When @gillianmckeith picked a fight last month it was interesting for two reasons: firstly, there was a massive flurry of activity on Twitter and secondly, it prompted a respected journalist to suggest that he might sue the Twitter account holder for libel (although probably not).

Incidentally – I am saying @gillianmckeith when referencing what was said on Twitter instead of Gillian McKeith because at the time of writing, it’s not 100% clear that the two are the same.

Here’s what happened in a nutshell: someone started taking the piss out of Gillian McKeith because they felt that her PhD is not a 'real' one (whatever that means). They made reference to a chapter in a book by the medical doctor, broadcaster and writer, Ben Goldacre in which he discusses Ms McKeith.

There then appeared the following Tweet from @gillianmckeith: “How sad a life to enjoy reading lies about another by an ass who makes money from pharmaceutical giants.” 

The result? Well Ben Goldacre asked her to contact him and, according to the BBC, asked for her to retract the statement by saying: “Bad Science by Ben Goldacre is not lies”

What then followed, again in a nutshell, is a series of bizarre distancing by @gillianmckeith and the Gillian McKeith website . They removed any mention of being able to follow her on Twitter from her website. Apart from they didn’t really. The last time I looked, the code for following her is still in the source – it’s just been commented out. (For those of you who don’t code, that basically means that the bit of code has some parenthesis around so it is not shown on the page, but at the same time hasn’t been removed completely – the idea being it can easily and quickly be reinstated at a later stage if needs be). @gillianmckeith also started posting statements such as “Do you believe this is real twitter site for the GM?” (sic). And since 14th July…. nothing at all and all her followers and all those she is following have disappeared. It's as though none of this ever happened. Apart from it did.

The point here, is not whether Gillian McKeith has a ‘real’ PhD. (If I were her and felt that my professional integrity was being rubbished publicly, I'd be pretty cross too). But the way in which it was handled. For me it always comes down to transparency.

Ideally, she (or whoever had access to the Twitter account) should have thought a bit harder before writing a potentially libellous statement. It seems there is still a sense that Twitter, because of its immediate and informal nature is not something that is taken seriously. But a person is libelled if someone discredits them in their trade, business or profession. It makes no difference whether that’s done in a newspaper, book or online.

Once the damage was done, she (or those advising her) should have explained her position - if for no other reason than just wanting to clear things up - (did she say it, or did someone else posing as her, was it a simple mistake), apologised if necessary, retracted the statement and above all, been seen to be transparent and open. Instead, according to several commentators, the whole event has been denied, deleted and ignored.

Maybe denial works in the real world, but in the online world, it’s very hard to totally delete anything you have done or said. It’s potentially there forever. And how much less of a story would this have become if the response had been forthcoming? Perhaps people would have had some sympathy. After all, we’re all human and we’ve all said things in haste we later regretted.

Having a ‘global website’ provides businesses with a tool to take their products / services to a global market with the opportunity for business growth and increased sales. But is it just a case of translating some of the copy or buying as many country specific domain names as possible? We have worked on several global and multi language sites over the past couple of years with briefs ranging from increasing brand and product awareness, selling to an international audience and making a campaign accessible to an international market. Going ‘global’ can provide big opportunities but there are also lots of things to consider. So here are a few of the important things to think about when going worldwide.

1. One size doesn’t fit all
Firstly you need to consider whether you want one website with a global reach or one site with multiple country and language versions. It is important to remember that each market will be different, from the obvious things such as language and currency through to the less tangible differences of culture, lifestyle and ethics and as a result each markets requirements from you as a company and your products / services will be different. But without a doubt the biggest consideration is language. According to Feedgrids ‘people who don't speak English as their first language, or at all, are six times less likely to purchase from an English-only site.’

That said to create a website and roll it out across a number of countries and languages doesn’t automatically mean success. Localisation is the key word when it comes to globalisation and HSBC certainly got it right with their strapline ‘The worlds local bank’. They realised that for a global corporation to be successful they needed to understand and work at a local level. Relate this back to your product or service and how this translates online. Should all your products / services  be available in every country? Will certain products be more popular in certain regions and if so how will this affect the hierarchy of information on each site? What information should you provide on your site? Can product / service USPs and information, terms and conditions and delivery information be standardised or will each country or region have their own requirements? I assume it is the latter and therefore key research, a flexible site and hierarchy of information will help you to achieve this.

Design is also a key consideration and depending on the markets you are looking to enter and the product or services you offer, you may need to look at your brand and site design. Colours that mean one thing in one culture do not always mean the same thing worldwide. The tone of voice you use aswell as the products / service names will also need to be researched, the last thing you want is to enter a new market where the name of your product is an offensive word  - unless that is your USP?! The best example of this was the Jif to Cif rebrand in 2001 which was due to the fact that any non English speaking person struggled to say the word Jif and having a brand that no one can pronounce isn’t a great sales strategy.

2. Single or multiple domains
There are two main options: Country specific domains e.g. .co.uk .fr are good for natural search and also valuable if you want to align yourself with that country or position yourself as being based in a certain place. This is a an approach that Amazon have taken. However it can be costly and difficult to obtain domain names in some countries. It may also be hard to obtain the same domain name for each country and may dilute the consistency of your brand. It can also be costly as well as time consuming to manage multiple domains.

The alternative is using a global .com domain name with country specific extensions e.g. com/fr. Many sites take this approach including Mini and Apple. This way you only have one domain to manage and ensures consistency across all of your countries / languages. This is the approach that we have taken in the past on sites such as Skechers and Ultra Motor.

