Aug

12

A fast and fun way to mockup almost anything

Filed Under Blogging, Doing, Review, Social Media | 3 Comments

Welcome! You appear to be new here (or you've reset your cookies recently). If you're new here, you may want to browse around a bit and find out what the site is about. I encourage you to register for the RSS feed or to receive updates through email. Thanks for visiting!


A fast and fun way to mockup almost anything (image: )

Mockups…easy!
Part of the regular cycle is the user interface mockup. I’ve worked with many different including Google Sketchup and Adobe Photoshop to build representations for clients.

But nothing has been as quick, easy, and as Balsamiq Mockup, and (and /offline) user interface mockup tool for PC, Mac and .

version is $79, but the version is , with some limitations.

I’ve done a couple of small projects for personal work using the (5 minute nag screen) version.

Mocking up
Here’s how easy it is to use:

  1. Load up the default ‘demo’ page.
  2. Press Ctrl-A to select all default elements
  3. Press Delete to remove all default elements
  4. Start selecting and dragging in elements from the element bar at the top of the page (over 60 of them)
  5. Double-click on an element to edit its properties
  6. Repeat until you’ve got a mockup you’re happy with

A fast and fun way to mockup almost anything (image: )

Yes, it’s that easy.
With the version, you’re prompted every 5 minutes with an advertisement, but you can still save your work or print it out. Ads don’t get in the way of your workflow.

Developers have chosen a , look for the presentation because:

Balsamiq Mockups intentionally uses hand-drawn UI elements, so that people don’t get attached to “that pretty color gradient” or think that your mockup has actual code behind it and is “practically done”.

A fast and fun way to mockup almost anything (image: )

This lets your focus on the functionality of the item and is generally more open to honest critique (which is what you want at the mockup stage).

Some other features of the version:

  • Export to Human-readable text
  • Import from text
  • Integrated into Confluence, with other apps in the pipe
  • Pre-drawn controls and icons
  • Very easy to use
  • :)

So, if User Interface , User , or website is your thing, you need to check out Balsamiq Mockup.
Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Aug

11

Lesson learned: Relying on one of anything is bad (Gmail Down)

Filed Under Blogging, In the life, News, Social Media | 6 Comments


Lesson learned: Relying on one of anything is bad (Gmail Down) (image: )The world was in a tizzy this afternoon as ’s application crashed and burned.

and Apps for domains all seem impacted.

This is a breaking event so I’ll update this post when more is known. Gmail’s Blog has nothing on it, currently.

*** UPDATE ***
It looks like the big brains at Gmail have fixed the issue.

The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.

And indeed it does seem to be back to normal. Excellent.

Jul

22

Bag Open. Cat Out. Internet in danger! OpenDNS to the rescue?

Filed Under Blogging, Doing, How to, In the life, News, Web | Leave a Comment


PDP-11/45 lock
Creative Commons License photo credit: Jef Poskanzer

One little secret that your ISP ( Provider) has likely been involved with is the -wide patching of the Multi-vendor DNS Issue.

Simply, this issue could allow malicious evil-doers to redirect your surfing to that they control, intercepting important and private information (such as passwords, banking info, etc).

Frequent Black Hat Speaker Dan Kaminsky today announced a massive, multi-vendor issue with DNS that could allow attackers to compromise any name server - clients, too. Kaminsky also announced that he had been working for months with a large number of major vendors to create and coordinate today’s release of a patch to deal with the vulnerability.

of this industry-wide vulnerability and the collaboration (to fix the flaw) was originally scheduled to be announced at the Black Hat Security Conference in August, but due to the vulnerability being published elsewhere, the presenter thought it best to release the information so that people can take the appropriate actions.

What can you do?
Basically, this is a complex issue, but it boils down to a test and a very fix.

The test:
To find out if you are vulnerable to this issue, you can use the DNS checker link on Kaminsky’s webpage here (in the upper right corner).

