How we manage the future

Testing for every browser is a costly and time consuming excercise and I have put a lot of thought into how we get the best result for our clients and their customers while keeping the cost under a million dollars . Heres what we do ....

We manage  future bowser version compatability by developing using the W3C guidelines for world wide web standards

We manage browser compatibility by testing to the following browsers:

          * Internet Explorer(IE) 6, 7 & 8
          * Firefox 2 & 3
          * Safari - Mac & iPhone
          * Chrome

Roughly 60% of the market (Net Applications via Wikipedia) is using IE. IE6 & IE7 do not fully support the world wide web standards so we sometimes go away from the standards in order to make things work in IE, which is the major web browser. Of course we check everything works fine in the other browsers at the time, but new browsers and new versions of the browsers can be, and will be, realeased after we have delivered the project.

When new browser versions are released we check that our Nautilus software works in the new release but not custom built software.

How to grow your Twitter following

Here are 5 ideas for growing your following on your business Twitter account:

• Post your Twitter link/username everywhere - website, email signature, blog etc
• Retweet great, appropriate tweets
• Respect your followers - don't flood them with sales messages
• Follow users you have something in common with
• Remember you are a professional - don't tweet your personal life on your business account

Collaboration Success

The latest consultant site delivered by Spiral also involved collaboration and working with a branding expert.
Working with other people and organisations to bring you the best possible result is something we are very practiced at and we very proud of our achievements in this area.  We have numerous examples of successful collaborations. To date they include:

• SME's who have a great relationship with their graphic designer where the designer has primarily been working on print collateral and they now want to upgrade their website. As software developers, who also do some design, we are well placed to interpret the visuals and build the website or newsletter template.
• Historic Places Trust. This project, implemented late in 2009 was a collaboration between Historic Places internal marketing department who wrote all content for the new site, Datacom who supplied the content management software and Spiral who supplied the database and web programming plus detailed visual design elements based on pre-existing concepts. 
• New Zealand Registered Architects Board (NZRAB). NZRAB have a database of all the architects registered in New Zealand. This information is shared with the public via the NZRAB website and via web services with the NZIA who manage architects professional development. Spiral is responsible for the technical management of this database and collaborates with the technical team at NZIA to enable secure sharing of some information and passwords across the two sites.

My tips for working with others are:

1. Leave your ego at the door
2. No-one likes to be left out - Include everyone in the communication
3. Have well planned a strategic meetings when needed, distribute the notes to all involved
4. Be honest and speak with kindness
5. Speak up and if the group decides against your recommendation, get over it - see tip #1

If you have ever watched a team of Husky dogs pulling a sled you will note that it only works if they all work together - it becomes a tangle if one dog says "Oh, I think we should go this way today!"

Sustainability Update - Congratulations Cain

Being sustainable means several things to us,  its not just about the environment! A sustainable business offers products and services that fulfil society's needs while placing an equal emphasis on people, planet and profits.
Cain recently published code he developed for the new version of Nautilus, to the open source community. This is part of our commitment to people in the community, in this case the world wide programming community.  The user control Cain developed, which is part of the code in Nautilus used to resize images and create thumbnails, was downloaded 4 times within 2 weeks of being posted.
If you know anyone into .NET programming and code bashing then send them the link - http://thumbnailcreator.codeplex.com/

Good enough becomes awesome

Theres an old saying that good enough is good enough - it's really a comment on delivery and meeting deadlines. As a team we are constantly delivering to deadlines, both ours and our clients, and we know what excellent is so we always strive for excellence - trouble is, the web changes every day and what was excellent today may only be "good enough" tomorrow.
If we look at that project thats been on your desk (or inbox) for weeks, it would appear to be nearly finished, maybe you want to do a few final tweaks to it, maybe you will get it QA'd (Quality Assurance tested) just one more time, is the spelling all correct etc, etc. The question is, deliver it now or wait until it 110% awesome?

Delivering now doesn't mean it wont ever be awesome. Even Apple delivers on "good enough" - who remembers the first iPods?  The first generation of iPods had some issues but Apple sold truckloads because they were good enough to be awesome. They keep improving them and iPods are still awesome.