3. Getting from A to B
Once you have agreed on your domain set up and if you have opted for a global .com address, the next thing to think about is how to get users to the relevant country or language site. This can be done through IP matching where country IP addresses are matched against a specific version of your site. This service is available through various providers such as GeoLite country. It isn’t guaranteed to be 100% accurate and there will also be issues if users have IP addresses registered to other countries. So to support this a language / country selector should be displayed prominently enabling users to  change their country / language options if required. Although Apple do not appear to have IP matching in place, the country selector on the footer of every page is very prominent aswell as a very clear country selection page. Dyson appear to be using IP matching and also have a clear, prominent country selector located in the footer of every page.

4. Should you show the flag?
Should you localise your site by country and or language? This really depends on budgets and which markets you are looking to cover. If you want to cover all ‘English’ speaking countries then having an English language version of your site would be more cost effective than have a site for each country that speaks English. However bear in mind those subtle differences in language, spelling, currency and whether an ‘English speaking’ country would class themselves as ‘English’ or speaking ‘English’. Localising your site by country is the other option but also bear in mind that some countries such as Canada have multiple languages. However this is easily overcome (although not the most cost effective solution) by having  two language sites under one country. There is no right answer to this one and really does depend on the markets you are or looking to operate in, budgets etc. Some, like British Airways, cover all options. We have used both routes in the past, but either way ensure that it is set up in a way that will allow you to make changes as your requirements change.

5. Translation - Traduction
Next on the list is how to localise the copy on you site. It’s not enough just to translate the copy, you need to make sure that:
A. The translated copy makes sense in that language
B. That it reflects the brand, positioning and tone of voice of your company
C. Sells the relevant features to that market.

Ideally you should look at using a translation company or contacts / colleagues that can provide a translation service for you and have a good understanding of your company and the culture of the language they are translating into. A cheaper alternative and for situations where brand values, tone of voice are less important such as user generated content, Google Translator and Babelfish are good, cost effective options. We are currently integrating Google Translator into two client sites which will enable all of their user generated content to be translated across all languages.  

6. Search Engine Marketing
A quick mention on SEO and PPC. Keywords in one country are not necessarily the keywords that customers will search with in another. Achieving good natural search is dependent on you understanding what customers are searching for and what the competition are doing in that country. If you do run PPC campaigns then you will need to consider your PPC strategy for each country. Search engine popularity varies from country to country as does the meaning of words.

7. One database and CMS
On top of all the benefits that come with the ability to manage the content on your site you should also look to have one CMS that controls the pages of all of your country / language sites, keeping everything in one place and making it more cost effective and easier to manage. The same goes for your database, it will be easier to manage if it is all in one place and you can set filters for country specific reports.

8. Get your customers to the finish line
If you are offering a product or service that customers can pay for through your website then make sure all payment options are covered. Arguably too many options may confuse people, but definitely make sure you use a 3rd party payment handler such as SagePay which offers payment in multiple currencies and an ecommerce platform such as PayPal. Or one day and depending on what you are selling you may even be able to use the Facebook micro payment service. Whatever you use it is essential that the payment options are convenient and accessible, safe and secure. The last thing you want is to put your customer off at the final hurdle.

So a few final thoughts:

• One step at a time. Don’t try and recreate everything on your main site into multiple local versions all in one go.
• Research each market and make decisions about what is relevant to and expected by that market.
• Five sites instead of one is very different so keep it manageable. Functionality such as blogs that need to be updated on a regular basis and require moderation may be best left to a later date.

Whilst completing my masters in IT and Marketing in Paris two years ago I wrote a dissertation on mobile social networks and their marketing opportunities (you can read it here although it is in French...). I was convinced that the meeting of mobile and location based social networks would become THE next big thing and help businesses to deeply connect with consumers. Today, I am glad and not so surprised to see location-based services going mainstream!

Location-based services are defined as applications delivering relevant information to users on their mobile depending on where they are based. The LBS market is burgeoning with two types of players:

1. The check-in based companies like Foursquare, Where.com, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, Rummble or Yelp... These are the ones currently leading the way. Just to give you an idea, Foursquare reached the 1 million members in April and it appears they have just crossed the 2 million users mark yesterday!
2. The more established players like Twitter, Facebook and Google have recently entered the market as they see location-based services as a massive revenue generator in the future. GigaOm estimates the potential value of the location-based services market could be worth up to $20 billion (see infographics here) and according to Juniper Research, revenues from mobile location-based services market are expected to exceed $12 billion by 2014! These revenues will mainly come from advertising, retail coupons, business sponsorships and local search marketing which will be exciting news for brands.

Whilst mobile marketing has been around for a while with SMS, MMS, banner ads etc. it has never really taken off before because it was targeted for users and lacked that special social element. However, the improvement of the wireless carriers' network infrastructure (3G), as well as the increasing proliferation of internet and GPS-enabled smartphones combined with the need for consumers to always be hyper-connected has led to a promising future for mobile advertisers. Location-based services use specific location information for delivering the right message to the right person at the right place AND time. The consumer only receives information relevant to him which should engage and encourage interaction with advertisers. Location-based services are opening up a range of new marketing possibilities improving experiences and relationships between people and businesses.

An example of location-based service: Foursquare

Foursquare is a free game available on a variety of mobile platforms. Once you start using the service on the go, you are presented with a list of locations around you and the whole point of the “game” is to check-in to broadcast your location in real-time at the various public venues you visit each day to your inner circle of friends, family and colleagues. The location can be anything from bars, train station, restaurants or work. If you can’t find a venue, you are invited to add it and you are rewarded for your crowdsourcing effort. You can also create notes/reviews for others about the venues like promotions, recommendations or tips. Every time you check-in to a venue, you are awarded a number of points based on how many times you have come there. The more often you do that in the same location the higher you are ranked in the leader board. You can also unlock badges such as newbie, adventurer, explorer, local, or superstar. The user who checks-in more than anyone else becomes “mayor” of that location. Mayorship encourages real competition between users and is very addictive. You can check Louis Gray’s article to see if you are on your way of being a Foursquare addict :)

So how can you tap the power of the “check-in” for your business?

