The countdown for a huge tranche of new top level domain names is well underway* and the list of applied for domains will shortly be made public. One applicant is making their option known now at GlobalINET which is taking place this week in Geneva.
dotAfrica
dotAfrica branding
The .Africa top level domain application is a African Union sanctioned bid to establish a regional internet identity of Africa. Mohamed El Bashir, Chair of the dotAfrica steering committee describes the reason for the domain:
“Africa’s new top-level domain (dotAfrica) will be utilised as a mechanism to promote the development of Africa’s Internet services and ecosystem, and to showcase African pride, identity and know-how.”
The registry will be run by non-profit .za (South Africa) operator, UniForumSA, and they hope the new domain will stimulate the whole African domain name market. Pricing and availability (including any restrictions) will be announced closer to launch.
*The countdown hit a bump in the road in April due to a security issue with the online platform ICANN uses for the process.
Release your inner geek at a tech conference this year
Here are some of the tech events taking place in 2012
NEXT Elevator, Germany (May 8-9). The NEXT Elevator is renowned for creating platforms for new ideas and giving startup founders an opportunity to pitch before investors and opinion leaders. elevator.nextconf.eu
Thinking Digital, UK (May 29-31). 3 day event built for people who believe in the power of innovation and creativity to create positive change in their work, organisations and communities. thinkingdigital.co.uk
Digital Shoreditch, UK (May 21-June 2). A festival celebrating the outstanding creative, technical and entrepreneurial talent of East London and Tech City. digitalshoreditch.com
Over the Air, UK (June 1-2). Over the Air is a unique tech-agnostic event for and by the developer community, featuring technical workshops where attendees can roll up their sleeves and tinker with new platforms, operating systems, APIs & SDKs; and tutorial sessions that feature real business cases & new insights. overtheair.org
Picnic, Amsterdam (September 17-18). A leading creativity and innovation platform. It functions as an incubator and accelerator for game-changing ideas, concepts, products and services. picnicnetwork.org
MADE: The Entrepreneur Festival, UK (September 19-21). Whether you’re a startup, a high growth business or a well established business looking for inspiration and idea, MADE is for you. madefestival.com
Wired 2012, UK (October 25-26). WIRED’s first conference in October last year was a compelling event that was sold out and attended by more than 440 delegates. This years event will be jam-packed with stimulating content, networking and inspiring talks from people reshaping our world. wiredevent.co.uk
WIRED Magazine (UK) is currently offering discounts and the chance to win tickes to some of these events – email tilly.bull@condenast.co.uk if you are interested.
Graham Armfield presented his favourite WordPress plugins and invited others to share theirs too. They are linked to in the comment to this article. As SlideShare isn’t the quickest way to see them, I’ve picked out a few here:
Relevanssi
Replaces the default search with a partial-match search that sorts results by relevance. It also indexes comments and shortcode content.
wp-twitter-feed
Place a twitter feed on your site with shortcode
Point and Stare CMS Functions
This plugin generates special functions to convert your WordPress install into a CMS, add security and generally white label the admin.
WP Better Emails
Adds a good looking HTML template to all WP default plain/text emails and lets you set a custom sender name and email address.
Our own picks can be seen on this blog, on the right hand side.
Talk 2 – Multi-lingual WP
Rich Holman discussed methods, things to look for and consider, design considerations and plugins that can help you build a multi-lingual site with WordPress.
In a detailed and well explained talk, Rich took us through the pitfalls and shortcuts to building WordPress sites in more than one language. The easy option is just to install seperate copies of WordPress for each language. This approach works well if you can build common elements to your theme, and it’s appropriate for the project. This is best if the content on the different sites does not need to be equivalent. A more common requirement is for the same content to be readable in several languages. This will involve several considerations.
Design
Allow enough space in menus and other areas. Verbose languages like German can really mess up your lovely neat menu!
Be aware you are designing blind. Often the designer won’t know the other languages and good communication is the key.
Right to Left (RTL) languages could mean moving your content around – for example moving the sidebars from right to left.
HTML Language codes. Make sure you declare the language being used in your underlying code. This way plugins like Facebook’s Like button will automatically change it’s text to match.
Rich Holman
Development
The admin screen in WordPress already have translations.
Theme translations use .po and .mo files. Use Poedit to create and manage. Some of the translation plugins available will read your theme and create translation files ready for editing.
Problem areas
Tags and Taxonomy
Queries – one home page had over 1000 queries to load.
Rich advised that switching plugins is not a good idea – they don’t really work together or store data in a consistent way.
If you actually need translations to be done for your content, Rich suggested ICanLocalize, which is part of the WPML family. Rates are around $0.07 per word. One final word from the audience was a note to check the font you are using has support for all the characters in your chosen languages. Many fonts from providers such as Google Fonts and Typekit only contain the Latin character set.
Talk 3 – Human Centred Design
Tammie Lister presented a call to action to bring back human focused design.
