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photo credit: Randy Zhang

Google Chrome is no Firefox (yet).

For the last week and a bit, off and on,  I’ve been using Google Chrome (Google’s new entry into the browser wars). On the 3 XP-based systems I’ve used it on, I’ve found it to be very fast, very efficient, and stable. Pretty good performance for a ‘beta’.

I do have concerns about the way Chrome appears to ‘monitor’ my surfing activity (by using Google Gears functionality), but then again, I use Gmail and other Google Apps so I’m sure the Big G knows all about me at this point.

But, without plugin extensibility, Chrome is currently a curiosity. I won’t be using it for my daily work.

One major annoyance is the lack of Adblock. The web is a very marketing-heavy place, and I prefer to selectively view my advertising. The Adblock extension for Firefox allows this.

To achieve an advertising-reduced surfing experience with Chrome, I need to use Privoxy, a local privacy managing Proxy server. It’s a quick install and seems to work flawlessly.

A solution to this for now is http://www.privoxy.org/

1.) Install Privoxy
2.) Click on the Wrench icon in Chrome in the upper right corner
3.) Choose options>Under The Hood>Change proxy settings
4.) A windows box pops up, choose LAN settings (at least this is what it’s called in Vista)
5.) Check off “Proxy settings” and in the address setting add127.0.0.1 and in the port 8118
6.) If you have the option, you can also check off “Bypass proxy for local settings”
7.) Click “Ok”, close chrome and restart it. 

Tada. Enjoy.

Geekzone provided the process (thanks guys!)

I’ve written before about Moo (cards & stickers) and LinkedIn (the business social network), but this is the first time I’ve written about both in the same post.

Short story.
Moo is letting you make 50 of their beautiful photo-enhanced business cards for free!

It’s really mashup²
Moo itself is a mashup of the traditional business card printing business, an online card creation and billing model, and an ability to import images from Flickr and other sources. The new mashup component is that you can import parts of your LinkedIn profile into the card creation process.

And 50 free Moo cards is always cool.

Technorati Tags: mashup, social media, business, printing, cards, moo, LinkedIn, cool, technology

photo credit: Jef Poskanzer

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

Simply, this issue could allow malicious evil-doers to redirect your surfing to websites 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.

News 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 simple test and a very simple 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

• Features Overview
• Content Filtering
• Adult Site Blocking
• Domain Blocking
• Domain Whitelist
• Phishing Protection
• Statistics
• OpenDNS Guide
• Customization
• Large Cache
• Ultra-Reliable Network
• Shortcuts

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

• OpenDNS: Safer, smarter, speedier surfing
• One year of OpenDNS

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

Technorati Tags: Black Hat, DNS, OpenDNS, Security, Flaw, Vulnurability, Privacy

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 business are now one. What to do about the left-over websites. 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 business goal for the merged business. 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:

photo credit: casey atchley

Audience
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 business purpose? Is your website there to book 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 audience understands that purpose.

photo credit: marcbel

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

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

photo credit: inju

Google Juice
Both sites have some search engine pagerank value. This is the value of
the page to a particular set of search keywords or search 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 business needs, or not, and consider appropriate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques in your merge process.
• 301 Redirects — if you’re creating a new domain, you’ll need to set these up to ensure that the search 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 business pages are appropriately redirected to the new site.

photo credit: perreira

Ancillary touchpoints
Over the development of the two previous websites, you’ll find that there may be some communication touchpoints including RSS feeds, tag feeds or even
regular email 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 communication process. Where does web fit? How about RSS feeds of particular content 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 free utilities or consider purchasing a service contract with a service provider? What kind of reporting do you need? What kind of decisions are you going to be making based on what kind of data?

photo credit: robholland

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

• These help build pagerank (Google 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 communication with your website network…work the social side of the medium

photo credit: alq666

Promotion on your old sites
Regardless of all the work you do, your old websites will still be bookmarked or linked in old email 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. Domain names are pretty cheap these days. After you’ve merged them into the new site, kill the old content 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 book, 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.

• 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 Google 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 Wordpress 2.6 features in action, check out this video.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, blogging, blog, blogger, upgrade, easy

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 Experience metric? I bet you won’t find that one in many web analysis textbooks.

Did you find what you’re looking for?
Good question! Because short of receiving email 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 web analytics platforms like StatCounter, Google Analytics, Microsoft AdCentre Analytics, or even the cool 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.
Google’s Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik recently launched a free, cool little web 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)

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 experience.

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 experience.

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: Analytics, Analysis, Google, 4Q, Avinash Kaushik, Visitor, Experience

photo credit: iDream_in_Infrared

Part three: The good, the bad, and the content developer.

This is the third part of an interview with Krista Vieira, my co-worker and recent attendee of Gerry McGovern’s Masterclass for web content professionals. Part one focuses on knowing your audience. Part two is about keywords, carewords and focus. In this part, Krista speaks about the role of the content manager / developer.

