It seems like every day, someone tweets a link explaining what the ‘best’ method of implementing mobile content is.  It’s an App.  It’s a Progressively Enhancing, Gracefully Degrading standalone mobile website.  It’s WAP.  Ok, not WAP, but some combination or variation of the former.

If you tried to debate the relevant merits of one method vs another method amongst a group of developers, you could spawn a pretty enjoyable argument.  But, as fun as dev-baiting might be, you’re very probably missing the point – context is KING, and that in reality there are arguments for and against each different approach depending on the development scenario.

Here comes the mandatory analogy.  When you’re buying a car, there is no best option.  There are only options that make sense.  A giant 4×4 doesn’t make sense for the school run, unless you live in Kensington.  Neither does a Ferrari, unless your kid goes to school in Monaco.  Similarly, a Mini makes less sense if you live up a snow covered mountain, in a shack at the end of an un-surfaced dirt track, like I assume Bear Grylls does.

Here are some examples of different solutions, and why/when they work:

1. Do Nothing

Pros: Modern Smartphone browsers are pretty impressive at rendering full fat websites – and getting better all the time.  If you have no money, or time, or inclination to build a mobile website, you can at least be pretty confident that your site will be viewable by the top two – iPhones and Android.

Cons: I know I said context is king, but so is speed.  Mobile users expect a mobile site to be as fast, if not faster than a desktop, and even top smartphones may creak trying to load up your Flash-based, Javascript heavy, desktop optimised website.  More importantly though if you do nothing, you’re not forced to consider why, and where Mobile visitors are accessing your content – and in reality this could be for entirely different reasons to desktop users.  Most important argument for me – if you arrive at a site and it has a Copyright date of 2005, it looks bad.  Nowadays, if you arrive at a site and it’s not even slightly mobile optimised, or clearly advertising an App, that is starting to look as bad.

2. Apps

Pros: No matter how advanced mobile web technologies are these days, I doubt anyone would seriously argue against Apps for usability.  Good Apps are developed from the ground up to take the fullest advantage of the smartphone’s interface.  They’re small, quick (usually), simple to install, and they usually provide an extremely focused set of functionality. They usually provide at least some level of functionality when you’re offline – and they provide access to all the gadgets and functions of your phone. This is one reason why Apps have proved the most fruitful market for innovation – it’s easy to mash together different device features in an infinite number of ways.  That, and the fact that you can charge for them.

Cons: Does your mobile site really need that level of device integration? If not, you’re going to be stuck making 2 or 3 versions of the same functionality, all slightly different, and fighting to promote them amongst another 350k others. Even if you use a Hybrid App framework, your developer resource will need new skills.  Users are also not going to be searching for your Apps on Google – unless you have a desktop or mobile website to promote them with.  Apps, because of size and development constraints, usually don’t do everything your desktop site does – but then users probably don’t expect then to.

3. Mobile Websites

Pros: If you already have a website, you’re on familiar ground – you probably have a hosting infrastructure you can use, plus your developer resource already has 95% applicable skills.  You’ll likely only need 1 mobile website, plus customisations for any specific devices you want to target – a decision ideally based on real stats about what people use to access your existing site, not what a website tells you is most popular today (because they ALL disagree.)  Your site can be promoted through Google, you can link to it… and if it’s built intelligently, every device including your Nan’s Sony Ericsson will be able to display something.

Cons: Mobile Websites have to be designed well from the ground up, to come close to the usability of Apps.  Leading edge mobile sites like mobile.twitter.com show how much progress has been made in this area – at least on Android devices they are almost indistinguishable from TweetDeck.  But unless you undertake that level of (re)design (see below), you’re unlikely to get that high quality an experience.  You’re unlikely to be charging for access to your mobile website as the micro-payment model that works for Apps, generally horrifies mobile site users.

