Recently in design Category
I've been a fan of Seth Godin's writings for quite some time, so I was delighted when my copy of The Big Red Fez arrived a couple of days ago.
In common with some of Godin's other books, The Big Red Fez is not a hefty volume with tiny print. It's just over 100 pages long, but every second page is a screenshot of a website or email, so it's actually a mere 50 pages in total. But a book shouldn't be valued based on its length, especially not in the case of Godin.
While some authors suffer from something akin to verbal diarrhoea, Godin excels in getting his point across clearly and succintly (the screenshots help illustrate what he's talking about).
So what is it all about?
It's about taking your website to the next level. Making it more useful and thus more profitable. No matter how good you may think your website is you can probably tweak it and improve it (I know this to be very true of any I operate!)
Most of what Godin talks about is simple and easy to put into operation - making the call to action more obvious for example, or rejigging error messages etc.,
Word of advice - if you run a website get a copy of this book!
In common with some of Godin's other books, The Big Red Fez is not a hefty volume with tiny print. It's just over 100 pages long, but every second page is a screenshot of a website or email, so it's actually a mere 50 pages in total. But a book shouldn't be valued based on its length, especially not in the case of Godin.
While some authors suffer from something akin to verbal diarrhoea, Godin excels in getting his point across clearly and succintly (the screenshots help illustrate what he's talking about).
So what is it all about?
It's about taking your website to the next level. Making it more useful and thus more profitable. No matter how good you may think your website is you can probably tweak it and improve it (I know this to be very true of any I operate!)
Most of what Godin talks about is simple and easy to put into operation - making the call to action more obvious for example, or rejigging error messages etc.,
Word of advice - if you run a website get a copy of this book!
A few days ago I mentioned the issues I was facing with the mess that was the UK Webmaster forum I'd taken over.
Rome wasn't built in a day, as the saying goes, so I wasn't expecting immediate results. However a pleasant surprise is always a good thing, so I was delighted to see how quickly some of the issues were getting resolved.
The most obvious area that needed attention was the forum's content itself. There was a LOT of spammy junk, which caused two problems:
Vbulletin's plugin and permissions allows you to customise a site to your heart's content, so I've added a few plugins and settings that mitigate spammer activity. For example, users cannot post external links until they've got a post count of 15. The same kind of logic is applied to signatures ie. the links / tagline below someone's post.
Another thing that needed to be addressed was the site's visible focus, so some of the sections have been either removed entirely or moved around a bit ie. topics that are not related to the site's core topic have been moved to the "off topic" area.
VBSeo's tools definitely help in deciding which areas of content you want to optimise and which areas you want to "devalue", so ignoring the "member profile" pages seems to be a good idea (some of the member names are barely "safe for work" at the moment!)
Measuring progress isn't that easy, but there are a few tools that help. So I've spending a lot of time poring over the Google Webmaster Tools console, as well as checking Analytics.
What is interesting to see is the significant jump in GoogleBot activity (click to enlarge):
While bot activity can be quite meaningless in isolation, when you compare it with the previous levels it's very interesting. (To me at least, I wouldn't expect everyone else to be this fascinated by it!). One of the conclusions I've drawn, which may or may not be realistic, is that the site's new hosting helps ie. it's the only site on that particular server and the server itself has very good connectivity.
Unfortunately I don't have enough web statistics data to work with as yet, but I did notice that the site now has a Google Page Rank score, which it didn't have a short time ago.
James, from the excellent Forbairt Media , has been tweaking the site's layout, so it's now a lot simpler to look at and hopefully more pleasing to the eye.
Of course it's very early days yet, so I expect it will take a lot longer to see any real jump in visitor levels and member activity. Thankfully several people who read my original post on this have been kind enough to join and "get the ball rolling", which is fantastic and is much appreciated.
Let's see how it goes from here ...
Rome wasn't built in a day, as the saying goes, so I wasn't expecting immediate results. However a pleasant surprise is always a good thing, so I was delighted to see how quickly some of the issues were getting resolved.
The most obvious area that needed attention was the forum's content itself. There was a LOT of spammy junk, which caused two problems:
It was being indexed by Google et al, so the site was appearing in the results for search queries that genuinely alarmed me The content had put off new and existing members from hanging around
I'd love to say that I've managed to remove all the spam posts, but I know there are probably plenty of them still lurking (though searching for certain keywords isn't turning up much these days).Vbulletin's plugin and permissions allows you to customise a site to your heart's content, so I've added a few plugins and settings that mitigate spammer activity. For example, users cannot post external links until they've got a post count of 15. The same kind of logic is applied to signatures ie. the links / tagline below someone's post.
