January 2010 posts

New advanced web writing training course for March 2010

By Ismail Ismail on 26 January 2010

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I’m sure you’ll agree that good quality content, written for the web, is the cornerstone of a good online user experience. We’ve been delivering web writing training courses for years - in fact it’s been one of our most popular courses. Many times we’ve been asked to go one step further and develop an advanced course for more experienced practitioners.

As a result we’ve decided to launch an all-new advanced web writing course to help delegates further develop their skills. The course will be run here at our offices in partnership with digital copywriting agency, Sticky Content and it’ll begin at the end of March.

This one-day course will give you an in-depth view of how to commission and develop the right content for your site, users and business objectives. It’ll teach you how to develop content using the techniques of editorial professionals to work in brand tone of voice and to help sell online.

Anyway, just thought I’d let you know about this new course. If you’re interested check out our Internet marketing training pages to find out more about advanced web writing and all our training courses.

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How can Spotify ads make money if I can’t click them?

By Alexander Baxevanis on 22 January 2010

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spotify1I know the title of this blog post may look a bit strange. No, I’m not suggesting that there’s a widespread bug in the Spotify software that prevents me from clicking on ads. Things are a little bit more complicated than that.

Unless you’ve never used Spotify or have always had a Pro account, you’ve probably listened to these 30 second audio-based ads that play between songs. They don’t even bother me that much any more - it feels the same as listening to (commercial) radio or TV. Most of these ads end with something along the lines of: “… to find out more, click the banner on the bottom left corner of your screen”. And that’s where the trouble starts.

Most of the time, I leave Spotify playing on my laptop, connected to my home stereo, and head off to do more pleasurable things than staring at the Spotify screen, such as reading or cooking. And when I hear this “click on the banner” call, which is invariably played at the end of each ad, I have zero chance of running back to my laptop and clicking on anything before the ad has finished playing. And this is particularly frustrating when the ad mentions some free offer or discount, and I feel like I’m missing out.

From this perspective, Spotify ads aren’t any more effective than traditional broadcast advertising and Spotify is missing a big opportunity to make advertising better. When I listen to an ad that’s interesting, I’d rather go straight to a targeted campaign page than of have to remember what to search for on Google or which phone number to call.

Fortunately, fixing this isn’t rocket science. All Spotify has to do is to keep a list of “Recently played ads”  and make this list easy to access, for example by adding it to the left column of the screen, where other playlists are also listed. Those who are only annoyed by Spotify ads won’t notice any difference. But those who, like me, find an interesting ad once in a while, will finally be able to click on it!

UPDATE (25 January): According to Spotify, what I’m suggesting is already possible by going into the “History” tab under “Play Queue”. But I wonder how many people have discovered it - maybe it’s still worth making it a little bit more prominent?

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Which industry sector has the most difficult to use websites?

By Jon White on 21 January 2010

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Between September and December 2009 we ran a poll on the Webcredible website asking the question of which industry sector has the most difficult to use websites? This may be a pretty generalised survey, which didn’t focus on specific sites, but the results (which we released yesterday) were interesting nonetheless. This is how they turned out:

  • Retail / ecommerce - 133 votes (13%)
  • Financial services - 164 votes (16%)
  • Local authority / government - 342 votes (34%)
  • Travel - 91 votes (9%)
  • Utilities - 116 votes (12%)
  • News / media companies - 69 votes (7%)
  • Other - 91 votes (9%)

Some of the results may not come as a particular surprise to many. The content focused sites of news and media companies do not tend to need to use the complex checkout processes that other sites use, and given the high levels of competition, travel and retail websites need to be pretty easy to use.

However, I would like to focus on the local authority and government sites which caught the brunt of over one third of the vote.

It’s true that local authority and government websites often have to offer a vast amount more information and functionality than their counterparts in other industries, which can make it more difficult to provide a great user experience, but there are some other reasons why they may have faired badly in this survey.

It could be a lack of investment in comparison to say online retail and travel companies, and it also could be put down to the fact that when using local authority and government websites, dropping off and using another site is often not an option (something which is common when poor usability is encountered in ecommerce and travel) so users will have to just grin and bear a poor user experience.

There’s no doubt that the usability of local council websites is improving, as shown by our most recent local council usability report and although there’s still much room for improvement, it’s certainly not the only industry sector where this is the case. So, do you agree with the findings? Let us know which what type of websites you find most difficult to use.

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Useful extension for simple CSS forms

By Brigitte Simard on 19 January 2010

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Forms are common on a wide variety of websites and it’s important that they’re well designed and laid-out. There are many tools and extensions to help with this and one I came across recently is a free CSS form designer extension for Dreamweaver from DMXzone.DMXzone CSS form designer extension

It allows you to create forms visually, using a simple drag and drop interface and a variety of CSS styles. It’s very useful for creating short simple forms and allows you to populate fields with default values such as days of the week or with dynamic values from a Dreamweaver record set.

There are however, a few things that could be improved with this extension. Firstly, the HTML mark-up isn’t 100% accessible as labels aren’t properly assigned to checkboxes and radio buttons (they have been implemented following an out-of-date w3c recommendation). It would also be difficult to manage a form with a complex layout with this extension, as the HTML mark-up is not really flexible and when new field elements are added, they’re automatically added at the end of the form (not within context) and have to be dragged and dropped into position. Also, the CSS produced by this tool isn’t cross-browser compatible.

So in summary, this is a useful free tool for creating short, simple forms, but to really be suitable for longer, more complex forms, the extension requires a few modifications. You can try it yourself by downloading the CSS form designer extension for free from DMXzone.

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Guest blog - Disaster day

By Rhodri Buttrick on 18 January 2010

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Organisation for a dyslexic can often be a major issue. I make a super effort to keep myself organised. I use an online task management system, (rememberthemilk.com) which syncs with my PDA. Inevitably, however, “the best laid plans of mice and men” go completely wrong, everything falls apart and I end up in a complete mess!

My day of disasters started off early, right after breakfast. I logged in to my e-mail account to find a lovely £5 fine from the library! This was most perplexing, as the night before I had borrowed a book on a six-hour loan. It was due back in at midnight and I returned it at 9:30pm. This really made me start to doubt my sanity, did I really return the book? Or had I just had a dream about it? Unfortunately I hadn’t realised this book belongs to a magical realm of the library called the ‘course collection’. While I just put it in the usual return bin I had previously used when returning books. So, I rushed off to the library, and luckily upon explaining they let me off the fine. Phew!

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