4. Which types of Mobile Website do you need?

If you’ve decided to build a mobile website, the decision process isn’t over.  There are a number of different ways of doing this, all of which offer different levels of design and/or functional compromise – balanced with and increase or decrease in build and maintenance complexity:

One Site – you might choose to give your existing website a fluid layout makeover (or build one from scratch.)  You can design the site to start off simple, and become more complicated based on which device is accessing it, and what it can support (progressive enhancement.)  Or, you can design a ‘full fat’ website, that breaks back down to a simple one (in a managed way), for devices with less support (graceful degredation.)  OR… you might choose to target a popular size of screen – iPhone 4 for example – targeting the best mobile experience for that screen size, and then enhancing/degrading for everyone else.  Although it might sound like a lot of work (and it can be), you only end up maintaining one site at the end of it.

Downside is that although you have some design options for your desktop and mobile variations, there will be an inevitable compromise.  You’re also almost certainly not going to be able to provide much difference in functionality between the two versions.  Worst of all in some ways, you’re not driven to consider why and where a mobile user is accessing your site, which might be for totally different reasons – no consideration, no new user journeys.  Plus – you’ll need to do some serious work to get this site to load as fast as a standalone mobile version.

One set of content, two templates – if you have a ‘slot based’ CMS, you can limit the need for design compromise by pushing the same content to two totally different templates. Your desktop version can look as sparkly as you want, or at least as sparkly as it ever did, while your mobile version can be as responsive and fluid as you fancy.  You can still use progressive enhancement/graceful degradation to target a specific viewport, and you have more choice on where that target is (though as mentioned about, that should really be based on stats rather than blog preferences.)  You also get the choice (if your CMS is clever enough) to have single OR double URL structure – though pushing the same content to two different pages has an SEO impact you need to handle. Finally, it’s likely to run much faster than a single site version, once the decision has been made on which template to serve.

What you’re doing in the scenario, is saving data entry time by only needing to add content once, and reducing design compromise – but it has a price.  You’re going to need two sets of templates, which means double the design, development, support etc.  Also, you’re still unlikely to be able to make the mobile site do something completely different to the desktop version – which means that even if you consider why and where your mobile using is accessing the site, you are restricted in your response to that, outside of slightly altering your user journeys.

Two sites – this is by far the approach with the least compromise, both in design and in functionality.  You can literally design two sites that do completely different things, in entirely different ways. You can consider the mobile user journeys, the why’s and where’s of you mobile user, and design entirely for them.  This is also the easiest route to a mobile website that looks something like an App.  AND, you can still target a specific screen size or device using enhancement/degradation, or simply build from your preferred starting point – top down, bottom up, or some arbitrary middle point.

This approach really IS the most flexible, but it is double EVERYTHING.  It’s two sites to design, build, support, populate, tweak etc.  There’s no way you can avoid this approach being more expensive in either time or money.

So… that’s a cross section of some of the different approaches to the same requirement – getting content to mobile users.  I’m certain that’s not ALL the possible approaches – I’m certain some people may argue with my arguments for and against the different approaches.  If you do… great, the point I’m trying to make is that (like buying a car) there is no obvious ‘best’, only a best suited for a given scenario.

It should be noted that my previous cars include the salmon pink Fiat Seicento pictured, therefore I may not be qualified to use the car analogy above.

We’ve been using the brilliant ZipGenius for some time now on our old Windows XP machines.  It’s worked flawlessly for years, so now we’re rolling out Windows 7 x64 across the company, we naturally decided make ZipGenius part of our default installation.

We instantly hit a snag!  The software installed fine using the domain administrator account, however when logging in as a domain user, the following error appears and the program hangs

c:usersadministratorappdataroamingzipgeniustbskin” – Native error:00020 file processing error disk is possibly full

You then have to kill the process using Task Manager.

Well, I’m happy to report the following fix!

Open Regedit and browse to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWow6432NodeM.Dev SoftwareZG5

Look for the string called IniPath, you’ll see it’s populated with a hard link, rather than a relative one :

e.g. C:UsersadministratorAppDataRoamingZipGeniuszipgenius.ini

You can fix the problem by using %appdata% in the string to make it work for every user who logs in :

e.g. %appdata%RoamingZipGeniuszipgenius.ini

Systems Architect / Analyst

Based in Leeds, West Yorkshire, we are an award winning full service digital agency specialising in Social Media and Search (SEO) led projects.