The fix:
If you are vulnurable, then you can either A) wait until your ISP fixes their DNS servers, or B) set your own computer’s DNS strings to point to OpenDNS servers.

I highly recommend option B.

The OpenDNS website has friendly, easy to implement instructions on converting your DNS settings and also offer a whole host of additional features your current ISP may not have:

Features

I’ve written about OpenDNS before, so feel to check out these previous articles and then help save the .

And if you do test your ISP using Dan’s page, please post your results in the comment section! I’ll start things off by adding mine.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Jul

18

Merging domains — important things to consider when you feel the urge to merge

Filed Under Blogging, Doing, How to, Web | 4 Comments


pet doctor | bicycle mad scientist
Creative Commons License photo credit: Kevin Steele

A friend recently asked me for a bit of advice regarding merging two corporate domains. Two organizations, with similar or complimentary lines of are now one. What to do about the left-over . A quandary.

Below I’ve outlined 6 areas to consider, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I guess the only reasonable quick-answer is to first understand the goal for the merged . Once you understand that, you can begin to ask questions about the goals for the new website.

Let me create a fictional example to help illustrate the situation, then dive into the six points, and then I’ll outline a couple of things to think about for each of these points.

Obviously there are many more things to consider, but this is a blog post and not a downloadable eBook :)

Please leave your thoughts on what I’ve missed! I want to learn from you…now on to the example:

Ben’s Bikes (a local mountain bike retailer) has merged with Sammy’s ski and sports shop. Ben’s Bikes is a market leader in this region, with over 40% of the annual sales volume in new mountain bikes. They also have exclusive dealership agreements with a number of the premier mountain bike manufacturers in Europe. They have a very loyal and select clientele and are considered the ‘go-to’ shop for all regional mountain biking aficionados.

Sammy’s cycle shop is a general bicycle retailer. They don’t really specialize, but they do have a wide selection of mid-priced bikes in all categories (road, mountain, touring, cruising, kids, etc). They also have multiple locations in the local geographic region.

The businesses have merged and are operating as Ben & Sammy’s cycle therapy. They have a small internal team tasked to manage the website integration.

Now that we understand the landscape, we go back to the quandary of the website. Let’s get to some important questions:

broken bike
Creative Commons License photo credit: casey atchley


These are the visitors to your site; your potential or past customers. Questions you should be asking your team include:

  • Who are you servicing and what are their goals for using your website? This is basic and should be asked before any website is designed (or redesigned).
  • What’s the purpose? Is your website there to appointments, to take orders, or to provide a catalogue of information? Your new site will depend on how well you answer that questions, and how well your understands that purpose.
Nou web de Brompton
Creative Commons License photo credit: marcbel


This is what your is looking for. Audiences conduct research and order .

  • Inventory — both sites likely have similar , so which do you keep and which do you ditch? You can’t make decisions until you’ve evaluated all the assets.
  • What about unique to one …is it still relevant in the new landscape?
  • Keep only that supports the ’s ability to fulfill the goals of the site. Everything else is distraction.
Blog Juice Calculator
Creative Commons License photo credit: inju

Juice
Both sites have some engine pagerank value. This is the value of
the page to a particular set of keywords or term. It determines how high the page appears in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when a particular phrase or keywords are searched upon.

  • Determine if pagerank is really important to your needs, or not, and consider appropriate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques in your merge process.
  • 301 Redirects — if you’re creating a new , you’ll need to set these up to ensure that the engines know that the previous businesses haven’t vanished, just merged. Setting them up can be a bit technical but is very important to ensure that visitors who’ve bookmarked the old pages are appropriately redirected to the new site.
Shop
Creative Commons License photo credit: perreira

Ancillary touchpoints
Over the of the two previous , you’ll find that there may be some touchpoints including RSS feeds, tag feeds or even
regular newsletters. You’re going to have to consider migrating
all these to the new site.