You can deliver now on your website or software app. and keep improving it too. Each day you say "Lets wait until we have the ... finished" is another day you put off the launch of your project.

You know that tomorrow you are going to think of a better way to do something, say something or display something. Its a given, the big question is are you brave enough to launch as you are - is it good enough to launch - can your project be delivered now?

This week we launched our new profiles pages. We know from our web stats that these pages are looked at a lot. I surmise that people are checking us out before they work with us, so they are pretty important pages on our website. The deadline for delivery was the end of May. The pages were delivered with some photos missing and two quotes missing - was this going to lose us business? I wouldn't think so. Were the pages complete and fabulous? nearly, they were good enough. Should I have waited until they were complete? Whats complete? Each day brings new information and new ideas to add to our projects. One of the joys of the web is its ability to embrace change - I can update my website everyday if I have time. So can you!

Which brings me full circle to what projects have you got that are just waiting for that final 5% before they are delivered? Can you deliver them now and make changes next week when you have more information. If we are talking about webpages or software applications, consider what can be delivered now:

• if its a webpage/s:
• look at the webstats after its launched and make adjustments based on whats popular
• get a friend or colleague to give you feedback and make adjustments
• watch people using your pages and make adjustments
• if its software:
• pretend you are a user and find out how hard it is to use
• try it on different computers and make adjustments
• ask a friend to try it and make adjustments

Get away from your ego, launch now and good enough project is on its way to becoming awesome.

Search Engine Optimisation in a Nutshell

Search engine optimisation is an art and a complicated one, but in a really over simplified nutshell. To be found on google:
Use the phrases you want to be found on in your content

To increase your rank on google:

• Use the phrases and variations of those phrases repeatedly in content and headings
• Get links in to your site preferably from sites that Google rates highly and if the text of the link (or to a lesser degree the content around it) contains your keyword phrase, even better
• Be around for a long time - google rates longevity

New server - true cloud computing

Most of what we do at Spiral, all that software development, happens out there in "the cloud".  This week we gave our customers the same dependability and flexibility enterprise applications enjoy by going truly, madly, deeply into the cloud with our new VMWare server.

VMWare enables us to virtualise our server. Virtualisation dramatically improves the efficiency and availability of resources and applications. Our server "sits" on a collection of pooled computing resources in the form of CPU, disk space and memory - between our server and the hardware is a 'hypervisor' layer that manages the server resources. Virtualisation is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute. Today’s powerful x86 computer hardware was designed to run a single operating system and a single application. This leaves most machines vastly underutilised. Virtualisation lets us securely, share the resources of our physical environment with other organisations thus conserving the Earths energy.

Energy Savings

As a member of the Sustainable business network we are constantly looking for ways to reduce our impact on the environment. Virtualisation provides energy savings as high as 70-80% without sacrificing reliability.   Most servers today are in use only 5-15% of the time they are powered on, yet most x86 hardware consumes 60-90% of the normal workload power even when idle. VMware virtualization enables consolidation and increases utilisation of the hardware to as much as 85%. Read more on the VMWare website.

Flexibility

Virtualisation of a single server is just the beginning- we can build an entire virtual infrastructure, scaling across hundreds of interconnected physical computers and storage devices. We don’t need to assign servers, storage, or network bandwidth permanently to each application. Instead, our hardware resources are dynamically allocated when and where they’re needed within our private cloud. Our heavy use applications always have the necessary resources without wasting excess hardware that is only used at peak times.

Need more resources? we can expand "the cloud" with just a few simple commands to meet increased demand.

Cloud computing gives our customers the flexibility, availability and scalability they need to thrive.

Cloud Email reduces Spam by 98%

Spam is the single most annoying email issue and it can be expensive or timeconsuming to find a suitable solution to blocking it. Our website has been around for more than 10 years and spammers have had plenty of time to find us, so we get more spam than a lot of people.  Our mail provider is out there in the cloud where we like to operate too - our mail provider is Google.

NOT GMail - we use the Google mail app - it's a solution that deals with large volumes of spam, effortlessly. If you want to see whats being marked as spam its a simple process to check the list and, happy situation, the mail stays on Googles server(until you delete it), never to taint your computer, it all happens out there in the cloud.

