Start with the end in mind

In many projects, especially for large organisations, most ideas and requirements are driven internally within your organisation.  In many cases, the project sponsors (the people paying the bill) will have an agenda the project team will endeavour to satisfy.   While it is obviously important that internal requirements are met, this common practice has often left one important group of people out in the cold - your end users. 
Whether the website is intended for use internally or by the general public, it is a good idea to engage your end users.  This can be done via surveys, reviewing the site with them or even as simple as asking your existing customer for ideas and feedback. Engaging end users early in the project will save you time and effort in the long term and ensure a better end product.

Get on the same page

When defining requirements for your website, there will be many meetings, brain storming sessions, emails and phone calls with your web team.  While today’s technology provides so many ways to communicate, there is nothing better than face-to-face meetings. Not even webcam or videophone will be as effective as being in the same room with other stakeholders.  These meetings should be no longer than 1.5-2 hours as concentration levels and productivity will decline as the meeting drags on.  Have a clear agenda that outlined the objectives and goals of the meeting. Finally, have short coffee breaks if long meetings are unavoidable.

The end result of the requirements gathering phase is a Functional Requirements Document.  This document should contain detailed description of what the web site will do and how it will interact with the end user, broken down into the functionality of each module of the website.   Always avoid including specific implementation methods.  For example, while screen mock ups are useful as visual clues to how the site may operate, they should not be used as a commitment to the design of the website.  Similarly, there should not be any source code or data tables in the requirements document.  These can go in the technical design document if required.

What is the time?

Web projects are constantly under pressure with time and budget constraints.  Just like any other forms of construction, a website that is delivered on time and on budget starts with an effective requirements gathering phase.  As part of gathering requirements, you and your web team should have an idea of budget and timeframe for the project.  This forms a boundary as to how much functionality and features you can include in your website.  Obviously, certain requirements are mandatory and must be included.   However, when time and budget are pressing and you need to get a website out in the marketplace, it pays to think carefully and prioritise your requirements.  Split your requirements into phases and go live with the features you must have first, and then implement the rest in a future phase.

When a requirement specification is agreed by all party involves and signed off, it is important that the scope of the requirements is maintained.  That is not to say that it cannot be changed.  Often, extra requirements are discovered after the requirement document is signed off and work has commenced in the project.  Or half way through implementation, a major issue has been discovered that require changes to the requirements.  Communication is key here and the sooner you and your web team are aware of the potential issues, the sooner a solution can be decided on to minimise project time and budge blow out.

Obviously, this is only the first stage in the development process but its the key one. Projects are not seen to go wrong at the start or in the middle, it is at the end when schedules slip and budgets are affected. By approaching the start of the project effectively you avoid this issue arising and ensure a better result.

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When we started out in web, a ‘web presence’ tended to refer to an entity’s public website. The old ‘dub-dub-dub’ site. Build it, upload it. Count the hits.

Online marketing is much more complex today, although the principles remain the same. Eyeballs. Who’s eyeballing your brand or entity online?  Who’s looking at you, when and where? And what are they saying? Once you answer those questions, you’ll quickly realise that your online presence has the capacity to stretch well beyond your painstakingly worded, carefully designed, search engine optimised website.

Youtube. Banners. Facebook. Twitter. Forums. Blogs. Pay per Click campaigns.  [Insert more each day]

Every time we analyse a client’s web statistics or prepare an online campaign, we appreciate how much traffic is worth, how much effort goes into attaining it, and how much value it brings to our clients. There is even an attached cash value to each click, visitor and conversion. When this is the case, it’s staggering how careless some people are with these web assets. Strangely you insure your underpants and socks with contents insurance, yet the ‘free’ perception of the Internet seems to leave people thinking they can just leave their web assets out in the weather, so to speak.

Companies, at least the ones we cross paths with, tend to spend an increasing proportion of their marketing budget online. Investment that can simply waste away if not tracked, monitored and optimised.

Just like your financial assets, your online assets need to work for you. Optimise and reap the rewards.

Start at the top - Your website. Optimise it, promote it, tune it. During this process, your web expert will look at your traffic sources. This is the most painfully obvious example of your online assets. Your Google rank is probably your single highest ranking asset (If you don’t see it that way please contact me and I’ll explain). How many visitors did it bring to you this week? What are you doing to tune, focus and capitalise on that source of your traffic, which after all, is ultimately your business?

