Web Essentials Day One Highlights

Web Essentials 05 day 1 is over. Plenty of info floating around in my head tonight, somewhat hindered by the few beers I enjoyed at the close of the conference! So you'll have to forgive any typos or grammatical errors in this post for the time being!

Three speakers really stood out today - Jeffrey Veen, Kelly Goto and Douglas Bowman.

Jeffrey Veen

If you ever get the chance to hear this gentleman speak - then don't miss it. He's engaging, entertaining and passionate about his stuff. Particularly mountain biking. But that's another story.

Could have listened to him all day, as he spoke about getting your stuff together in such a way that it fits your users' goals. And that's really the crux of it - your users have goals, and you have stuff (content, products, whatever). Sometimes what you have to put on the website doesn't always fit neatly with what your users want or need. But what do they want or need? And what words do they use when referring to your stuff? And do they think in terms that make sense to you?

Too many questions? Yeah, there are.

Kelly Goto

I've just bought Kelly's book, so I'll go over that at a later date, but today a couple of point stood out from her presentation.

We've all had trouble getting content from clients. Kelly's suggestion is to make 2 appointments - one at the start of the week and one at the end. Meeting 1: Sit down with all the stakeholders and decision makers and don't quit until you get your wireframe done. If it takes half a day, then so be it. Then leave it a few days allowing your client to think it over, and meet again toward the end of the week to finalise it. Sounds simple! (Will have to give it a try!)

Secondly, Kelly suggested iterating your website after it's launch. Huh? Well, it's a good suggestion to stop scope creep, for a start. Let me explain.

Say you're redeveloping an old website. The old one is version 1.0 - and you're working toward your redesign - version 2.0. Along the way you'll prototype and iterate from 1.1 through till your redesign is ready to go live at version 2.0. But then the client says, "How about we include this feature?"

"That's fine," you can say, "Well schedule that for release 2.5, due next Winter." Your initial redesign stays on track, and you know you have that work coming up later and can plan accordingly.

Douglas Bowman

Not the usual CSS type presentation this time. Quite a thought-provoking part for last thing in the day, actually!

Doug briefly walked through where the web was 10 years ago, and how much it's changed to get where we are now - in order to challenge us: Where would it be in 10 years? What role would we be playing? If we knew what the industry would be like in 10 years, would we design or program differently now? What will be the next big thing that revolutionises the way we do things? If anything was possible, what would you do?

A refreshing and unexpected look at things - "zooming out" and taking a look at the horizon. Fantastic.

That's it for now - got an early start tomorrow - a brekky date with Tantek Çelik.

Oh yeah - here's the Technorati tag: WE05

A big few days... WE05 plus a Grand Final!

Well, jumping on the plane tomorrow morning to head down to Sydney for Web Essentials 05. Can't believe how quickly it's come around!

In my infinite wisdom I'm flying home on Saturday... and the North Queensland Cowboys are playing in their maiden grand final on Sunday! Didn't organise that very well, did I?

At least I have my Cowboys jersey to wear to the conference on Friday! ;)

Oh yeah, you can also read some other blogs about WE05.

Don't Click Here!

Ever had to try and convince a client not to use "click here" on their links?

Well, I have found a resource you can point them to. Want to read it? Click here!

Finally - A Tall Screenshot Grabber

The problem: capturing a whole web page - even the stuff below the fold.

I gave up looking for something that did this and have been manually taking screenshots as I scolled down the page, and stitching them back together in Fireworks.

But here it is! And it's a plugin for Firefox! How cool is that!

Edit 2007-12-06: It's actually now got it's own domain: www.screengrab.org.

IE Developer's Toolbar

How long has the Firefox Developer's Toolbar been available? Well, Microsoft have finally introduced their own for IE.

If you still use it.

Do any developers still use IE for anything other than checking if their sites display okay in it?

Making the most of your images

If any of you are interested in marketing and you're not getting the Sherpa Weekly, go kick youself in the head, and then come back to your computer and sign yourself up.

This week Anne makes a couple of interesting observations about using images on your website.

