Dreams vs. Reality

In an ideal world, you would be able to create your site using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and any other necessary technologies and your site would look great in any browser. The reality is that each browser and operating system has its own quirks, and the only way to make sure your site works on any given platform is to test it there. It is important to prioritize for which browsers you’re going to perfect your code, as there is a seemingly endless number of browsers out there, and with mobile browsers and tablets growing in use, you should focus on where most of your site visitors will be seeing your website.

Desktop browsers

There are a few sites on the web where you can find statistics on which browsers are most commonly used. StatCounter.com interactive graphs are a great way to see the top browsers by date and location. As you can see by the graph below, only four browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari) account for more than 90% of browser usage worldwide. It’s therefore essential that you test your site in the latest versions of these top four current browsers.

Mobile browsers

In addition, you should find out whether your site visitors are often using another platform, such as mobile devices, to access your site. In that case, it’s important to test your site on mobile browsers, as well. Again, as shown in the chart below, the top six browsers account for 85% of mobile browser use, so you should concentrate your refinements on these browsers. And just for perspective, desktop browsing still accounts for more than 95% of all browsing worldwide. You should verify that your site is being accessed often on mobile devices before spending a lot of effort to make sure your site works on mobile browsers. For more on what’s involved with developing a mobile-only version of your site, see How is web development different for mobile devices?

Special Requirements

Sometimes your site might have to work in a particular browser that’s not necessarily on the “most popular” list. For example, a sales force might need to access the site from mobile devices all the time, there may be a specific browser version installed on a corporate network, or the site might require some special technology that works best in a certain browser. Be sure to have a handle on all the required browsers and platforms before beginning your site development and design.

Prioritizing your work

With site visitors viewing your site on different browsers and devices, you have to plan for multiple browsing experiences when designing and building your site. In general, when we develop a site, we plan on the following browsers on Windows and MacOS devices:
- Internet Explorer 6.0 (or later)
- Firefox 3.0 (or later)
- Safari 5.0 (or later)
- Chrome 8.0 (or later)

We also test to make sure the site looks acceptable on the following mobile devices:
- Android, iPhone, and RIM
- iPad

The end results

The site might not look the same on all different browsers and devices, but you should come up with solutions for each platform to ensure “cross-browser” compatibility. It’s worth taking the time to make your site look good in as many browsers as practical, since some users are averse to upgrading while others are early adopters of new browsers. If you want to include other browsers and platforms, be sure to leave enough time to customize and test your code on those browsers.

Your goal should be to make your site usable on a range of platforms to keep your visitors happy.

Setting up analytics on your website can be as easy as adding a free Google Analytics code to the pages of your website. And most e-mail service providers generate data and reports for each mailing that you send. The key is to get these analytics programs in place as early as you can so that you can use the data they generate to continually improve your online communications.

Fine-tune your website and SEO

Google Analytics is a free suite of analysis tools that’s widely used to capture and display information about how visitors are using your site. Using analytics, you can find out what’s appealing to your audience, pull them into your site, and get them to click.

From the Google Analytics dashboard, you can get a great overview of how your site is performing over time. Detailed reports let you drill down for more detailed information about every aspect of your site’s performance. And you can have Google Analytics e-mail you reports on a regular basis so you don’t forget.

Google Analytics will give you as much information as you want, or you can stick to the high-level analytics. To see more details on any report, just click the “view full report” link.

Reports that you should monitor regularly are the following:

• Dashboard – See whether the number of visits is going up or down, see a map of where your visitors come from, and see which pages are most popular.
• Visitors overview – See how many visitors you have and how much time they’re spending on your site, and see which browsers and connection speeds your visitors have to make sure your site is optimized for all your audiences.
• Traffic sources overview – See whether your visitors arrived at your site from searches, directly, or from links on other websites.
• Keywords – See which words visitors used on search engines to find your site, plus what they did once they landed on your site.
• Top content –  See which pages get the most traffic on your site.