Any company from just 1 or 2 employees to big corporations can use the app. At Spiral there are just 6 of us, so we use the free version of the application. NZ Post use the paid version and are New Zealands biggest user (at Sept 2009) of Googles corporate email (the paid version of the Google mail app) which includes phone support and extra features.

5 simple reasons to use Googles cloud based email app:

1. It takes care of spam spectacularly
2. You can access mail via POP, IMAP or webmail - keep using Outlook if you want too
3. You can set it up yourself with the easy to follow help - no geeks required
4. Its free for organisations with less than 50 employees
5. Its reliable

Give me a call or send me an email if you would like to know more and we can point you in the right direction.

Does scrolling beat paging?

Your website visitors know how to scroll, according to internet guru Jakob Nielsen's latest report, based on an eyetracking study of over 500 webpages. Nielsens findings show that a website visitors viewing time was typically spread 80% above the fold and 20% below the fold.

"The fold" is the content visible on a webpage without having to scroll. This obviously varies depending on the size of the monitor used to view a webpage. You can read more about the fold on our website.

Important information goes above the fold

With 80% of visitors attention going on what they see without having to scroll, placing important information above the fold is critical. If you have a long article it is better to deliver it as a long page with scrolling than to split it up into short pages. You may need to write it in such a way that the important stuff comes first, a little like a magazine article is written, or if you are not able to structure the content to have the import information above the fold you can use clues to draw the attention of your reader to the text below the fold.

A visitor to your website should be able to understand who you are and what your website is about from the information presented above the fold. After that, if their attention is caught, they will scroll. A poll on about.com indicates that 49% of people will scroll if the page seems useful and only 5% of visitors hate to scroll.

3 Tips on scrolling

1. Don’t try to squeeze your content into your page to make it more compact because most visitors will scroll down below the fold to see your entire page
2. Make life easier for your visitors when scolling by dividing up your layout into sections
3. You can encourage your visitors to scroll with teasers or a cut-off layout (such as cut off images or text)

Stop worrying about the fold - Scrolling BEATS paging

Placing important information above the fold is still a primary consideration for content writers and editors. Website visitors are comfortable with scrolling and are prepared to scroll to the bottom of the page in some cases.

Read the full report on Jakob Nielsens Alertbox

Whats Twitter, whats all the fuss about and should I be using it?

So what is Twitter?
Twitter gives a voice to even the weakest signal. It can help you make better choices and gives you a platform where you can influence whats happening in the world.

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows you to send short messages, 140 characters in length, that answer the question “What’s happening now?” or "Whats got my attention?". The messages, called “tweets”, can be read by your friends or “followers”. It could be breaking news, a great deal at your favourite shop, a local traffic jam (hands free of course) or simply a friendly hello. You can access Twitter through the internet, on your smart phone or via SMS on a simple mobile phone.

Twitters growth has come from older adults who might not have used social network sites before, the NewYorkTimes reported. You might like to think about the implications for your organisation as more and more of your customers join Twitter.

What can Twitter do for your business?

Twitter helps you stay connected with your customers and connected customers are more likely to think of you when they want something. As a business you can use Twitter to:

* Bring customers into your shop by sharing information ("New stock from Italy unpacked today")
* Show appreciation to your customers ("thx 2 all who sent in their IT horrer stories. The winner is
…")
* Gather feedback ("which was the most fun - the chipmunks slide or the jack in the box?")
* Gather more feedback - Imagine people are having a great experience using your widget, wouldn't you want to know?
* Offer tips ("always do what your mother told you")

Are people Twittering about your business and what are they saying?

Do you know what people are saying about you right now on Twitter and don't you want to be part of the conversation - I would! Heres how to listen in and you don't even need a Twitter account.

Listening in means starting with searching for you business name. You can use the Twitter search at search.twitter.com or Googles Twitter search - we have embedded this on our website at www.spiral.co.nz/twitter - to make it easy for you to find.  If the buzz is good ... great, you have testimonilas you can use. If the buzz is critical ..., great, you can do something about it.

If you want to be part of the conversation you will need to get a Twitter account and start tweeting. If you want to influence whats being said about you, you will need to get tweeting.


Search Twitter now to hear whats being said, right now, about your company, product or brand.

Where are you?

