Recently in Web Development Category

I seriously dislike Microsoft products for the most part.  Especially their browser.  As a web designer, Internet Explorer has been a thorn in my side for the better part of a decade.  But, as sad as it is, the world needs Microsoft.  What we no longer need is IE6.

If you've read any of this blog, you know that I am a big proponent of using the next best thing.  Moving forward with technology, ideas, solutions, and standards.  Right now, supporting IE6 specifically is the biggest hurdle I have to overcome on a daily basis.  It's old technology that doesn't support current web standards, yet 15-20% of web users still use it as their primary browser.

No one wants to build a site that doesn't work properly for 1/5 of their target audience, but the time and money wasted on building a site that holds up in today's markets and is IE6 compatible is ridiculous.  It's 2009!  Designers and programmers should not have their creativity and ingenuity handcuffed because people still choose to use a browser that doesn't support advanced CSS or XHTML.  The research, the hacks, the workarounds, the extra lines of code, the extra processes that slow the site down... they aren't worth the money spent by companies and developers. Especially when their user base can upgrade their IE browser for free.  Yeah that's right, it's FREE.

Afraid of upgrading your IE browser? Upgrading your OS to Vista left a bad Microsoft taste in your mouth?  I don't blame you.  OK, here's another solution then. Download Firefox... it's FREE.  Download Chrome... it's FREE.  Hell, download Safari... that's also FREE.   No it's not just for a Mac.  They all support the latest web standards and make an attempt to continue upgrading on a semi-frequent basis.

If you won't do it for me or the benefit of the designer community, do it for the economy.  Abandon IE6 so clients don't insist on being compatible, and designers like myself can charge them less for development time.  If you'd like to further support bringing down IE6,  check out this site to get involved.

I had a need for an internet faxing service earlier this month and after a little research, I decided to try the eFax trial service.  Basically, you sign up for a full eFax account, give them everything including your billing information, and if you decide you don't want it, you cancel your account before the 30 days are up.

Today, I decided it's time to cancel before I get nailed with a fee.  While eFax proclaims "Easy Faxing Anywhere", it should also state "Canceling Near Impossible".  There is nowhere, I repeat NOWHERE, on the eFax site that gives you an option to cancel.  After much frustration, I decided to try contacting eFax to get it done.  On the top navigation on the site, I went to "Contact" and then clicked the live chat link.

This is the conversation I had with a delightfully blunt customer service representative.  Actually with the speed of the replies, it might have even been a bot:

Please wait for a site operator to respond.  You are currently number 1 of 1 in the que.  Thank you for your patience.

You are now chatting with 'Soi'

Soi: Welcome to our sales chat.  How may I help you?

Scott Bouchard:  Hello Soi, I'd like to cancel my eFax account and can't seem to find the option on the website account page.

Soi: I am sorry to hear that you wish to leave us.  We have a special support team to assist you with the cancellation process.  Please use the following webpage to get Chat support for cancellation. https://www.efax.com/en/efax/twa/page/chat

Soi: https://www.efax.com/en/efax/twa/page/chat

Soi: Thank you for contacting the Sales Team.  Hope you found the session helpful.  Goodbye!

Chat session has been terminated by the site operator.

Well... I tried the link, and it didn't work.  I tried on Safari, Firefox, IE... none of the browsers were able to launch the chat after I filled in my name and e-mail.  Fun times.  So I decided to try the "FAQs" option at https://www.efax.com/help/faq.

In the search I typed "Cancel" and received 2 choices for an answer.  I chose "How to Cancel your eFax Account (2901)".  This page stated the following:

How to Cancel your eFax Account

If you are considering cancelling your eFax account because you are having a problem using the service, keep in mind that the solutions to many common problems can be found in this "Help" section.

If our online help is insufficient or you wish to cancel your eFax account for another reason, please click the blue "Chat Now" button below or click HERE and a Customer Service representative will assist you. Please note that your account should not be considered cancelled until so confirmed by Customer Service.