Tammie Lister
Tammie related her views on how the web recently has become very structured what with grids, templates and stock photography proliferating. She called on designers and developers to “make it personal”. Inspired by Aarron Walters work on MailChimp, and using examples such as the Twitter “Fail Whale” and Google Logos she showed how even large companies can humanise their image. Another personal dislike of Tammie’s is seeing “Submit” on forms. When in real life does anyone “submit” something? Jargon like this should be excised from the new web.
WordPress allows content to be created freely so stock phrasology and stock photography can be avoided, plus it supports custom error pages, custom headers and backgrounds in many themes, and language files in many themes allow the nuts and bolts to be humanised. Tammie suggests customising the Admin part of WordPress so that users you are designing for only get what they need, and removing the clutter that gets put in by default.
One member of the audience took a counter view and said how he’d tried in the past to get clients to go for a jargon-free website but because the client and their audience were within the same related sphere, some jargon was inevitable.
Social
As always after the talks proper, discussions and informal networking carried on ’til closing time at the nearby pub.
Do you like data? We do! This post is about trends and data useful for optimising your website for getting more visitors (traffic) and contains lots of pretty pie charts to help explain what you should do to improve your web profile.
When building a website, there are certain questions you should be asking yourself.
What is my target audience?
How are they going to find my website?
What search engines should I target?
What browsers should I make sure my website supports?
Target Audience
Are you providing information? Selling something? Providing a service? These are the kind of questions that will help you decided how to build your website. The answers to these are down to you, but will affect the kind of website you build, whether you’ll need the services of third parties (such as PayPal for example), and the kind of hosting you’ll need. As a very experienced host, 2020Media is happy to discuss your likely needs with you, at no cost. Please contact us, if you’d like our help.
How will they come?
How do you think your website visitors will arrive at your website? There are basically 3 ways:
From the results of a query on a search engine.
From a link on another website
Direct – by typing in your website address (domain name) directly to their browser.
Visitor Source
The graph shows that most traffic to websites comes from a search engine. The 20% of direct traffic reflects the importance of a good domain name. Although there is normally not much to be gained in terms of visitors coming from other websites, it is still very important to get good links from relevant websites as these affect how your site will rank in the search engines.
Which Search Engine?
So we’ve established that most traffic to websites comes from search engine results. The most popular search engine by a long way is Google. Google’s share is around 80% at present. Bing (from Microsoft) comes second with 8.7%, Yahoo next with 8.0%. Runners up include Ask (1.4%) and AOL (1.3%).
Search engine market share
Market Share is important for where you spend your advertising budget, and also how much time you spend getting your site into those search engines.
Position is Important
When you are using a search engine, how often do you need to look at the 2nd or 3rd pages of results? We’re guessing not very often. The alogorithms used by search engines are now incredibly sophisticated, and now include your past searching habits to help tune the results to what they think you want. This means we’re now in the era of personalised search. Now, no two users will see the same set of results for a given search term.
Search engine results page
Page 1 is clearly the place to be. Getting a page one placement for common terms is difficult to say the least. If you sold cars, getting your website on the first page of results if someone typed ‘Cars’ into a search engine would be an uphill struggle. However as our next chart shows, most users don’t type single word queries.
Phrases are Key
The report below summarizes the number of keywords used by end-users when using search engines. For example, “used car sales” has three keywords while “used car sales milton keynes” has five keywords.
Keyword Count
This analysis reveals that the majority of searches conducted on popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. contain 3 or more keywords. Over time, users of the internet have adapted their behaviour to be more specific in their searches so as you get better quality results.
Come Inside
A follow on result of the way people use search engines with multi-word searches is that the results are more specific too. You may think the home page of your website is the most important, but analysis of the data reveals that over 3/4 of traffic goes to inner pages, not the home page.
Entry Page Type
It’s worth remembering that not all traffic to a website comes from search engines, as our first chart showed. Over a quarter will likely come from elsewhere. Consider whether people linking to your site will link to your home page, or is it a particular page on your site that caught their interest?
Web Design Considerations
We’ll now look at some data regarding users themselves. People use many different types of device to browse the web. There are laptops, desktops, tables and smartphones. We’ll just look at non-mobile use here, and as the chart shows there are many many screen sizes in use today.
Screen Resolution Usage
Screen sizes on desktops and laptops have grown over the last 10 years, and a minimum of 1024 pixels width should be considered for web design. This information is critical for web designers to ensure that their layouts comply with the vast majority of the intended audience.
Web designers are now concentrating on Responsive design. Rather than designing different versions of websites for different screen sizes, the idea is to make the site gracefully adapt to different device capabilities. For example this could mean showing less information on mobile devices so as not to overwhelm the user.
Backwards Compatibility
Many people only have one browser on their computer, but even those who’ve installed some alternatives will probably end up using one as their primary tool for web browsing. Browsers don’t all follow the same rules for displaying pages and checking your website across a good range of software is essential. It’s something web designers should take care of, but if you update your website yourself, occasional use of a site like Browsershots that shows you what your site looks like is a good idea.