Reviewing our (JSA Digital’s) stats, notable sources of traffic are: our email marketing campaigns, our Google adword campaigns, Facebook, Twitter and this blog, all of which we control, and which deliver a substantial amount of quality traffic to us.  These sources of traffic are well worth reviewing. An increase of just 1% of traffic to our site, typically would result in 10 more enquiries to our business. Now that’s a return your bank offer you.

I recommend you complete an audit of your web assets, just as you do of your financial assets.

Start with the basics:

• Domain names: Keep track of them all, and make sure your contact details are up to date.
• Inbound links: These are vital to both your visitation and Google ranking, and you need to make sure the addresses they refer to are maintained.
• RSS Feeds: How many subscribers do you have to your RSS Feeds? Are they declining or increasing?
• Are you on Youtube? Although you might not be getting direct traffic from Youtube, it is technically, the number two search engine in the world. What’s your exposure on Youtube? Have you branded your Youtube ? Are you auditing public comments on your YouTube assets?

The list goes on…

In the same way we maintain our physical property, we all need to maintain our web assets. Until someone can guarantee you a steady 10% return on your web assets (which as we all know no one can do on real estate anymore), speak to your digital marketing guru or digital agency about optimising and guarding your online assets.

PS: After my little rant, I found the original article on online life after death. BBC. Of course.

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Created for JAG Clothing the Microsite is designed to promote a limited edition jean range. A range that is so exclusive and limited that we have even developed a stock control counter for each product, when each hits zero that is it, no more available!

The site has been very successful for the client so check it out and tell us what you think!

But why a Microsite? Why did the client not simply extend the existing JAG site with this product range? Why go to the trouble of creating a new site, look and feel and register a new domain? More importantly what benefit does it have for the client?

The main deciding factors in creating a Microsite instead of adding pages to an existing website are focus and priority.

Your existing site may have information for investors, company information, other products and be expected to appeal to many different diverse audience groups. A Microsite will not suffer these burdens. It is often focused on one product line and branded accordingly. There is nothing else on the pages competing for the audience’s attention other then the single message that the business intended.

This focus also allows added benefits in the area of online advertising, more specifically keyword contextual advertising or pay per click (PPC is the process were you only pay if you advert is clicked). Microsites are often specifically created with contextual adverting in mind as they can lower PPC costs because they often focus on specific keywords therefore improving your Quality Score which in turn lowers your cost per click. Goodle adwords has a good example of how this works.

A Microsite with its own URL can be effective in creating a consistent and easily remembered message. For example rather than www.yourcompany.com.au/a-new-product the Microsite could be www.productA.com.au which will be aid better recall in offline campaigns and is more effective in branding the campaign.

Also, as a Microsite is usually used to focus the attention of a particular demographic on a specific product, a company can grow their market by capturing interest. Often this is achieved through viral means such as “forward to a friend” (note that the example above has this feature) which allows the visitor to past it on to people they feel may find the message or product interest, therefore ensuring that Microsite gets further attention.

Microsite should only be used if the application of the above points ring positive with your marketing initiatives. Remember that a Microsite could affect the traffic to your main site so think through your options carefully. To allow you to assess if a Microsite is needed ask yourself “What is the overall objective of the campaign?”. Is it to:

• Simply promote your existing site - If no, then a Microsite maybe an option
• Introduce a new product – If yes, then a Microsite maybe an option
• Target a key demographic -  If yes, then a Microsite maybe an option

If you decide that a Microsite may not deliver the results you desire then look at how you can utilised your existing site/s to promote your product through theme application and homepage promotion.

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Cloud Computing is the latest buzz word in the world of IT, some consider it the next step in the progression or development in computing. This new technology is simply a platform for which online and offline applications can be ‘hosted’ – similar to current hosting models – but way bigger, better, more integrated, and hopefully more secure.

So where did an idea like Cloud Computing Come from?

Computing in my lifetime started with trying to get as much power as possible behind the 5.25 floppy disk drive. When Pentiums came out, I thought that a 120MHz would be all the processing power I’d ever need, 6 months later, I found myself drooling over the 333MHz in the shop window…. Due to these hardware changes and subsequent drop in costs companies started to move away from slave terminal models and towards a networked Desktop approach.