Another thing that needed to be addressed was the site's visible focus, so some of the sections have been either removed entirely or moved around a bit ie. topics that are not related to the site's core topic have been moved to the "off topic" area.
VBSeo's tools definitely help in deciding which areas of content you want to optimise and which areas you want to "devalue", so ignoring the "member profile" pages seems to be a good idea (some of the member names are barely "safe for work" at the moment!)
Measuring progress isn't that easy, but there are a few tools that help. So I've spending a lot of time poring over the Google Webmaster Tools console, as well as checking Analytics.
What is interesting to see is the significant jump in GoogleBot activity (click to enlarge):
While bot activity can be quite meaningless in isolation, when you compare it with the previous levels it's very interesting. (To me at least, I wouldn't expect everyone else to be this fascinated by it!). One of the conclusions I've drawn, which may or may not be realistic, is that the site's new hosting helps ie. it's the only site on that particular server and the server itself has very good connectivity.
Unfortunately I don't have enough web statistics data to work with as yet, but I did notice that the site now has a Google Page Rank score, which it didn't have a short time ago.
James, from the excellent Forbairt Media , has been tweaking the site's layout, so it's now a lot simpler to look at and hopefully more pleasing to the eye.
Of course it's very early days yet, so I expect it will take a lot longer to see any real jump in visitor levels and member activity. Thankfully several people who read my original post on this have been kind enough to join and "get the ball rolling", which is fantastic and is much appreciated.
Let's see how it goes from here ...
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I recently acquired a webmaster discussion forum that had been semi-dormant for a period of time ie. it was like a wild garden where the weeds had been left unattended.Looking back over the archives you can see that it once was quite a vibrant community, but that after the founder left to move onto other projects, or possibly a more demanding dayjob, the quality of the site declined.
Rebuilding a community on a site like that is not an easy job and I don't expect to see tangible results for quite some time.
Over the last year or so the forum had been attacked by a lot of spammers who were posting content that drove away potentially valuable members of the community.
After moving the site and its contents to a server I controlled the first job was upgrading the forum software to the most recent version. While Vbulletin has a pretty good security track record I wouldn't like to leave an old version "in the wild" for too long, as there are plenty of nasty little hacks that people can try.
The next thing was to install VBSeo, which is a very nice plugin for vbulletin. It helps with making "pretty" URLs and rejigs a lot of the other parts of a site's display to make it that bit more attractive to search engine spiders.
Over the next few weeks I expect there will be quite a bit of work to be done in trying to attract new members and retain them, but it can be worth the effort. (At least I hope so!)
Another thing that will be addressed, of course, is the site's look and feel.
Personally I can't stand graphic heavy forums with loads of flashing icons etc., I'm much happier with a clean and simple look and feel. James from ForbairtMedia has been working on tweaking the site's layout and design and given it a nice new logo - nothing crazy, but something quite simple and elegant.
The next big job is to see about regaining the search engines' trust of the site. The amount of spammy junk that was there would have led to the site being heavily penalised and judging by the lack of longtail referrals my suspicions are that the site wasn't being taken seriously by the likes of Google et al.
If anyone has any experience of rebuilding a community and would like to lend a hand please let me know :)
I have an annoying habit of grabbing domain names on whim and then promptly forgetting why I bought them.
Coolsites.ie was one of those domain names that I grabbed a few months ago, as I knew instinctively that I would find a good use for it, I just wasn't 100% sure what...
Months later I came across a very tasty MT template called "Mid Century", which has been released under the GPL.
It's a simply gorgeous template and combines a lot of features that I felt were ideal for a site like CoolSites.ie, so I'd have been rather silly not to make use of it.
It's now live!
I plan on posting a site every day if I can, so if you know of any nice, cool or simply interesting sites that I should mention please let me know via email to submissions@coolsites.ie. I'd strongly recommend that you use the subject line "coolsites.ie submission", as it will get lost in my inbox otherwise.
(Please bear in mind that I do not use Windows, so if a site requires IE6 or 7 to render properly I won't be able to see it)
I'll also be asking a few other people to do guest posts, as I think spreading the subjectivity might not be a bad idea! (If that makes any sense)
Coolsites.ie was one of those domain names that I grabbed a few months ago, as I knew instinctively that I would find a good use for it, I just wasn't 100% sure what...