Where is your business, how do customers get in touch with you? Going back to fundamentals - the internet is not for a bunch of geeks and hackers, its very much mainstream and its a communication highway.

Communication is a two way thing. You may be communicating with your customers via your website, or at least you are providing a message, how well you do that and the response you get turns it from a message to communication. One of the simplest, easiest things you can do to encourage communication on your website is to make your contact details easy to find.

Email, fax, telephone or even a letter - each person, each of your customers will have their own personal preference for contact. You could put your contact details on every page or you could have a prominent link in your menu/navigation that says something simple like "Contact Us". Use a phrase like "Location" or "Info Centre" and you could confuse your website visitor and make them stop and think about how to contact you - in that moment you may lose them, another business like yours is only a click away. Use a phrase that everyone understands like "Contact Us" or "Get in Touch" a phrase so common on the internet that people don't need to think about it and you are the business that receives the lead.

Having all your contact details on your website and making them easy to find enables more people to communicate with you - more leads from your website which in turn leads to more sales.

Shorten your email links

How can you help the person receiving your email, who may be your next customer, to follow a link and find a page on your website?

If the URL's on your website look like this http://www.mailroom.co.nz/Default.aspx?page=1597 - what a mouthful! Then you have what is commonly called a CMS or Content Management System. A CMS is great for updating your website but those links are awful - .aspx? - what is that!

If you want to shorten a link you are sending out by email thus making life a little easier for your customer, try one of the websites that create short aliases from long URL's, like Tr.im - http://tr.im .

The Tr.im website generates a short URL for you, from a long URL that you enter into the website. For example the longish mailRoom URL above was tr.immed to http://tr.im/lDzl & tr.im/jxZZ will redirect you to the homepage of the Spiral website.

The service is free.

PS. If you get bored you could try tinyURL-whacking - placing random letters and numbers after the forward slash in an attempt to hit interesting sites without knowing in advance what they will be.

Blogging for small businesses – are you missing out?

Business blogs can be very effective for marketing, PR and branding purposes. They help differentiate you in a crowded marketplace – especially if they create buzz, eliciting feedback and comments.

To promote your business, write about something you are passionate about, something related to your business, perhaps trends, latest releases or "how to" tips, this way you position yourself as the expert in your field. Write in a personal, maybe casual manner so that you can impart some of your personality through your blog then if people like what they read they will contact you for information or to leave feedback - now you’re doing business! Just remember to put your contact details in your blog profile.

You can write about anything you love - short stories about how you got to where you are now, case studies, snippets from your everyday experience in your industry, these all help establish your brand and promote your business.

If blogging sounds like something for your business you can be up and going in just minutes with the help of either of these two popular, easy to use websites - www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com. It’s free, you can do it all online, there’s no technical stuff to get your head around and in just a few minutes you could be increasing the profile of your business – wouldn’t you like more buzz and customers!

Look Professional for less than $53 a Year

Earlier this month I was following a car into Wellington that had been beautifully sign-written with the owners email address - myname@xtra.co.nz - Oh dear, not very professional, how could they be so careless to pay all that money for sign-writing their car and overlooked the most basic thing you can do on the internet for your business - get a domain name. For less than $53 a year this person could have:

• myname@mybusiness.co.nz on their car
• info@mybusiness.co.nz on their print advertising
• www.mybusiness on their business card

A domain name makes you look so very much more professional in all your advertising and promotional material. Who do you want to promote - your business or Xtra?

You can purchase your own domain name online from any number of New Zealand or overseas companies although I recommend using a local, New Zealand comapny. Simply, Google "domain name registration" for a list of businesses offering this service or try one of these - www.freeparking.co.nz, www.2day.com or www.registerdirect.co.nz. Your local web designer probably offers this service too.

Once you have purchased your domain (actually its more like renting because you pay an annual fee) you can set up your email - whatever@yourbusiness.co.nz and if you have a website, blog or facebook page you can even point your domain name at that, so people can find out more about you and your business.

Can I say "Send me an email" with any confidence?

Don't throw away the FAX machine!

