I've over the last few years become increasingly frustrated when the term "marketing" is used to describe actions such as publicity campaigns, or straightforward advertising. So just this once, I'll rant. Well, I'll rant for one paragraph, and then make up by talking about how great life is when businesses get marketing.

Start of rant:

Marketing is NOT advertising! Advertising is just one of the small actions that may or may not happen as part of the whole marketing activity! If you're guilty of using the word "marketing" to describe "advertising", or "publicity", you should write this out a thousand times: "marketing is finding out what customers want, and delivering it to them, making a fair profit".

End of rant.

My apologies for this rant. (I don't like ranters much, but I've wanted to do this for such a long time, and feel much better now!)

Incidentally, the definition of marketing, that it's "finding out what customers want, and delivering it to them, making a fair profit", is a slight modification of the definition given by Malcolm Auld in his book "Direct Marketing Made Easy". It's a great book by a man that gets it, and helped me to get it too.

So, what happens when businesses get marketing?

They win customers of course. I'll give three examples:

Air New Zealand

I used to love this airline, back in the days when they gave decent hot meals on long flights, served in porcelain, and gave you stainless steal cutlery.

My loyalty to Air New Zealand dwindled when they went cheap, same as all the others, and reached a low when the unofficially started discriminating against lone male travellers (though that, admittedly, might have been either an urban legend or FUD dreamed up by the competition). But to the competition I went, and flew Qantas until they too, stuffed up their quality and stopped flying between Christchurch and Wellington.

And then, earlier this year, I discovered the www.saverjet.com spoof, and Air New Zealand's bodypaint commercials. My goodness, do these guys have a brave marketing team! They worked out what the issues was that bothered me about their competitors, worked out how they can make a difference, and told me about it in a bold (almost daring) campaign.

Well done Air New Zealand, you've won me back!

Cadbury

I've never liked Cadbury's chocolate much, mainly because it's to sweet to my personal tastes, though I do have a soft spot for a few of their products, especially Crunchies.

When Cadbury changed their recipe, adding palm oil, I thought okay, I'll do my bit and tweet it. Marietjie even wrote to them to complain.

While Cadbury wasn't quite into it at first, trying to advertise their way out of a sloppy marketing decision, they certainly rose to the occasion by not only reversing their decision, but also publicly apologising for their mistake. How brave is that? They even emailed Marietjie back, thanking her for her feedback, apologised about the vegetable fat and palm oil thing, and telling her when the old recipe will hit the shelves again.

I'm impressed, Cadbury. I still prefer European style chocolate that's not so sweet, but next time I stand in the chocolate aisle in the supermarket, I'll consider buying you instead of Whittakers.

Wagamama

How to turn occasional customers that like good food into loyal brand advocates?

• Serve food that makes them feel energetic, rather than sleepy!
• Serve food that their kids love: they will bring their friends for a birthday lunches.
• Facebook and Tweet to them: they will find you and start mentioning you in their online conversations.
• Invite them to a free lunch to launch a $12 lunch: they will queue into the street, drawing even more attention.
• Give him vouchers for free fruit juice if he buys another lunch: the will be back for more.
• Start a photo competition: they will publish themselves, creating even more online conversation about your brand.
• Find your supporters' Tweets and Facebook mentions, and join the conversations.

Notice how we started with "occasional customers" but ended with "supporters"? I'm following Wagamama's marketing in New Zealand with interest, because this business gets it!

Almost five months passed since my last entry in this blog, so it's about time that I get round to it again, isn't it? So here goes.

Since February, I have:

Been working flat-out to develop the Entrybox website. Entrybox is a site that makes it easy for New Zealanders to find and enter competitions. The coolest part of creating Entrybox (using the Drupal CMS), was the challenge to stay true to the awesome grapic design, using the Zen theme as a starting point. The result is a site that doesn't look anything like Drupal (until you go to the login page that is).

Completed my MySource Matrix admin training.

Become a BlackBerry user. At first, I had my doubts about the BlackBerry, but it definitely grew on me. I actually became fond of it. It has certainly confirmed my belief that all websites should be built using web standards, and made me even more irate when I encounter Flash that is used inappropriately on a website.

