Simon Griffiths Blog

I have been playing with Google Chrome for a few days now and for the most part have enjoyed the experience. However there are areas which essentially mean that I will not use it as my default browser but and will only keep it for testing.

I won’t go through all the good points. I have to say though that I like the interface, even though it doesn’t really match the standard windows ‘chrome’. I haven’t however found it that fast in fact it seemed to open Google docs slightly slower than Firefox, although I have not timed this to be sure.

So what would stop me using Chrome? If I discount the very very dodgy EULA, I still think security is a major problem. In Safari there is a default privacy setting that ensures 3rd party cookies cannot get into the system, and this is on by default. All other browsers have similar settings, although most aren’t on by default. However Chrome doesn’t have a similar setting, and instead has a rather dubiously named ‘treat 3rd party cookies differently’ or something of that order setting. Not only is it not clear what this actually does, but it seems clear that it doesn’t block 3rd party cookies going out. This is of coarse exactly what Google subsidiary Double Click would want, but it is not good for consumers and their privacy.

My second and biggest reason not to use Chrome, is that it seems to be aimed squarely at Firefox, as there is no way that the large majority of IE users will ever switch. So why would Google take aim at Firefox? In my opinion the main reason could be the much smaller announcement of Firefox Ubiquity about a month before.

If you haven’t had a play with Ubiquity you really should. It is a bit like the launchers available on the Mac. What I mean by that is that you open up a dialogue box with a keystroke and then type a command. This allows you access to functionality in a few keystrokes. With Ubiquity you can add maps into gmail, add calendar items and much more all by typing a few keys. Note that most of the functionality here is to do with Googles apps. and this tool allows you to bypass Googles own interface in many cases. This you would think isn’t a bad thing, but it is where Google makes its money with its ads.

The reason for Chrome could therefore be a shot across the bows for companies trying to bypass Googles ads rather than a particular desire to make a better apps browser.

I tried the new Google Chrome browser yesterday and went to one of my sites to test it. I was amazed when it through up a malicious site warning so went to investigate.

What I found was some code had been added after the closing HTML tag on the page which pointed to Google-analysis. At first I thought this was some odd response of a beta browser to google analytics but on further investigation found it to be a Trojan.

At this stage I thought it could have been either our ISP trying to track our usage or our host, so I uploaded the page again and the problem disappeared. In further investigation I found that our hosting provider Smartyhost has had problems with this as far back as March of this year, and there was quite a few reports of infections and reinfections after the code had been removed.

I phoned up smartyhost support and asked them to explain why this had happened, why it has not been fixed 6 months later and why they had not informed their customers. The guy couldn’t really answer but said to stop reinfection I should change my password, and write a complaint by email.

First I went to change my password and found that I was warned not to do that due to certificate issues as I logged in. I know that smartyhost have taken the thankfully unusual approach of signing their own certificate, but am unsure if this is the problem or they have further infections. Eventually I decided I was not game to do this.

Having had all these issues I sent what I think was a strongly worded but business like email to them asking for a response in 4 hours, which I think is reasonable especially as they have had 6 months to work up a stock reply. 6 hours later and no response.

The moral of this story is that Smartyhost does not seem able to cope in any way with this sort of issue and I would strongly advise you to think twice before using them. If you are already with them I would probably say change your passwords if you date and get out fast!

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.

In these days of tighening economic conditions you would think that business owners would jump on every opportunity to develop relationships and respond to enquiries. However it seems that is not the case online. In a recent study it was found that 59%, yes that’s fifty-nine percent of Australian companies did not answer an enquiry within 7 days of it being sent.

Now at this point I have to say that as a user of those systems, I am not surprised at all, but on the other hand, even the successful criteria was a response within a week…a week!!! If I send a web enquiry I want it answering fast, or I’ll send it to someone else. A week is hardly fast in anyones reckoning.

As an example, I have recently had an experience where I have sent 2 web enquiries to Xerox Australia, neither of which was replied to. However in their defense, I also left a phone message and they didn’t reply to that either! What I don’t understand is that at best this is leaving our customers thinking we don’t value them, and at worst they just go elsewhere.

In the company I work for, we currently generate quite a few web enquiries, many of which I know don’t get followed up. The sales manager for one of the states has told me “I know those that are worth replying to, all the others are just looking for a price”… no shit Sherlock! In reality what he actually means is that if he doesn’t know them already he is not interested.

So having said how bad we are at handling web enquiries, what can we do to resolve the situation?

Well first thing is to make sure when you design your enquiry system, be prepared for the enquiries that result. Have a system prepared for how you are going to handle what is coming in. That might be a fully automated system, semi automation, a manual system with templates set up, or even having a follow up system with your sales team which they must feed back into within a given time.

