Top ten new things for 2008
At last, Christmas has passed, and now we can turn our attention to the big tech trends for 2008. Soothsaying comes in units of ten (ask Moses), so here goes:1. AJAX will stop being something developers use to hype web site build prices, and start being a serious method for delivering very smooth and usable web apps. 2. Google will switch from an auction pay-per-click model to a revenue-share model. Google wants a slice of the economy, and it’s going to get it. 3. The rate of web application development will continue exponentially. We can expect to see more sophisticated web apps arriving much more quickly and for much less. This is being driven by highly extensible and inter-operable languages such as Ruby on Rails, and even Microsoft’s ASP.NET 3.5. 4. I hope the term Content Management System will die.5. Small businesses will wake-up to the business efficiencies they can gain from integrated web solutions.6. People will see their www. as only a small part of their online strategy.7. Social networking sites may have reached their apex - I hope so, because I don’t want to update my Facebook status anymore.8. Skype will stop dropping packets from voice calls.9. Google’s successor will be born.10. A broadsheet newspaper will stop physical distribution.
Jersey.com
Dear Blog readers,I’m on holiday at the moment, and so am a bit late to put the boot in about the demise of Jersey.com. Besides, nothing I write could come near to Robert Mackenzie’s Tourism carol.Instead, I’d like to look back to the ministerial decision made nearly a year ago by Philip Ozouf: ”The Minister agreed to grant £250,000 from the Tourism Development Fund to Jersey Tourism for the development of the www.jersey.com site …Reason(s) for decision:Following a thorough and rigorous process of evaluation the recommendation to the Minister is that Communique 360 should be appointed to the task of rebuilding the tourism sections of jersey.com website at the quoted cost of £250,000.Funding for this has been agreed by the Tourism Development Fund Panel whose members have evaluated the proposals from short listed companies and are unanimous in their support for this decision. The funding will be provided to a maximum of £250,000 by the Tourism Development Fund. ” (full text at www.gov.je).Signature:Senator Philip OzoufMinister for Economic DevelopmentSo, the questions I’d like answering are:1. If the process was so thorough and rigorous, why was a company chosen that has singularly failed to deliver?2. Exactly how much has been spent on the website so far?3. How much is being spent fixing it?4. How much has been paid in compensation for reputational damage, loss of potential revenue, and failure to deliver?5. Has £250,000 been exceeded, and if so, who authorised it?6. Who will take responsibility for this debacle? (The signature at the bottom of the above decision is just a suggestion).
Jersey.com Adwords
I do hope when Jersey Tourism launched their new £250,000 site they remembered to update their Adwords campaign…
Sadly … no. The campaign takes you to a very graceful 404 page.
Ho hum. Still Jersey Tourism’s blunder gives us a good teaching point for Adwords campaigns.
Adwords are Pay-per-click campaigns (PPC), which means you only pay when someone clicks on your Ad. Therefore, you should make sure that your site is running when someone clicks through, otherwise you don’t just burn Ad spend, you alienate customers (see Jersey.com above). Ideally, your Adword campaign should be monitored, and be linked to real-time testing, to ensure that Ads are only served when your site is performing properly. Webreality’s Adword manager does this, and I’ll post more about it soon.