  • Now’s a good time to evaluate the integration of your entire process. Where does fit? How about feeds of particular streams…or newsletters? This is where your marketing team will have some valuable input too…really!
  • If you’ve had a website, you’ve likely been measuring traffic to that site. Well, since you’re merging sites, now is the perfect time to re-evaluate your website measurement strategy. Will you continue using the or consider purchasing a contract with a provider? What kind of reporting do you need? What kind of decisions are you going to be making based on what kind of data?
New Orleans Annual Bicycle Beauty Pageant
Creative Commons License photo credit: robholland

Changing external linking
Both have been around for a while, and have a fair number of inbound links from other sites and articles.

  • These help build pagerank ( Juice). Yes, they’ll automagically flow through when they hit the 301 redirects, but it’s also good to contact the sites directly and ask them to update their links. This is a great time to (re)establish with your website network…work the side of the medium :)
Bright Orange
Creative Commons License photo credit: alq666

Promotion on your old sites
Regardless of all the work you do, your old will still be bookmarked or linked in old etc. If, perchance, that someone does click on an old link, help them find your new location.

  • Keep your old sites live for a year or two. names are pretty cheap these days. After you’ve merged them into the new site, kill the old on the old sites (to reduce the size of the sites you’ll need to maintain) and leave helpful messages on the appropriate landing pages. Use your analytics and server logs to determine heavily visited pages.

I’m not the expert…what do you think!
As I mentioned, this is not a , just a blog post. So, there are many more things to consder in the merge process. I’ve listed a few above, but what do you think? What have I missed that I shouldn’t have? Leave your thoughts below.

Jul

17

Wordpress 2.6 is out — and you’re using it now.

Filed Under Blogging, Doing, News, Social Media, Web | Leave a Comment


Wordpress Plugin for iPhone/iPod touch
Creative Commons License photo credit: purplelime

It was a fairly painless update (thanks to the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin), but there were a few quirks I’ve had to address:

  • Avatars. WP 2.6 has much better support for Avatars (images used to identify authors of comments). But, my theme doesn’t natively support them so I’ve had to maintain use of the Easy Gravatars plugin.
  • Turbo mode. This is an admin. function, but basically it lets you
    speed up some admin functions with Gears integration. Gears behind my firewall is messy, but I will be trying this from more open connections in the future.

If you’re interested in seeing more of the 2.6 features in action, check out this .

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Jun

26

How to *really* know your blog is successful (or not)

Filed Under Blogging, In the life, Social Media, Web | 2 Comments


How to *really* know your blog is successful (or not) (image: 256)Hey! How’ya doin’!
There are many ways to define your blog’s success; Hits, Links, Trackbacks, Comments, PageRank, Subscribers, etc.

These are all good indicators of activity. Your blog is busy. You’re getting a lot of pageviews. People are hitting and reading and crawling the pages and posts of your blog. All is good, according to the numbers.

But those are only numbers, not people with goals and needs — your visitors and their reason for visiting your blog. How do you measure up in the Visitor metric? I bet you won’t find that one in many analysis textbooks.

How to *really* know your blog is successful (or not) (image: 256)Did you find what you’re looking for?
Good question! Because short of receiving or comment posts telling you about a problem or concern, you have no idea if the 30 unique visitors to your blog today managed to achieve their goal for visiting! You just know that they visited.

Current analytics platforms like StatCounter, Google Analytics, Microsoft AdCentre Analytics, or even the new live analytics application Woopra (more on that in another post), can’t really tell you if any visitor actually read and learned something from your latest post. They can only tell you what that visitor did while they were on your blog. Period.

Ask the question.
’s Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik recently launched a , little application (4Q) that will allow you better understand your visitor behaviour by presenting them with a friendly and polite ‘exit survey’ when they leave your blog.

The way it works.