Q: You’ve worked as a content developer and web professional for quite a few years now, was there anything at the masterclass that shocked or surprised you?

I wasn’t so much surprised as disappointed by the number of websites that don’t focus on the audience. Obviously I am aware of this, but it really sunk in seeing example after example after example. This is not just a North American problem it’s global.

Gerry has a knack for pointing out the absurd on a website and getting participants to see the web page with new eyes (along with showing us it’s OK to laugh at ourselves). I found it interesting that in each example he sited, the organization completely missed the mark when it spent to much time focusing on them and not enough time focusing on the audience. Each website that made improvements did so by focusing on what their particular audience wanted.

I find it funny that in traditional advertising, marketers take the time to get to know the demographic they are selling to. They find out what motivates a particular group, then build an ad campaign around what will best speak to the audience they are trying to reach. People seem to forget that the web is really just another marketing tool. Marketers forget that they still need to focus on the audience and deliver a message in a way that will reach the people they are trying to reach.

For some reason I have still not figured out, a lot of people working on the web take it really personally. They create something and it becomes all about them, so it’s difficult at times to recommend changes or improvements.

The web is a really fun place to work, but at the end of the day it’s not about the web team or the organization the website if built for, but the audience. Something not working on the web does not automatically translate to being a poor communicator or being bad at your job. I think of it like a teacher. When you become an educator you learn that people have different learning styles. Some people respond better to hands-on learning, while others respond better to textbook or traditional lecture style learning. A good educator understands the need to teach to all styles of learning during class time. Each class will be different, so the teacher needs to identify the learning styles of each class then adapt their teaching to suite the students’ needs.

As web communicators, we need to understand that our audience may not behave on the web as we intend. We need to take the time to learn how they are using our website, what’s working for them and what isn’t, so we can adjust our communication style to best suite their online behaviour.

It should be obvious but it isn’t. As web communicators, we are producing a product for a particular audience. How is it we even need to spend any time discussing the importance of finding out who a particular web audience is and what their needs are?

Q: Gerry spoke for two days, and there was a lot of information delivered, but if you could have a second part to the masterclass, what additional information would you like to have heard, or explored in even more detail, if any?

I would like to have a hands-on session that gets participants to start analyzing websites to see what is working and what isn’t. As I mentioned earlier, Gerry has a knack for pointing out the absurd on a website, things we may notice about a site, but be blind to on our own.

I think it would be beneficial to analyze websites and break down what makes them good and what makes them bad. At the end, participants could be required to analyze their own websites. The fresh perspective may allow web professionals to step back and clearly see their websites for what they are. I think as web professionals we need to be able to maintain a distance from the websites we support, so we can continue to see it the way our audience does.

In the final part of this series, we’ll review key learnings from Gerry McGovern’s Masterclass for Content Managers.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk

Part Two: Words, Carewords, and Focus

This is the second part of an interview with Krista Vieira, my co-worker and recent attendee of Gerry McGovern’s Masterclass for web content professionals. Part one focused on knowing your audience (good advice for any communicator). In this part, Krista talks about carewords and focusing on the really important tasks.

Q:Gerry talks about Carewords, does that resonate with you?

Definitely. I prefer the term carewords to keywords. Carewords focus more on the audience and what the audience wants. Keywords is more about the organization and the words the organization wants it’s audience to use; the words that are important to the president of a company or the head of the marketing/communications department.

Carewords ties in to the key messaging we received over the two days - get to know your audience. A website is built to reach a particular audience and whether the purpose is to communicate an idea or to sell a product, the purpose is still to reach an audience. If you don’t use the words the intended audience uses, you risk not reaching them at all.

By focusing on carewords (the audience) and not keywords (the organization) I believe web professionals better remember who they are creating the website and the content for. Who the audience is and what they want should always be at the forefront of anything a web teams does.

Of all the concepts that Gerry spoke of over the two-day conference, what do you think will be the hardest for most content developers to implement? The easiest?

I think the hardest concept for most content developers to implement will be to get large organizations to focus on the top tasks of a website regardless of which department those tasks may come from. So often large organizations create large websites that are arranged in the classic organization-centric manner of departments. Each department is fighting for their position on the website and their portion of the revenue. It’s all about them and not about the audience.

I think most content specialists would like to get large organizations to accept that an audience doesn’t care which department a particular task or piece of information comes from; to them, the website represents the organization as a whole. Each department needs to work with the others to create a finished product that benefits the audience. By focusing on the audience and creating a user-centric website, the revenue will come, the brand will be recognized and the organization’s reputation will be established.

The easiest concept should be to start writing with the words the audience is using. This is at least one step in the right direction of focusing a website on the audience. Some organizations may not support user testing, but even small web teams can track their web stats and see which terms are being searched for most. They can then begin to use those search terms in their content and check the stats again to see if improvements have been made. This small step may help to support the need for further user testing. It’s a small step, but a first step non-the-less.

In part three, Krista will look at the role of the content manager / developer.

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