Started to tweet on Twitter . Yes, I'm Twitter-pecked. I mostly tweet about #coffee, #cooking, and #baking, but also a bit about marketing, websites, and the odd social issue. Such as #cadbury stuffing up their already questionable chocolate by adding palm oil to it. Yuk. Long live De Spa Chocolate !

Did not become a slave to Facebook. Me, I prefer LinkedIn. True, Facebook is a neat way to catch up with old connections and relatives now living Far Far Away, but I just don't feel like living my life in Facebook.

Added less recipes to Rainbow Cooking that I would have liked to. Not doing so makes me feel a bit guilty, especially as the number of visitors to Rainbow Cooking continue to climb at a steady rate. Sites such as www.self-help.co.nz and all4women.co.za started to re-publish our recipes, which is really cool.

Wellington Convention Centre, 19 Feb 09, 9:00, the hall is full, wireless is up and running, and the lights just this minute dimmed and the music started rolling, we're getting the credits rolling on the screen too: Webstock 09 is All Systems Go!

Technorati Tags: webstock | webstock09

A college, who is gearing up for a large website rebuild, asked if I know of any events or seminars coming up here in New Zealand, or in Australia, in next 6 months.

My answer: Webstock 2009. The programme is not out yet, but the list of speakers is. Because it tends to have a good mix of concepts and practical topics that is geeky but not geek-only, Webstock is great for web staff who is not complete geeks. Webstock 2008 will be in February, in Wellington, and is not overly expensive. I'm going. You should too.

Technorati Tags: webstock | webstock09

Felicia from Tag Design introduced me to Balsamiq Mockups : an application that allow you to rapidly draw wireframes.

And I mean rapidly.

I used Mockups for three different projects this past week. Two of them required fast action, and Balsamiq Mockups was just what I needed.

Until now, the software I've seen and used in this category of tools, can draw anything from company org charts and flow diagrams, through to pixel-perfect mockups of websites and desktop apps. Which is why they have steep learning curves and complex toolsets.

Not so with Mockups. It doesn't try to be the next Corel Draw, it simply wants to make it easy for you to draw simple mockups. That's why Balsamiq Mockups has a two-minute learning curve. Well, almost.

All you need to do is:

1. find a pre-drawn building element from a scrolling library

2. drag the element to the sketchpad below the library

3. edit the text that describes the element

4. drag the interface to the size and position you want

It is really that easy.

To give you an idea of what you can quickly dream up in Mockups - this design took about 20 minutes to complete:

Mockups has a wide range of buttons, navigation interfaces and media objects in it's libraries.

It is easy to group objects into a single object, and Mockup's interface to move objects forward or backward it simply delightful.

Another clever aspect of Mockups is that it gives a hand-drawn look to your mockup. This is great when you create wireframes for customers because when they see the sketch-like designs, they understand that you're busy with concepts, not visual designs. Which means they don't start talking about colours and logos, but concentrate on the words and interfaces.

Balsamiq Mockups is simple. It is not overly comprehensive, but also not highly flexible. There are a few things you can't do with it:

You can't print directly to a printer. You have to save your design as a PNG and then print the image. At least it automatically saved your image files to a new revision every time, which is handy.

You can select the size of text for a given element from a drop-down box, but you can't type in the text size.

And you know what? That's okay with me. I actually wouldn't want Mockups to become too advanced. I don't want it to do everything for everyone because making it too powerful will risk will cluttering up the interface, and the result may be a complex, increase learning curve.

I hope that as Mockups mature, it will retain the simple interface and balanced library-size, that enables me to create simple wireframes, rapidly.

Technorati Tags: balsamiq | wireframes | mockups

In my presentation on 22 August 2008 at the 8th Annual Strategic Intranet & Enterprise Portal Management Summit in Wellington, I looked into aspects of merging corporate Intranet, Extranet and public websites into single synchronized systems that allow access to both staff and partners.

