Data.gov.uk a welcome move for developers

Look out for a barrage of new UK applications hitting the web anytime soon based on the non-personal data now being made available by the UK Government on http://data.gov.uk

It’s a bold and in my opinion welcome move which will open up more data than even the U.S. government holds at its Data.gov.

The site was officially launched last week by Web creator Sir Tim Berners Lee and been has been running for the last six months in beta with almost 3,000 data sets available. By contrast, the U.S. site Data.gov, has less than 1,000 data sets.

So far over 2,400 developers have registered to test the site and 10 applications built. These include PlanningAlerts, a free service that emails you if someone has put in a planning application to build near your house and FillThatHole, which lets people report potholes and other road hazards across the UK.

It promises to be a great resource for developers especially independents who struggle to get or afford reliable data.

Not often we have something to say well done to the government about these days, so credit where credit is due. this is a great move.

Things you should know when Developing a site

I’ve seen it done many times.
Someone comes up with a good idea for a site, they investigate how they can make it flash and fancy, they spend quite a bit getting it developed, get the seo perfected and build a decent marketing campaign and then wait for the traffic to pour on in.

It’s exciting to see the initial traffic start arriving on the new site but then although the traffic to the site remains good, showing that the marketing and SEO are working, the bounce rate starts to rise.

It’s a worrying statistic when that bounce rate goes over 35 – 40% but what can be done to get it down?

1) Clean up your pages especially the home page – If the user has come to you from a search engine they will have clicked on the link expecting to see that particular content clearly displayed to them. If they arrive at your home page and there are lots of other stories on there they will not bother staying and searching again. They’ll hit the back button return to the search results and click on the next item in the list.

If you must have multiple stories / articles etc on the page then seperate them and title them clearly.

2) Show related articles – The fact they have clicked through to you indicates that there was something about your page they were interested in. It might not be quite the article they were expecting once they arrive at your page but if there are a list of related stories shown clearly they may still find something of interest.

3) Clearly display your category list – they may arrive at a page that sits in a category that would not usually interest them. If this is the case show them that your site carries other content too.

4) Show most commented only if people are actually commenting – I’ve seen this so many times. Pages carrying a list of the most commented stories, I think this is great, but only if the stories are actually being commented on. If your most commented story has 3 comments then the user is going to take a look and think your site doesn’t have many users.

5) Link to other articles from within an article – If the user starts reading an article obviously it is something that has grabbed their attention and interests them. Therefore take this chance to take them to other articles of interest within your site. If your article mentions tableless CSS and you have previously written an article regarding tableless css link directly to it.

6) Remember web reading is different to print reading – Web users scan pages, it’s a well known fact that people read the web in an F pattern – the F pattern means the user will read the full width of the paragraph at the top of the page, scan down the left hand side for relevant keywords, then browse further along the paragraph before scanning down the left hand side again. Make sure your most relevant keywords therefore are within the ‘F’ of your article.

Users also like short paragraphs. They don’t come online to read War and Peace!

7) User don’t care about scrolling down – It’s a common misconception that you should get everything in above the fold. This is ludicrous, there is no way you can cram everything in above the fold and if you do then the user will not scroll to find anything else that sits below it. The best way to get people to scroll down your page is to carry content “Through” the fold.

8 ) Stats are vital – Most people use stats to track how much traffic they are getting. Unfortunately that’s all most people use them for. It does not matter if you are using the excellent google analytics or another off the shelf stats package, harvest the information, interrogate and you will improve your sites overall effectiveness.

You can see which pages people are leaving on, you can see where they are coming to you from, you can see how long people are spending on particular pages. If people seem to spend a lot of time on a particular page look at it find out what it is that makes it sticky and write related articles for it.

The above really is just the tip of the iceberg on things to consider when building  a site, but if you start off on the right foot then the rest will come together.

Even google fears recession.

People see the internet as a living breathing thing. It changes by the second, advances by the hour and more and more people use it by the day.

Many people forget about the goings on of 2000/2001 (read more below) and seem to think that websites, due to relatively low overheads will be more immune to the impending recession we now face.

Well think that at your own peril!

