Firetop

This evening I attended my first British Interactive Media Association event at the BT Centre in Central London. I finally became a member of BIMA last month so that I could attend this event entitled ‘The Great Facebook Debate’. Facebook has seen phenomenal growth in the UK in the past twelve months - now at ten million users according to one of the evening’s slides. However, it’s not really clear to me how anybody is going to monetise this social networking tool without impacting on the user experience; yesterday whilst logged into Facebook I was delivered a leaderboard ad for ‘Phoenix University, Arizona’ – you would have thought that my detailed profile would more than adequately provide a better optimised advertising experience for my demographic! Where’s Google Adsense or Amazon ‘related products’ generating referral commission? (more…)

Some of you may have noticed that earlier this month I changed the colour scheme of this website from pastel blues to ‘vibrant’ oranges (in keeping with the lovely Dorking sunset photograph I added to the header). One of the major upsides of this theme change has been the doubling of Google Advert click-throughs - which means increased ad revenue. I’m now seeing average banner click-throughs in excess of 1% each day, and it won’t be long before I receive my second payout, much speedier than the first $100 which took about six months. So why has the new colour scheme caused this increase in clicks? (more…)

A Firetop client recently had problems with an impolite search engine robot which was indexing links on their website to ‘add to basket’ when it should have followed instructions and ignored them. The result was that many items were being added to a non-existent basket and taken ‘off sale’ for several hours at a time (they are unique one-off items and have to behave that way). Having fixed the matter and installed a new ‘basket watching’ function on the client’s customised Content Management System the question came up – “Why, when shopping online, do so many genuine people still abandon their transactions? (more…)

April 1st saw the launch of the new website for the African Child Trust - a UK charity supporting the education of widows and orphaned children in Africa. Frequent readers may remember the ACT open day I attended in October 2006; I’ve been working with ACT for a number of years to support their web activities free of charge (we all need a bit of karma don’t we!). After two years of planning and development at my end (Suzie_Q included), and with the kind donation of free build services by Atto New Media, ACT have a shiny new website. On the back end is a Content Management System built with TYPO3 - giving the staff at ACT free reign to edit their content without waiting on developers. Should you be feeling particularly generous please visit the new site and test out the online donation options… there are plenty of children who need sponsoring so that they can go to school. (more…)

As we moved into 2007, Forrester Research identified that 81% of broadband users now have pop-up blocking software installed. According to the National Statistics Office, UK broadband users account for more than 73% of the UK’s Internet audience. With such information available it’s fairly safe to assume that next to nobody will see a pop-up campaign on screen. The continual demise of the traditional pop-up advert has surely reached its climax; pop-ups are beyond terminally ill, they’ve flatlined and there’ll be no resuscitation. (more…)

I removed the Snap preview window functionality from this blog yesterday. It was responsible for generating the preview shots of websites when you moused over links to external websites. The poll I ran on the right hand menu clearly came out that it was ‘very annoying’ so not being one to ignore customer research… down it came. With hindsight I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised - clicking to a page to find it’s not what you wanted and having to click back isn’t that much of an inconvenience - in fact it’s half the fun of browsing. At least we all know now though - don’t go for Snap preview functionality.

Technorati Tags: snap preview, web usability

This morning I visited the Grange Fitzrovia Hotel in London to attend a Forrester Research presentation. There the folks at Forrester went through the results of their second 2006 UK Internet user study. Forrester run such surveys every 6 months, collecting user data from over 130,000 UK consumer profiles visiting the UK’s most popular websites. Typically this data is collected through invitation to an online survey, as a visitor surfs a website. Participants are questioned over their basic demographic information such as age, sex and income - data which is then reviewed against their own described online behaviour to identify trends. For me the results were fascinating, giving a great insight into the real UK usage levels of blogs, social media, mobile phones and media sites. (more…)

Last week I managed to pick up a cold, one of those ones where you feel it coming on for a few days, do your best to fight it by drinking lots of orange juice… but in the end wake up at 3am in a cold sweat and a memory full of nonsensical fever dreams (mine usually involve cats dancing on tables). I’ve been exhausted for the past four days, so the weekend was a frustrating write-off - no trips out of the house at a vital ‘Christmas shopping’ time… just Web, TV and Xbox Live. I did manage to find a few hours to upgrade this blog a bit with some useful functionality though - ‘Mapstats’ and ‘Snap Preview’ of most interest. (more…)

Tonight I received an email from my domain registration vendor Fasthosts, it offered me five free credits on the Fotolia image bank website. Fotolia allows both individuals and professionals to buy and sell their photographs or illustrations legally - at reasonable rates too (£0.57!). Having gone there to check it out I found it pretty good. I purchased four useful high quality images using my free credits, and loaded one or two of my own photographs to see if they might be saleable. This website looks like a great alternative to the likes of Getty who greatly irritated me earlier this year by sending a £1000+ fine in my direction. (more…)

This week BBC online reported on a survey criticising major websites for not doing enough to make their virtual presence accessible enough for the disabled. However I was puzzled by the BBC’s accompanying photograph of a man in a wheel chair using a computer, this puzzled me because being in a wheel chair doesn’t actually stop you browsing websites however they’ve been constructed. It’s the visually impaired who are affected by this matter, not people without use of their legs. The article went on ‘The World Health Organisation estimates that there are around 600 million disabled people worldwide, which represents about 10% of the world’s population’… OK yes they do, however, the WHO site also says that a much lower 2% of the world’s population are visually impaired. Further research shows that half of this 2% (1% of the world’s population) have cataracts and live in developing countries. (more…)