The challenges that I discussed included:

• Synchronising visual design and branding
• Integrating separate systems from multiple vendors into a single sign-on system
• Creating search results that are rich in context
• Finding win-win solutions to diverse requirements from teams and business units that are distributed across the globe

I find the most interesting challenge, however, to be the issues around publishers that want to use a single instance of information across multiple websites.

Re-use of content when publishing to corporate Intranet, Extranet and Internet websites

The write-once, use-many-times model is popular and rightly so: when content requires updating, a single update of the source will automatically be reflected on the multiple websites where that content has been used.

Requiring multiple instances of similar content also happens when publishing to corporate Intranet, Extranet and Internet websites.

A very simple model would be to use security levels as access levels: documents marked as Internal would appear on the Intranet, Restricted would appear on the Intranet and Extranet, and documents with a rating of Public would appear on the Intranet, Extranet and public websites.

There is a down-side to this approach: external audiences often require less information than internal audiences, but they need more context around the information. A system engineer, for instance, will be comfortable with highly detailed descriptions of the features of the products that must be integrated into a system. A salesperson may require a less detailed description of the features, but would need to know as much as possible about the benefits that these features will have for a potential customer.

Due to the need to have different levels of detail and context for different audiences, matching a single instance of information to a wide audience is not always appropriate. It sometimes mean that content must be adapted into different formats and then maintained in more than one location.

Another approach is to display additional information when required. In the example of feature and benefit descriptions, someone who is part of the system engineering group will see fully detailed specifications of a specific product, but nothing about benefits. For the same product, a sales person will see a subset of the technical specifications, but a comprehensive range of benefits. In other words, content is presented or filtered out by audience role.

What is the difference between Intranet, Extranet and Internet?

Steve Gallagher from Synapsys and I had a number of conversations on this topic in the past few months, and it was also a regular point of discussion during the summit.

Ten years ago, Steven L. Telleen wrote on this topic, and laid down a rather robust definition (relevant after 10 years) of the difference between Intranet, Extranet and Internet.

My take on it:

The Intranet is the sum of an organisation's websites and web applications used by its staff. This can range from applications such as the phone book and calendar, issue and document management systems, through to internal wikis and blogs. Mature Intranets consolidate the information and applications that a staff member requires on a personalised home page.

The Extranet: websites and application on the Extranet is meant for business partners or customers of the organisation. Note that the sites and apps that comprise the Extranet, may also be part of the Intranet. There may also be sites or apps that are part of the Extranet but not used by staff and therefore not part of the Intranet.

The Internet: any content that is not secured by a login.

To ensure data security, Extranet sites and applications are best located on a DMZ, while Intranet sites and applications belong inside the corporate firewall. This requires a physical separation between Intranet and Extranet, but the information served up by these separate systems can still be integrated seamlessly as described above.

So in the end, in terms of information, Intranets and Extranets are separated only by the roles of its users: if a website or app is used by staff, it is part of the Intranet. If it is used by users who are not staff, it is part of the Extranet. If it is open to the public, it is part of the Internet.

From that, I conclude that we had better know who our users are and what information they require!

Technorati Tags: intranets | extranets

Just one week to go before the start of the 8th Annual Strategic Intranet Summit .

I found myself being more fussy during the preparation of my presentation than usual, possibly because I'll be providing insight into how my employer's Extranet was created. The issue is that I need to provide compelling information to my fellow delegates, without providing too much insight for our competitors. As a result, I opted for a presentation that is relatively low on text, but visually rich. I choose this approach not only to not reveal too much in an electronic format, but also because I believe that modern presentations tend to loose oratory impact because we tend to rely too much on our slides.

The two most compelling presentations I have attended in the last five years was by Don Norman (at University of Canterbury) and Greg Comfort (talking about Web Standards during a seminar at my workplace). Both speakers delivered rich oral presentations that were beautifully illustrated, but not overshadowed, by their slides.

Greg is presenting at the Intranet Summit too, and I'm looking forward to listen to him! The other talk I particularly look forward too, is Michael Sampson on Collaboration.