Even google are at present preparing themselves for the recession.
Their share price is at a 3 year low and has halved in the last year.
Every company peaks! And maybe, just maybe google has peaked and is now seeing a downturn. It’ll take a while for the boys like Yahoo and MSN to catchup but with google this past month reversing certain “Rules” they had, such as allowing gambling firms to take out sponsored selling and attempting to push You-Tube into E-commerce. They are seriously throwing their weight about trying to bring in extra revenues.

Established websites are cutting their marketing budgets and smaller websites are pushing less into google adwords and more into SEO, hoping the longer term effects of good seo will see their sites thrive or at least survive.

All of this will hit google hard over the next 8 months or so. Maybe they are big enough to ride the storm but the term “The bigger you are the harder you fall.” has never seemed more apt!

In 2000 /2001 there was a big “dot.com bubble burst” which saw many websites, which had received millions of pounds of investment thrown at them, go POP!

The stock markets in western nations had watched stock valuations rise faster than usual and with less caution. This quickly turned into a gold rush.
Venture capitalists suddenly wanted a dot.com or a part of a dot.com.
Being dot.com’s these companies where nigh on impossible to value, but simply based on the amount of investment received many individuals who had the intitial ideas for these websites, found themselves on paper at least to be suddenly multi-millionaires.

It didn’t take long of course for the stock market to step back and look at these sites and realise they where never in a million years going to recoup the tens of millions invested in them. That’s when it all fell flat on it’s face!

The Dot-com bubble crash wiped out $5 trillion in market value of technology companies from March 2000 to October 2002.

Famously Boo.com set out to become a global online fashion empire. They spent about £100m in a space of 6 months, the site launched in Autumn 1999 and was placed into receivership in May 2000.

Yahoo went from a high stock price of $128 at the peak of the bubble to a low of $4 at the end.

Lycos where the “google of their day” and where sold to Terra Networks for $12.5 billion in 2000, they where sold on for just $95 million dollars three and a half years later.

Infospace stock price hit $1,305 per share in March 2000 but by April the following year the price had crashed to $22 !!

Facebook in the workplace

It seems to be a trend these days for companies to ban the use of sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Bebo etc. for personal use during the working day. Understandable to a point I would have to say, but I would also add that I think it’s also important for staff to have a certain amount of freedom in the workplace and as long as they still produce results in their respective field a little surfing of the web is a small price to pay for a happier workforce.

The truth is that people will find another equally unproductive way to take up that 10 minutes or so of time, only in that 10 minutes they will moan to the person who they are nearest to about being unhappy in their work and the conditions of the place that they work being unbearable.

A former MD of mine told me that I should try and take a 10 minute break from my monitor each hour and break up the day by surfing the web when things where quiet. He added that in my role as a web developer it was good to keep up with popular sites even if they had no relevance to my work. His philosophy was that if I and the other employees where treated as adults and allowed to govern our own web usage we would A) be happier in our roles and B) be more likely to work overtime (which is generally unpaid in this profession) as and when required.

It resulted in me working 7 days a week at some periods to ensure deadlines where met and clients kept happy, but amazingly I still enjoyed and liked my job and the company I worked for.

In fairness I must add that my current employers attitude to web usage has been quite sensible to date although they have just announced a restriction, not a ban, on Facebook and similar sites.

I think also that Facebook in particular can be used as it was originally inteded as a networking site.
There are a lot of groups set up on Facebook that are good for business.

In my opinion people don’t need Facebook or alternative sites to waste time. They’ve been doing that since well before facebook or the internet as a whole was available to them. Whether it be going for a smoke break or simply chatting to a colleague for 10 minutes at a time there will always be ways to slack off.

Time to go mobile?

With internet speeds ever increasing, mobile phone technology ever changing and people becoming more used to what they want when they want, the time to go mobile is finally upon us.

About 6 years ago I developed some WAP sites for the Battlemail gaming platform on the Siemens mobile phones. It was quite a coup at the time, we signed a deal with siemens and it was a buzz to be able to walk into a mobile phone shop and see something we’d actually worked on in the shops.

WAP though was not the perfect solution. This was before we had the full colour screens we have today, and well before having the actual internet on our phones was too imaginable.

Now though with browser applications such as Opera Mini etc there’s no need to develop in a different technology just to see your site on a phone. It’s all there in glorious colour at faster speeds than some people still get at home!!