We now have a requirement for  a freelance Senior Systems Analyst to work with us on a 4-6 month project.

The successful candidate will work with the in-house team including Project Manager, Account Manager, Technical Project Manager, and our Search & Social Team, to produce a technical system specification.  This is a new project for one of our key blue-chip clients who have a strong brand and are one of the market leaders in their field.  It is therefore imperative that we find the right person for this project.

Details

• Day Rate:                 £negotiable
• Contract Length:        Up to 6 months
• Start Date:                 ASAP
• Location:                Leeds

Requirements:

Excellent track record of…

• Delivering high quality technical systems analysis and design for web based systems.
• Analysing, interpreting and designing complex systems and data processes.
• Producing comprehensive, precise, clear and easy to read technical specifications.
• Working collaboratively across multi-disciplined project teams.
• Strong analytical & data analysis.
• Identifying and understanding business and commercial objectives.
• Designing large web-based systems, incorporating real-time data streaming, integration with 3rd party systems, and large traffic volumes.

Bloom Media is a leading digital agency based in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Our solutions are totally ROI focused combining strategic, creative and technical innovation to realise maximum commercial value for our client accounts.

An opening has emerged for a talented, flexible and experienced Front End Web Developer to join our team in Leeds.

We want to hear from skilled web developers with excellent front-end development expertise, ideally in an agency environment, although we’ll also consider applications from individuals who are in the earlier stages of their career and can demonstrate a true passion and interest in web development.

About you:

• You have superlative ability to hand code lightweight, standards based, semantic XHTML and CSS
• You have extensive experience in cross-browser development techniques, and progressive enhancement strategies
• You have good working knowledge of JQuery and unobtrusive javascript
• You have experience in WordPress, ExpressionEngine and/or Drupal
• Your best friend is Firebug and layout tables make you weep
• You are following the buzz about HTML5
• You provide accurate delivery time lines
• You have an almost unhealthy attention to detail and take real pride in the finished product
• You are well organised and self-motivated, with the ability to work to tight deadlines
• You have design awareness and follow the creative brief to the letter
• You are interested in and follow SEO best practices
• You may have some familiarity with server-side languages and databases such as PHP and MySQL
• You may have some familiarity with Facebook API and the Open Graph
• You may have some flash and Actionscript experience
• Experience in mobile development a plus

As an individual, you’ll enjoy brainstorming ideas with the team and you’ll believe that there is always a solution to a challenge. A self starter, you’ll instinctively know how to approach and manage your work and your enthusiasm for what you do will be infectious – you’ll really care about the quality of the work you produce.

In exchange for commitment and hard work, you’re guaranteed a good humoured team environment, a competitive salary and the opportunity to take your career to the next level.

If you’re up the challenge, please send your CV and cover letter (outlining your experience, your current salary or salary aspiration, and examples of your work) to Alex Morris, HR Manager at amorris [at] bloommedia.co.uk.

Over the last couple of weeks, some users of DoubleClick may noticed server outages and massive spikes in server connections.  The connections were apparently referrals from DoubleClick banner adds, but coming in such massive waves that they caused the target servers to overload and stop serving pages. The flood of connections peaked between 6000 and 10000 connections in a 15 second sample.   In terms of website security, we call this a Denial Of Service (DOS) attack and would only ever expect to see it from a malicious source, such as a hacker or botnet.

Google don’t seem to have publicised this amazing blunder, although they have issued this statement to marketing campaigners who reported the issue :

Recently Google was notified of a problem being experienced by a small number of advertisers who were seeing large volumes of server requests from activity on the Google platform.  Following an investigation Google identified the problem and resolved the cause of the issue.  The problem related to ads being delivered across the platform that triggered a server request at the same time as the ad impression was delivered.