My daughter keeps an eye on the sites that I work on. Being a bookworm and a budding cook, she expressed appreciation for the two sites that kept me busy this month: Rainbow Cooking, which is our family's recipe website, and Tell Tails, which is an online shop for children's books that I co-developed with Felicia from Tag Design. It is a fun website that I thoroughly enjoyed working on, mostly because I recognised so many of the books that my daughter and I read over the past six years or so.

The highlight of February was, without any doubt, attending Webstock 08 .

My family came along for the ride. They were having fun in downtown Wellington while I slaved at the conference: two days of drinking amazing coffee , typing 7000 character's worth of notes, and listening to prolific speakers.

My favourites included Luke Wroblewski (forget the "guru", this guy is for real!), Dan Cederholm (the reason I decided I just have got to get to Webstock) and Peter Morville (if I had a hero, it would have been Peter!). 

PS: February also included a business trip to the States. I prefer Kiwi airports any day!

It's sad that so many people consider cooking to be a boring chore, because it really is not! I find cooking up a storm of a family meal to be one of the most pleasant and productive ways to wind down after a hectic day at the office. It is so much more satisfying than cooking out of the freezer, or even worse, out of the local supermarket's deli.

Yes, Marietjie and I enjoy cooking good food. Especially traditional food. Moroccan, Mexican, Kiwi, Thai, Chinese, Italian and French, to name a few... they are all lovely, and surprisingly easy. And then there's our favourite: South African cooking.

There are two reasons why we like South African cooking. The first is that we grew up with it. The second reason is that migrants from all over the world brought their staples, flavours and techniques to South Africa over a period of three centuries, to create a truly magnificent fusion cooking.

It is fascinating to see a second wave of fusion happening to South African food: the cuisine cooked by South Africans living abroad, using local ingredients, and adding local techniques, tastes and flavours.

Marietjie and I found that South African dishes go down well with our Kiwi friends and we are frequently asked for the recipe for the dish of the day. Because almost our recipes are in Afrikaans, this required constant translation. In the end we decided to publish the recipes that we adapted and translated and this led to the birth of our Rainbow Cooking website: a collection of mostly South African recipes, in English, for people that like the tastes and flavours of migrant cooking.

Swart.co.nz, my other personal domain, used to be hosted in a data centre in the UK. I used it for email, my wife's blog, my own website, the Afrikaans in Christchurch website, and numerous test and development sites and apps.

Some 18 months ago my friend Bruce mentioned a data centre in the States so I gave them a go. They proved to be faster and cheaper than my existing hosting provider and, most importantly, much more reliable. From that time onwards I used them to host new domains, but due to the complex setup of the swart.co.nz domain, I really did not look forward to moving my personal domain to the new server. Of course the obvious answer was to reduce the complexity, so I moved my own site (this site!) and our Afrikaans in Christchurch sites to their own, new domains.

When annual renewal of the hosting of swart.co.nz came up, I took the plunge and transferred Marietjie's blog and our email accounts to the American server. It was a bit of a pallava, but ultimately worth the reduced cost and increased reliablility and speed.

Rosebank Restaurant in Christchurch has two things going for it: it has a perfectly peaceful setting (it borders on the Groynes reserve ), and serves the most wonderful South African style food.

While the restaurant has always been there (well, it has been there for ages) the South African influence is brand new. Our friends Johann and Hanna Scholtz sold Morgan's Corner and bought Rosebank Estate Winery and Restaurant in September. And asked me if I can help with a website for it.

Although building the website was hectic (we had two weeks) it was loads of fun too. I popped over frequently to discuss the site, take photos, discuss concepts, and to get feedback on the work-in-progress. This suited me fine, not only because of the hospitality of Johann, Hanna and the staff, but also because I love the setting. Every time I get out of the car there, the green fields and imposing gardens has the same effect on me: I pause a bit, and just take in the tranquillity, the wind, and the trees. It is invigorating.

Here is the link to teh Rosebank Restaurant website: www.rosebankrestaurant.co.nz.