4Q employs a two-stage invitation process. When visitors arrive at your site, they will be presented an invitation to participate in a survey after their session. If they accept, a second, minimized window, which contains the survey itself, will be launched and will wait in the background for the visitor to complete his or her session. 4Q surveys are designed to be collaborative brand building exercises, not annoying browsing interruptions.
(from the FAQ)

How to *really* know your blog is successful (or not) (image: 256)What’s in it for me?
Knowledge. Direct feedback. 4Q survey results enable you to know that the sampled visitors said they’re happy, or unhappy. You know that they’ve said they’ve achieved their task or goal. And you’ve asked them for specific feedback so you can improve. All benefits for anyone who cares about improving the visitor’s .

So, to really know if your visitor was satisfied, you need to ask them. Nicely, politely, but ask them. It shows you care about your visitor’s .

Now you know, and you’re much better off that simply guessing based on the numbers. Oh happy day!

*** Update ***
Apologies for the images not showing up. Bad formatting for Brad.

As well: as I noticed when replying to Margaret in the SocialMediaToday version:

…Also, one thing I neglected to mention in the post, the survey doesn’t
appear for every visitor. You can scale the sample rate in the
application. The default sample rate is 10% of the unique visitors, so
one in ten will be asked to participate…

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Jun

23

Tweaking your FeedBurner / FeedSmith plugin to support Wordpress 2.5+ tag feeds (easy!)

Filed Under Blogging, How to, Social Media | 4 Comments


FeedBurner Logo (© FeedBurner, Inc.)
Creative Commons License photo credit: magbag

Sorry for the uber tech in this post, but I thought this was a fix that anyone running a Wordpress 2.5+ blog could do if they wanted to enable ‘Tag Feeds’.

Before I get into the how, let’s explore the why briefly.

Some background:

The current incarnation of the FeedSmith / FeedBurner plugin doesn’t support the new feature of Tag Feeds. No big deal if you don’t care about allowing your visitors to subscribe to your based on Tag. But you’re missing an opportunity to allow your readers to better filter the if that’s the case.

For example, lets say a visitor is only interested in receiving my posts on photography. They don’t care about all this , , usability, or engine optimization that I may be about. They only care about my photography posts. 2.5+ allows you to subscribe to any Tag Feed or Category Feed. But not if you’re using an unmodified FeedSmith plugin. Fear not, I’ve got a fix for you in a moment.

The way the current FeedSmith plugin works is that it takes all my feed subscription requests (comment, category, tag, etc) and returns only the main blog feed, which is the main feed at Feedburner. Not good if you want to have an Feed of only my photography tagged posts.

The workaround is quite and requires slightly modifying your FeedBurner / FeedSmith plugin. Here’s how:

  1. Navigate to the main Plugins page. Scroll down until you find the Feedburner / FeedSmith plugin. Click on the Disable link in the right-hand column. When the page refreshes, scroll back down and click on the Edit link.
  2. The Plugin Editor screen will open. Scroll down in the edit window until you find the function function ol_feed_redirect()
  3. In that section you’ll be adding text to a line of code. Change the text that reads
    is_feed() && $feed != 'comments-rss2' && !is_single() &&
     to read
    is_feed() && $feed != 'comments-rss2' && !is_single() && !is_tag() &&
  4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and press the Update File button.
  5. Then, go back to the main Plugins page, and re-enable the FeedBurner / FeedSmith plugin by clicking on the Enable link.

Congratulations, you’ve just re-enabled Tag Feeds for your 2.5+ blog whilst maintaining Feedburner compatibility for the main feed.

Bonus for the advanced student: Since your Tag Feeds are now separated from the main blog feed, you can set up discreet Feedburner feeds for select tags. Unfortunately the little above won’t automagically redirect Subscriptions to Feedburner for you, as the FeedSmith Plugin does. You’ll have to manually publish the Feed URL, thusly:
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlogbradgriercomWordpress">My tag feed hosted on Feedburner</a>

Which would render thusly:

My Wordpress tag feed hosted on Feedburner.

