Christmas online - fast delivery beats clever marketing

Christmas - the time for giving, receiving...and acquiring new customers online. This year the worldwide online holiday shopping sales are projected to reach $25.3 billion, a 39% increase over last year, according to US-based researchers Gartner. Royal Mail expects to deliver around 100 million Christmas presents bought online between now and 23 December -- that's 30 million more than in 2005. And incredibly, in the UK more than £4m will be spent online each hour on presents in the run-up to Christmas.

Despite this rise in spending, research has found there is still room for improvement for e-tailers to deliver better customer service. At Christmas time, delivery time is key and although it seems as though more and more people are choosing to shop online at Christmas, customer satisfaction through timely delivery is really the only way to retain customers. A snazzy site can have all the bells and whistles in the world but if santa doesn't deliver in time, the customer certainly won't be visiting again.

Some of the big players this season are Ikea, John Lewisand Topshop. Ikea's site opens with a flashy interactive quiz-like scenario questioning 'how many guests are you expecting this Christmas?'. It's great fun if you're looking to buy furniture or waste some time, and certainly an original concept.

John Lewis has also cottoned onto the festive 'look and feel' for their website, encouraging customers to make a purchase by offering free delivery and customised gift ideas. Topshop has gone a slightly different route by launching a 'Pass the Parcel' viral email campaign which has 100,000 layers of gifts and prizes, including a years supply of shoes. That works for me!

Accessibility - another word for common sense?

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, interact with and contribute to the web. The term 'disability' is pretty wide-ranging and covers visual disabilities, hearing impairments, physical disabilities, speech disabilities, cognitive and neurological disabilities, and age-related conditions.

So what can be done to make a website accessible? Personally I think that the answer is common sense: a well-thought-out website should automatically be accessible if it has been designed with the user in mind. For instance, a website with a good search facility will provide accessibility to a dyslexic user and to someone with cognitive disabilities. An online shopper with color blindness would benefit from a website with sufficient colour contrast and redundant information for colour. Using style sheets (CSS) also provides a colour-blind user with the option to control how colours appear on the screen.

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops guidelines for accessibility of websites. You can read their 10 quick tips for making accessible sites on their website. Through the use of W3C compliant html and css coding, a website should inherently cater for users with disabilities. However, when writing content for a website it's still always worth thinking about who you are writing it for: after all, the world wide web has to cater for a pretty massive and diverse audience.

Test your website's accessibility with Wave Accessibility Tool.

Getting Google to Notice You

Almost 23 million people in the UK visited a search engine in January 2006 = 84% of the Internet population. The UK Internet population alone clicks on over half a billion links on search engines every month (click-throughs). Google continues its dominance of the search market generating nearly two-thirds (64%) of all click-throughs and almost 19 million visitors each month - three times as many as nearest rivals Yahoo! and MSN Search

Sometimes I think about those google geeks and how much trouble they cause me. We launched a site for a client last week and the very next day the client phoned and demanded to know why they weren't top on Google yet. I had to explain that it does take time - maybe even months for Google to send its little crawlers around the website, but I assured the client that they'd get a very good ranking eventually. The reason I'm sure of this is that I know we build our sites to W3C standards which means our html is very clean and tidy. That makes it much easier for the crawlers to analyse the webpage content.

Another reason I am confident this site will rank well is that they have spent a great deal of time inputting relevant content which accurately descibes their topic. And lastly they have lots of their manufacturers hyperlinking to their website, which effectively means they are getting votes so they must be important.

The good thing about Google is that there is no human involvement, which means it is a genuine source of objective information. That is unless there's money involved, such as the pay-per-clickthrough feature (Google Adwords), but I'll save that for another day.

The Rights and Wrongs of Installation

If ever you are angry with your laptop, try not to uninstall your monitor driver as funnily enough your computer no longer believes you have a monitor and so displays nothing, leaving you with absolutely no means of fixing it. I know this from experience after the hours of fun and games I had last night messing around with the screen resolution, I thought the only way to fix my problem was to re-install the driver. In order to do that I thought I must uninstall it first, and surely when I restart the laptop, the machine would realise it had a monitor, reinstall itself and happy days - problem solved.