This issue was unforeseen, Google is sorry that the select client sites experienced problems with the volume of server requests.

Such heart warming remorse from the company comes only weeks after Chinese hackers launched attacks against Google’s systems and penetrated their security.  In those attacks, servers and accounts were compromised resulting in trojan horses and viral code being uploaded to Google’s systems.

In Google’s brief explanation of DoubleClick’s recent strange behaviour, they have not confirmed if the events are in any way linked and if DoubleClick’s servers have also been compromised.

As no doubt many of you are aware, there have been some big changes in Google Analytics lately, especially with the ways you can track how people interact with your site as well as the way you can structure your goal sets without having to create ridiculous numbers of profiles for you to track your 200+ goals! And yes, all of us here at Bloom are HOOGELY excited about it!

Google Analytics now lets you track up to 20 goals, all in the same profile! Each Profile is allocated 4 goal sets, each of these goal sets contain a set of five goals which make it really easy for you to now group similar goal types into one goal set:

Example:

Goal Set 1 – Registrations

Goal 1 – Party Registration

Goal 2 – Meeting Registration

Goal 3 – Conference Registration

Goal 4 – Charity Registration

Goal 5 – Seminar Registration

Goal Set 2 – Downloads

Goal 1 – Yearly Summary PDF Download

Goal 2 – Chairmans Statement PDF Download

Goal 3 – Widget Download

Goal 4 – Flash content Download

Goal 5 – Press Release Download

..and so it goes on.

Of course, you are not limited to the different types of goals that you can track; you can track just about anything! From completed ecommerce transactions to how many clicks you’ve had on your site “Follow us on Twitter” button, time on site, pages per visit, bounce rates, the possibilities are endless!

Engagement Goals

This is the thing which we Bloomers are especially excited about! Google Analytics has listened to the community and responded with a new type of goal called “Engagement Goals” which allows you to track how people are interacting with your website, and is an absolute must have if you are planning a new site launch and wanting to test the overall “stickiness” of the website, or even tweaking the website to improve its usability. This type of goal allows you to set thresholds for Time on Site or Pages per Visit.

Time on Site Goal

Google Analytics now allows you to set a greater than or less than value of time spent on the site for one of your goals.

For example, you can set a specific goal to track how many people spent less than 10 seconds on your site, then another goal to track how many people have spent 10 to 20 seconds, then another for 20 to 30 seconds, and so it goes on. This is particularly useful for when you are launching a new website, wanting to test some linkbait or how well people engage with a form or other facility that you’ve provided.

Pages Per Visit Goal

Google Analytics lets you create a goal that you can set to greater, equal to or less than value to a pages per visit.

For example you can set a specific goal to track how many people made less than 5, 10, 15 (the list goes on!) page views per session. As before, this is particularly useful when you are launching a new site, and you can gauge the success of it by seeing if the number of page views has improved, or God forbid, gone down!

And in case you’re wondering how you’re going to save all that historical data from your old goals, Kaushik tells you how to keep your old goal history in your new goal!

Advanced Table Filtering

A new addition to the reporting power of Google Analytics is the ability to filter the elements on a table based on the different metric conditions.

Example

If you only want to see your top pages that have an average session time of over one minute and received less than 100 pageviews, you can do that by performing the following action:

• Click Advanced Filter at the bottom of the report window:

• Click on “Add new condition” and select the metrics you want to set:

• Set the values you want to monitor:

• Create a new filter using the same process for the number of PageViews
• et Voila! Your Custom Report:

A very useful and powerful addition to the way you can report on your campaigns, I’m sure you’ll agree!

Google Analytics Intelligence Reports

This really is THE most useful new addition to the way Google Analytics reports your data. Google Analytics now tells YOU what’s happening on your website, your campaigns and much more!

Analytics Intelligence provides you with automatic alerts of significant changes that are happening to your website in terms of traffic, bounce rates, conversion rates, and a whole lot more!