If you want to get specific the following may be of some help: -

Customer service

Customer service, unlike an enquiry for a product should be something you are looking to reduce. If your customer service is right first time, there will be very little need for people to contact you. There is also a rule that says if they are not satisfied with the result of the first call, they will carry on and on, taking up more and more of your time. So have a system that feeds back into your process with problems to try to design them out. If you get repeated questions, either find a way to fix them, or put them in an FAQ section.

If your team is getting swamped in emails, which are backing up, enable clickcalling or even add in a text service. Clickcalling allows them to talk to an operator, which should reduce the amount of time spent with minor issues, texting on the other hand ensures that your answer have to be short and sweet, saving you time.

Lastly, if you are in a large organisation working in a help desk environment you may find another department is causing you misery. This could be a new product, or a marketing campaign or whatever. Well charge them for your services. If they see charges adding up, they will be much more inclined to fix the problem.

Enquiries

These are what every company wants more of, but most don’t handle when we do. Short of the designing automated systems mentioned above, I can recommend a few other actions which can help.

Firstly if you are going to change and improve your enquiry system, test the new one on a small section of your site first. As you can see from my previous posts I have done this and know that changes I am going to make will increase the enquiry rate by around 550%. If I know this, I can design a system to handle it, otherwise I might get totally caught out.

Another approach is to design two enquiry systems. One is designed to maximise the number of enquiries, so it might for instance have the simpliest form requiring little info from the user. The other is designed to produce the most qualified and committed enquirers. This may have a much more complex form to fill out, so that sales people get to know a lot of additional information about the client. You may for instance if you are a b2b supplier try to filter out companies interested in one off, low value items. So it could include questions that ask them to state how much they spend on your type of products a year. This means only the most committed enquirers will complete the form.

So why do this. Well if the sales team want more leads you can go with the first option, if they want more qualified leads you can switch to the second, and if you are really smart you can use A-B testing procedures to run both at once so that you only generate the number of enquiries a day you can handle.

I have to say that although this is a perfectly valid approach I would be careful that it doesn’t drive away potential long term customers. For the company I work for, my preference would be to have an automated system, but that really depends on your products, your pricing strategies and sadly often your internal politics.

One last thought is that you should not forget lead generation firms. These companies will follow up your enquiries for you, and the advantage of using them is that they are an infinite resource. If you get more enquiries, they put more people on it. You pay for it of coarse, so as always, it is a numbers game.

Hopefully if you are one of the 59%, this should give you some ideas on how to solve your problems and improve your situation. Lets get that number down, and lets work on that week response time so we are all replying the same day. That can only be good for our businesses.

I’m sure this isn’t exactly original but I thought I would mention it anyway.

I have just added a Dreamweaver plugin form2excel to one of my sites. This adds some PHP that collects form data as a Excel form and send you an email of the info every time the form is completed. This is a great time saver if you use Excel for analysis or as a mini database, as obviously there is no retyping.

However what we found was that the emails could not get through our corporate firewall as they are sent from the same address as they are going to. Obviously any reasonable firewall will spot this and stop it dead.

What we did as a workaround was to send it to gmail and have gmail automatically forward it to an address behind our firewall. The added bonuses are that we don’t need to open our firewall up, we have a backup of all enquiries, we get great spam filtering and the enquiries are much more searchable in gmail if we need to go back through them.

Next step is to use Google Spreadsheet API to just dump it in. Ahh digial nirvana!

Cool iphone wordpress blog posting tool is now available. I like it already.

I have spent the afternoon working on revising a CSS menu system. Having got it working, and with multiple level dropping down, I was actually amazed at just how easy it was to do. Why am I excited about this? Because it works in pretty much all legacy browsers, and does not require scripting. If you look at typical drop down menus, they tend to require javascript support, which is certainly common, but is not universal. A CSS based menu means that all your users will get the same experience.

So why am I so bothered if a well designed javascript based system is designed to degrade gracefully and still allow navigation? Simple reason is to make my life easier. If I know that every user will get exactly the same experience, I don’t need to design multiple ways through the site, or redundant navigation.

I guess that the other thing to explain is why we are doing this. I have recently done some user testing on one of the sites I manage and found that none of the users saw the 2nd level of horizontal navigation we have. I know that this second level is used but my feeling is it is used by people who know our site, although I am yet to test this.

The second reason for looking at this multiple level navigation is that if you focus on your user, under your product or services menu, you should have various methods of a visitor finding the content they are looking for. What do I mean? Our products are enclosures, metal boxes basically, people may want to find them by material, application, size, industry etc. Using 3 level navigation you can easily push them to the content they want and reduce the number of steps they have to take to get to their content.

Having said that I intend to test this navigation on our site and see if or user like it. I will report back then.

I am just trying out flock (the browser) as I seem to spend an awful to of time twittering and posting things in various places. Flock looks like it smooths this process a bit, and as I haven’t tried it since the beta version I thought I’d give it a go.

Tags: webdevelopment