing to understand about link tagging is that you don’t need to tag everything and you can’t tag some stuff. Organic traffic is impossible to tag. No matter how much of an analytics ninja you are, you just can’t tag organic traffic. If you use Google AdWords, you don’t need to tag those because Google already does that for you. If, however, you are using a different paid advertising campaign or any email campaigns, you will definitely want to tag those.more
As I was organizing some papers, I came across an old marketing piece from the late nineties. Done by the Gardner Group in 1998, it illustrates how businesses can embrace the Internet (back then called e-business) and ultimately transform to efficient and powerful enterprises.more
If you’re a reader of this blog, chances are at some point in your career or life you will be a part of a team that builds and launches a new (or improved) website. For those of you who have launched a website, how were the first couple of days? Websites are a lot of work. They take weeks or months to plan, design, develop, create content and get to the point of going live. Website beta testing is done internally by your staff, your Web team and those you know. Given all this hard work, going live is a HUGE milestone, right?! It makes sense to want to tell people the day it goes live.more
While shopping the LEGO website the other day, I ran across a free application they provide called LEGO Digital Designer. With it, you can assemble bricks from the included palette, then package and upload your creation back to the site. This looked pretty fun so I gave the software a whirl. Now, I am not a professional 3D modeler, but I do have experience in a few tools, such as Blender, and expect a few necessities in a 3D modeling application. LEGO Digital Designer does not have them. But that’s OK, I thought. I’ll just play around with it. For an experiment, I decided to model the building I work in, 25 Ottawa SW, Grand Rapids, MI, the home of MINDSCAPE at Hanon McKendry. My goal was to capture the feel of the building (being that it is LEGO and not a precise, 3D replica) without getting into too much detail. Well, that’s hard for me to do, and before too long, I found myself agonizing over placing bricks exactly where they should be to accurately reflect the building’s layout. Then I would take a step back, take a deep breath, and remind myself that I’m just capturing the building’s essence. Then it would get fun again.more
At Mindscape, I've really been jumping head first into mobile web development for the last year. I find it interesting to create something that works across the board on several different devices. We're at a point where we're starting to offer this to clients, and surely the question of "Why do I need a mobile site?" is going to come up a lot more frequently. So I thought I'd address some of the key benefits to creating a mobile-friendly website in this article. Keep in mind that developing a mobile site doesn't necessarily mean creating a separate site for mobile devices. It has more to do with creating a site elastic enough to display nicely on whatever device your end user is viewing it on.more
A month ago, I wrote about the Google Page service. The Page Service caches your static content and serves it up from their servers for faster page views. It sounds great in theory, and perhaps it will perform well in practice. Currently, it’s still in a beta period and available to only a small set of webmasters. While I was researching that article, I stumbled upon a service called Cloudflare. Cloudflare already does what the Google Page service does, but also protects your sites from known threats like spambots, can auto-minify your site’s CSS and Javascript files, hides your email address from any spambot that may get through, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. Basically, they level the playing field for small websites. A small website no longer has to pay large sums of money to get the security and reach that giant, corporate websites get. And Cloudflare manages to do it all for free.more
So many times I find myself, as a programmer, diving into a problem with an initial thought of a solution that ends up being way too complex. I don't know if it's programmers in general or just me, but it seems that as I gain more and more coding knowledge and can take on more and more challenging problems, my brain can fall into a complexity trap. Now I have numerous tools (algorithms, patterns, etc.) at my disposal, and at times I tend to attack a problem with one or more of these tools without stepping back, taking a deep breath, and determining which is the simplest way to get something done. These solutions usually work, but the code can become messy and hard to maintain versus the simple way that I failed to see at the beginning.more
Mobile is convenient. Mobile is there with us, no matter where we are or what we do. We don't have to be sitting at home or in the office or in a coffee shop where our laptops are plugged in. Our world is outlet-less, whether we're in a meeting or on the bus or walking downtown. In the past, mobile was the future. It is now the present. So what does your mobile content look like? Is it easily navigational? Is content clear and distinct, or does it get jumbled or lost? Jumbly content is not fun for anyone. So how can you ensure your content is up-to-snuff?more
Can I Just Cut Some Code Already? All I wanted to do was let users share a video link from a web app I was building. I thought it would be easy. And you know what, it probably is. It's probably easier than what I'm going to show you here. But is it simply stated somewhere in Facebook's documentation? Not that I could find. So after piecing together parts of their docs, plowing through search after search and reading a multitude of blog posts, I came up with this solution.more
Google Apps for Business is a great solution for companies that want email, calendar and documents hosted in the cloud by Google. Mindscape, where I work, has used Google Apps for Business for a number of years now. It allows me to have aaron [at] mindscapesolutions.com as my email address. What it did not allow in the past was for me to access tools like Google Reader, Checkout, Picasa, and a number of other popular, ancillary services from Google. What I could do, however, was create a second Google account using the same aaron [at] mindscapesolutions.com address. This account had to have a separate password, but as a standard Google Account, I had access to those other Google Services. I wasn’t interested in using my work email to access those other services. So I made it even more complicated. My wife runs her own photography business, www.branderphoto.com. I use aaron [at] branderphoto.com as my personal email. It’s also a Google Apps for Business account. So, when I wanted to access Google Reader, and Checkout and Analytics and Picasa, I had to have a separate aaron [at] branderphoto.com account, with a different password, to access those accounts.more
If you're focused on getting your site to the top of the search engines, you understand the battle we have against spammers (crap sites). Google is constantly trying to further optimize their algorithm to get rid of the spam sites (spam sites, for example, are link sites you'll land on that provide you with no value). If Google always sends users to sites that provide no value, people will stop using them. So it's in Google's best interest to make sure their search results are the best possible. Before, getting to the top of the search engines was a fairly level playing field for spammers (black hat) and real optimizers (white hat). It came down to some basics of optimizing the page to communicate with the search engines and building lots of quality links (I am over simplifying this a bit, but you get what I am saying). Anyone could tell the search engines anything they wanted and the search engine believed them to a certain level. And BIG power lied in the links. Until Panda.more
I had a meeting with a company that doesn’t have a website. Yes, businesses like that do still exist. Even in a day where it seems like you can get a website just about anywhere. They believed that they had to sell online in order to justify the investment in a website. I’m here to tell you there are many, many things a website can do for every business.more