Technorati Tags: web design | restaurant website

No, not a thriller! Just thrilling. Tonight, at the local TCANZ branch meeting, we will be digging into corporate and commercial websites that went social. Of course it is easy to get it wrong, because there is such a fine line between crowd wisdom and mob rule. Especially online. ;-)

Instead of a slide show, the talk will be a tour of websites and video clips. And I intend to get sidetracked into virtual environments.

Fantastic news for New Zealand's Web community: Webstock 08, New Zealand's definitive Web conference, is to be held in Wellington from 11 to 15 February 2008. That's going to be three days of workshops, followed by two days in conference. Great stuff!

Technorati Tags: webstock | webstock08

On Thursday 13 September 2007, at a meeting of TCANZ 's Christchurch branch, I will talk about Commercial websites that go Social.

I plan to take a rather brief look at Social websites that try to become popular and then cash in. The focus of the presentation will be on the land of challenge and opportunity that lies between Commercial and Social websites, the new breed of Commercial Socialists that challenge and change the way we do business, and how not to get yourself into trouble if you want to build one of these new-generation websites.

My previous blog entry (Can business websites become more sociable?) is a primer rather than a summary of the upcoming presentation.

On the topic of going Social: Joshua Porter recently wrote the insightful Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications and How to Avoid Them. I can recommend it. While the majority of blogosphere is praising the Social web, we also need to understand its shortcomings and problems, and it is good to see that experts and designers started to blog about the other side of the coin.

After all, to be successful in our respective markets, we need to understand opportunities as well as challenges!

Technorati Tags: social web | online business

While business websites tend to have formal, well-defined structures, social websites (built by people hanging out online) tend to have informal structures based more on hyperlinking and tags. Is the territory between these two types a barren wasteland, or a land of opportunity?

Websites by businesses

Businesses tend to have websites with well-defined structures. On the majority of these type of website, we will find that content can be located through primary and secondary menus. Using search is an option, but taxonomy and controlled vocabulary tends to be predominant.

Social websites

When online communities discovered there is life after Yahoo's forums, they promptly started to hang out at MySpace, started to publish on Flicr , YouTube and Blogger , and formed communities of interest on sites such as OnlineGroups.Net . (Okay, I know everyone mentions Flicr, MySpace and YouTube, and they start to sound boring. I might have to write a posting about the new kids on the blocks sometime. Meanwhile, try OnlineGroups.Net.) The popularity of social content exploded .

Folksonomy and collaborative tagging by the crowds became predominant, and we now tend to follow tags to see what our peers find worthwhile, interesting, fun, or cool.

Problems with social websites

There is a downside though. When compared to traditional websites, social websites are not strong in the structured navigation department. This tend to cause problems for information hunters. For instance, how do we find blog posts about a very specific topic on Technorati ? We can use search, but how do we know that we're using the correct search terms? In other words, which terms did the crowds use when they tagged (classified) the content we're looking for? Did they tag it at all?

Search only works if you know what to search for. A few months back I looked into the options available to make websites hosted in new New Zealand faster to use on the other side of the globe. Searching for the phrase "website caching" got me nowhere; so I trawled through the seemingly irrelevant search results until I spotted the phrase "web acceleration" on a random forum. Bingo. So if you don't know what you're supposed to be searching for, you have to spend some time to work that out first.

And then there is the problem of quality vs popularity. Can we trust the recommendation of the crowds? Do the crowds know best? In his book Ambient Findability, Peter Morville cautioned that "there's a fine line between the wisdom of the crowds and the ignorance of mobs." He's got a point.

These issues, and a few others, led to a healthy debate between the proponents of taxonomy and folksonomy.

Given that social websites are so popular, what is the owner of a business website to do? Do we abandon our structured content and hand over classification to the crowds?

Sociable business-websites

Or is there a middle road that will allow us to incorporate the advantages of social websites with sacrificing our structures? The answer is yes.

Amazon did not take long to add social interaction to its online shop. Not only can clients review products, but others can comment on the reviews. Customers can tag the product. The interface tend to get a bit clucky, but the functionality and the social interaction is there. The information that we find here is so useful, that it's becoming common for Yanks in Barnes&Noble or Borders to use their smart phones to go to the Amazon site to read the reviews of the books they are interested in.

