Firetop

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…)

Eye tracking research studies are available from relatively few web technology companies. EyeTracking Inc are one such US based company, their eye tracking service enables customers to determine where an audience are most frequently looking, and within the context of a website - on screen as they browse page content. Data is obtained by fitting willing volunteers with head gear which, in my opinion, resembles some kind of medieval torture device, or the kid at school who got bullied for having a full head brace! In reality it has to be a bit cumbersome because it contains a series of cameras which track the movements of a user’s eyes as they read web pages. The tracking provides a ‘heat map’ of hot and cold areas of a web page with hot (red) being most read. For companies employing eye tracking researchers the resulting data is massively helpful in planning site layout. (more…)

Mozilla Firefox is clearly the largest rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser; my own recent analysis put its use at 22% of the 3.5 million audience I sampled (up 2% on January 06). However, whilst popular with web users the browser is not making the life of online advertisers (or ad operations staff) any easier. Firefox is Adobe Flash enabled, but only enabled for standard in-page units such as a 728×90 leaderboard or 160×600 skyscraper. Anything that I class ‘enhanced’ rich media’ such as an ‘expand on mouse-over’ format will malfunction. (more…)

It’s a shame that SurveyMonkey doesn’t have an affiliate program because over the years I’ve set up so many accounts for customers, and recommended it to so many people that I’d have earned a bundle out of it. I’ve been at the top of the testimonials page for about six years now, my only annoyance that the job title matches the one I had years ago and I’ve moved on a long way since then. I’ve asked them to change it three times since but they haven’t… hey ho. I still stand by what I said - I found the tool to be better than Zoomerang not only because it contains the word ‘monkey’. (more…)

I found a handy image serving PHP script tonight to replace the JavaScript I’ve been using for the past six years. Essentially it’s a PHP file which can be dropped into a folder full of jpeg or gif files and called by defining the script as the source of the image. I’ve implemented it here on the blog home page so that you don’t have to see the same photograph of me each time you log in. The PHP script can be downloaded from Daniel Benjamin’s ‘A List Apart‘ website. In addition he has a newer script which can be used to serve random banners - complete with URL and ALT tag handling - something I’m often asked about so this is a good solution for those without ad servers.

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I’m getting sick and tired of seeing journalists reviewing new websites and still referring to the number of ‘hits’ a website is receiving; it’s relatively meaningless data and does NOT mean ‘visitors’. Back in 1998 I thought technology editors might wake up to this by 2006 but it seems not. A hit is recorded in a server log file for every single file downloaded per page viewed on a website - this includes images like jpegs and gifs, .txt, PDF files and page includes themselves. Just opening this blog’s home page for example causes you to make around 50 hits. To give this some perspective let me put it this way - Firetop has received 106,463 hits in August - a journalistic field day! However, the number of visits has been a lot less at 2,118 from only 1,141 unique visitors. (more…)