Specials Offers

Last year some venues started rewarding their Foursquare mayors with special deals like free cocktails instant discounts. Foursquare loved the idea and realised that the check-ins were not only benefitting users in their quest for badges and mayorship but also businesses by giving them a chance to engage better with their loyal customers! They therefore built support for this type of deal and started offering Foursquare Specials for business. This is where Foursquare gets interesting as a marketing platform, especially for retailers selling physical merchandise. You can claim your venue from a foursquare venue page and once your business is verified you can start offering specials to your customers. There are 4 types of Specials:

• Mayor Specials: unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue (the user who has checked in the most in the last 60 days). Example: "Foursquare has deemed you the Mayor? Enjoy a free order of French fries!"
• Check-in Specials: unlocked when a user checks in to your venue a certain number of times. "Foursquare says you've been here 10 times? That's a free drink for you!"
• Frequency-based Specials: are unlocked every X check-ins. "Foursquare users get 20% off any entree every 5th check-in!"
• Wildcard Specials: always unlocked, but your staff has to verify some extra conditions before awarding the Special. "Show us your Foursquare Swarm badge and get a free drink!"

You can also get Foursquare to provide you with some window clings so you can market your Specials to customers in your venue. Foursquare also provides you with free real-time stats about your venue: most recent visitors, most frequent visitors, time of the day people check in, total number of unique visitors etc. Valuable information for every business trying to learn more about their customers and track their behaviour patterns and habits.

This is a real win/win situation, on one hand users get engaged into a free and friendly competition over the mayorship of your venue and potentially get the chance to win freebies and discounts. On the other hand, as a business you get the chance to monitor and identify your customers, give them special treatment and encourage frequent visits and loyalty!

Some other thoughts on how to leverage Foursquare

1. Give tips to your customers – it is a good idea to leave advice in the tips section. This could be some info on a new menu item, an upcoming event or tip on how to avoid busy times. For example the History Channel has started using Foursquare to give its users tips at various venues around the United States to coincide with its show, America The Story Of Us.
   
   
   
   
   In the same way, Louis Vuitton is partnering with Foursquare to offer users tips on their favourite locations around London. Check some of their tips on the Louis Vuitton account
2. Create your very own official badge for your business - Starbucks created a Barista badge for caffeine addicts which you can get if you check in at 5 different Starbucks.
   
   
   
   
   Bravo, Fashion Victim badge by Marc Jacobs for the Fashion Week 2010, Time Out - Happy Hour (New York) Badge, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) and some cities like Chicago are also good examples. But don’t be intimidated by the big names cited above, it doesn’t matter what size your business is; you could do the same thing to promote your product or service and engage with your customers.
3. Listen and learn from people’s comments – remember the user now has the power to talk and say what he thinks. Don’t ignore this and leverage Foursquare to gather users' feedback and show you are listening and improving. You could even use the ‘to do’ list facility to show your customers what you are going to improve.
4. Hold an event or a party for customers to earn the Swarm Badge – 50+ people are also checked-in here - it's a foursquare flash mob! The best example is probably AJ Bombers restaurant which hosted an event for customers to help them earn Swarm and I’m on a Boat badges (difficult badges to obtain). They managed to attract 161 foursquare users at the same time and their typical Sunday sales more than doubled, with an increase of 110% that day! You can’t do much better in terms of harnessing the power of location-based services. By using Foursquare, this restaurant owner not only achieved record sales but also managed to build a sustainable and real-time word-of-mouth which will probably have an impact on long-term sales as well.
   
   
   
   
   Read the full story on Hubspot blog
5. Think outside the box... The only limitation is your imagination! – Early this year Jimmy Choo, the fashion shoe retailer used Foursquare in a very interesting way organising a real-time treasure hunt around London via the location-based service for the launch of it's new trainer range. The idea was simple and fun, the audience was hugely engaged and a lot of PR was generated.

Whatever your current digital marketing plan is, don’t underestimate the power of location-based services. Unlike the current social media marketing activities, services like Foursquare and Gowalla are able to bring to life online and offline relationships and experiences to unlock a city’s true treasures. So, are you now ready to check-in?

Further reading:

• Nice Slideshare presentation - How Foursquare Helps Consumers and Business Owners
• Check out some more examples - Ten Foursquare marketing campaigns and 21 Unique Location Examples from Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, and MyTown
• If you still don’t understand why people are checking-in, this article could help you out - Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location-Based Social Networks
• Some more exciting news coming from Foursquare HQ last week - Foursquare Launches Location Layers - This is Big and Foursquare Unlocks ‘$20 Million in Funding’ Badge

Shock horror Flash doesn't work on the iPhone or the "magical" iPad. Steve Jobs has declared its death, and decreed that it's not worthy of inclusion in Apple's market leading mobile platform. Dropping Flash in favour of HTML5 is akin to replacing floppy drives with CD-ROMS we are told. You don't need it, you will be better off without it, it's time to stop living in the past and embrace the future. Naturally Adobe (the makers of Flash) aren't too happy about having the door slammed in their face. Adobe tried launching a campaign online but were forced to accept they have lost the battle. However the war is only just heating up; Google's latest phones support both HTML5 & Flash.

The controversy has been fodder for bloggers, sparked flame wars between fans, and led to an awful lot of FUD (fear uncertainly and doubt) being spread online. This puts many of us in the industry in an odd position. For years Apple and Adobe have been the pillars of the creative industries. As developers and designers we have a love hate relationship with both companies. Designers need photoshop to get their work done, yet vent about it online. Developers love apple hardware, but have a hard time accepting the App Store's restrictions on how they can write their apps.