1. If you have a photo or image on your page, people will usually notice it. Many will also try and click on it. If your image is not clickable, what opportunities are you missing?


2. People will usually read text directly under an image. The lesson? Use captions! We're very well trained to look for these in print media - and this is one convention that makes sense in the online world as well.

One example I read somewhere (might have been another Marketing Sherpa article) was that you should use a link on product photos to take you to a page with not just a larger photo but also an "Add to Basket" button as well. The visitor has expressed interest in the product - why make extra work for them if they want to buy?

As for the captions, we've seen research that shows how little of the page content actually gets noticed - putting critical info in captions might be a good idea. Certainly can't hurt!

Yarrrrrrrr

Yep - it's that time of year again!

September 19 is International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

So make sure you be brushin up on ye pirate talk...

Goldmine? Try Landmine.

Goldmine must be the most complicated piece of software ever written. Sure, it might be powerful - but for a small to medium business, it's about as difficult as it gets.

Picture this scenario: I want to do a mail merge.

That's all - just a mail merge. Should be simple - right? Wrong.

I had a client call for some help with this yesterday, and after 2 hours of frustration, I finally got it figured. What a drama!

So if you need to do a mail merge in Goldmine, here's what you need to do:

1. First of all, you need to install a plugin to insert Goldmine fields in Microsoft Word. It is a free download from the Goldmine website, but I challenge you to find it. Took me 15 minutes just to find the download, after I'd spent however long discovering that I actually needed this plugin in the first place! You would think that something as fundamental as this would be easy to find.


2. Once you've got that far and inserted your fields, save the doc as a Goldmine Template from the Goldmine menu.


3. In Goldmine, do your lookup and select the contacts you'd like to include in your merge.


4. Click Schedule, then Literature Request.


5. Now, Goldmine will present you with a list of documents here that you can use for your merge. Don't choose any of them! What you have to do is select your document from the "Cover Letter" drop down list. Obvious, hey?


6. Click the Group Schedule tab and tick the selected contacts.


7. Then click the Schedule button.


8. Click View from the Menu, then Literature Fulfillment.


9. In the Literature Requests list, under Today, highlight all the contacts listed there.


10. Click the Fulfill button.

This might be great if you have a different department on a different floor that does the actual mail merge - but how many small/medium businesses have that?

If you're a corporate user, fine. Small to medium businesses: stay away! Aaaaaaaargh!

Web Essentials 05 - Less Than A Month To Go

Well, there's less than a month to go before Web Essetials 05 kicks off in Sydney. Last year's event was fantastic - I learned quite a lot - and I could have listened to Dave Shea and Doug Bowman all day.

Looks like a great program ready for this year too. I'm really looking forward to hearing Kelly Goto's part on Workflow. Always looking for better ways to get things done. Might even have to get a book signed while I'm there ;)

While there's a billion online tutorials on CSS, HTML and the like, I have found very little useful info on project management. I always had the goal (and still do) of putting something useful on here. Perhaps after this event I'll be more inspired to write.

(I've got to spend all day Saturday sitting at Sydney Airport waiting for my flight home - not much else to do during that time!)

I Finally Made My Own. Sort Of.

After however long it's been since I upgraded from Wordpress 1.2 to 1.5, I have finally created my own theme!

Well, sort of. There's still lots of the standard theme here, but I reckon I've done enough for now. I'll finish it off next month. Or year. Or something.

Or more likely ditch the whole thing and start from scratch!

Hanging on to user preferences and data

Jakob Nielsen's latest alertbox makes a few interesting points discussing The Slow Tail: Time Lag Between Visiting and Buying.
Important issues from a developmental point of view:

• Set longer expiry dates on cookies used to track visitors


• Hang on to preferences, shopping basket contents, wish-lists etc


• Don't delete landing pages designed for specific campaigns

The number of people who don't buy on that initial visit, but still convert later is really surprising. It might be a good idea to give people who choose not to purchase other options - bookmark this page, sign up for a mailing list, or some other way to help them remember to come back to you.