If you were one of the people affected by Telecom moving it's mail servers to Australia then you understand. Last week every one of our customers, that uses the Xtra/Telecom mail servers had issues with their mail. Because Telecom has such a large share of the market this impacted on just about everyone in New Zealand. Emails delivered late, received late, lost in spam filters and now the latest - spam not being filtered and coming through into our mailboxes.

There's plenty of comment on the fiasco in the New Zealand Herald if you have time to read it - the links are at the bottom of this post. The important points, for the future of your business are

1. We cannot rely on Telecom to provide the service we expect.
2. What can we do about protecting our businesses from this type of problem in the future?
   

What can you do?
As business owners, we are assessing risk everyday in our operations. You probably, hopefully, have backup procedures for your office data and now might be the time to consider what you are doing to maintain the flow of information into your business, in particular, email. Here's a few ideas:

1. Change to another provider, of course the same may happen to them in the future - no guarantees.
2. Install software such as Microsoft Exchange on your office server thus eliminating the need for an external mail server.
3. Use GMail for all your mail. GMail can be set up to look professional if you configure it carefully.
4. Stop using email for your important communications (yeah right!).
5. Setup a dual system enabling your mail to be delivered to two different places. If one mail repository is down then switch to using the other.
   

If you are a Spiral customer, you are welcome to call us. We can check the status of mail on the internet and we can check the website of your mail provider, although you can do this too. Where we manage a customers domain name the mail is often setup to flow through our server like water in a stream. When there is a blockage downstream, similar to a log blocking the flow, we sometimes see a buildup on our server. If this happens the mail sits on our server while it waits for the blockage to be cleared. During this time our server logs messages saying the mail was undeliverable and it will try again later, which it does.

Remember, if you are sending a really important email and you don't get a reply then use the telephone.
Looks like the fax machine will be around for a bit longer.

Links to articles and comments on the Telecom mail problem.
Telecom admits Xtra email fault
Has Telecom done enough over the Xtra Bubble fiasco?
Deborah Hill Cone: Email? Sorry, try Australia

Blah blah wastes your dollars and your customers time

Introductory, or blah blah text, found at the top of web pages is skipped by readers unless it is relevant and succinct.

The worst kind of blah blah text is pure filler and platitudes such as "Welcome to our website, we hope you enjoy your visit"make you look incompetent and insult the intelligence of your visitors.

So why have any intro text?

The introductory text on a page

• can help people better understand the rest of the page
• lets people know what they are getting into
• provides a brief summary of the page

How do I write intro text?

Focus on your visitor and answering these two questions

• What will visitors find on this page?
• Why will they care?

Captivate your visitors with information that is delivered quickly. Don't waste words, people read very little on web pages so give them what they want and help them stay on your web site.

How keywords attract customers to your website

It is critical for small businesses to have a website, but building a site is only half the battle. You must also attract customers.

One way to draw customers is to have a high listing on search engines. You want your site to appear in the first few results when potential customers do web searches related to your business. Optimising your website for your keywords is the best use of your time and money, heres how:

Which keywords?
Keywords are the search terms customers use to find you. Getting a high listing with popular keywords is difficult because there's a lot of competition for them, instead choose narrow, focused search terms.
For suggestions on keywords try Yahoo's overture tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

Use product type, people search by product type rather than brand so if you are selling Masport lawnmowers use lawnmowers rather than Masport in your keywords.

Try location, you may want to optimise by location. If you sell lawnmowers locally then use "wellington lawnmowers" as your keywords

Using your keywords
Use your keywords in your page text. Don’t go overboard, remember people will be reading the page along with search engines. Keywords placed in the following locations on your page are given emphasis by search engines

• the title meta-tag
• description meta-tag
• -h1- page heading
• the first paragraph
• headings
• bullet points
• the last paragraph
  

Monitor how you are doing on the search engines and be patient as it can take a few months to see results. You will need to keep tweaking your website because search engines change their algorithms and as other webpages get higher rankings yours will be pushed down.

Try these simple things on your website and see your website listing soar!

Websites in hard times

This is a happy story, at least for one business and hopefully for the other. Talking to a local business owner today and he was all doom and gloom about the economy, business - "I've been in business for 30 years and I'm proping this company up with half my house (mortgage!), grumble, grumble and I'm just not getting any new business, grumble, grumble, recession." Funny thing is this guy (names are protected) is obviously an optimist or he wouldn't be in business, he's a practical fellow with a can-do attitude.