Depending on your business, you may want to run additional Google Analytics reports. For example, you might want to know what country your visitors come from or what time they are visiting your site. Perhaps you’d want a visual representation of exactly where users are clicking on your web pages.

Improve your e-mail campaigns

After you send an e-mail blast, you should plan on analyzing the results using the analytics that most e-mail services provide to learn how your audience is responding to the communications you’ve sent.  You can see how many people opened your e-mail, and who they are.  You also can check which links generate the most interest, and which campaigns are most effective.

For each e-mail campaign, you should analyze the following:

• How many e-mails were sent, received, and bounced due to bad e-mail addresses
• How many people opened the e-mail, clicked on a link, forwarded your e-mail, and opted out or signed up
• Which links and graphics received clicks
• A comparison of this campaign and past campaigns to identify differences and the reasons for them

Taking a close look at e-mail analytics lets you spot trends that help you refine and improve your e-mail marketing plans. If you get too many unsubscribes, you might be sending your e-mails too often. If none of your graphics are getting clicked, many of your subscribers might have their images turned off and you should design your e-mails to rely less on images and more on text links. If your response rate for a particular e-mail was particularly good, you should see how it differs from less successful campaigns.

Test and refine

One of the great things about having a robust analytics solution in place is that you can test the results you get by updating your content or making multiple versions of your content. For example, you could take a look at which words are leading visitors to your site and create more content that concerns those keywords, and see whether that improves site traffic. You can create multiple versions of a single e-mail campaign and see which gets the most click-throughs. Or reorganize your site to remove pages that are rarely visited, or create stronger links to those pages.

The key is to take a look at analytics at least once a month, plus after every major website change or e-mail campaign.

There are some great free tools to monitor your online presence. Most of these require a few minutes to set up and then a few minutes per day to monitor. There are some that you can use once a month to track how your online brand is over time.

Setup an RSS reader

An RSS reader aggregates web content such as news, blogs, and online searches in a single location for easy viewing. A reader helps you view new information from all the sites and searches you choose on one page. Google Reader is very easy to set up and use.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts let you monitor the web for new content. Just enter the search terms you’re interested in following and how often you want updates and you can monitor any word or phrase. You should set up Google Alerts on your company, your brands, keywords, your competitors’ companies, your key employees, and influencers in your industry. You can get updates via e-mail or add the RSS feed of your Google Alerts to your RSS reader.

Twitter Searches

Twitter searches are feeds of search results of keywords, brands, companies, people, and #hashtags on Twitter. Be sure to search for @mentions of your company Twitter accounts. The results are almost instantaneous and allow for time-critical monitoring.

LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Answers lets you ask and answer industry-specific questions. You can subscribe in an RSS reader to all the questions in a category relevant to your company and your customers. You can keep track of the kinds of problems your customers have, answer questions to show your expertise, and follow discussions in your industry.

Check your social media pages

LinkedIn

Visit your LinkedIn home page to see who has visited your profile, read status updates from your connections, and answer any messages you’ve received. Visit groups you’ve joined to see what kinds of discussions are going on.

Facebook

Look at your company’s Facebook page stats and activity using the View Insights link on the pages you manage. Scan your fans and page views count. Visit your Facebook company page (or personal profile if you use it for business) and answer any questions or address comments that visitors have made on your page. If you are a member of a group, check to see if any interesting new discussions are going on.

The ongoing buzz about your company

Sites such as Social Mention and  Addict-o-matic show you the buzz on your company across a wide selection of social networks. Topsy lets you search terms on Twitter over the past 6 months (Twitter’s search only goes back about a week).

Assess the quality of your online presence

There are a range of free tools that can analyze the quality of your online brand. Use Twitter Grader, Facebook Grader, and Website Grader to get a free analysis of how your pages rank compared to others. You can run these analyses once a month to see how changes you make to your site, pages, and online conversations improve your ranking.

Monitor in real time

Use software such as TweetDeck to monitor online conversations in real time. Set up custom columns that monitor @mentions of your accounts, searches on keywords and names, and activity by your Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections.

