Happy Christmas YOU are Time person of 2006
In a prescient piece of old-world publishing, Time Magazine has nominated YOU as 2006 person of the year.
Time’s article acknowledges the democratization of publishing that social networking has achieved. With the plethora of social networking sites, the general public is being greeted by luminaries from Gary Brolsma (Numa Numa) to Snow Patrol.
“It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.” sums up the power of social networking perfectly. So, Happy Christmas to all my customers and readers, and here’s to 2007 where we’ll work even harder to make sure you’re part of this revolution, not the post-script.
Gilly & meta tags
The interested thing about team blogs is that it gives team members the opportunity to discuss different view points in a public forum.
Gilly Challinor has just put together an excellent post on meta tags, and it’s definitely worth a read. Here’s the bottom line though; meta descriptions are useful for steering Google on the page description it displays in its results. Meta keywords are completely redundant and should be avoided.
If you don’t put any meta tags in at all, Google will approximate the site description from the site content. If your site is well constructed, has intelligent content that is Google friendy, this description *should* make sense. For my money, I’d drop meta tags altogether.
Webreality.co.uk achieves 6/10 PageRank
PageRank is Google’s measure of a site’s importance, and is formed using the usual balance of content, hyperlinking and site traffic. If you want to check your site’s rank you should install the Google Toolbar, but be warned, Google will then know exactly what you’re looking at.
Webreality’s PageRank has recently increased to 6/10, which isn’t bad for a provincial web agency. Our peers in the 6/10 ranks include the Daily Telegraph, FHM and Abbey National.
This is good news for our customers who benefit from links to their sites on our portfolio page, and an even better reason why site by webreality is a badge of quality.
ASA rules blog as ad
The Advertising Standards Authority has extended its long tentacles into the blogosophere for the first time. Radio station, TalkSport, added blog entries to multiple sports-fan blogs.
The ruling, under sections 7.1 and 22.1 of the CAP Code covering misleading ads and recognisable marketing and communications, found that TalkSport had deceived blog readers.
I think TalkSport were naive in not recognising that authenticity and integrity are supremely valued in the blogosphere, and in social networking in general (what goes around comes around). This is like black hat search engine optimisation - it’s unethical, and breaks the generally altruistic nature of the internet. But we don’t need nanny-state quangos policing the internet. Like the PCC, the ASA are desperately trying to find a raison d’etre in the new world.
Cautious approach from Chancellor on LVCR
Buried deep in today’s pre-budget report (full text here) you will find a fleeting mention of the Low Value Consigment Relief (LVCR) that enables Channel Island companies to export VAT-exempt goods to the UK where their value is lower than £18.
The clause you need to read is on p. 132:
5.136 The Government continues to monitor the £18 VAT-free threshold for imports of small
consignments from outside the EU. Despite the attempts of the Channel Island authorities to
limit the exploitation of these rules, the cost of this relief has increased in the last six months
to around £90 million per annum. The Government will assess the case for reform to protect
tax revenues and will take into account the wider public interest, by balancing the
compliance costs on carriers and importers with the impact on UK based retailers.
What’s really interesting about this statement is that it seems to acknowledge that proportionately LVCR is not a big problem. Particularly as the previous clause refers to Missing Trader Intra-Community (MTIC) VAT costings between £3.5 billion and £4.85 billion in 2005-06. LVCR is costing only £90 million, and as I’ve mentioned before Jersey and its businesses have been incredibly compliant, we even collect VAT for items over £18 and pay it HMCE at no cost. Let’s hope common sense will prevail.
Missing padlock on IE7?
A few customers of our ecommerce clients have indicated concern that their sites are no longer secure. In all cases, these customers have upgraded from IE6 to IE7.
On IE6 they’ve been taught to look for the padlock at the bottom of the page.
On IE7, the padlock is now to the right of the address bar, and the colour of the background indicates if it’s ok (blue, red etc). If you click the icon, you’ll see a summary of the certificate as well.
3 Click rule outdated?
I’m grateful to Lee Carré for his comment on a recent post that drew attention to the clickclickclick fallacy. The article points out that empirical tests on usability reveal that user satisfaction is more governed by the outcome than by the number of clicks. So if a user can book a flight easily and it takes 10 clicks, the user’s not too bothered.
In balance though the article also concludes that whilst that the focus that the 3 click rule brings to designers and information architects has got to be a good thing.
To this I would add that the way we enter websites is changing rapidly. So much design and planning thought is given to the home page, when the reality is that good SEO and SEM will lead to many entry pages to your site. In this scenario, the browser performs initial research through Google, and then the browser lands at a page where the task can be completed without further clicking. So should we be aiming for a no-clicks rule?