Browser usage trend
Internet Explorer still has the highest share of the market, across several different versions. It’s worth noting that Internet Explorer version 6 was notorious for displaying websites in unintended ways but has thankfully only 1.30% market share.
Summary
There is a lot to consider when building and promoting a website. We’ve looked at some data on website traffic, and this can help guide yo in building a compelling website that comes top of the search engines. However you may find some of the points we mention are not easily within your control. In general terms, search engines seek our unique, informative content wherever it may be found so if you avoid mediocrity and keep updating your website with fresh content you are on the right path to success.
Acknowledgements
This post would not have been possible without the data provided by StatOwl. Visit their site for lots more free data to help you improve your site. It is important for anybody using, referencing or relying on the data to understand the scope of coverage, which includes:
80% of web sites serve a predominantly United States market
32% of web sites classified as e-commerce sites
29% of web sites classified as corporate sites
20% of web sites classified as content delivery (blogs, news sites, etc.)
19% of web sites classified as “other”
Please keep the information above in mind while viewing StatOwl reports.
The UK CiviCRM user group meeting took place last night in London. We were there, and this is our report.
CiviCRM meetup
The meetup was hosted at techhub, in London’s “Silicon Roundabout”, Old Street. Our host for the evening was Michael McAndrew of Third Sector Design, a company specialising in CiviCRM based in techhub.
Meet-ups are free and a great way to get to learn more about CiviCRM and are suitable for those that are new to CiviCRM as well as people that have been using it for years. There were two presentations, a mingle session and a case study report from a charity that’s successfully implemented CiviCRM.
CiviCRM in 2012
The keywords for 2012 are: mobile, scalable, community.
CiviCRM
A code sprint (?) scheduled for later this month in London will be focusing on CiviMobile. CiviCRM for mobile devices includes iPhone, Android, iPad, Blackberry and more. This version will include the ability to view/search contacts and see most of the details of each contact. It will also allow users to create/edit contacts, and handle event attendee check-in. Several core developers will be in town and any developers are welcome to join.
CiviCon is taking place in San Fransisco on 2nd April. CiviCon is THE annual event bringing together the people who use, develop, design and implement CiviCRM. Good news for us in the UK though, a CiviCon Europe is planned for Autumn, although dates and location have not yet been finalised.
CiviCRM 4.1 News
Beta release for WordPress – along with Drupal and Joomla, CiviCRM will now work within WordPress. WordPress has emerged from it’s blogging roots to become one of the most widely used content managment systems in use today, powering an amazing 14% of the web.
Social plugins (Facebook, Twitter etc).
Better cron (simple for admins to setup).
Personalisation of campaign pages for events (think JustGiving).
Improvement to admin menu.
A couple of UK specific projects were mentioned, with a call for some help from developers or sponsors to get them completed. These are Direct Debit integration and Gift Aid. The Direct Debit integration is a “make it happen” project, which basically is a call for funding, and the Gift Aid module needs a bit of development help to fix some not too tricky bugs.
CiviCRM Marketing
The new CiviCRM website
Dave Moreton, from Bristol based Circle Interactive, talked to the group about improving the marketing of CiviCRM. It’s apparent that next to the giant forces of SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics etc, CiviCRM has a much lower profile. It’s also true that it’s a very different product. That said, the non-profit, membership, civic sector are often unaware of the existence of CiviCRM and end up using a commercial-focused CRM system that is less than ideal. David’s talk was about efforts within the CiviCRM community to increase awareness, talk up it’s successes and provide comparisons and marketing material for system integrators to use. He finished by showing us a sneak peak at the new CiviCRM website, which of course aims to solve these issues.
If you are interested in helping, there are occasional IRC meets, an online group at civicrm.org/groups/marketing and PDFs, Powerpoint and how-to material at Spreadtheword
CiviCRM Case Study
Finally we heard from Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research (LLR). Parvez Saleh from Veda Consulting, talked us through the tasks that were needed for migrate in just 2 hours a complete legacy system to CiviCRM.
the LLR website
LLR went from a system that was used by just a few users which specialist knowledge (and lots and lots of spreadsheets), to a website-integrated CiviCRM system that can be accessed by 80+ users, speeds up the financial reporting functions and will save the charity tens of thousands over the next few years, as well as enabling increased fundraising. Now one of the largest CiviCRM installations in the UK, the system serves the needs of 350,000 contacts, 90,000+ participants and over 1.2 million contributions a year. LLR are now holding a “spreadsheet amnesty” to move all data onto the system.
Successful Event
The event was attended by around 50 people. Most were new to CiviCRM but we also met with system integrators, developers, current users and administrators. The user group meeting showed that there is an established infrastructure of support for CiviCRM here the UK, and organisations considering it for themselves can be confident they will get the support they need. 2020Media provides complete hosting packages for CiviCRM, and our support is based around our hosting expertise. Therefore we can deal with the kind of problems you might have if you get a error on a page, emails not being sent, uploading images and so on. We can also help users get to grips with the basics of using Civi. We also have a network of developers and consultants so get in touch if you want to know more.
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