Also around this time the internet was commercially kicking off and services such as Ask Jeeves, Amazon and eBay made their names and their millions over night in the Dot Com era. Companies rightly saw the huge potential and value in the net as a way of cheaply communicating with their customers… until the bubble burst of course! However moving a business to a completely web based model was still far from people’s minds.

Over the last few years, we have seen a shift back to a Client-Server type Model and talk about Web 2.0 and Web Services taking on more and more processing, almost allowing us to use ‘Dumb’ terminals again like back in the olden days(!). You can now do you Word Processing and your Spreadsheets online, and there is now talk from John Nack (senior product manager for Photoshop) of having a free online service for image editing.

So as these Web 2.0 applications get larger and require more from their platforms, the platforms have to step up… and this is where the Cloud is born. The Cloud offers incredible processing power and enterprise data storage. It has been designed as a utility model, or services model with the concept of pay-for-what-you-use.

A typical Cloud is built from one or more Data Centres, located anywhere in the world, consisting of a farm of servers, both physical and virtual. Data stored on Cloud Databases can have billions of rows in a table spanning over multiple physical disk drives, again, in many worldly locations, with no noticeable drop in performance. All data stored in the cloud has triple redundancy, and if a server, service, database, or anything fails, a ‘Fabric Controller’ will seamlessly transfer application requests to other resources that can handle it… Applications are load balanced, and resources managed so that application scalability for high volume sites can be catered for by flipping a switch. Gone are the days of having websites failing due to high demand and the lack of Hardware to support.

Concerns

Cloud Computing, by its nature places your data not behind your walls, be them fire or brick, but somewhere out there, scattered in Data Centres around the world. How can you guarantee its integrity, security, privacy, recovery and regulatory compliance? This is a BIG factor to consider when choosing your tools for development. Is your final product going to be trusted in your eyes and those of your customers? Some points to consider:

• Security: This question comes down to the policies set by the Provider, as a consumer, you’ll need to enquire about their security policies by finding out who has privileged access to your data, and understand why they do.

• Legality: Make sure the that data and the processing that you are doing will not impede on any local jurisdictions of the area of where the Data Centre resides

• Data Encryption: As your data is mixed with other users’, ensure that the encryption methods have been checked and tested thoroughly by experienced specialists

• Recovery: Ensure you can recover a full copy of your data if something goes down, and how long that will take to implement.

• Monitoring: Find out if the Cloud Provider supports investigations of any suspicious activity and they continuously log what is happening in the cloud

• Availability: Your Cloud Provider is just another business, try to make sure that they are financially sound and will not go broke or be bought out by another company.

• Regulatory Compliance: As customers are ultimately responsible for the security of their own data, ensure that regular backups are taken and you check the data for consistency as well as testing security and following best practices.

The Future

Having spent some time playing around with the Microsoft Azure, I can safely say that developing anything inside the Cloud and knowing that Microsoft is there ready to support my application from when the first user hits it all the way through to is 100 millionth user, puts my mind at rest and lets me get on with the important things, like coding!

Security wise, I feel that not developing in the cloud  (especially as the actual development techniques do not change) and entrusting my application to a smaller hosting company is actually more of a security threat, as well as taking longer to implement, is harder to scale, and ultimately more expensive.

Microsoft Azure was launched late last year (Oct 27, 2008) and already websites are popping up with this technology, it will not surprise me if Azure is seen as the preferred medium to work on with the next few years.

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As an Internet Development Specialist (rough translation, GEEK) I read a lot about this wonderful place we call the interweb. A lot of which is delivered over the web. Everything from current affairs to gadget news fills my reading material and I am both better and worse off because of it.

Clients often ask me how I wade through all the content that is out there and I commonly tell them that although I read the latest content from hundreds of websites each week I very rarely actually visit the sites…

Content is king, they say, but what happens when you have information overload? Browsing the web can be a great way of finding new information. However we normally browse a very constrained number of websites that fall in our areas of interest and we trust. We find ourselves revisiting the same sites to find out what has been updated. Often there is nothing new and on we go to the next site.

To use an analogy we are channel surfing without a TV guide when we visit sites to see if anything has changed.