Jun

19

Key Messages from the Gerry McGovern Masterclass, Ottawa, May 5-6, 2008

Filed Under Blogging, How to, Review | 1 Comment


Wild Abandon
Creative Commons License photo credit: dandy_fsj

To wrap up this interview series with Krista Vieira, we’re featuring the Key Messages generated by conference attendees.

If you missed the interview series read these:

Key Messages from the Gerry McGovern Masterclass, Ottawa, May 5-6, 2008

  • We need a clarity of understanding of what our website is for.
  • To much choice = no choice.
  • We must focus on what our customers want. Why are they coming to our website? What task are they trying to complete?

Customers

Customers are:

  • Harsh, demanding and difficult
  • Skeptical and cynical of authority
  • Have the power on the - not the organization
  • Dictators, not kings
  • Impatient
  • Quick to use they’re favourite button - the Back button

reality #1: The takes the power to control information away from the organization and gives it to the people.

The is about giving real information and facts. The allows people to get to know a subject better or make a better decision. People can comparison shop; read reviews; find out what other people think, etc.

The is the land of A.D.D. We live in a money rich, time poor economy. Time is our most valuable resource. We measure our website’s success by the time it takes users to do something; the quicker they perform the task, the better. The sin of the modern economy - though shall not waste my time.

reality #2: Using the is not a planned activity; it’s rushed, impatient and hurried. People are searching the in between commercial breaks, after they’ve put the children to bed, when they’re tired. Accept this: the is ALWAYS fitted in between something else.

Building Trust

  • People trust people like themselves, not authority figures. They will trust the factory worker more than the CEO.
  • Give the truth on the not PR or marketing. This will build trust.
  • No one believes an organization is perfect, so they don’t expect it.

Importance of Simplicity

  • We read on the like we’re riding down an escalator.
  • needs to be direct and to the point. Think speed of action and clarity of message.
  • The is an active doing medium, so use the language of action. Don’t talk about what you’ve done or what you’re going to do. Don’t become the passive communicator, become the active facilitator of the .
  • Every time you add to your website, you complicate things. There is always a trade-off with simplicity. To make something more means something else will be more complicated. Focus on doing your top task well, then worry about the rest of the website.
  • Something that’s easy is immediately doable. Show by doing; don’t talk about it. For example: doesn’t have to explain to you how to . The simplicity of it immediately makes it usable.
  • Don’t talk about an application form, let people use it.

Remember, are built from, and function, on words.

The is Self- or Having a Customer-Centric Website

Only having information on the is the greatest mismanagement of a website. People are not coming to looking for information. Do you go to an information booth and just ask them to give you information? People come to the to solve a problem.

Information only has value when associated with a task. Identify the most important tasks and make sure your customer’s can find them and complete them quickly.

reality #3: Sometimes we spend so much time doing things wrong, that we don’t have the time to do things right. The best focus on their top tasks and keep improving them. They find out how people are reacting.
3 core rules of self-:

  1. Convenience
  2. Speed
  3. Price (the is the land of the cheap deal)

If you can’t do price, you’d better do the other two really well.

reality #4: Having a customer-centric website means the focuses on what the customer wants. When an organization doesn’t know its customers or what they want, they end up with a put-it-upper website: can you put this up for me by Thursday? The 20,000 page website is built by put-it-uppers.

Economies that aren’t successful put numerous steps in the way of their customers. For example, in Peru it takes 289 steps to set up a company.

We measure success by the amount of time it takes people to do something.

To have a customer-centric website:

  1. Identify the top tasks
  2. Speak the language the customer is using. Don’t make them use the organization’s language.

The is where you go to do stuff. In order for a person to do something, a website must be useful. We must potty train our so we get rid of the we-we’s: We did this; we launched that.

We must focus on what the customer wants to do.

Additional Resources:

Next Page →