Use the information you find

Keeping track of your company online can give you the ability to spot issues before they become problems, find opportunities in your marketplace to grow your business, and build a reputation as an expert in your industry. Responding to people that mention you or your competition can help you win new customers and build relationships in your industry.

Six Revisions has a comprehensive list of monitoring options in ”12 Social Media Monitoring Tools Reviewed.”

Link to your site from social networks

Be sure to complete all the information in your social network profiles, including URLs of your site and/or landing pages. Be sure to include links to your relevant website content on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other appropriate networks.

Add yourself to online directories

Augmented reality snowstorm

Our first augmented reality project was built simply for fun. Every year, we create an online, interactive application that we share with our clients during the holiday season. In 2009, we created an augmented reality snowstorm app that uses  a web cam and a “marker” (in this case, the Scott Design logo printed on our holiday cards). When you launch the app, you put yourself in the middle of a snowstorm that you can control with the marker.

If you don’t have the holiday card, you can print out your own marker and use that instead.

Augmented reality business cards

During the process of creating the snowstorm app, we tried out a few other augmented reality ideas that we really liked. We kept those ideas on the back burner, waiting for the chance to use them.

In early 2010, we launched a new version of our website that presents a cool Flash portfolio with spinning “cards,” each displaying a featured project. It’s a quick and easy way to show off our portfolio.

At the same time, we redesigned our business cards to go with the new web look, and we put the augmented reality marker on the back, knowing we would be making some sort of augmented reality app triggered by the cards.

What we came up with is a version of our portfolio that works with a web cam and the augmented reality marker. If you launch the augmented reality business card and face the back of the business card to the web camera (or print out your own marker and put it in front of the web cam), the portfolio launches. You can move, tilt, and zoom the spinning cards, just by moving the business card in front of the camera.

It’s a great way to turn a regular business card into a 3D portfolio. Take a look and let us know what you think!

Here’s a quick rundown of the good, the bad, and our experience using WordPress to create websites.

Software: Frequent upgrades, plenty of plug-ins, large user base

• Good: WordPress is an open-source project and there are plenty of developers, so security flaws get patched quickly and new features and plug-ins appear regularly. The large, helpful community of users can help you fix problems. If you’ve had the problem, chances are, someone else has too.
• Bad: Plug-ins can sometimes stop working when you upgrade WordPress to the latest version. Since plug-ins are often developed by individuals, mostly volunteers, fixes aren’t always done immediately.

Functionality: Built-in search, search engine optimization (SEO)

• Good: WordPress has a built-in search function and facilitates SEO. The search function is easily added to all pages of your site. WordPress allows you to tag all contents, create custom keyword-rich URLs, and allow trackbacks and pingbacks, all of which help your site to be found in online searches.
• Bad: WordPress search is limited — results are sorted by date, not relevance, and there are no advanced searching options. For a more robust search function, you should install Google Site Search on your WordPress website.

Platform: Based on PHP and MySQL

• Good: Allows experienced developers to completely customize sites.
• Bad: Not as easy to customize for non-developers or those who know only HTML. WordPress has its own PHP syntax and functions that create a bit of a learning curve, even for experienced PHP coders. Also, you can’t just preview a post in your browser without having a WordPress testing server set up.

Design: Plenty of templates

• Good: Even if you don’t hire a designer to customize your site, there are enough templates so your site won’t look like everyone else’s site.
• Bad: The templates are not designed to further your brand. You may find one that is similar to your current branding, but it won’t match exactly. You might want to start with a simple template, which takes care of a lot of the drudge work of setting up the site. Then, to customize the template to match your branding, you definitely should be (or hire) a web designer/developer. If you want to make some pages in your site look significantly different from a regular “blog” structure, you will need to spend a lot of time working with style sheets and PHP.

Updates: Content Management System (CMS)

• Good: Can be used as a simple CMS, and it is relatively standards-compliant. Adding new content doesn’t require much training and there are many plug-ins you can use to add CMS functionality to your site.
• Bad: With some work, you can turn WordPress into a CMS, but WordPress is not really a full-featured CMS. For example, WordPress won’t keep you from introducing bad code if you use Word to write your posts instead of WordPress. It also doesn’t do workflow management or track user roles.