This topic is currently quite popular in the blogoshere, with postings from, for example, the UIE Brainsparks and the folks at Adaptive Path .

Opportunities

There are many opportunities that open up for our business websites if we are prepared to learn from social websites. Business websites can have the best of two worlds. The trick will be to implement and maintain interfaces that enable and encourage social interaction, and then keep an eye on the social interaction, without spending too much time or resources. The businesses that can get this right, will find the territory between structured and social websites to be a land of opportunity.

Technorati Tags: social web | online business

You may have heard that people do not like to scroll.

It's a fable. The problem is not that visitors don't like to scroll, but that they often do not realise that they can do so. Scroll stoppers, as defined by Jared Spool, are design elements that prevent visitors from scrolling because they give the impression there’s nothing else on the page.

In his latest post on this topic , Jared describes how a user missed the information below the fold and said: "That’s not very much information. I don’t think these guys are serious about fitness stuff." And then left the site.

Steve Krug taught us that when a visitor looks at a home page, the questions she or he asks are: What site is this? What do they have here? What can I do here? Why should I be here and not somewhere else?

So for Jared's user the answers to questions 2 and 3 were: "not a lot". And that was the end of it.

Another fable about the design of websites is that home pages has to be very simple. Almost minimalistic. I'm not saying that your home page should describe of each and every page on your site. My point is that your home page should reveal the depth and richness of the information on your site when visitors ask: What do they have here? What can I do here?

Your home page must say: Here is the information (or product, or service) that you're hunting for. This site will solve your problem. And it will be easy too.

If your home page reflects the value proposition of your website, it will turn your visitors into engaged users. So don't believe the fables: Give them enough information to make them curious. Let them scroll.

Technorati Tags: web design | online business

"Environment Canterbury says the newly-launched water consent trading website - www.hydrotrader.co.nz - has the potential to improve transparency surrounding water use consents and to increase the efficiency of water use"

Read the full story on the Environment Canterbury website.

This is of interest to me, not only because I live in Canterbury, but also because online trading of water consents has not been done in New Zealnd before, and also because two of my friends worked on the project. (Well done, boys!)

Will Kiwi's sense to look after the environment and their increasing tendency to do their business online combine to make HydroTrader a success? It might well happen.

Technorati Tags: online business

Two new blogs to ad to your favourites:

Needles and Plastic proclaims to be thoughts and musings about information design. Now this is not a claim that can be made lightly, because Information Design is a discipline that encompassed many other disciplines. You have to be a willing, lifelong student of new disciplines, if you want to make progress in this field. But Bruce Russell and Greg Comfort being the guys they are, I guess Needles and Plastic will deliver worthwhile thoughts and musings. Keep an eye on this one.

ClickLounge is a blog by the folks at LeftClick – the Christchurch-based company that helps e-business websites to become more successful. The topics of the first couple of entries are very much about user experiences. And rightly so: an ongoing positive experience is more likely to lead to a conversion. Which is why I’ve added the ClickLounge to my favourites.

Technorati Tags: information design | user experience

Rainbow Layers, my personal website and blog, now has it's own home: www.rainbowlayers.co.nz.

All the blog entries from the old site are now here and the rest will follow as time permits.

I took the opportunity to install Drupal 5.1. What a beauty of a CMS! I really like the way the folks at Drupal.org re-organised the backend. The default theme, Garland, is quite cool, but I selected the fixed-width version of the new Zen theme for Rainbow Layers.

Zen, a simple standards-compliant theme that is easy to customise, creates reasonably clean XHTML. What I like most about it is it's ample use of white space. To be frank: the old site was a bit claustrophobic, somewhat short of breath. Zen gives the site elbow space, a bit of space to breathe.

Technorati Tags: Drupal 5 | Zen theme

On Wednesday 28 February, Greg Comfort and I will discuss some of the practical issues of Web Standards at the WDANZ Conference in Christchurch, which is organised by the Web Design Association of New Zealand. Everyone knows that Standards is the best thing since melted cheese.

