Voluntary code for blogs needed??
The Press Complaints Commission are arguing for “self-imposed regulation“. Incidentally, you can judge the quality of the PCC’s grasp of internet technology, as you sit through the skip-intro to their site.
Director Tim Toulmin argues that “free speech” and “free press” are relative terms because views expressed on the internet are still governed by laws such as libel and data protection.
Sounds to me as if the PCC is trying to engineer itself a position in the information age, and like all quangos is clutching at power in an age where its remit is pretty redundant.
Moreover, Toulmin seems to underestimate the power of redress offered by blogging (”… there is no means of redress”). If I write defamatory comments about a company or individual, they can complain right here. Or they can run a counter-blog, both of which will show in a blog search.
Governments get very twitchy when they can’t control what people read and think. Do you think Stalin would approve of blogging, or the PCC?
Jersey Tourism : How to win on Google
Slides of the recent presentation I gave at the Jersey Tourism 2006 Industry conference are now available at their website: http://www.jersey.com/conference/
Robert Mackenzie launches new blog
And what a blog! Following our blog seminar last week Robert Mackenzie, marketing director of the Seymour Hotel group began his own blog about Jersey Tourism and the hospitality industry.
It’s ascerbic, witty, and makes some powerful lobbying points for tourism in Jersey. I hope Frank Walker is reading.
Image Group says no to blogs
Couldn’t resist this one. The Image Group’s lavishly produced quarterly newsletter has a nice article on corporate blogs where the writer poses the question, “would Channel Islanders read the daily ramblings of a local CEO? The answer is probably not.”
I do like it when the competition is racing ahead like this. Judging by the feedback from this blog, and the blogs of my customers, I think the Channel Islands is more than ready for its businesses to start interacting.
It will be interesting to see whether Image are monitoring their company in the blogosphere - if so, I look forward to receiving their comments here.
Web accessibility
Must read from Gilly Challinor - great blog on web accessibility.
How to create a fast loading site
Even in these days of 2meg broadband, users still appreciate (no demand), fast performance of websites.
This is particularly vital for adwords browsers (your adwords strategy should deter these random clickers anyway, you want determined buyers). How many times have you clicked on an ad, and moved on before the page has completed loading? The adword advertiser has paid for your clickthrough, and lost a customer for life.
Total page weight is calculated by the number of bytes that make up the html and css, and the number of bytes that makes up the images. Some pages can deliver very slowly if there is excessive use of javascript, java or flash. Older browsers and PCs will really struggle if there’s lots of code to execute on page load.
In the old days we used to aim for a total page weight of 48k, now that’s crept up to around 120k. To achieve this you need to make sure that image use is limited, and carefully optimised. We had one client who once uploaded an 8meg image to their homepage, and complained that the page was loading slowly (it’s no longer possible to do this in reWrite!).
There’s another key. Make sure your webdesigner is separating design (css) from content. In modern browsers, this will enable your page to be parsed very quickly, and all available text should be displayed immediately.
Finally, make sure your hosting company is running fast hardware, with good bandwidth availability. You will not achieve this on a £2 per annum nastyspace hosting contract.
Creating sites with easy navigation
At Webreality we believe that the functionality and ease-of-use of a website is more important than visual effect. That’s not to say that it doesn’t matter whether websites look beautiful, it’s just that beauty is simplicity.
Many web designers have migrated from a print/advertising background, and many advertising agencies, are still print dominated. You’ll often see ‘web’ tagged on to their list of services, and usually they’ll out-source the hard stuff.
So typically, corporate websites end-up as brochure-ware. Heavy pages, with cliched businessmen shaking hands, and taglines like “because we care about you”.
These websites ignore the fact that the most successful websites have been interactive and/or transactional. Meshing sites like youtube and myspace are supremely interactive, whilst ebay pulls of the golden trick of being interactional and transactional.
So three rules for good navigation:
- Focus on one goal the site’s going to achieve
- Make sure that you can get from anywhere to anywhere in 2-3 clicks.
- Make sure there is clear hyperlink navigation throughout the site (for users and for Google!)
Jersey’s first blogging seminar
Webreality hosted Jersey’s first business blogging seminar today. For the benefit of those who attended, and for regular readers, I’m listing some key facts and urls.
Many people expressed concern today about how to find out what’s being said about their businesses. The first place to start is Technorati. Technorati indexes blogs in real-time, and is also helpful for identifying trends in the blogosphere. You should also start reading some industry blogs with a blog reader, like newsgator. You can find new blogs by searching on Google, e.g. travel blogs.
If you’d like to start blogging today, you can use one of the free blogging engines, like blogger. Or you could wait for Webreality’s new business blogging portal, which will be online during December. You could also take a look at some sample blog policies here.
If you’d like to do more reading on blogging, I’d strongly recommend Blog Marketing by Jeremy Wright.
During the seminar we spoke about interacting with bloggers. Since many of the attendees were virgin bloggers, perhaps you’d like to do the deed, and post a comment right here, right now?
P.S. Sincere thanks to Angela Alder, Gilly Challinor, and Suzanne le Lay for their prodigous organisation, and to Suzanne for buying table cloths. Thanks also to the rest of the WR team for their front-of-house work today.
Good news for freedom of blog-speech
The California Supreme Court has ruled that bloggers and US internet providers can’t be held liable for the posting of defamatory comments written by third parties.
I expect this decision will influence legal judgements in the UK, and EU, but to the best of my knowledge there are no European precedents in the blogosphere.
Our advice to customers is to ensure your user policies (both external and internal) are up-to-date, and that employees in particular are trained in blog-production.
Rackspace’s perfect website formula??
Yesterday Rackspace published their formula for the perfect website:
Pwebsite = { ((14.14* EaseNav) + (13.56*Speed) + (13.11*CleanDes) + (10.89*Func) + (10.89*Up)) - ((12.63*Pops) + (10.32*Ads) +(5.21*MultiM)) } / 6.26
Which is a slightly pretentious, and pseudo-scientific way of agreeing with Webreality’s philosophy of websites (we scored 93% for www.webreality.co.uk, which was quite gratifying). Here’s a better translation of Rackspace’s formula. Good websites should look like this:
- Very easy navigation
- Very fast page load
- Simple and clean design
- Easy and powerful functionality
- 100% available
- No pop-ups
- No (or very little) advertising
- Sparse use of Flash/multimedia
I’ll expand on some of these in future posts.