I have heard the arguments that the internet on mobile phones will never really take off because the screens are too small etc. To those people I’ll say one thing “Wake up!!!” those problems are already being solved with phone browsers showing whole pages and allowing to zoom in to just the pieces of information you are interested in.

The good thing about these great little browsers is this, you probably don’t need to redevelop because they can read your existing site.

True mobile sites are in fact mini versions of our sites formatted for viewing through mobile phones and devices. all in all it’s just another nice big arena for us to show off our wares and we’ll ignore it at our own peril.

Internet development – where to start….

When I started off in Web Development about 10 years ago, there weren’t too many resources to get good tutorials, code examples and just overall advice from.

These days with everyone and their dog developing sites in their bedrooms and calling themselves Web Developers, there are countless sitres offering tutorials and samples for people just starting out.

I thought it might be useful to list a few of my bookmarks.
Places you can get help, tutorials and advice on development.

W3schools

One of the best sites in my opinion on the web for developers is http://www.w3schools.com/
Here you will find tutorials on just about all web development topics.
When I was starting off I bought books such as the “For Dummies” range etc but even they where unclear. At W3Schools you will find all the Web-building tutorials you need, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia and WAP.

Even for those people who are seasoned developers will find useful reference guides there.

Aspin.com

http://www.aspin.com/ is a resource for all asp scripts and components which can save you hours in development time.  If you are not developing using asp then it’s still worth going to the http://www.codango.com/ which is the group site for aspin as they also do sites for JSP, PHP and asp.net

Poll daddy

http://www.polldaddy.com/

Is a site that can provide polls and surveys for your site. Again a great time saver and so easy to implement into your own site.

http://www.wordpress.com

Remember that there are millions upon millions of people on the internet and a hell of a lot of them blog.
What I’m saying is that there are loads of people in the same boat as you, search wordpress or blogger for people who are writing about their experiences.

So take a look and if you have some resources that you think other developers may find useful then please leave them in the comments.

Print vs Web or Print & Web?

First of all I’ll apologise for not updating the blog recently.
It’s been a hectic month or two both in work and at home.

Work is interesting at the moment, lots of different bits to work on, linking up with external companies to handle various elements of our business and also we have our in house builds to keep on top of.

We’re constantly trying to think up ideas that will provide extra value to our customers and of course we want to make a bit of money along the way. As a newspaper publisher we have tried our best to keep up with modern trends and realise that we are now much more than a print publisher but an all round Media company. Print is still at the forefront of where we want to be and where we want to go, but our web offerings are really coming on and if we can maintain our momentum we can achieve great things I’m sure. We’ve got an enthusiastic and talented digital editor in Christian Dunn and in Martin Wright we have an editor who identifies the web as friend rather than foe, which breaks down a lot of barriers.

It’s still tricky convincing a lot of people who have spent their life working with print that the web is an enhancement to our business, not a replacement, yet!!!
The web, should we use it correctly, should in fact drive readers to the paper and vice versa, afterall research shows that title websites have, if anything, a positive effect on print sales.

It’s easy to blame the internet of course. In a climate that sees one medium decline and another increase you would think there was almost certainly some cross over. This is more evident with the nationals but still relatively unheard of as far as the regional / local paper is involved. The best way still to publicise in any town is a story in the local newspaper. And if you’re selling advertising to local businesses, a lot of your clients still want to be able to hold that ad in their hands. Me included!!

It’s an interesting argument, and one to which the is no definitive answer but I firmly believe in the sustainability of both print and web services running hand in hand for some time yet.

The Project

Just stumbled upon this.

It made me laugh. I’m sure many of you who are developers will identify with it.

(Click image to view full size)

Test your web design in different browsers

Most people test their sites in Firefox and I.E. but there are a whole host of different browsers out there.
I’ve quite literally stumbled upon http://browsershots.org/ by using the Stumble tool bar.

It’s a good idea and not only has a range of Windows based browsers but Linux and Mac ones too.

Worth a look and a bookmark I think.

Explaining things to management……..

I’m sure we’ve all been in the situation where we are trying to explain our latest project or proposal to our superiors and are blissfully aware that they don’t have the foggiest idea of what we are talking about but refuse to admit it. Most of the time we try to be very diplomatic and explain things again and again, more and more clearly until they finally …… nope they don’t get it!

I think this sums it up quite well…….