If you are an eFax Plus user, and you are cancelling your account near the end of your billing month, please be aware that you may still be charged for the next month. If this occurs, simply contact us and we will issue a refund.

I realize that the link here sent me to the same page that Soi tried sending me to that didn't work previously, but for some odd reason I decided to try it again.  To my surpirse, it worked on the first try and the bottom of my page launched a chat.  Here's what followed:

Welcome to chat.
The session has been accepted.
{- Stanley K.}    Hello, Scott. Welcome to j2 Global online support. I am Stanley, your online Live Support Representative. How may I assist you?
{Scott Bouchard}    Hi Stanley, I'd like to cancel my eFax account and am having difficulty trying to do so.
{- Stanley K.}    You can cancel your account through this chat session. Do you wish to cancel your account now?
{Scott Bouchard}    Yes please.
{- Stanley K.}    I am sorry to hear that you wish to cancel. Could you please provide me with your Fax number and PIN for verification?
{Scott Bouchard}    1-###-###-####
{Scott Bouchard}    ####
{- Stanley K.}    Thank you for providing your information. Please type the number corresponding to your reason for cancellation:
1) Moving to another provider
2) Bought a Fax machine
3) Business or role changed
4) Short term project completed
5) Financial reasons
6) Problems with Faxing or Billing
7) Dissatisfied with Quality of service
8) Too Costly
{Scott Bouchard}    8
{- Stanley K.}    Thank you very much for your prompt reply. Please give me a moment.
{- Stanley K.}    Scott, we understand that currently you may find it expensive to pay the monthly fee. In this situation, we will waive the monthly fee for the next two months. This will allow you to use the fax service without a monthly fee for the next two billing cycles.
{- Stanley K.}    Your eFax account will be credited with $33.90. We are suggesting this so that you can give it a second thought, as you will not be paying any monthly fee for the next 2 billing cycles, usage charges applicable for sending faxes.
{- Stanley K.}    As you will not be charged the monthly fee for the next two months, you could keep the account till then. If you still feel that you do not have any use for our services by the end of the two months credit period, please feel free to contact us anytime. Will that be fine ?
{Scott Bouchard}    That sounds fine, as long as I am not charged until then.
{- Stanley K.}    Scott, as stated above in these 2 months credit period you will not be charged the monthly fee of $16.95 for 2 months, usage charges applicable for sending faxes and this amount will be credited to your eFax account and not to your credit card. After the end of the 2 months credit period, you will get charged the monthly fee, so, all you would need to do is contact us before the end of the 2 months credit period and we will process your request immediately.
{- Stanley K.}    I'm glad that you have decided to stay with efax. I will update your account with the offer right now. I'm sure that you will have a great experience. Your account will remain open until we hear from you.
{- Stanley K.}    Is there anything else I may assist you with today ?
{Scott Bouchard}    No that's all. Thank you Stanley.
{- Stanley K.}    You are welcome.
{- Stanley K.}    It was indeed a pleasure assisting you.
{- Stanley K.}    Thank you for contacting j2 Global online support. Good bye and have a nice time.
The user has ended the session.

Yeah, yeah... I know.  I'm a sap for free stuff.  But in my defense, I know I'm going to need another fax service next month and was just going to sign up and try another service in another week or so.  But, I did finally discover how to actually cancel the eFax account.

I've also found (but have not confirmed) that you can cancel your efax account at this number: 1-323-817-3205

A handful of the largest sites were brought down last night by the surge of traffic that ensued after news of the death of the King of Pop hit the wires.

Google went down for over a half hour for some users due to the weight of traffic, and many were receiving the message "Your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application".  The search term "Michael Jackson Died" had bombarded Google's servers so fast, so frequently, and in such a volume that it's automated system shut down the keyword.  It wasn't until the term was manually released that users could receive their news on M.J.'s death again.  Google trends described the "Hotness" of the search term as volcanic: http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=michael+jackson+died&date=2009-6-26&sa=X  7 of the top 10 searches had something to do with Michael Jackson throughout the day.