Which side are you on?
Despite what you read online I don't see a major split in the web community between HTML5 and Flash or between iPhone and Android for that matter. On the contrary, I see lots of overlap. In our industry it pays to have multiple disciplines. Lots of the popular games for the iPhone are written by people who are also Flash game developers. The people doing the cool 3D demos in HTML5 are often the same people who pioneered 3D in Flash. Those of us working on the cutting edge do not erect walls between technologies, we tear them down.

Flash has a long history of bringing innovations to the browser: animation, fonts, audio, video, 3D, and networking to name just a few. Recently we have noted interest and momentum building behind HTML5. It's about time browsers had native support for many of the things Flash has supported for years. The 4 "modern" browsers (Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox) are competing against each almost daily to take the crown as being the fastest, and most feature complete implementation. Competition is a good thing, after years of stagnation it's an exciting time to be working in the web. If you are stuck using a "legacy" browser (hint: the one with a blue e) do us all a favour and upgrade today, I promise you won't regret it.

Unfortunately outside of cutting edge Mobile web it's hard to fully utilise all the advances offered by these "modern" browsers. The elephant in the room remains every web developers pet hate; Internet Explorer with it's stubborn 50% market share. Even if Microsoft were to support full HTML5 and CSS3 in IE9 (unlikely), we won't see IE7 and IE8 disappear for years to come. Many sites are only just getting around to phasing out IE6. The key strength of Flash has always been that it's cross browser; unencumbered by the incompatibles and quirks that have plagued browsers. With penetration rates hovering close to 100% and a fast upgrade cycle driven by automatic updates it's no wonder Flash has become the de-facto standard for delivering video and rich experiences online.

So where does this leave HTML5 and CSS3?
Some features lend themselves to progressive enhancement, enabling HTML5 drag and drop file uploads or offline storage for those with capable browsers is an easy win. Using the latest CSS3 properties to render nice UIs while still degrading gracefully to support IE can be tricky, but is doable. It doesn't have to be pixel perfect, it just needs to work in older browsers. This leaves those features that you can't degrade gracefully without falling back to an alternative such as Flash. This category includes the much hyped video tag and canvas element.

Video support in HTML5 is still a bit of a minefield, there are 3 different codecs (H264, WebM, and Vorbis) that may or may not work in your browser, some with critical hardware acceleration, others lacking. In order to provide the best experience on the web and mobile you need to encode and deliver the video in multiple formats as well as providing a Flash version for those without HTML5. There are other rough edges too, such as fullscreen support; which depending your browser works differently or may not be supported at all. My advice to clients is to do what YouTube is doing and give users the choice to pick what works best for them.

This brings me to canvas element, a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly. Many of the demos show it being used for amazing Flash like experiences. Unfortunately there are problems here too. when you do a lot of animation and graphics processing you are going to burn CPU. Lots of it. Technology can always be abused at the expense of your CPU, those annoying battery draining banner ads can be rendered using canvas on the iPhone too. Recently Flash player added code to throttle down processing on browser tabs that are not active. I expect a similar feature will have to be added to browsers to control canvas abuse. Then there is the legitimate concern of accessibility, while it can be a challenge to create truly accessible Flash, it is at least possible.

In conclusion
Despite all the challenges I think it's our duty to push for the adoption of the latest web standards. While I may not agree with Steve Jobs reasons for banning Flash from iOS, I'm grateful that the controversy has put the spotlight on HTML5. I take issue with the assertion that Flash is a dead technology, on the contrary I see Adobe continuing to innovate and evolve Flash for many years to come. When noise generated by all the bloggers and fanboys has died down, it will be left to us humble web designers and developers to make all these technologies work for users.

In the past few years, one of the biggest areas of change for the Web has been the amount of Internet users who are accessing websites via their mobile devices. You are probably aware of the facts: today, 71% of smartphone owners are browsing the Internet (88% of iPhone users do, 92% for Android). And this trend isn't going to stop: 4 billion mobile subscribers worldwide are expected by the end of 2010(1).

However, accessing Web content on a mobile device is still a rather inconsistent experience. Dozens of mobile browsers exist, each with different rendering capabilities. Designing and building mobile sites brings some unique situations and challenges. For web developers, optimising websites for mobile browsers is often a painful and difficult process.

But things are changing: the latest mobile browsers, available on the iDevices (iPhone, iPod, iPad) and Android phones (Nexus One, Motorola Droid) are game changing, offering a much superior browsing experience to their users. Amazing results can be achieved, as web developers are now able to make use of the latest web technologies, even on mobile devices.

It comes as no surprise that the US mobile browser usage is now dominated by the iPhone, with 64%(2), and Android, which comes second at 19%. Both Apple and Google are pushing mobile browsing, and empower their users with tools far ahead of the competition.

But whether or not you decide to focus your mobile strategy on the iDevices and Android specifically, here are a few things to consider when going mobile:

Simplify
The key to a successful mobile site is simplification: simpler navigation, fewer options (especially in web apps), a reduced amount of text, and possibly fewer images. While webpages made for the desktop often get crowded (banners/ads, huge blocks of text, countless buttons and links etc.), mobile websites have to remain simple. What is important on the page has to be kept, but the rest should be cut out. Less is definitely more on mobile. With fewer (carefully selected) options available to the mobile user, the site gains usability and the viewer is likely to continue browsing your site.

Think lightweight
Because of the limited bandwidth on mobile devices, as well as the inherent hardware limitations, an important focus has to be put on optimisation (load speed, image compression). Your visitors using mobile devices do not need high definition pictures, neither do they need ambient sounds or music. Pages have to be leaner, so users are spared excessive bandwidth costs and enjoy a faster browsing experience.