Okay, melting cheese is not everyone’s cup of tea, and the same goes for using Web Standards. It can be great, or it can wreak havoc with your digestive system. In my case, I find that Standards saves me time, especially when I need to re-skin a site.

During our presentation, Greg and I will share some of our recent experiences.

Registration for the 2007 WDANZ Conference is still open.

Technorati Tags: WDANZ Conference | Web Standards

A year or two ago I was determined not to hand-code a website ever again, mostly because I don't like maintaining navigation on a static HTML site. But, as General Alcazar said, "never say never, amigo."

Last week I completed Funds 4 Photos, a four-page website that did not require anything more elaborate than static HTML. Because Fund 4 Photos is a website for a business that takes photographs for fundraising events, it has a photo gallery. Photos might be added over time, and a slightly customised version of the PhotoStack PHP album proved suitable. I used Bluefish to write the code, and the beta of Firebug 1 to debug the CSS.

Firebug deserves a special note: I started using Firebug v0.4 a couple of weeks ago, both at home and at work. The beta of version 1, which you can download from www.getfirebug.com, is more polished and easier to use, and really speeds up debugging style sheets. Firebug is an extension for Firefox, but developers that use IE, Opera, or Safari can try Firebug Lite, a JavaScript file you can insert into your pages to simulate the Firebug console.

Technorati Tags: hand coding | Bluefish | Firebug

7 to 9 March 2007 in Melbourne, Australia

This conference is aimed at Webmasters, Web Managers, Intranet Managers and Team Leaders, Web Designers, IT Managers, Internal Communication Managers, CIOs and Information Architects.

Read more about it on the Ark Group's website.

Did they say Website Managers? I guess that means I have to go! :-)

Technorati Tags: intranet usability

Web Standards NZ, the people who organised the Webstock 06 conference, just announced a day of CSS and an evening of Trade Me, blogging, travel and Web 2.0.

If you’re keen to do an advanced CSS workshop, presented by Russ Weakley, and listen to Natasha Hall (head of user testing at Trade Me), Russell Brown (blogger and media man), and Nat Torkington ( Web 2.0 commentator) – head over to the Webstock website to register.

In 1998, Jared Spool wrote an article entitled As the Page Scrolls, that questions the popular perception that user's don't like to scroll:

"Users say they don’t like to scroll. As a result, many designers try to keep their web pages short. But one of the most significant findings of our research on web-site usability is that users are perfectly willing to scroll. However, they’ll only do it if the page gives them strong clues that scrolling will help them find what they’re looking for."

Then, on 2 August this year, Jared revisited the topic, and reported:

"Not much has changed in our observations since we released our original research on the subject. Basically, users have no trouble scrolling, as long as the page is designed to accommodate it."

Read the complete story: Utilizing the Cut-off Look to Encourage Users To Scroll

An interesting click-stream study at the University of Hamburg, reported on WebSiteOptimisation.com, found that just over three quarters of links followed are those visible when the page loads. 23% of all links followed required at least some scrolling.

What does this mean?

The important stuff should be visible when the page loads. Help your visitors to find the content they want to see – or the content they need to see, which is not always the same thing. Once they are engaged (started reading), scrolling will come naturally.

Technorati Tags: scrolling | web design | click stream study

Bulletproof Web Design was brought to my attention by two friends within the same week. It took a couple of weeks before I got round to order it, and a couple of months before I got round to read it.

I was initially sceptical about the view that absolute-size keywords are a safer option than sizing text with pixels – but Dan's arguments are watertight. In my future projects, I will move away from using pixels to size text.

A tip that I find very helpful is that a container, when floated, will stretch to fit around floated child-elements inside it. Handy to know.

The reviews on amazon.com are pretty accurate. (In a fun sort of coincidence, when I added a feed to Roger Johansson's blog yesterday, I found that he posted a review Bulletproof Web Design on the 28th of last month.)

Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm is a worthwhile read – and good value for money too.

Technorati Tags: bulletproof web design | Dan Cederholm

But also, Goodbye IE 5. And maybe not too long before its time to say goodbye to IE 6?

