Simon Griffiths Blog

I have just started a new company blog for Webxopt (stands for Web Experience Optimisation) and am hoping to put all my work related info on to that site.

My first post is on Overlay Box Usability. Those are the boxes that ‘overlay’ the main content of the page – No surprises there I guess! I have talked about how to put them together and when to use them and when not to!

The post is at http://webxopt.com/wordpress/2009/07/overlay-box-usability/.

btw – I’ll still be using this site for anything that doesn’t fit my work, which will probably be most things to be honest!

I have just been working on my first PDF portfolio. This is the new Acrobat 9 feature that let’s you put a heap of different file formats together and make them into almost a mini Ajax website.

I had thought this would be complicated, but actually it was a piece of cake when you just customize their templates. Managed to add a load of PDFs, flash videos from animoto and other bits and pieces in a few minutes.

Probably my only negative comment would be that navigation is not consistent sometimes there are breadcrumbs, sometimes not. Also not checked yet in older versions of acrobat.

After another post pushing the virtues of a wireless system rather than a wired NBN, I have the following comments which I made on an article in iTWire.

- The wireless system is capable of reasonably high speed, but there is a latency issue which means anything where packet priority (read Skype/VOIP) is an issue, wireless will be a problem. Not surprising then that Telstra is pushing it as it will mean they keep their expensive phone line rentals.
- ADSL2+ is great if you live 10m from the exchange. Go onto whirlpool and you can see all the people that upgraded to 2+ and got no change in speed over standard ADSL. This is because speed drops off quickly the further you are from the exchange.
- FttN is really expensive to implement and speeds they are looking at seems to be no higher than you can get anyway. In 5 years time they will seem pathetic (as our speeds do now to much of the world)
- BPL (Broadband over power line) could have potential in the bush, and is currently being rolled out in the US for remote locations

In short there is no clear answer. The best solution would be a combination of the above. Maybe no fibre nodes within 1km of an exchange where ADSL2+ would be better, fibre nodes in the city and BPL in the country. One thing that seems clear though is that wireless is a supplementary connection and shouldn’t be regarded as your main connection unless we want to cripple our VOIP service and keep Telstra shareholders happy for the next 10 years!

Pushing wireless internet to faster and is probably a master move from Telstra. Increasing the speed of wireless seems to make it more and more attractive to the user (obviously there are the limits per tower). However the big strategy seems to me to be that a wireless network has high latency making VOIP next to useless. This means that it is fine for browsing, but Telstra maintains its stranglehold on the public which would need to keep their landlines.

Obviously this is great for Telstra shareholders, which the board of Telstra reports to at the end of the day, but useless for customers. Just one more reason why structural separation is probably the only way to go.

I have particular experience of this trying to use Skype video conference with someone using a wireless dongle in the UK. Both systems report 8MB down, but there is a huge issue with dropped packets on their end.

Google have just launched a guide to setting up Adwords designed specifically for small business in Australia.

I haven’t been though it yet but will edit this post as soon as I have to give my opinion. It’s good to see them demistifying, I just hope they have explained it with sufficient clarity.

http://www.10searchmarketingsteps.com.au/

Google in Australia has just banned companies from using Apple trade names in the body of their Google ads. This has been greated with a storm of protest, as how can a legitimate Apple certified retailer sell an iPod if they can’t call it that!

From what I have seen this would not stop these companies advertising against the Apple keyword, just from using Apple brand names in their ads. My feeling is that Apple is looking to defend is quality image and as you know Google ads that work usually imply some type of discount, such as “cheap Apple computers”, “Cheap iPods” etc. Apple are probably seeing this as undermining the quality of their products by marking them as cheap (they may also be defending their rrp)

I have to say I think they have probably done the only thing they could to remove the “cheap”, but it really hasn’t hit the mark. I have had this discussion with people at my work and they will not use the word “cheap” in relation to our products, preferring ‘cost effective’ or some such term which actually means nothing to anyone (cost effective iPod anyone?).

I would be interested in getting feedback on the term cheap. In my opinion if you apply it to a product that is of high quality, it simply infers a reduced price. What do you think?

I am a bit concerned that a few of my recent posts seem to be Google bashing! First let me point out that I love most of Googles apps, I use analytics on my sites as well as Google docs, gmail etc. However I keep finding things that are perhaps not quite right!

About a week ago I did a search on Google Insights for the company I work for, and one of our competitors. I seemed to indicate some unusual activity happening, so I rushed out a report for our management meeting which is in a couple of days (from the date of this post).

To make sure I was up to date, I had another look at the stats today, and to my surprise, not only did it not show this unusual activity. A lot of the line was totally different. I have checked the keywords, period, geographic location etc and these are all the same, but the line is definitely different. Thankfully I took screen shots so you can see for yourself below: -

Same search on Google Insights - 1 week apart

I think the moral of the story is probably that Insights may not be quite as Insightful as we think. I really don’t know why this should change, but it makes me concerned that this is really not a tool you can use reliably without significant supporting data.

I came across an interesting firefox greasemonkey plugin the other day called mediatriggerwords that allows you to find and replace common trigger words used in media today. This includes things like the range of killers from Freedom fighter, through insurgent to terrorist. This really changes your perspective when you are reading news as you become more aware of the bias of the news media (or country) to a particular event.

The reason I am commenting on this is that it is not much of a stretch to go from media trigger words to marketing. Imagine a situation where your carefully crafted marketing message is re-written on the fly by your browser.

My best advice, is hopefully what most people do on the web anyway, and that is to stay away from too much marketing speak. Always use language that is easy to scan and understand, and isn’t overtly trying to sell to people. That way not only will your website perform better, it is less likely to fall foul of greasemonkey scripts!

I came across this graph today and thought it was worthing passing along. This is well researched info on some easy ways to increase your PPC ad landing page conversion. Obviously these are general rules and you would really have to test your own results, but at least these give you a start on what to concentrate on.

Obviously the best results are obtained from repeated testing and tweaking your page, but it is interesting to see that removing navigation produces such a big effect. What they mean of coarse is removing standard site navigation so that the visitors only focus is the offer.

 Google Insights is a new tool from Google that really surpasses the keyword tool in some areas. Where the keyword will suggest many different possibilities that will narrow the keywords you are targeting Insights will only give you the top 10. However where it has significant advantages is its geographic targeting. For example you can pick Australia or a state (unlike the keyword tool where you can only pick the country). If you do pick Australia it will break down search volumes by state so you can get some idea of where you should target, or even where you need to set up your distribution centre.

Insights for Ski in Australia

The other area that is useful is that you get a graph going back to 2004 that shows searches per month. This gives you a great idea on what is happening over time, whether there are seasonal variations and even whether you are about to enter an increasing or decreasing market.

One thing to note is that get numbers to show on the graphs, you will need to have a Google account. You can get one of these by signing up to Gmail or many of the other Google services. However one word of caution is that these are not absolute numbers they are normalised against the highest figure (ie if the top search volume was 1000 and the months search was 700, the value would be 70[%]).

So you would use this to look at your market trends over time where as the keyword tool would still be your primary research tool for looking which keywords and phrases to optimise for.