Wrong.

Another similar Gilly-moment I had this week was when I erased my outlook email account. This is easier than it sounds believe me. I was meaning to delete the test account I had (very cleverly I thought) set up earlier that day but in the heat of the moment I selected the wrong account to delete. My entire inbox, contacts, calendar, and sent messages vanished before my eyes.

Fortunately for me I work with understanding IT bods who seem to revel in my misfortune and cluelessness. It is important to make these mistakes in order to learn from them - just not twice in one week!

Caching, Cookies and Cups of tea

Ever wondered why it is that you make a change to your website and yet the old version is still visible? The answer is because the webpage you have changed has been cached. A cache is effectively a 'storeroom' on your hard drive or server where data is kept. The reason for it being that it makes it quicker to retrieve past information, thus reducing the time required to read and write data.

So what is it that causes caching? One answer is cookies. These are small data files which are placed on your hard disk by a website in order to record your preferences when you return or remember and log information that you have input such as shopping basket contents.

One use of cookies is for affiliate tracking. So if a customer buys something from 'website A' but has found 'website A' from a link from 'website B', 'website B' will get a commission on that sale and every subsequent sale made by that customer on 'website A'. That sounds confusing I know but it is worth understanding because online affiliate schemes are basically a way of making money through well-thought-out hyperlinks.

A good housekeeping tip - if you want to clear your caching and cookies then at the top of your web browser, click on Tools>Internet Options and 'Delete Cookies'/'Delete Files'.

Image optimisation and the magic of 'Save for Web'

Firstly, my apologies to my ardent blog-follower of a sister who has not had anything to read for over a week. Sorry Janet - this one's for you!

I'm taking a class on the uses of Photoshop at the moment; it is an amazing piece of software both for professionals and for anyone who likes to play around with pictures. It's not cheap though unfortunately, but it does have a cheaper cousin, 'Photoshop Elements' which works the same way only with a few less features.

One of the main problems I have come across with people wishing to add images to their websites is filesize. Usually when you take a picture with your digital camera and transfer it to your computer, the image has a filesize of about 2MB (that's 2,000,000 bytes). You can't just put that image straight onto a website because that web page will take forever to load - that's if it loads at all.

Try right-clicking on the picture of me above and select 'Properties'. You'll see that picture is 7,773 bytes (or 7kB). Once upon a time that photograph was 2MB, but just by cropping, risizing and using that magic 'Save For Web' option, the image size has been optimised to achieve the right balance between filesize and picture quality.

What about format? Using the right image format can also shave the bytes of your filesize. Here are a few simple tips for shrinking your image filesize, and you don't need expensive software to do it - most of this can be done using microsoft paint.

• Use GIFs for logo's, line drawings and simple images
• Use JPEGS for photographs
• NEVER use bitmaps
• Check the dimensions are no bigger than necessary
• Crop out the rubbish
• Check the resolution (you only need 72ppi - pixels per inch) for the web
• Reduce the number of colours
• Be minimalist - a word can tell a thousand pixels

Domain Mapping for Dummies

Yesterday I was asked to describe what domain mapping was and it had me stumped. I knew it was different to domain forwarding (otherwise known as URL redirection or web forwarding) although I wasn't exactly sure how.

Domain forwarding (or web forwarding) is where you can have any number of different domains registered. They can all be pointed to the same website IP so that when you type in the URL of any one of those domains, the same website will be displayed, but the URL will retain the domain name entered originally. Some of the purposes of domain forwarding are:

1. To have similar domain names all pointing to the same website (e.g. try typing in www.gooogle.com)
2. So that you can move a website to a new domain and still retain the old domain
3. To have short, meaningful aliases instead of long, easily forgotton URLs

Domain mapping is different to domain forwarding because the permalinks and URL contain the address of your primary domain, even if you type in a completely different domain which has been 'mapped' to the primary one. So how is this useful?