The Michael Jackson Wikipedia page also had to be brought down do to the increased traffic and the bombardment of requests to update the page.  As conflicting news reports were released, users and fans began an editing war on his page trying to get the latest and correct information up.

Twitter also crashed (not a big surprise actually), with unconfirmed reports stating that there were 66,500 tweets containing the words "Michael Jackson" within an hour of the first news of his hospitalization.  Supposedly twitter registered that M.J. based tweets were 15% of the global total yesterday, the highest ever single subject tweet volume.

TMZ.com broke the news, and later that night broke itself when the traffic became too much for it to handle.  The LA Times was the first to confirm the reports, and also succumbed to the influx of traffic shortly after.

One site that managed not to break was Bing.  But, that's because Bing didn't pick up on the story for hours after the event.

While I think M.J.'s lifestyle and choices became somewhat questionable later in life, I can't deny that his talent and music were a large part of my childhood and he will be sorely missed by millions.  Rest in Peace M.J., you left your mark in more ways than we ever thought you could.

I found an interesting feature of Bing this afternoon.

First, go to Google and do a search for Bing.  My search found about 47,800,000 results and displayed the first 10.  Now do a search for Yahoo!.  This search turned up about 2,460,000,000 results for me.  That's a lot of real estate Google allows for other search engines in the market, and rightfully so.  A search in Google gives you everything you could possibly want that it has in the index in a fairly logical order of importance.  The user gets to choose what to ignore.  Sounds like a true search to me.

Now go to Bing and search for Google. I don't know about you, but I get 1 result displayed.  It says it found 184,000,000 results, but only opted to show me 1.   No supporting stories, no news listed underneath, no other websites, just Google.  You have to click the link below to "search for other results containing Google" in order to see more.  Now search for Yahoo!.  Again, I get 1 result displayed.  It's the same for Ask.com.  However, if you search for Bing, you get a full display of the first 14 of 6,270,000 results.

I also found that a handful of news sites are treated the same way.  CNN, Fox News, ESPN, The New York Times, and probably more.  Thankfully my main source of news, BBC, has been excluded from this treatment, which actually helps me prove my point.  A search for BBC gives you a ton of results on the first page including, sub sites, news articles, and video clips.

Seems like Bing has restrictions built into it that greatly limit the exposure of certain competitive companies in its search results.  I'm not sure who the genius is behind that one, but come on Microsoft...  do you really have to be that petty?  You want to be the next best search engine next to Google?  Then take a page from their book and treat just about every search the same.  Find everything you can, lay it all out there for us in an order that makes some kind of sense, and we'll figure out what we want from the results. Hell, we might even learn something new a few pages down.

Hooray another search engine... sorry "decision engine" according to Microsoft.  What's does Bing mean for people like me?  New rules, new headaches, and more importantly new research.  While it's still a fledgling at this point, Bing has sparked enough interest to make me actually care about trying to devote extra effort into gaining ranking somewhere other than Google, which still holds 60% of the search engine market share.

Don't get me wrong, I always try to rank everywhere.  But, with such a fickle science as SEO, once I gain optimal ranking on Google, I stick to whatever I'm doing until I see a fall off.  Sort of a "If it's not broken, don't fix it" mentality. If you try to do too much you can sometimes get nailed with a penality.  While a lot of us who spend a substantial amount of time with SEO know what will and will-not affect our ranking... sometimes you just get blindsided.  Personally I feel maintaining ranking is somewhat simple, but fixing something I accidentally broke is an absolute nightmare.

That said, I don't see too much difference so far in the ranking of sites I maintain on Bing versus the old ranking in MSN Live Search from a few weeks ago.  Either I'm doing everything I'm supposed to be doing for every search engine (which is highly unlikely), or the algorithm hasn't changed that much.  While Microsoft has gone from a 9% share to an a 11% share in the search engine market with Bing, I'm going to treat it as a new wrapper for the same product.  Well... that is until I see some major issues with the ranking of the sites I manage.  I will however start running tests of cause and effect in Bing for some of the sites that don't do so hot on either search engine.