Example:

Google Analytics will alert you if you’ve seen a big spike in traffic on a particular day from a referring website or search engine, like your blog, Google, or just about anything. It would also alert you if you saw a drop in Time on Site with visitors from London for instance. So instead of you having to monitor reports constantly, Google Analytics now does it all for you!

You can also set up Custom Alerts which makes it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what trends to look out for. You can set daily, weekly or monthly triggers on different dimensions and metrics and be notified by email or on the interface when the changes actually occur. An extremely powerful addition to Google Analytics indeed!

Fin

And there you have it! It’s easy to see why Google Analytics is one of the top Analytics packages available! Keep the new features rolling!

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

The highlights :

Operating Systems

• At 60.55%, Windows XP is still three nearly 3 times more popular than Vista
• OSX sits at 7.11%
• Windows 7 is about to overtake Linux, and it’s not even out to retail yet
• iPhone OSX sits between the deceased Windows 98 and server based Windows Server 2003.  (I find it interesting that Server 2003 racks up a higher percentage than iPhone as by default it blocks trackers and cookies, also being a server OS, it typically isn’t used for web surfing)

Browsers

• IE 7 dominates, with Firefox 3 lagging 6% behind
• IE 8 is close on the heels of Firefox 3
• The aging IE 6 is still hanging in there with 14% of the share
• Buggy Firefox 3.5 is down in 5th place
• Slow on the uptake, Chrome is way down in 7th place with a measly 3.23% of the share

Screen Resolutions

• 1024×768 is still top dog
• VERY closely followed by 1280×800, which is a wide screen resolution, typically not found on new monitors having been superseded by :
• 1440×900 (as used by our office Dell desktops) which is in 4th with 8.68%, that’s a bigger share than the total OSX users – this will eventually overtake 1280×800 as the standard wide desktop resolution.

Summary
IE6 has double the market share of OSX as a whole.  So let’s stop banging on about ditching IE6 and get rid of OSX instead.

Being a ‘silver surfer’, Chairman, CEO, NED, etc., gives me a privileged position of ‘outside-in’ insight into this industry which is still highly embryonic and quite naive in some ways; occasionally exhibiting the inconsistency of an early stage teenager! I am also ‘contemporary’ (some might say contentious) in my views on business management. I firmly believe that business sustainability is only enabled by developing real underlying value in the enterprise. Value that is founded upon market positioning, brand, image and stakeholder value with financial gain being the OUTCOME of leading, aligning and managing these essentially non-financial assets.

I am therefore always mystified by individuals and enterprises seeking short term gain by seemingly ‘following the money’. For example I recently read of an exclusively SEO ‘start up’ seeking to invest big sums to ‘grab’ market share … WHY? Is it because they saw it as a quick turn investment? In my humble and biased(?) opinion, to REALLY make a success of SEO you need to know and have major influence on how websites work and vice-versa. Furthermore, social media is rapidly growing in terms of its influence on SEO/WEBSITE effectiveness. To  enter an already fairly mature yet dynamic and aggressive market in such an exposed manner seems at best, high risk.

DIGITAL now encompasses an ever expanding domain. With such rapidly growing technologies and techniques, the power of the collective (enterprise brand/image/credibility/etc.) needs to be harnessed TOGETHER with enabling the individual to express their flair and develop their own brand/image/credibility. Enterprise is then enhanced by the individual and the individual enhanced by the enterprise whereby such pro-active engagement enables each partners aspiration to be mutually enabled ….. engaging warp-drive if you will.

This takes enlightened leadership and staff engagement and is what true HOLISTIC benefit means.

2 + 2 = 6

Such an approach is also where stakeholder (enterprise, staff, client, partner) engagement is truly empowered. The focus for both enterprise and individual is therefore on mutually inclusive contribution and value add as opposed to I/me/my financial gain; albeit when WE get it right, mutually sustainable financial gain is a natural outcome.