Down the road another fellow, in the same line of work is going gangbusters. 2 years ago the two companies were equally profitable and the owners are good friends. Now one has as much work as he can handle and the other is dispairing. Whats the difference - you guessed it - a website!

The fellow with as much work as he can handle has a website bringing in business for him and the other guy . . . no website. Thats about to change.

Why does my website look different on my Mums computer?

Mum may have an older computer than you or she may have a state of the art modern computer with all kinds of fancy bells and whistles. Either way chances are your website will look different when you view it on her computer.

Heres some background on why. . . .

Did you know that you can set-up your browser to display things the way you prefer them to be displayed?
At times it may not seem so, but you have control, you are in charge and you can set how you experience the internet - you, the end user or website visitor - control your own experience of the internet. Even if you adhere to the defaults set-up when your computer was delivered there will be enormous variation in

• How your monitor renders text
• How your monitor renders colour

You can also choose to:

• Set minimum font sizes so all the text on websites displays bigger
• Use an older browser like IE6 or IE5.5 both of which veer widely away from the world wide web standards in the way they render pages
• Use a Mac or a PCAdjust your monitor colours to suit yourself
• Turn off images and navigate/use a website in text only mode

The resolution settings of your monitor can also affect the display. Common settings are 800, 1024 or 1280 pixels wide, but there are many other options and your site may end up scrunched together or spread out, depending on Mums setting.

But the Font's different and I want it the same - can't you FIX it!
Different computers use different fonts and sets of fonts. Macintoshes have different fonts to PCs'. Some fonts are universal most are not. For example many people use Verdana , thinking it universal, most PCs' come with Verdana but older Macintosh computers did not!

What we do
We set fonts up in families or groups so if the first font in the family is not available on your visitors computer then the browser will look for the next one in line. i.e. a common font style for us to set up is: font-family: verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif - here we are telling the browser or computer to use Verdana if its available, otherwise try Helvetica and then Arial finally if none of the others are available just display the text in any sans-serif font.

We use standard fonts like Verdana or Arial whenever possible to ensure we get the most consistent result for your website.

If your Mum has a stoneage PC she may not have Verdana and no Helvetica ... your website may start to look quite different. For websites where this is important we can make special allowances for the huge variety in monitors/computers etc.

What about the difference in colour?
A tiny minority of older computers can only display 256 different colours - if Mum has an old computer that cannot display millions of colours then your website colours will morph to what the browser thinks is a good approximation of your colours and the results are sometimes aweful. More likely the difference is because your Mum has a different monitor (LCD vs CRT) or her monitor settings need adjusting.

Perhaps she is using a Mac, in which case the colours are reproduced slightly differently between a Macintosh and a PC.

What we do
Where possible we choose from the 216-colour web-safe palette for our colours Use white or black for the main content areaAccept that a minority of people may get a compromised experience of the site design

What else do we do?
We make the text on your website resizable so maybe Mum has taken advantage of this and has made the text bigger on your website - so she can read it!
Mum may be smarter than you (I know mine is!) and have changed her settings - theres a setting on her browser (and yours) that makes all the text on websites bigger. This makes her life easier but your website looks different.

So while your website may look different on different computers - we design to look great on them all.

Squeeze pages raise questions about ethics and blindness

remember the song "Mama's got a squeeze box, Daddy never sleeps at night" ? - the kids don't eat and the dog can't sleep!

Well now theres the Squeezepage! Squeeze pages are landing pages created to solicit opt-in email addresses from prospective subscribers. The goal of the page is to obtain the visitors email address.

Hyperlinks and navigation are almost always absent from squeeze pages - anything which distracts the visitor is avioded. Anything that takes the visitor away from this page is avoided - total focus is on obtaining that email address.

The method used for obtaining that elusive email address is to offer you something for free - information, access to content, secret passwords, whatever to give up your email and possibly get additional information.

I have seen many of these squeeze pages on the web and only this week found out what they are called which raises the question how do you find out about a trend or idea that you can observe and have no name for. Without a name the trend becomes blind to us - we can't search for it on Google. To not have the words to search for a trend or idea on Google ... now thats a scary thought!