There is one change I can tell you for sure though.  The old link for submitting your site to Live Search is dead, and it doesn't direct you to where you need to go (which in my opinion is pretty half-assed by Microsoft).  For those of you not in the know, this is a tool for submitting your site to the Microsoft web crawler, MSNbot, to hopefully have your new site found and indexed faster.  Does it really work, who knows?  But, I'm all for using every tool at your disposal.  The new link for submitting your URL to Bing is here.

What is poor web design?  How can you tell it's not good?  Why does it matter?  How do I fix it?  These are a few of the questions I'm asked on a weekly basis by clients and sponsors.  Here's my take on things.

Well for one, if it's poor design, it's not design at all.  An actual "design" has a plan and a goal behind it, and if those are not represented in the final product... you failed and didn't really design anything.  You manufactured a waste of everyone's time and money.   Well, that's not entirely true.  There's plenty of poorly designed websites that work out there, but they definitely do not work to their potential and in the end drive users somewhere else.  I really debated citing a few examples of what I mean, but it's probably best that I don't.   I don't want to hurt the feeling of any past or potential future clients.

The internet is the best media source at our disposal for marketing right now and it's all because the internet has given consumers the ability to find whatever they want, whenever they want, from whomever they want.   In turn, it also gives advertisers the ability to push their products to a more targeted audience. The other sources of media that aren't able to follow suit are suffering.  Print - dying.  Direct mailers - dead.  Radio - a joke.  Even television has changed.  Television production companies have to compete with streaming Online Videos, Tivo's, DVRs, and the shortening attention span of consumers who can find what they want at the touch of a button.  Commercials are increasingly directed at advertising more television shows, and less products.  The product advertising is more focused inside the shows as product placement.

I'm off subject, sorry.

There's 4 essentials to keeping your site from being a failure.

1) Brand Yourself
Everyone has a brand.  Your colors may be offensive, your logo may be terrible, but you can still make it all work without redesigning them.  Even if you only have 1 color, there is a series of other colors and hues that complement it.  Pick 2 - 4 colors, and make those your branding colors.  These are what you use whenever you are creating something that applies directly to your brand.  Unless your logo incorporates a rainbow, don't waiver.  It's not necessarily always a bad thing, but if you use every color, it becomes very hard to use it as a branding tool.

Even if your logo isn't present, you can use the colors to remind them. Like...  "Black and Yellow".  What came to mind?  I'm a dork, so I thought Batman, but for arguments sake and due to the industry I work in, let's say you thought Sprint.  But that's what you want, instant recognition.

Regarding the logo, don't be afraid to use it or parts of it everywhere.  If the logo is simple and clean, stamp everything with it.  If it's complex and nasty looking, use a piece of it.  Even if it's just a word, pull a defining letter or character out of it, and use that as a shape or accent around the site.  Fade it back.  Use an outline.  Make it a bullet.  There's a million ways to do it.  But never give up on your logo.  Even if you don't like it, use it and find ways to make it work.

2) Make Your Objectives Clear
The following sentence is poor marketing on my part, but it's necessary.  Click off this page and go to any other site for 5 seconds, then come back.  5...4...3...2...1.  Thanks for coming back, I appreciate it and so do my bosses.  What did that site want you to do?  What was their main offering?  You don't know?  Epic fail.

Every site has an objective.  Sign up for this, watch that, download this, click here, fill out this form, learn more, BUY SOMETHING, etc.   If the user doesn't get hit with that message within 5 seconds, there's a 99% chance that the site impression was worthless.  Sure they may stick around and read something, but generally if the objective didn't catch their eye off the bat, it's not going to entice a click later (unless you have some seriously persuasive editorial skills).

3) Deliver on Your Promises
This one's simple.  Someone clicked on your objective because it said, "SIGN UP FOR FREE STUFF".  So they voluntarily sign up for all your free stuff.  Weeks later, the only free stuff they received was spam e-mail...   Bad dog.  You duped them.  This basically means that consumer, if they have a grade school education, will never sign up for anything you have to offer again.