I'm not particularly sad to see the number of IE 5.0 – and even 5.5! – visits creeping closer to 0% on the website logs that I monitor. In terms of support for Web Standards, they are pretty antiquated. Their demise is good news for designers who prefer clean XHTML Strict to the everything-goes world of table-based presentation.

Last week I had to investigate what would be involved to change the skin of a web application that has lots of green and grey in its theme, to a different corporate look that is more into blues and light greys. It was not my favourite task of the week. The tables were nested seven levels deep. Seven! Lots of hard-coded background colours. Font-tags galore. Man, does tag soup get up my nose. The best I could do with this beauty was to create new background images, which took care of most of the green, but there was no way to change the colour scheme of the application's tabs.

So here's to IE 7's quick and painless adoption which, according to Tony Chor's posting on the IEBlog, will be distributed via an automatic update to PCs running Windows XP by the end of this year. And may IE 7 entice many coders to drop tables as a layout tool. :-)

Technorati Tags: IE 7

When my colleagues in Development heard that I was about to join the forces of Marketing, a few remarked (and only half-jokingly) that I am going over to the Dark Side.

It has been almost two years and I think working for the Dark Side might have taken its toll, because I started changing the design of two corporate websites that use liquid layouts into fixed-width designs.

Yes, I used to be a staunch advocate of websites that allow content to flow naturally. The turning point came last year with the new design of my employer's main corporate website. It is a fairly complex layout, especially the product pages where the main content comprise: a summary across the content area, followed by images and feature lists neatly laid out in three narrow columns, followed by overview text that is presented in two wider columns. Believe me, I tried a liquid design, but after a significant amount of hours gave in and settled for a fixed layout. On the up side, with the fixed layout we gained  a cleaner and more consistent layout and also an average of 52 characters per line.

(In case you wondered, we achieved this using XHTML 1.0 Strict.)

Back to this year: over the next few weeks I will look into ways to achieve closer integration of our various websites. Consistency of layout is one of the factors. With three types of website (corporate, support and shop) and as many variations of mastheads, layouts and skins, a bit of consistency will be a good thing. The first step is to clean up the mastheads and the first thing that must happen to make this possible, is to fix the width of the support site and the shop.

And guess what: I quite enjoy the process. The new designs looks – well, tight. And the average character per line count will go down too, which is good. There is just nothing like breaking out of the shell a bit.

If you need adventure in your live today, why don't you take a hard look at your old liquid designs?

Technorati Tags: web design | fixed layout | liquid layout

Following up on last week's entry about Mink: During the past few days I experimented with typefaces and colours.

Selecting a palette was fun. I started with a beautiful dark red (#900, from the Ximian palette) and then used the Color Schemes Generator to calculate a tetrad colour palette.

View Mink-b.

Technorati Tags: web design

It has been a while, but I have been working on a new site layout, and I must say that it feels really good to have my favourite half-dozen CSS references lying open on my table again. The code for the new design, which I shall call Mink, is neither optimal nor clever. It is simply a rough prototype of a paper concept that I dreamed up last weekend, and hey, it's valid markup.

I've not yet given much thought to the masthead, footer and sidebar, but experimented with a six-column virtual layout. Each column is 66 pixels wide, and the columns are  spaced 20 pixels apart. The page title spans six columns, the paragraphs five, landscape images three, and portrait images span two columns.

The idea behind Mink is to solve a problem I currently have with thumbnail images on Rainbow Layers. They span half the width of the content body and are right-aligned. The text is justified. As long as the paragraphs that flow past the thumbnails are composed of short words, there is not too much of a problem with "rivers of white space", but the moment I use longer terms, readability suffers.

I have high hopes for Mink, though.

The only troublesome part of coding Mink was deciding on appropriate IDs for the divs. There is such a variety to choose from! In the end I settled for “wrapper”, “masthead”, “content”, “sidebar” and “footer”. The whole exercise made me think a lot about Doug Bowman's talk on Standardising Webpage Structure at Webstock. Doug, I'm behind you 100%.

Curious to see what Mink looks like? Take a look at Mink-a.

Technorati Tags: web design