Manchester web designer Phil Thompson
Google Analytics, my favourite (free) web stats package is to undergo a major redesign. Hooray.
This is fantastic news. I love Google Analytics, I think it’s a great piece of arsenal for any website but, I can fully appreciate that for new users it can be massively overwhelming.
RSS is something I use everyday for my own personal use that speeds up my use of the internet tenfold. Sadly, most people outside the industry still haven’t cottoned on to it yet. So I’m going to try help you to explain it to them.
This Sunday morning saw us jaunting to the easyInternet opposite Tottenham Court tube station for the mission of obtaining Glastonbury tickets. I love going to see bands but I despise giving my money + extortionate booking fee + high postage price (or in some cases you have to pay to have the tickets emailed to you and printed with your own ink!!!!)
Last week, I talked about the importance of accessible web design and how to easily make the images on your website more accessible. This week, I’ll be talking about making your hyperlinks more accessible.
The internet as a medium has the potential to be very accessible. Telephones can alienate the deaf/hard-of-hearing, and television can alienate the blind/visually impaired but email and the web are great tools for people of all abilities.
Quickly make your check boxes and radio buttons more accessible and usable by adding a label and an id.
I live in Manchester, and I absolutely love it. I think it’s so great that loads of people should come and visit to see the city’s sights. So why does Manchester’s new tourism website visitmanchester.com not impress me in the slightest?
A tip often mentioned for improving checkout drop-off rates is to remove distractions from the checkout process.
Certain figures get bandied about for checkout drop-off rates from 60-90%. Every ecommerce site’s products and therefore, customers are different and so are their checkout processes, so it’s difficult to state what is the average complete rate for an online checkout. The best solution is to monitor what drop-off rate and then try to improve it.
A month ago I wrote that little design changes can make a big difference to conversion and now here’s the conclusive proof.
This week saw the launch of G24 - a PDF version of the Guardian that is updated throughout the day.
Here is the blurb:
G24 brings you the latest stories from the Guardian, Guardian Unlimited and the Observer - updated throughout the day. There are five pdfs to choose from: Top stories, World, Media, Business and Sport.
In his article Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Re-align Cameron Moll talked about not redesigning a site completely and certainly not just for aesthetically reasons but mroe a redesign (or realignment) should be done purely for the purpose of improving the goals of a website.
Really small, some might say insignificant design changes can have large effects on your conversion rates, for instance at work last week, at the request of a colleague, I moved the add to basket form from below the product description - which for most people was below the 1024*768 page-fold - and low and behold the percentage of people adding items to their basket increased dramatically.
A small change plus another small change and another and so on and so on add up to a big change but without the disadvantage of alienating your customers who have to get used to your old design. By slightly changing certain aspects of you site you can upgrade your customer’s experience hopefully without them noticing anything has changed.
Having a website that is little more than a splash page which offers visitors a choice of an online store or an instore-offers-website is a collossal mistake in web design. This is a mistake that we’ve made at work, but have recently rectified. This is also a mistake that quite alot of UK (newly-online) retailers make - especially our competitors. Read the rest of this entry »
Google Analytics is awesome and it’s free so it’s double-awesome. The things that can be measured include the drop-off rates for your checkout process, revenue by source (e.g. which website has sent you the most money).
Recently at JJB I’ve been taking it a step further by using GA to analyse the problems people are having with our site.
The first measurement I’ve added this week, checks how many people try to add an item to their shopping basket when the product size is out of stock. For this to make sense, you have to realise that our website has a select menu on the product details page where the user selects their desired size and if that size is in stock the add basket button becomes visible as does the select quantity option. When stock is not present the user is told so.
The second and more important measurement, from a usability point of view, is the counting and aggregation of the error messages the users on our website get. To be honest, this information isn’t giving me too big an insight as I am aware of a lot of the problems (thanks to Usability Testing with real people) but they do add weight to my suggestions to change the site in places.
Simply add this code to your page:
<script type="text/javascript"> urchinTracker('error/<?= $individual_error_message ?>'); </script> This will produce a folder in your content drilldown option in GA called error. N.B. For this to work your errors must be set up in an array so you’d call the above script multiple times in a loop or have multiple calls to the urchinTracker() JavaScript function for each error message otherwise, the data will be difficult to aggregate and therefore read.
It’s still early days for this data but hopefully, it will not only highlight issues I’m aware of but issues that I’m not and it goes to show how you can use Google Analytics to be even more valuable than it already is.
Let’s face it people, URLs need to be people and search-engine friendly; People need them as navigational aids and search engines love those keyword-laden pieces of loveliness.
It can be difficult to have a URL that represents the page title and fits in nicely without any <span>20 or random characters e.g. £</span>*&.
My favoured solution is to convert a page title into a URL friendly format and store it in its own field in the database. NB I don’t use it on this site but, Textpattern (which runs this site) does use a similar thing: e.g.
People friendly URLs using PHP, MySQL and mod_rewrite
becomes
people_friendly_urls_using_php_mysql_and_mod_rewrite
When creating a new page, be it a blog article, or a piece of news or whatever, I’ll give it a title and then just before uploading it to the database I’ll run it through a function that removes any nasty characters, then when I upload it I use two separate fields title and title_html.
The function looks like this:
function create_url()
{
global $url;
$url_searches = array(” “,”á”,”â”,”ã”,”ä”,”Ã¥”,”æ”,”ç”,”è”,”é”,”ê”,”ë”,
“ì”,”Ô,”î”,”ï”,”ò”,”ó”,”ù”,”ú”,”û”,”ü”,”fuck”,”shit”,”bollocks”,
“cunt”,”twat”,”tit”,”cock”,”dick”,”_-_”,”(”, “)”, “*”,”&”,”‘”,”!”,”%”, “/”, “?”,”£”,”$”,”%”, “,”);
$url_replacements = array(”_”,”a”,”a”,”a”,”a”,”a”,”a”,
“c”,”e”,”e”,”e”,”e”,”i”,”i”,”i”,”i”,”o”,”o”,”u”,”u”,”u”,”u”,”f—”,”s—”,”b——-”,
“c—”,”t—”,”t–”,”c—”,”d—”,”_”,”", “”,”",”and”,”",”",”",”",”",”",”",”",”");
$url = strtolower($_POST['url']); // turn url into lowercase
$url = str_replace($url_searches,$url_replacements,$url); // create browser-friendly url from title
return;
}
This code is far from perfect, as I am not a PHP expert. I invite people to improve this as it would be easy to do so.
When the page is called a MySQL script grabs the webpage based upon that title as long as it unique e.g:
SELECT * FROM articles WHERE title_html = $_GET['title'];
It may be that you don’t even use the title to get the page, you may have an id or other variable in the URL that is used and the title is just for show. Either way, this is a technique that works and gets both peopel and serach engines to use your URLs effectively.
The other option, as I see it, is to run the function everytime on the site whenever you link to the page within your site eg:
<a xhref=”/folder/link<?= create_url($row['title']); ?>”>link text</a>
This is not the method I’d recommend as it adds more things to think about and more code throughout your pages.
This evening saw the 2nd meeting of Manchester Digital’s Accessibility Working Group, based at the National Library for the Blind in Bredbury, Stockport (UK).
Although, I’d seen a little bit of screen readers in the wild (I downloaded a trial of JAWS a while ago but, didn’t get very far) and studied their potential application, I’d still not really had any interaction with them. Read the rest of this entry »
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