Overall, creating a website with WordPress is straightforward, especially if you are happy with an existing template.  However, if you want to customize the look and functionality of the template, you’ll need to have robust web development skills, or hire a developer.

It’s important to keep in mind what WordPress does well, and what it does only with great effort, so you can have realistic expectations from the beginning. As long as you want your site to leverage WordPress’s strengths, such as blogging, posting frequent updates, and sorting by date or alphabetically, WordPress is a good way to go. But if you’re looking for a straight CMS, highly customized page layouts, but few of the blogging features of WordPress, you’d probably be better off going with a straight CMS solution, not WordPress.

For a look at a website that Scott Design created entirely in WordPress, visit the CTW website.

What would you add to this list?

Special Delivery: Create your own holiday-themed web pages

Design and share your own one-of-a-kind holiday pages in minutes with Special Delivery. You can make a holiday page, send birthday wishes, invite friends to a party, or create a page just for fun. Upload your own photos, include music, select from beautiful backgrounds and borders, add animations, and write messages. It’s a free, easy, green alternative to traditional cards! Create your holiday greetings.

Snowbash: Can you stop the snowmen?

See how many snowmen your gingerbread man can get without harming the innocent pink bunnies in the award-winning Snowbash game, Best-of-Show at last year’s Silicon Valley ADDY awards. Play Snowbash.

Snowflake Designer: Design your own beautiful flakes

Select the number of branches, the shape of the crystals and their complexity, and watch as your snowflake grows right outside your window! Make some snowflakes.

Virtual Fireplace: May your days be merry and bright

Just because you’re stuck at your computer doesn’t mean you can’t gaze into the hypnotic flames of a crackling fireplace. Have fun decorating the mantle for the holidays, or just kick back and imagine the warmth! Curl up by the fireplace.

Happy Holidays!

We hope you have a lot of fun and hope you share your Special Delivery online greetings, as well as the games, with friends and family.

All our wishes for a wonderful holiday season!

If you think of all the tweets that are being sent as a wide stream, all of the tweets from the people you follow are a small branch of that stream. At any time, you can dip into the river and take a look at those tweets going by, just by looking at the 20 tweets on your Twitter.com home page.

But if you follow a lot of tweeters, you should consider using one of the Twitter applications that are available to help you manage your tweets. I use TweetDeck, which is available as a computer application and iPhone and iPad apps.

Using TweetDeck, I can add people to Twitter lists or TweetDeck groups that I create so that it’s easier for me to follow the tweets. Each of the lists or groups appears in a column on TweetDeck, through which I can easily scroll. I have lists for people I know, fellow designers, news outlets, people who share business news, and more. I also have columns for messages I’ve sent and received, as well as for search terms that I follow. There’s also a column for the tweets from people I haven’t added to lists yet.

And, TweetDeck also lets you add columns for your Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections so you can monitor their status updates from TweetDeck without having to visit those sites.

Now that I’ve started using TweetDeck, I don’t think that I would be able to work without it! It truly turns the wild river of Twitter into a nice meandering stream.

I’d love to hear how other people are taming the Twitter stream. Which Twitter applications do you recommend?

Twitter is an online “microblog” where you can write quick 140-character posts that are shared with everyone on Twitter. Twitter is a great way for businesses to share links, news, and events with customers and peers. You can subscribe to the Twitter postings, or “tweets,” of other people by “following” them, and others can “follow” your tweets. When you go to your Twitter page, you see a page filled with the tweets of all the people you follow.

Twitter Profile

It’s very easy to get started with Twitter. There is only one type of page, a Twitter Profile page. You should create separate profiles for yourself and for your company. A Profile contains simple information about you or your company: name, your location, a link to a website, a brief bio, information about the people you or your company are following on Twitter, and who’s following you. And, once you start tweeting, your profile contains all the tweets you’ve posted so far.