You could be searching for a long time before you find something interesting, new and above all relevant in your bookmarks via your browser. Information overload with nothing new learnt. TV with only ads and reruns…

RSS or Really Simple Syndication has been around for years (1995 in it earliest form) - almost as long as the commercially accessible web. However the benefits to us common folk has only really being jumped upon in more recent history due to the amount of content available and the accessibility of RSS. Now most  browsers, email software and productivity suites (Office for example) manage RSS feeds in some way, shape or form.

But what is it and how does it help me I hear you say.

Well put simply RSS allows you to subscribe to feeds from websites that have the option, and pull down fresh content as it is delivered by the sites. This fresh content is sorted in a RSS listing view that allows you to glace over your feeds and see what is new without visiting the websites directly. Depending on the application you use to manage your RSS (I use MS Outlook RSS feeds) unread updates will be highlighted so you can tell what is new.

How do you get started?

Well first, get a RSS application. You most like already have this but do not know it. As I stated earlier most browsers now a days deal with RSS directly. For example here is how Firefox does it.

If a website has an RSS feed it will show in the address bar with the RSS icon (orange and white icon which has been widely adopted to denote RSS)

Clicking on in will bring up the RSS bookmark subscribe option allowing you to save it to you bookmarks like you would any other site.

The real difference of course is now as the site content is updated so will the RSS feeds! Titles are shown for each new article so you can read only the stories that are of interest to you and avoid wading through those that are not.
So avoid information overload, browse your sites smarter not harder and sign up to RSS feeds!

While you are at it sign up to our feeds by clicking on the icon in the top right, we will keep you posted!

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“Software as a service” dispenses with the idea of software ownership. Now instead of the software vender selling you their software to keep forever, they rent you the software’s capabilities for just when you need it.

There are many approached to software as a service. The vendor could give you a copy of their application that deletes or disables itself at the end of the contract. Alternatively the vender could allow you to use their software running on their servers. Both benefit from the Internet as a delivery mechanism.

Salesforce.com (www.salesforce.com) was one of the first companies to embrace software as a service over ten years ago. Their customer relationship management (CRM) tool exists solely as a web application.

CRM as a web application makes sense. It is really a problem of maintaining a large, common database, and that can be most easily solved by centralising the database on a common server. It is then just a small step from having the server in an air-conditioned room at the end of the hall to having it out there, somewhere on the net (preferably in a concrete bunker with fire control and independent power supply in a non-earthquake prone, politically stable corner of the Earth).

That move on to the web seems incremental on the face of it, but there are greater implications. When the database went onto the web, the application that used that data went with it. The browser just shows a picture and reports back keystrokes and mouse clicks. All the heavy lifting is done by the server.

When this first occurred it was not an ideal solution. Putting the database on the net solved the problem of keeping the database synchronised, and introduced the problem of lag. On a slow connection there is a noticeable delay between mouse click and screen update. This has been the bane of web applications - lack of responsiveness.

The solution is coming from two ends. At one end the ubiquity of broadband means the internet is just plain faster. From the other end the growing capabilities of browsers  and client-side scripting means less data has to be pushed back and forth for the same onscreen effects. It has changed the web so much it got a new name: Web 2.0.

Now you can use online applications that are just as powerful and responsive as installed software. Google Docs (docs.google.com) offers applications that are not only equivalent to Microsoft Word and Excel, but they are free and take up no space on your hard drive. Abobe is already taking the first steps towards an online version of their flagship application Photoshop (www.photoshop.com/express).

Users benefit as they use software where and when they need it, with all the latest features and patches, without installation. Their applications live on the web so they can follow them from machine to machine. Developers benefit from the ease of rolling out patches and fixes as well as being able to control the only installation of their application – no one has the application to pirate it.

In the future, if your internet connection is fast (and it will be) then perhaps all you will need on your desktop is a monitor, keyboard, mouse and enough computing power to run a browser – the kind of power that is available on a modern mobile phone. You will not need to own software as you will be able to rent just what you need just when you need it.

And it is not just word processors and spreadsheets that are moving online and on-demand. Coming this year in the States is OnLive (www.onlive.com), an online service where you can play the latest PC and console games from multiple producers. The games actually run on OnLive’s servers while you view them through a browser plug-in on your PC, or on your TV through an OnLive micro-console - which is about the size of a pocket calculator. You will not need a powerful PC, a Playstation 3 or an Xbox 360. You will just need a fast internet connection. You do not even need to buy the games you play, just rent time on OnLive’s servers and play anything from their library.