Prioritise content
What is crucial in your mobile strategy is to put "function before form" and present users with a customised experience, relevant to mobility. Your mobile site has to be contextually relevant to your users, and first address how content is consumed. If you are an online reseller, you might want to put the search bar at the top of your page and a quick way to find a local store (which are the most likely actions users will need on mobile); if you're a small business with an online presence, you would probably need quick access to your phone number (e.g. a "Call us" button) and address (e.g. "here's our address, view it on a map"). The logic is that your viewers who are accessing the website are on the go and probably have something very specific in mind!

Do not neglect the Mobile Web
Having a mobile website doesn't mean removing images from your website. It deserves it's own strategy and requires dedicated development. As the number of users browsing the Web from mobile devices continues to rise, you cannot miss the opportunity to shine!

References

1. Mobile Subscribers to Reach 2.6B This Year
   
2. Net Applications, February 2010

We all get to that point, two or three years after launching our ecommerce website, sales growth isn't want it used to be, new customer acquisition is faltering, the site has lost its "magic". Yet we're all terribly busy maintaining it. How did this happen? How did our wonderful source of revenue become well, stagnant?

Don't fear Stagnation

Stagnation is a natural part of any system lifecycle. After the initial jump in growth you experience after implementing a new ecommerce offering, your ability to sustain it is limited. The features and quick wins that you achieved are already out there, you focus on ensuring the visitors are catered for and most of your effort goes into the day-to-day operations of running your site. Coming up with the Next Big Thing is increasingly hard. Frequently more money is pumped into Marketing, vastly increasing your cost per acquisition because your site simply isn't converting like it once was.

However, when you realise your site has stagnated, this becomes a wonderful opportunity for change.

Featuritis

Featuritis is a symptom, rather than a cause of Stagnation. Featuritis is a term coined by Kathy Sierra, a prominent blogger on User Experience, to describe what happens to software when new features are continually added.

Thanks Kathy for allowing re-use of your work

She describes the point of the Happy User Peak, the point when there is just enough functionality to please the user, without leaving them wanting more, or conversely, reaching for the instruction manual.

However, after the initial stage of growth, it's very easy to get into the mindset of adding new features, sections and functionality to your site to help maintain the growth you've achieved.

Without pragmatism, not just from you but your Board, and quite importantly, your Helpdesk, you can easily find yourself responding to users' demands through continuous developments. Multiple exotic payment options, unnecessary wishlist & comparison pages, complicated delivery options and "me too" social media integration are just a few of the ways to add complexity that can frustrate a large percentage of your audience.

Operational vs Strategic

After successfully running an ecommerce operation for a year or so, it's easy to get stuck in the day-to-day operational tasks. Content creation (certainly for smaller shops), catalogue management, helpdesk management, can all make you lose site of the vision of your ecommerce store.

Econsultancy, back in the day, created an incredibly useful map of the tasks that need to be undertaken to run an ecommerce store. Taking the ACRA model - Acquisition, Conversion, Retention & Analytics - these can easily be carved into a series of remits for you and your team.

If you find yourself consistently working on the Operational side of the business, with no time to work on the Strategy & Planning, then we have a problem. Not only are you not keeping an analytical eye on your competitors, you are also unable to focus on your vision and drive innovation - a quick route to stagnation.

Don't be reactionary

So, you've sat down with your Board, and said "I think our site has stagnated". My aren't you brave! There's often a compelling urge to scrap everything and start again, to rebuild from scratch and let's do it better this time.

However this is not only costly, but unnecessary and dangerous. Within larger organisations a considerable amount has been invested in integration, certainly with fulfillment and CRM.

Remember when you conducted Stakeholder Interviews at the start of your project? Do it again with your Board. Find out what the current perceived failings are - these won't just be quantifiable like sales and average transaction value, but emotional failings as well. Once you know this, then you can work on how to improve it.

A platform's just a platform

I'm not sure if everyone will agree with me on this!

Ultimately, a platform is just a way of skipping over building a database, business logic and an API yourself. If you've chosen a platform, then you were probably sold on features, but the real issues such as cost, integration, administrative overhead and scalability were why you bought it.

But do your customers care one jot what platform you use? Does your platform choice directly affect the experience that they have? Of course not. Which is why in most cases, a few pragmatic steps is all that it takes to get you back on track.

1) Understand what matters

Why do people actually visit your website? Do you know? We'd love to think that they're there to Buy Buy Buy! but often that simply isn't the case. What's going through their minds? What's their motivation? Are you catering for this, not only in your site content but in your marketing?

If you'd like to read more about this, here's a post on user-psychology I wrote for Econsultancy.

Just as we measure Conversion Rate, we can also measure how often users are able to do what they came to your site to do - a "Task Completion Rate". Remember that not every visitor comes to your site to shop. Just as we do when we enclose a Checkout, when your visitor knows what they want to achieve, your site should get out of the way and let them do it.

There are a number of tools to let you measure Task Completion Rate - predominantly based around user surveys. The most popular is called 4Q from iPerceptions and takes the form of a pop-under survey.

You can then measure your Task Completion Rate amongst a sample of your visitors and see in which areas you can improve. You may of course, have a site that doesn't cater to your users' needs. They may be looking for a store finder, or an offers section, or something that isn't currently in your strategy. In which case...

2) Go back to your IA

During the information architecture process, you should have come up with 3-4 user personas, with needs and wants and clear goals and motivations. However, if your site is failing, then either a) the personas are incorrect (which can certainly happen when these aren't based on user research) or b) the personas aren't being catered for. Either way, when visitors use your site "in anger", they will become frustrated and leave.

