Simon Griffiths Blog

You may be familiar with the use of personas for design. These are the summary of a typical users characteristics in a short page or so, often giving details of their working day, gender, age, what is important to them in their job, who they report to, what they like to do outside of work etc.I have recently had personas developed for the majority of our typical users. To do this we interviewed sales people about what they thought of a person and pretty much took it from there. I am now about to present these to the sales team and try to get their buy in on the project. Basically I would like them to look at personas when requesting literature, and try to give us in marketing an idea of who we should be writing for.My problem will be that the persona will be based around a particular person, or combination of people that the particular salesperson had in his mind eye at the time, and I am sure that will be controversial.At the moment I am wrestling with the problem of should I allow changes? The trouble with changing a persona is that it will tend to dilute it and make it what we think it should be as a group, rather than a particular case which we know to be the case. I will let you know how I go. The presentation is on Friday, so I’ll have to have my arguments together by then! 

I am just about to implement the new Google Analytics tracking code. One of the features of this is said to be cross domain tracking. This would be useful for us as I run more than 1 website with links between them, but are Google doing a doubleclick on this?

When I say that what I mean is that Doubleclick is notorious for putting a cookie on your system, then tracking you across the many sites they serve ads to. This invades the users privacy but allows them to build up a profile of who you are and what you like.

As Google has just acquired Doubleclick, are they trying the same trick? Wouldn’t allowing it’s users to track across domains, also allow Google to do the same across the many sites where analytics is installed.

I have to say I am a big fan of Analytics and am contantly amazed by the complexity and new features that are brought online, and for free. I am going to continue with the upgrade, but I am a bit worried about it!

I am just trying to get a mini intranet site together for my partner. She is a visual merchandiser and wants to share images, calendars etc with colleagues in different states.  At the moment I can’t decide between Google Apps and a Ning Social network.

On the one hand the Google Apps ensure that I can brand the site for free, give great calendar, email integration, but there isn’t much in the way of photo sharing. On the other hand Ning gives a great social experience with images, but no calendar. Has anyone come across a good solution for this?

I guess I could set up subdomains for each one but there is so much repeat stuff in there.

Yes, there is such a beast! Well almost!

If you have read my earlier posts you will know that I was looking for a bluetooth to wi-fi retransmitter. Well there doesn’t seem to be such a thing as that but there is a USB/mobile/EVDO thingy that does a similar thing. Cradlepoint technology makes it for about US$180, though the street price seems to be about $40-50 lower.

This seems to be a great solution to using your iPod Touch while on the road!

I have just written a comment on an article about user signup in a list apart, and thought I should share it with you.

Most of the posts were from users saying that they thought the user should be engaged first, so I wrote a post from the perspective of the company.

“I notice that you are giving opinions from the user perspective only and thought I could give a company perspective on this.

A web application I created a couple of years ago (www.ausrackid.com) went through this thought process. Ausrack ID allows IT pros to configure 19″ racking systems in a visual way, save print out the results, and get quotes from the company I work for.

I chose having no sign up until the user decides they want to save, at which point you are asked for username and email address, if they want a quote for items they get asked for more details. This is quite a way through the process. I was advised to put in a signup process at the front end to allow us to collect information on the users which we could potential use for emailing info. I resisted this at the time, and still do today. However, for the first year, the site was getting significant traffic, and significant usage, but very few people were saving their design, or asking for a quote. As the site needs to fund itself, it was very difficult to justify it’s existence at this stage, and the whole project was almost pulled.

I think the moral of the story is that your user details have a value, and giving those to a website you use may be the only way they can stay afloat. Think of youtube, they can justify their existence by the data provided by the number of users. That is why Google bought them. At the smaller scale my advice would be if they ask for it, and you want to use the service, give them your details, it might just help them survive in a competitive world.”

Hope you all have a great Easter. I am going to try to keep my hands off the eggs a bit tomorrow (I am writing this on Saturday night).To give you an update on tad.tw, handing out the cards in the city to commuters really didn’t have a significant effect on my stats. The mobile stuff is so tricky, as you can’t promote it as a traditional site, and there are very few avenues open. The next attack will be via traditional methods too. I am going to look at putting some press release in magazines and the paper, to see what that brings. I have also bought another domain brisbanetraintimes.com, which being international should help the organic page rankings, even though wouldn’t be that great for the user.btw – If you do have a look at tad and see the news and weather. I am also working on a way to get these more up to date. For some reason, even though I am using the same method the news comes through okay, but weather and TV are coming through sporadically or not at all.

The cards for tad.tw got handed out yesterday. I am waiting with bated breath to see if anything happened to my stats.

I am also going to write press releases etc over this weekend and see if I can shoot them off to a few places so that hopefully it will get picked up.

Mobile marketing is pretty tricky. I am not sure how to approach the SEO or the traditional marketing side really. Standard websites are much easier!

Yahoo have just announced it will use semantic markup to check relevance of pages. I think this is a good move by Yahoo, but I’m not sure how it will allow competition with Google. Trouble is that it will require so much more markup, and we aren’t really sure what tags it will support yet.

Great news for microformats though.

I try not to write about the general economic circumstances, but I have to report back on this one. The company I work for deals with OneSteel an offshoot of BHP Billiton the mining and commodities giant. From March to June of this year we have seen prices rises of 44.9% on the steel we buy, with more expected to come in July.

The excuse from OneSteel is that it is there is a shortage in world supply. However reading the press, and their releases it seems like in Australia, they create the shortage by limiting shipping to their customers, this means that demand is always behind supply. Internationally it seems that they are trying to play the spot iron ore market in China to get better prices.

I’ve got to say that the chain goes like this: -

We buy steel – we increase our prices – our customers increase their prices – consumers pay more – inflation rises – risk of recession increases.

At the same time of coarse the bhp shareholders are raking it in from massively increased profits.

I’m not against capitalism, but you have to say that this is a really short term view from BHP. If they drive us into recession, they can forget house building, and many of the other industries they rely on for their bread and butter. I guess what I’m saying here is forget your short term profits and think of your market as a whole bhp. It’s up to you bhp, and many of the other corporates. Short terms gain and long term pain, or a more even market where you are more likely to still be here in 5 years time!

Dammit, just as tad.tw starts to move, Google sets up transit in Perth.

I guess the good news is that it would struggle on most mobiles. Hopefully that doesn’t explain why Google hasn’t indexed the other domain I have it listed under brisbanetraintimes.com!