A blog by Dublin-based web design company, EdenWeb
A nice feature on the HP Media Server flash demo is the ability to mute the volume on the demo before it starts playing. It’s an impressive yet simple touch that saved me having to turn off my own music.
If you work in a shared office I’m sure at some stage you’ve come
in exploring their actual physical MediaSmart Server. Poor usability and design is the bain of my tech life so here’s a few free links for making such a thoughtful gesture.
I’ve been working on a series of illustrations for the Biodiversity department at Fingal County Council. The 5 pieces form a series of illustrations to highlight the unique habitats found in Fingal County and will be featured on the new web site which we have also designed.
Custom illustrations are a great way to bring something unique to your web site and can really enhance content heavy websites.
I’ll upload the other illustrations later in the week and possibly a screen grab of the new website which is being designed by EdenWeb. The other illustrations in the series are for
Contact me directly for more information. All work is copyright EdenWeb>Peter Knight.
On Friday I spent a few hours at Microsoft’s European Product Development Centre in Dublin with Reeves Little previewing project Gatineau and running through some of the new features being built into their upcoming website Analytics program.
I’d been a fan (and customer) of analytics company and product, DeepMetrix for several years and was interested to see how the product had evolved since the technology was bought by Microsoft in 2006 and what exactly Microsoft had brought to the analytics mix. Reeves is part of the team in Dublin that are building some new components into the product and was kind enough to ask me over and get involved in some user testing and sign up for the upcoming BETA programme.
Below are examples of a series of web site banners designed for Meteor.ie. I maximised the amount of information that Meteor could display in this small space by creating a mini slide show with up to 3 or 4 screens. Thereby allowing them to promote several products. The ‘1′ and ‘2′ square in the top left corner would indicate to the user which promo they were on and they could toggle between the different slides.
I’ve seen this technique appear now across several web sites from DELL to RTE to CNET.
One of the barriers to buying goods online is often just making it past the ‘Buy Now’ button. Poorly thought out form fields and unusable shopping cart systems are eCommerce killers!
Here’s a journey I took recently that is possibly typical of most buyer’s click-path when shopping online.
In fact, I’d say about 25% of all my online purchases fail because the form fields on eCommerce sites are badly configured, broken or have shopping cart systems thats just plain confusing. And I work in the field as a Web Designer so I’m comfortable with eCommerce and having to ‘work around’ usability flaws.
And it’s not just “Sheila’s flower shop” or your local DVD store with the tiny web presence and some technically brilliant but unusable e-Cart software that is losing them customers at the last step of a purchase. Larger companies that spend massive amounts of money on R&D, Compliance, Strategy and User Experience can get it wrong too and here’s a nice example of that in action.
I’ve seen a product that I want to buy and the site is integrated with Google’s new Checkout shopping cart.
I add my details to the payment form. Name, email, phone and country are all fine.
The postal code field (high lighted above in red) is mandatory and insists that I add it here. My address (and most addresses in Ireland outside of Dublin city) doesn’t have a postal code so I usually add ‘NA’ or ‘NONE’ when shopping online to circumvent this. That won’t work here because not only is the postal code required but the web site thinks that a postal code is a certain amount of letters or numbers long and is trying to shoe horn my details through their mandatory fields.
Thinking that the tiny question mark icon beside the Postal Code field will tell me how to get round this issue and allow me to order my product, I click on it. This opens a new window at the An Post web site.
It looks promising and someone is thinking in the right direction but this site just helps me locate my local post office. It doesn’t help me find my postcode and even if I had one, it doesn’t help me find it. I eventually go back to the check out page and try a few more hacks and give up. I was only shopping for a Letterbox but now I think I’ll just drive into town and buy one in a real shop.
So in closing, I understand that certain fields are consistent and can be made mandatory across most sites on the web.
For example
but other details which we take for granted or assume are global often just don’t translate to a one-size-fits-all format. Worse still, some details are driven by user preferences. IE an email address may not match my company domain name because I don’t want to be spammed at work.
So, when it comes to mandatory form field Vs user preference or regional fromatting, the retailer will loose but the consumer won’t win either. The biggest wastage for both in the example above is that it took me hours of searching for this product and dismissing several other sites to get to that particular website. With the average website losing 9 out of every 10 customers, its a real pity that the final site fell at the last hurdle.
Incidentally, doing a quick Google on the whole mandatory fields issue has brought me to this post from Tom Raftery who is having similar postcode trouble with Yahoo.
Google have just announced that their free Analytics tool is due for an upgrade and users should see an updated user interface kick in over the coming weeks. This looks like a global upgrade as opposed to a phased, regional update and comes after user feedback and requests.
I’ve always found Google Analytics to be really unusable and the interface was overly complicated but these are probably legacy issues that Google inherited when they bought Urchin. I’m looking forward to this upgrade based on the following statement from Trevor over at Google’s Inside Adwords blog.
The new version of Google Analytics has a more intuitive look and feel, with greater clarity in the navigation between reports. In addition to the new interface, we’ve added many new features including a customizable reports dashboard, scheduled emailing of reports, improved geographic map view, and over-time graphs for at-a-glance analysis.
There’s an updated Interactive demo available too.
What could a site redesign do for your business? All numbers are going in the right direction for this client after their site was relaunched by EdenWeb in early December 2006.
We took this screenshot of their website statistics in the first week of May and expect May, June, July and August to be even busier.
A fuller post and case study are in the works.
Inspired by Seth Godin and developed further by Nicolas, the ModernCaptcha offers a more accessible Captcha solution for people who want to protect online forms from spam bots.
It’s not without it’s problems as obviated by some of the comments on his blog, but this is the start of a better Captcha solution and Nicolas has done a great job. Some of those CAPTCHAs are not even readable by humans!
By the way - you probably encounter CAPTCHAs all the time and just didn’t know what they were called. Visit Wikipedia for more.
The EdenWeb homepage has been updated with a new top banner and an updated value proposition. I’ve also added a new Company and Design Services page which I’ll be updating over time (some services are not yet listed). Interestingly enough, the ‘holding page’ we had for several months (even a year) hasn’t really had a huge effect on new work coming in. My biggest regret to scrapping the old site is the obvious effect that removing all that content has had on certain Search Engine rankings.
In hindsight, if I was to do this again, I’d probably take the following approach instead of just replacing all content with a holding page…
So thats basically what I would do now instead of replacing everything with a holding page.
Apart from suffering a slip in visibility on search engines for key services, we didn’t do too badly. Each company is a different case and we had the benefit of most of our work being word of mouth/referrals. You may want to try the above approach or even try a blended approach (holding page and link to old site).
Whichever method you choose, I can recommend the blog, newsletter signup and newsletter/blog updates as the best way to keep your site current until you launch your new site.
I was pleasantly suprised to see some signage in Liffey Valley last week for the St Edmunds development that promoted a PodCast for the Apartments. It’s great to see some new marketing techniques being pioneered by the Irish estate agents.
Now if they’d just organise some decent Virtual Tours :O)
The Podcast is available over at stedmunds.ie. I wonder what the response has been to the Podcast. How many downloads etc.
*Added* Bernie has picked up the Podcast over at his IrishEyes Blog