For ecommerce sites it is invaluable as it means that you only have to pay for one SSL (secure socket layer) certificate: that of your 'primary' domain. You absolutely have to have an SSL to encrypt credit card transactions - shown by the little padlock symbol that appears at the bottom of the screen - but they don't come cheap so you don't really want to have to pay for one for each domain you own.

Domain mapping is also great for blogs. One example of where we have used domain mapping recently is for a client's blog. The blog portal is: www.blogmybook.com, and her full blog URL is: http://blogmybook.com/blogs/bliss_blog// - bit of a mouthful really. So, using domain mapping you can now enter bliss.blogmybook.com or www.blogmybook.com/bliss and still end up at the same place. And the cost - zilch. Magic!

Slick Shopping for Web-Spenders

I wouldn't class myself as a conventional female highstreet shopper. Don't get me wrong, I love getting new things, but I prefer things which are either shiny, have an 'on' switch, or make a noise. But the one thing I do have in common with every other shopper on the planet is that I dislike standing in the checkout queue. Spending money should be as quick and painless as possible. In that sense, shopping online is just the same as shopping on the high street.

So how can you acheive a slick online checkout? Here are a few quick wins:

1. Have a minimal number of uncluttered steps
2. Have a 'progress indicator' (this is just a fancy way of saying breadcrumb navigation)
3. Have a visual of what's in the shopping cart
4. Allow shoppers to edit their selections easily
5. Have a price guarantee
6. Build confidence and trust by having the SSL certificate clearly marked

And there's one last thing to remember about the 'successful' checkout. I don't know about you but I'm a sucker for the last minute impulse buy - I have an entire section of my bag dedicated to the chocolate, gum and mints which have this strange jedi-like power over me when I'm standing at the checkout. It works exactly the same way online. Cross-selling and upselling work brilliantly at the checkout stage for ecommerce stores, especially if you are clever enough to advertise products which are associated with those already in the user's basket.

And one last little secret to the successful checkout - once a customer has bought and paid for their products, don't send them back to the last product they put into their basket because it's a waste of their time. If you want to keep them interested, they should be directed either back to the homepage, or straight to the special offers page.

JavaScript and the Curse of the Pop-Up

JavaScript is NOT the same as Java - they are distant cousins but Java is a programming language whereas JavaScript is primarily a scripting language for use within HTML pages to add functionality. Because Javascript is embedded into HTML in order to be read by a web browser, it means it can be copied easily. Although annoyingly there are variations of JavaScript and different browsers don't always support the same JavaScript. It is supported by recent browsers from Netscape and Microsoft, although Internet Explorer supports only a subset, which Microsoft calls Jscript.

So what exactly does Javascript do? Well, JavaScript can spice up websites with dynamic content, open pop-up windows (which are really annoying), create mouseover menus (equally irritating), and change images as the mouse cursor moves over them.

So is it really that great? In my opinion, not really. Although it might be able to do a few snazzy things, there are browser incompatibility issues and SEO isses - most search engines are unable to index these scripts properly. So what's the alternative? Well, you can achieve added functionality such as the mouse 'rollover' effect by using standard compliant CSS. And where JavaScript really is essential, make sure you follow the W3C DOM Level 1 or 2 standards and most browsers should execute it correctly.

Breadcrumbs - Top Tip for Navigation

Breadcrumb navigation is actually one of those rare IT terms which makes a bit of sense. The terms makes you think of a trail which leads you somewhere. Exactly right. It shows where in the website hierarchy the currently viewed page is located. Here are a couple of good examples:

Using this form of navigation process, not only does it tell you where you are and how you got there, but it also provides user friendly shortcuts to other sections of the website.

For e-commerce sites, breadcrumbs are really useful during the checkout process to give shoppers a bird's eye view of where they are and how far they have to go in the order process.

Using breadcrumbs can also improve your search engine ranking because they use contextual text links - google loves those. But beware - multiple clickpaths can lead to pagerank dilution (if there are many different breadcrumb trails to the same loaf of bread). To minimise page duplication for the search engines, you can append the parameter containing the breadcrumb trail to the end of the URL using javascript. Ok, quite honestly I don't know how you do that but perhaps that's a good subject for tomorrows blog.