About 9 or so years ago I attended a conference in the USA where BT ‘proudly and confidently’ announced from the platform that they were not going to invest in installing another single km of fibre optic cable into the ground because ADSL (copper) technology was the way forward. This was followed immediately by both France Telecom and AT&T who both ’confidently and proudly’ announced that copper technology was limited (dead!) and that they were only going to install Fibre in the future! What a sad indictment for a company who allowed Balance Sheet bean-counters to dominate technological visionaries within its Martlesham research facility; one of whom (I believe) ’invented’ the World Wide Web! Short sighted financially driven decision making that has now put a UK Blue-chip at risk (read on!)

Consider now that Lord Carter has recently published his (Government inspired) report on the future for a ‘Digital Britain’. My problem with the ‘objective’ is that we have a comms infrastructure inherited from BT that is (and has been for some long while) 3rd world technology; so how are we (UK Ltd) going to compete on the world stage?

Put simply, how can we get beyond this ‘copper crap’ that delivers unbalanced bi-directional speeds with at best kB performance in one direction, to the point where we at least catch up with our peers in other countries?? ……
The exponential journey that the internet is currently driving business on, requires AT LEAST the 8MB bi-directional speeds ‘talked’ about and probably at least 20MB, but this requires a massive investment in fibre optic infrastructure. Virgin have inherited the NTL/Telewest fibre network but this is very limited in its user avialability. What is needed, for UK Ltd to compete on the world stage is for the last/first mile, exchange to every home and business premise, to have fibre cable delivering REAL Broadband. The applications, demand and technologies already exist. Furthermore, someone, somewhere has to carry out appropriate oversight to ensure that we (UK) do not end up with a 3 tier comms infrastucture; ie that service providors are not allowed to cherry pick the ‘super-centres’ and allow rural areas to continue to rely on copper. OFCOM have not demonstrated to-date (to me at least) that they can apply such strategic insight to their role in regulatory oversight.

However, we are where we are and such a capability requires massive investment which must be applied within the next 10 years …. and time is running. Without such investment the risk to us all is that we will have to compete on the world stage with 3rd world technology and that probably implies that we would end up as a 3rd world country.

Unfortunately, Lord Carters report is full of rhetoric and new committee’s; discussing legislation and control, etc. …. very little if any focus on how we deliver and meet the demands of todays rapidly evolving business world.

Put this situation into the context that BT has just reported a £2.3B loss for the first quarter of 2009 AND are only forecasting to invest in providing fibre to a ‘massive’ 1M homes and it is easy to appreciate the size of the challenge and risk!

There are other local service providors who are investing, eg Hull, Bournemouth, Dundee, etc, some of them with local authority investment, but these are just small pockets of activity and will not deliver what is needed.  What is needed NOW is a consensus which builds a powerful lobby that has a voice loud enough to be listened to in the corridors of power such that CHANGE HAPPENS…….
Help!!

If you are interested in this topic you might want to check out the following

http://nga-uk.blogspot.com/

http://digitalbritainforum.org.uk/

According to aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion page-views per month across more than 3 million websites, Firefox 3 has surpassed Internet Explorer 7‘s European browser market share.

For the first time ever, Firefox pulled ahead by just over half a point, registering 35.05% to IE7′s 34.54% with Internet Explorer 6 lagging way behind in third place at 11.92%.

While Internet Explorer as a browser on the whole (across all its versions) is still more popular than Firefox, these statistics show that the gap is narrowing quite dramatically. In Europe at least.

This can be compared to North America where IE7 still has roughly twice as many users as Firefox 3. (Let’s not talk about Asia, where IE6 still is king.)

“The move is partly explained by a small switch from IE 7.0 usage to IE 8.0 but also by growing market share overall by Firefox 3.0,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO and founder StatCounter. “The data shows that Firefox is closing the gap and is now just 10% behind all IE versions in Europe.”

This could mean that European web consumers are becoming more web savvy, care more about security and speed and have simply opted to use a superior web browser. The knock on effect of this is much better support for web standards on the whole, making our lives as web developers much easier. It also means less pressure to support hideously out-dated browsers such as Internet Explorer 6.