Once you have catalogued the objectives and motivations of your user personas, you need to see how well your site fits these. If you don't feel that the site fits, or your personas are wrong, then you should conduct a new round of user research. I always recommend doing this in the user's homes, so you can see the environment in which they interact with you, and the discussion becomes more of a "chat" than a survey, but this isn't always possible.

3) Simplification

Once you have a newly defined set of goals and objectives, you can simplify your site design to cater to these. John Maeda has a wonderful book called the Laws of Simplicity in which he states 10 (well, 9) laws that you can apply to any design or process to make it simpler. For example, whilst you can't remove elements that some users may find useful, you can Hide or Shrink them in the design. You can use this process to not only rationalise your product taxonomy, but also rationalise your language.

A case in point here, on a site I once worked on we had 12 different methods of getting help, none of which were labelled "Help".

4) Take time out

Pause, breathe and have a sit down.

As I said before, when you hit this point, it's very easy to run around, firing & hiring agencies and switching platforms in an urge to have something new. You can do this, sure, but it's not very Strategic is it? You need to take a little time out.

5) Visit some aliens

Go and visit another ecommerce operation, that has nothing to do with your business. You'll see that they have the same processes as any other business, a helpdesk, customer returns, a CRM strategy - but by doing this you can not only gather ideas, but share skills and see how their success can be adapted for you use.

6) Think strategically

Work out what makes you money. Start from "we receive money from our customers by" and work backwards from there. Look at your net margin, and what's actually driving value. See how you can align this with your customer's objectives, simplifying the process and creating an engaging experience, and you're onto a winner.

Congratulations! You have just convinced a potential customer to click through from your HTML Email, Google Ad, Banner, Social Network message (the list goes on) you have their attention and they are ready to read, buy or subscribe. So where next?

Sadly in many cases marketers are happy to link hot leads like this through to their home or product page in the hope the user will work it out for themselves. Where is the context? Is this what the user was expecting to see? Is the language consistent? Is that special offer you mentioned clearly visible? Probably not. Welcome to the world of landing pages.

Whilst good landing pages adhere to the core principles of user centred design such as strong usability, clear information layout and simple navigation they are also single minded in their push to convert, not generally inform, the user.

Here are a few golden rules:

Be consistent
It is really crucial to maintain a consistent tone of voice from the source of the click through. You could even consider having the same headline on your landing page as your upstream ad. Sure, it's repetition, but at least the user feels like they are in the right place.

If users are landing from a wide variety of sources then you should probably segment the messaging rather than trying to please everyone with boring catch all copy. The same rules should also be applied to visuals if relevant.

Grab attention and don't waffle
Keep the page to a single point and use minimal text to explain it. Then ask yourself "Does my copy answer immediate, obvious questions or concerns?"

Remove unnecessary navigation and keep refining the content as much a you can. Every item on the page needs to justify its existence. If you want to quickly test your page use the '5 second rule'. Show the page to someone fresh for 5 seconds and then ask them to explain what it was all about. If they can't or mention too many differing messages get back to the drawing board!

If you need a bit more help along the sales process and words, visuals and competitive pricing are not enough then sometimes giving away a limited free account, trial or sample can be effective conversion aids.

Learn to point
It is still quite important to keep your primary call to action (CTA) above the fold (no vertical scrolling) or to repeat the CTA throughout the page if it must be long. Arrows or oversized buttons are the usual visual metaphors for action online. Arrows can also be useful for breaking out of the standard grid lines of your design which will inevitably attract the eye.

If your design features people, face them in the direction of your CTA although resist the urge to be cheesy, authenticity is important.

Colour needs to be considered on CTAs. Red can evoke a strong emotional response although it does also represent "stop". Orange equates to an enthusiastic get-it-done attitude whilst blue is the default web colour for a link.

Use video!
Users are far more likely to watch a well crafted short video or screencast than read a long piece of text.

Only ask for the information you really need
As handy as it would be to know the age, gender and occupation of the user it is not always essential. The more you ask for, the less you will get. If you really do need to know personal information then turn it into a unique selling point e.g. "Tell us your birthday and we will send you a little present on the big day!"

Build trust
If the user clicking through is not already familiar with your brand then official accreditation or affiliation to organisational bodies, logos of well known brands you are partnered with or working for and testimonials (preferably not anonymous!) will support you in your endeavours to convert.

Don't stop the conversation!
Thank you pages are so often overlooked but why should we stop there? This is the ideal place to offer further incentives such as free ebook download or links to more information. A surprise bonus will leave the user feeling very good about the experience.

Likewise you have just converted your lead - well done! They are probably feeling at their most in love with your message at this point so add some social sharing functions here so they can tell their own community about this great product or service and help spread the word for you.

Track your results properly
If you can track the user journey you give yourself a fighting chance of learning from your mistakes as well as knowing what your conversion rate, bounce/abandonment rate and form completion rates are. How else can you tell if the campaign was worth while?

If you would like more information on tracking have a read of our blog article "Five Google Analytics tips you need to know"

I hope you have found this useful and please do leave any comments or other tips below. Also, I could not have written this article without some of the fantastic advice on http://unbounce.com/blog/

There should be no need to introduce you to Google Analytics, the most widely used web analytics application. The tool is powerful and FREE so it isn't hard to see why it is so popular. However, only a small percentage of users fully harness it's potential.

Google is constantly refining and adding new features to it's analytics service. Although you need to be a bit exploratory if you are going to make the most out of the 85 Google Analytics reports available. Lurking beneath the main dashboard Google Analytics gives you the necessary tools to analyse all of your website's data. Here are 5 under-used Google Analytics features you need to know.

1. Exclude internal traffic

Internal traffic to your site can skew your Google Analytics report. If you want to get a better picture of the traffic coming to your site, it is advised to filter out your internal traffic. Google Analytics allows you to set up a filter to easily exclude your own visits from the analytics results.