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Pamela Anderson was 15 years younger the first time I saw a picture in a graphical web browser. That was an early version of Netscape Navigator on an X-Windows terminal when it took nearly half an hour to download one single image from the World Wide Web.

Before that time there was a long period when the text-only browsers were popular as they were more or less the only option to access any information on the internet.

One of the commonly used text-only browsers, called Lynx initially, was developed by a team of students at University of Kansas.

The two ways of browsing in Lynx were either highlighting the chosen link using cursor keys, or entering the number of a previously numbered link. Before advanced screen readers appeared Lynx was commonly used by visually impaired people because of its text-to-speech friendly nature.

Text only browsers can still be effective when low bandwidth internet connections or older computers are being used, to get the pure information without images, distracting pop-ups, and advertisements.

Above JSA Digital website rendered by Lynx

Furthermore, text only browsers have a much more important role that needs to be considered by any web-site builders. Namely, what is shown by a text only browser is nearly the same as what the web indexing search engine robots, crawlers, can see. So you can easily loose valuable information being indexed by search engines if your website does not present key information in a text-only browser. Obviously, this could result in a lower page-ranking, loosing potential visitors and customers.

To avoid this shortfall there are common techniques which can make sure that your website presents a similar experience to robots as to real people.

It is important that all images and buttons on your pages have the “alt” attribute which describes in text what is in the element. All links should have “title” values which add information about the nature of the links, especially in the cases of a linked images. This is as easy to forget as it is easy to check. The common browsers render this as a tooltip, so when you hover your mouse over the element, you can see that text.

There is another area where it is important to have additional text based information. Most of the multimedia elements of a website are not visible by default search engines. It is important to have an alternative text version of content for browsers (and search engines) without support for Flash, Javascript, embedded video or any components other than html.
With a text-only browser you can also test the structure of your site from a search engine optimisation prospective. If you see the actual content at the top with the navigation and other information after, its highly likely that the real and most relevant content will be indexed. This is because most of the crawlers only use the first 200 words from the <body> section of the page. If your navigation lists many items, the search engine may not encounter your main content within the first 200 words.

One way to check your website is through the online version of a text browser by the World Wide Web Consortium, alternatively you can install Lynx from here to your own machine and have an historic surf experience.

Where are the other animals? Last month Microsoft Research released a paper about a Web browser calls Gazelle that’s constructed in such a way as to act like an operating system exclusively protecting resources and giving better security.

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DigiDigest is an initiative from the dedicated bunch of young designers, developers, and managers (most of which are not young anymore but still feel it) within the multimedia development agency JSA Digital.

We have been developing websites, applications, kiosks, and multimedia solutions for well over 9 years. Collectively we have over five decades of experience in our team.

Being the creative bunch we are we find our biggest assets to be the knowledge in our heads. So we decided to create this blog to allow us a get some of our musing down on..er..screen and at the same time allow you to hopefully benefit from some of our thoughts and suggestions.

We aim to keep the writing style as easy to understand as possible and we will try and ensure that any ‘tech’ stuff is explained so we can all follow it.

The blog will be divided into a number of categories to aid you, the reader, to read posts of interest. There are:

• Communications - How technology can be leveraged to make communications easier
• Future - Future direction of the web and how it will affect all of us both socially and commercially.
• Live! - What we have being developing as it goes live and how it affects you.
• Marketing – Everything from the latest viral, what is happening, what is working and where it is heading
• Social - About what we have been getting up to! Plans, People and Parties!
• Technology – Everything from the latest browsers and plug-ins, to servers and databases and more importantly how it will effect you
• Trends - What is creating waves and, what’s not hitting the mark
• Useability – Design: what works and what does not. Navigation, accessibility, browser support

We hope you enjoy reading but more importantly, we want to hear your feedback and comments on what we write so we can tailor our future posts toward items of interest to you. Please feel free to suggest a post idea whenever you like, we would love to answer your questions via this blog so that all our readers can benefit!

Looking forward to talking to you online but always nice to see you AFK!

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