Now if you give them free stuff AND spam, I'm all for that.  That's beneficial for you and them.  Just make sure the free stuff gets there.

Oh, and one other suggestion, don't force people into signing up if you can avoid it.  No one likes being forced into anything, especially the American consumer.  Let your impressive marketing skills entice them.  Make them want it.  If you've got skills and they still don't want it, they probably aren't your target audience.

4) Be Organized
There's two types of consumers.  One is looking for something, and the other one is just passing through.  If your objectives are clear as in point #2, that markets to the people that weren't looking but are now interested.  The rest of your site needs to be designed and laid out to market to the other consumer.  The one doing research and comparing products.  The one looking to find out where their money would be best spent.  If they can't find your information fast and easy, you lose.  Off to another site they go.

Your navigation has to make sense.  It has to be simple and tiered.  Another good practice is to make it so that there is only one way to get to each item in the navigation (minus a footer area, which has become a TOC for a lot of sites).  Don't have 9 links all over the page in different areas, all with different names, but going to the same place.  It's confusing and frustrating.  People are unsure if the link is really going to bring them where they want to go, and if after they click they are still unsure, they'll want to click everything else that also might be the right link.  They end up spending more time looking instead of seeing.

That's my take on web design.  It doesn't have to be pretty to work, but it needs to make sense and it needs to represent EXACTLY what you want the consumer to see and do.   It's not a perfect science, and there's a lot of potential to get carried away with a web site.  Determine what your main goals are, make a plan, and stick to it.  Good luck.

I jumped on the Twitter wagon a month or so ago and like almost everyone else in marketing, I used twitterfeed to abusively spam topics of interest across the Twitter interface in an attempt to gain exposure and social prowess in my field of expertise. I've had a change of heart.

While now unethical in my eyes, my strategy worked.  I basically set my Twitter on auto pilot. My twitterfeed would pull from 5 or 6 of my favorite rss feeds every hour or so.  It would automatically take a recent story and send the title of the article or blog and a link to with a tweet. I also used socialtoo to auto follow anyone that followed me.  Both services combined made it actually look like I was involved and was socializing with the the rest of the Twitter world.  My followers were increasing at what I thought was a fairly impressive rate.

But then something happened.  I actually wanted to socialize with Twitter.  I discovered that people like me were just... spam.  Twitter Spam.  It's actually out of control in my eyes.  People tweeting just to tweet.  They don't even know what they are tweeting most of the time by using twitterfeed.  It's not original contributions.  Robots talking to robots, following robots who followed them.

However, In some cases, I think it's fine.  Like with the TMCnet twitter.  This tweets every article we publish.  That's all it does.  It's not meant to be social.  It won't direct message you.  It won't @ you.  It won't RT (retweet) you.  If you are following it, you know that's all it's going to do.  It will tell you what we published, and if you are on twitter constantly, it may be the best way we can reach you.  A glorified RSS feed for our site.  We know exactly what we are tweeting, because we wrote it.

I think Twitter could take dramatic steps at stemming the spam abuse while further increasing its user base by adding filters to the interface.  Personal preference filters to be exact.  Twitter already tracks where your tweets come from.  When I tweet from my Storm the tweet comes tagged with "from twitterberry".  When twitterfeed tweets, the tweet says "from twitterfeed".  As an example, I think Twitter should allow you to have all twitterfeed entries removed from your homepage.  In my case it would probably weed out 95% of the tweets that I follow.  Now I don't mean to just point out twitterfeed, I know there are a multitude of other services out there, but it's the one I am familiar with.  I'm suggesting there could be filters for all.

Now, before anyone calls me out on it, I still use twitterfeed.  It tweets my blog entries for me, and it tweets articles from sites that I feel publish some of the best SEO advice out there.  But, it does this once a day. I have shut everything else down.  Every other tweet you see now is direct from me.  While I suppose these filters would still affect my strategy on Twitter, I think it could only make it a stronger social media tool in the long run.