• On your Google Analytics dashboard, click on the Analytics Settings link.
  
  
• Then click on the Filter Manager link.
  
  
• The Filter Manager page will show you all existing filters for your site. Create a new one by clicking on the Add Filter link.
  
  
• In the new filter window:
  
  Enter the name of your new filter (ie: internal traffic)
  
  "Filter type" - tick the radio button "predefined filter"
  
  We want to exclude traffic from your IP address, so you will need to select "Exclude," "traffic from the IP addresses," and "that are equal to" in the three dropdowns.
  
  Enter your IP address (if you don't know your IP address, simply click on this link)
  
  Select which websites you want to filter by clicking on the appropriate website profile(s) and then clicking "Add"
  
  Finally, click "Save Changes"

Your Google Analytics report should now exclude your own traffic and you can get more accurate tracking data.

2. Set up goals and funnels tracking
(probably the most important tracking feature to set up)

Google describes a goal as a website page which a visitor reaches once they have made a purchase or completed another desired action, such as a registration or download. Please note that if you have an e-commerce site, there is a more specific tracking feature for measuring your goals.

The "goals" feature is a simple way of tracking your business objectives for your website. A goal must be a measurable action performed by your website's visitors (such as a page view visit to a thank you page). So a business objective + a measurable action = goal

Check out these common examples:

Usually between the initial click and the visitor's action, visitors are required to make multiple steps to complete the desired action. This creates the "goal funnel", with each step being a measurable action. Your visitor can take two routes: 1) follow the intended path, which means the goal is "completed" or 2) decide to leave the process along the way in which case the conversion chain is broken and goal abandoned.

Google Analytics allows you to track visitors as they go through the different steps of the goal funnel and shows you how many potential customers abandon the process, and at which point. The funnels feature is an amazing and very valuable tool that will help you detect issues with your conversion process. With this precious information in hand, you should be able to address the sections of your site preventing you from completing your business objectives, informing future updates.

Setting up goals in Google Analytics is one of the most important actions when it comes to configuring your account. Here is how to do it:

• First you will need to define your goal funnel – When you are on your website, ask yourself what are the steps required to complete the goal? Once you know, write down the URLs that will define your funnel (or ask your developer).
  
  For example:
  1. start_registration.html
  2. enter_shipping_info.html
  3. enter_subscriber_preferences.html
  4. finalise_registration.html
  5. thank_you.html
   
• On your dashboard, click on "Goals" on the left hand side navigation and click on "Set up goals and funnels"
• Enter goal information.
  
  
  
  Note you have the choice between 3 different types of goal: URL destination, time on site and pages/visit.
• Enter goal details
  
  
  
  Set "Match Type" to either "Exact Match," "Head Match," or "Regular Expression Match. This mainly depends on the type of websites you have (ie: static vs. dynamic). You can read more about the difference between Head, Exact, and Regular Expression Match on Google Analytics help page.
  Select if the goal URL is case sensitive and finally you can add a value to a goal.
• Define Your Goal Funnel - Specify the URLs and name each steps of your funnel.
• You are done! You can now analyse your goals performance.

You will only be able to see your goals data in reports after a few days of activity but please note this feature is not backwards compatible. Once the data is collected, go to your dashboard, click on Goals and open the Funnel Visualization Report. Google Analytics will tell you the following:

1. How many people enter at each step of the funnel.
2. How many people abandon at each step.
3. How many people make it to the next stage.
4. How many people make it all the way through.

The funnel will look something similar to this:

On the left you can see how your visitors enter the funnel, on the right where they leave the funnel and where they go. Finally the middle part shows you how visitors progress to the funnel, how many continue on to each step. In the example above, you can see 33,376 started the process and 25,434 go to another section but approximately 10,000 users leave the site at the first step. We can see something must be wrong with the first step. However, the abandonment on the second step is lower, which is good. Finally, you can see the overall conversion rate is 9.98%.

If you need a bit more information about goals in Google analytics, I suggest you check out this very handy tutorial: "Google Analytics IQ Lesson: Goals in Google Analytics"

3. Set up Analytics Intelligence & custom alerts

Google analytics recently launched Intelligence Beta which is an "algorithmic driven intelligence engine". What does that mean? It means Analytics Intelligence constantly monitors your website's traffic, detects any anomaly in your traffic patterns and sends you automatic alerts of significant changes over daily, weekly and monthly periods. Clever eh?

You can also create your own custom alerts, where you set the conditions for the alert depending on what you want to monitor. Go to the left hand side of your dashboard and click on "Intelligence Beta"

You have 2 choices:

1. Set up your own custom reports for specific things that you want to monitor.
   For example, you could have just launched a campaign in a specific location and wanted to be notified how the campaign is impacting traffic from that location. You could also create another alert to see when the traffic from that location is decreasing, so you can find out when the campaign starts to run out.
2. If you are not very familiar with setting up "customised alerts" then you can select one of the templates on the "manage intelligence alerts" page. Just click on "copy" and modify the alerts so it monitors what you need.

Once your intelligence alerts are setup and triggered you will receive a custom alert, posted in your Daily, Weekly or Monthly Alerts on your Google Analytics account or sent by email if you requested that option.
For further information on the Analytics Intelligence feature, visit the Google Analytics Help Center.

4. Tracking traffic from social media

With Google Analytics you can by default analyse traffic mediums such as direct, organic etc. It also automatically tracks referrals from other websites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other networking sites. However, in your Traffic Source reports, social network visits are grouped together with visits from all the other referral links to your site. If you are only interested in social network referrals there is a trick you can use.

• Select Advanced Segments from the lower left hand side bar in your Google Analytics Dashboard.
  