Start by finding and following influential people in your industry, organizations, and groups where your customers are involved. You can see who others follow and see who’s following them, and follow those people, too. When you first get started, spend more time listening than speaking, getting a feel for the types of information people share on Twitter.

When you decide to start tweeting, your tweets can be about subjects that interest you and your peers, or your customers. Try to share information that you find on websites that feature your industry or subjects of interest to your customers. Share information about what you are interested in so that others with similar interests can connect with you. Be sure to limit sales or promotional messages about your company or products to less than 10% of your tweets. No one wants to follow an infomercial.

When you read a tweet that interests you, comment on it, or share something more, to engage in online Twitter conversations. When someone asks a question and you know the answer, feel free to reply to them. The more you help others, the more people will be interested in following you on Twitter.

Twitter Company Profile

Through your company Twitter account, you can connect with your customers by posting tweets that interest your audience and reading and responding to your customers’ tweets. Use Twitter to announce new products and services, share news about current promotions, link to interesting articles you’re reading, let people know about interesting posts on your blog, and join in conversations with others. Encourage customers to share feedback on your products and services, ask questions, and share their own tips. You can also create Twitter surveys to get direct feedback from your customers.

Organizations and individuals use Twitter for as many unique ways as there are unique individuals. Charitable organizations have used Twitter to raise money through direct appeals and Twitter events, celebrities keep fans up-to-date on upcoming appearances, artists show off their latest works, restaurants highlight the day’s specials, hotels share information on local events, and news organizations break the news on Twitter. The key is to provide information on your Twitter profile that is helpful and interesting to others.

And, all it takes is being able to type 140 characters!

For step-by-step instructions on setting up your account, see “Getting Started with Twitter.”

For information about other social media sites your company should be using, read “Social Media Quickstart Guide — 6 Tools You Need.”

Journalist Karen Kefauver wrote a very comprehensive article about Twitter called, “How to Use Twitter – Part 1: Tips on How Tweeting on this Social Network and Microblogging Service Can Promote Your Business.” It’s got a great list of ideas on how to use Twitter for your business, as well as links to a complete collection of resources to make using Twitter a lot easier. Check it out when you have a chance!

Facebook Profile Page

A Profile can contain information all about you, including both personal and professional details. You can include your work history, your education, your interests, and as much personal information as you’d like to include. You can easily add photos and videos to your profile, plus there is an ever-growing collection of applications you can add to your page to share even more about yourself. If you’re going to use Facebook for business, it’s best to keep the information on your profile very professional.

Once you have put your pertinent information on your Profile, you can connect with other people, who become your Facebook “friends.” When friends accept your invitation, you can see their Profiles and they can see yours. Your friends can be your personal friends and family, or your peers and customers—if you want to use your Facebook Profile for business.

On your Profile, you can let your friends know what you’re doing in a few different ways. You can update your status at the top of the page with a short phrase, or write something longer on your “wall.” Information that you share on your Facebook “wall” or in the status field is visible to your Facebook “friends” and appears on their walls. Depending on your security settings, this information can be shown to the world or just to your Facebook friends. And, your friends can comment on the things you share on your Profile, letting you interact with others.

Facebook Group Page

Facebook users can also create Facebook Groups to give others a place to start discussions, share information and events, and get answers to their questions. Groups can be centered around a common interest, an industry, a hobby, a travel destination, a school, or almost anything. You should join groups in your industry or groups that might interest your customers. Get involved by commenting on the group’s wall, answering questions, or joining in discussions. You can also create a group of your own if there isn’t already one where your customers hang out.

Facebook Fan Page

Facebook Pages are created by businesses, by celebrities, or for products. You should create a Fan Page for your company, completing all the contact information, and be sure to add a link to your website and add photos or videos for your business. You can post information about sales, new products or services, coupons, and more on your wall, plus send messages directly to those who “like” your page. And, your “fans” can comment back on everything you post, making your company wall another place to connect with customers.

For a quick guide to opening a free account on Facebook, check out “Getting Started with Facebook.”

For information about other social media sites your company should be using, read “Social Media Quickstart Guide — 6 Tools You Need.”