Twitter is buggin today.

I just ran through my twitter page and noticed I can't delete my tweets anymore, because there's no trash icon.  Careful what you say today, because you can't take it back, at least for a little while.  You can follow the pandemonium it is causing across the social network here.

If you're in desperate need of a trash icon RIGHT NOW, this link is the best I can offer you.

Other than that, I'm stuck and waiting with the rest of you.

So, today I learned something.  Studies from top universities don't apply to the real world.

A recent study from the University of Melbourne has "concluded" that those who surf the Internet for fun during office hours actually increase their productivity.  Read more about their ground breaking research here (yes I rolled my eyes when I typed that, but I refuse to use an emoticon).  Essentially there is conclusive research now that goes completely against one of my earlier entries titled Facebook is Killing Productivity.

Dr Brent Coker, from the Department of Management and Marketing, says that workers who engage in 'Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing' (WILB) are more productive than those who don't.

That quote alone disqualifies this study for me.  WILB?  Really?  Not only did you spend the time on a research project devoted to creating a defense for lazy people around the world, but during said research project you also found time to create a useless acronym for it.

Example of what will NEVER happen:

Boss - "Scott, what have you been doing? I need that site up and running yesterday!"

Me - "Don't worry boss, I'm WILBing, I'll be 9% more productive later"

Boss - "Oh, my bad, please continue"


You know what WILB is? It's an AM radio station in Canton, Ohio, USA, that offers Catholic programming.  It will never be anything else.

Here's another quote from Dr. Coker that proves he doesn't understand the human race, or at the very least Americans, "Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days work, and as a result, increased productivity."

We are a society of people who don't know the definition of MODERATION.  If you give people an excuse to slack off, 95% of us will take you up on it.  Of that group, I'll bet 80% will abuse it.

Of course, anything in moderation is fine.  You could of asked me for that advice instead of funding a research project.  But, we are a society based on indulgences, and it's leading to bad habits.  A lot of us are incapable of deeming what is and what isn't unobtrusive, and we could use less excuses.

This was actually one of the more disappointing tracks from this week at SES 2009 so far.  I don't mean to complain about Facebook any more than I already have on my blog, but for a company that is being regarded as one of the hottest marketing tools today... this just felt unprofessional and for the most part worthless to anyone that was already familiar with the social platform.

 

Kasey Galang, Product Marketing Manager and Rebecca Sawyer, Online Sales Operations Manager at Facebook spent 30 minutes trying to guide us through the social graph and provide tips and tricks for leveraging and optimizing our advertising on Facebook.

Kasey isn't much of a public speaker, and the lack of fresh information coupled with her monotone and very unenthusiastic voice really got this track off to a slow start.  Rebecca was a bit more captivating but she followed up with information that I felt was mostly common sense.  The question and answer session was comical.  After each question the two girls would whisper to each as if they were contestants preparing an answer for the old Double Dare show. After each little secret session, one of them (usually Kasey) would pop back up to the microphone with an answer that revolved around the phrase, "Nothing I can report on today".

Basically the presentation broke down into these few useful bits of information:

• Facebook users spend and average of 3 billion minutes on the platform a day.
• The average Facebook user has 120 friends that they interact with on a semi frequent basis.
• Advertising on Facebook is a way to find your target audience before they search.
• With all of the personal information on Facebook, you can find out what people like, don't like, their activities, etc.  The market data is at your fingertips.  You can market directly to their interests.
• Target age, gender, education, and more with your Facebook advertising campaigns.
• Make sure the ad has an enticing image, strong CTA, and follow through with the intent of the ad.
• Once you find your audience, test multiple messages to find the best ROI.
• Refresh your Facebook creatives often.  Facebook is driven by fresh information.  Keep your ad content fresh.
• People on Facebook are already absorbing a lot of interesting and fresh information.  Make sure your ad will be noticed.

Basically, nothing new for me here, but maybe someone else out there will find some of this useful.  Personally, I was very unimpressed by the presentation put on by the people at Facebook.