  
• Once in the Advanced Segment page, select Create a new custom segment.
  
  
• Drag the "source" box which is under "Traffic sources" to "dimension or metric" window.
  
  
• Select "Matches Regular Expression" from the "Condition" drop down. In the Value field, paste the following sources:
  
  digg|aim|friendfeed|econsultancy|blinklist|fark|furl|misterwongs|wikipedia|stumbleupon|netvibes|
  bloglines|linkedin|facebook|del\.icio\.us|feedburner|twitter|technorati|faves\.com|newsgator|PRweb|
  msplinks|myspace|bit\.ly|tr\.im|cli\.gs|zi\.ma|poprl|tinyurl
  
  If you wish to add more domains, simply add a "|"symbol between each name. However this field is limited to 256 characters.
• Name your segment (ie: "social network traffic"), click on "Create segment" and you are done! Then from your dashboard, click on "Advanced segments – All visits" and tick the box for the social networks traffic custom segment you have just created, finally apply the changes.
  
  
• Well done, you can now start comparing your social media traffic sources in relation to your overall site traffic.

5. Create annotations on reports

Google launched this very handy feature at the end of last year allowing comments on graphs regarding events that have happened. Users can either add shared or private notes on the dashboard graph. Every time you make a change to your site, be that technical, design, content or any other updates, make sure you add a note specifying what has been done so if the performance of the site improves/decreases, you can easily explain to your colleagues who see a spike or a dip the reasons why. Watch this video to see it in action.

The "annotations" feature is a great collaborative feature that brings intelligence to data and makes your stats understandable and shareable within your company. As Google explains "A simple note from a colleague can save hours of real work (and frustration) for an analyst who is tasked to explain a usually dry set of numbers."

If you want to go beyond the tips we have discussed here and learn more, here is a list of Google Analytics blogs:

• Google Analytics blog
• Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik
• Analytics Market
• Analytics talk
• LunaMetrics

I hope this post was useful and you will soon become a more knowledgeable Google Analytics user!

It’s not unusual that in a digital agency the producer will say to the designer “ just put in some Latin, and we’ll put the copy into the CMS later”. This got me wondering; by doing this are we relegating a very important part of our messaging to an afterthought in the creative process. Is Lorem Ipsum killing design?

We have all heard a thousand times, that “content is king”, but do we really believe it? Websites are information services  and as much as this may offend many designers, the User isn’t coming to the website you are designing to Marvel at your use of colour, or be impressed with your choice of typography; they are there to find the information they want. Don’t get me wrong the design is far from irrelevant, but it's role is to make the user feel comfortable and guide them to the CONTENT they are looking for.

Have a think about how “normal web users” use  websites. The people I am talking about are people like your parents, the type of person who uses the scrollbar to scroll, the person who uses the internet every day, but won’t know what a browser is. These people are more than happy to ignore the design and put up with cumbersome usability, as long as they can find the content they are looking for. Good copy is responsible for helping people find what they are looking for and good copy should be clear, concise, and informative. Throwing some copy in at the end will more than likely be none of these things. If the content is the most important part of any website,  why aren’t copywriters embedded into the beginning of the process of  all digital agencies? They are the ones who can make the real difference to the success of any website.

Have I offended all the designers reading this yet?

You shouldn’t be offended. We should encourage designers to be part information architect , part copywriter and of course part designer. We need designers to think about the user at all stages of the design process  and get them asking the two most  important questions “Where do we want the user to go?” and “ what messaging can we use to get them there”. From a user perspective the advantage in this approach is clear, but there is an added advantage to the designer themselves. By placing considered copy into your design your clients will better understand the messaging, making it easier to get sign-off. The other advantage to the designer is not trying to force the final copy, which is always twice as long as the Lorem Ipsum placeholder, into the keyframes. Everyone's a winner.

So before you hit cmd+c on the Latin,  stop and think about what you should actually be saying.

In recent weeks I seem to be getting more and more briefs landing on my desk, requesting "web 2.0" graphics or a "Glassy effect". I find it interesting that this language has seeped into to the mainstream, however, this is a prime example of clients jumping allowing their personal preference to get in the way of their audience's preference. This way of thinking relegates the design process to simply applying a style and colouring in-between the lines and doesn't consider the design as communication.

Design should never be a style or a fashion rolled out and applied to a wireframe. Design is about relevant effective communication with your target market. It is often forgotten that the design is the first experience a user will have with your website. Before the user has read a word, they have already scanned over the page, taken in the visual language and made an instant decision on whether or not this is the right sort of site to be able to find what they are looking for. This is where good design will stand out and help guide the user through the page, without them even knowing. For the best design does not announce itself to its audience but is accepted and engaged with without them even realising.

Here at codegent, once we have identified the audience we want to communicate with and the key message which we want to leave them with we begin intensive research into that audience. We look at competitors and then look at other brands which our target audience engage in. I have written before about the crucial nature of knowing your audience but I can't stress this enough. You need to know everything about your audience, you need to know where they go online, whether they use social media, whether they access their email through a blackberry, the kind of visual language are they used to, what sort of symbols they associate with value. By getting to know your audience, you can learn the best visual language to communicate to them with .

Once we have collected this information we sit down and analyse the visual language. In the simplest terms this is identifying themes in typographic styles, colours used, style of photography and how these graphic elements are brought together. Once this visual language has been deconstructed and the meaning of all of these symbols has been identified, we can use this visual syntax to be able to create the right message for the right audience. This can then be used to guide the audience through the website, getting them to take the path we want them to follow .

This semiotic approach is at the heart of all good design. By taking this approach all design decisions become quantifiable and it removes personal preference. As much as the client's wife may want to make it "glassy", if the researched visual language doesn't support this, then it is the wrong decision to make.