In short - breadcrumbs are a great navigation tool particularly for complex websites. They are both user friendly and google friendly so they definitely get my vote.

Web 2.0 - pointless buzzword or technological revolution?

It seems that the term 'web 2.0' has made it to the mainstream. I was hoping it wouldn't because I never really understood what it meant - I don't even believe that the guys who made it up knew what it was about. They were just trying to reinvent themselves after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. But now with millions of people blogging, uploading videos, dating, and downloading every second, it seems plainly obvious what web 2.0 is all about.

A few years ago the internet was an information portal unlike anything we've ever known. But as the technology has advanced, so has the sophistication of the internet. With the advent of web 2.0, users can actively participate and interact online by leaving reviews and posting comments. Not only that but there is a new breed of web-based applications produced by businesses and software companies who are using web services to share data. Even RSS, the subject of my last blog is none other than a product of web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is nothing but another layer of complexity, the icing on the cake perhaps...actually lets just call it the first layer of marzipan - web 3.0 has already made it to the wikipedia. I better catch up!

What's all the frss about?

RSS has been around for quite some time although it has recently become a bit of a buzzword in my office. RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, Rich Site Syndication or Really Simple Syndication - yet another acronym which doesn't really describe what it is or what it does.

Using RSS you can pull content from a website database without actually having to go to the website. Obviously the website which you are pulling from has to allow it which it does by registering the document with an RSS publisher. So in essence it's a great way of sharing and transferring information between websites. Content types such as news feeds, event listings, project updates and headlines are often displayed using RSS.

The even greater thing about RSS is that you can use it to pull any information you want from any website or blog straight to your desktop. More and more sites now offer feeds which you can identify by a small button that says either RSS or XML. To read them you need an RSS feeder which you can download for free. I use sharp reader but there are plenty to choose from. I'm subscribed to Baldy's Blog, our internal project log and a great bbc news blog which means I get alerted any time one of those sites is updated.

So, why all the fuss about RSS? That I can answer - RSS is the way forward for all e-commerce stores. It is the best e-marketing tool available and will bury those horrible spammy email newsletters that nobody ever reads. But more on that another day.

Lesson #1: Have a cluster of black boxes

My first blog is on the subject of servers - I hear the word server so many times during the course of my day and it seems to me that it is the crux of our business. So I suppose I should know what they are, where they are and why they are there. I'm told that they're all the black boxes scattered around the place - we even have a 'farm' of them up the road! I've seen it - it's not as exciting as it sounds believe me. The one under my desk is not as important as the ones in the cupboard and at the farm but I find it pretty useful.

There are different types of servers used in the web business: web servers, file servers, database servers, mail servers and servers which are a mixture of the above. The web server does what it says on the tin - it serves up web pages. To do this it needs an IP address. So far so good. The file server stores all the files that might appear on the web page, and the mail server stores the email. Easy.

And then there's the database server.

In my place of work whenever someone mentions the 'sequel' server I start to feel anxious and out of the loop. Incidentally, I am aware that 'sequel' is not referring to Superman 2 and it is in fact an acronym which stands for 'structured query language'. There you go, I do know something after all!

The SQL server is nothing but the industry favourite for database management systems, kindly provided by none other the Microsoft. You ask it questions (in its preferred language of course) and it spits out the answer.

And last but by no means least, there's the backup server. Even I know the cardinal rule of the IT industry: back up your files regularly. Even the most reliable computer is liable to break down eventually - I think it's called planned obsolescence. At Webreality we are especially safe (or paranoid) so we keep one backup on a totally separate server to the others.

So when it comes to our servers I suppose I have a lot to learn. But here's what I think are the good practice basics when it comes to servers:
1. Keep them dedicated to their task - this streamlines internal processes by distributing the workload between the servers.
2. Give them plenty of Ram to do their job .
3. Always have a backup to prepare for the day your server decides to give up the ghost.