Months later I came across a very tasty MT template called "Mid Century", which has been released under the GPL.
It's a simply gorgeous template and combines a lot of features that I felt were ideal for a site like CoolSites.ie, so I'd have been rather silly not to make use of it.
It's now live!
I plan on posting a site every day if I can, so if you know of any nice, cool or simply interesting sites that I should mention please let me know via email to submissions@coolsites.ie. I'd strongly recommend that you use the subject line "coolsites.ie submission", as it will get lost in my inbox otherwise.
(Please bear in mind that I do not use Windows, so if a site requires IE6 or 7 to render properly I won't be able to see it)
I'll also be asking a few other people to do guest posts, as I think spreading the subjectivity might not be a bad idea! (If that makes any sense)
As most regular readers have probably gathered by now, I like tshirts. Actually that's a lie. I love tshirts.
Today is a tshirt bonanza day, as not only did a couple of tshirts arrive courtesy of Pat, but a friend of mine in Australia finally unveiled her new tshirt shop.
GotInk offers a nice range of humorous tshirts in a nice range of colours and sizes.
At the moment shipping is only available to Australia, but they're planning to offer international shipping very soon.
They're also offer a custom tshirt service, which is pretty cool!
Today is a tshirt bonanza day, as not only did a couple of tshirts arrive courtesy of Pat, but a friend of mine in Australia finally unveiled her new tshirt shop.
GotInk offers a nice range of humorous tshirts in a nice range of colours and sizes.
At the moment shipping is only available to Australia, but they're planning to offer international shipping very soon.
They're also offer a custom tshirt service, which is pretty cool!
Image by Irish Typepad via Flickr
Enterprise Ireland seem to be funding a Template Monster clone, which is linked into Digiweb. Why should tax payers be paying for another Eoin Costello project? If it's commercially viable shouldn't it be able to stand on its own two feet? And does the world really need another template monster?
Why would anyone in their right mind pay that kind of money for a such a horrific "design" when so many free site building tools would do as good a job if not better?
Ammado are a very odd business. Judging by what people have been saying this morning it looks like they spammed quite a few bloggers this morning (Justin Mason, Donncha O Caoimh and Damien Mulley that I know of). I have an account with them, so while I thought the email looked dodgy I wasn't going to complain to them formally.
Twitter has been down more than up over the last few days. If anyone wants an invite to jaiku I have a few.. If you want to see what people are blathering about check out Twit.ie (love the name!) which pulls in the latest posts from both jaiku and twitter from an ever growing list of Irish based users.
UPDATE: Justin has blogged about Ammado and also points out that they're signed up to Habeas!
UPDATE 2: Someone from Ammado has posted an "apology" in the comments on Justin's blog. I'm beginning to see a pattern emerging here..
UPDATE 3 - Looks like quite a few people weren't that impressed with being "targetted" by Ammado: Alexia, Maman Poulet, Damien,
The ICT Excellence awards have been announced.
Unfortunately they have a website. I say unfortunately as it is truly horrendous.
If this is one of Ireland's premier awards I'd hate to see what the bad ones are like....
Unfortunately they have a website. I say unfortunately as it is truly horrendous.
If this is one of Ireland's premier awards I'd hate to see what the bad ones are like....
The Royal Mint has unveiled the new designs for the UK coins. They look really nice, though I guess this means they won't be joining the Eurozone anytime soon :)
You can order a variety of mint sets via their site - if you're insanely rich go for the Platinum ones, whereas mere mortals can opt for base metal ones.
You can order a variety of mint sets via their site - if you're insanely rich go for the Platinum ones, whereas mere mortals can opt for base metal ones.
I signed up for a StumbleUpon account nearly 3 years ago. Of course I lost the login details and ended up creating another account last year, which I then forgot about. Bernie was inviting people to connect with him earlier this evening, so I dugout the original emails...
While I can appreciate that StumbleUpon is free and useful it's got some really annoying UI / "user experience" glitches.
Why does the main page invite me to "join" when I'm already logged in?
Why does the "invite friends" screen insist on sending emails to people instead of actually searching for them? There is an option to find people via their email address, but it's well and truly buried.
The invite friends email isn't particularly well crafted either. Instead of sending you to a page to join OR login it forces you to signup, so Bernie's emails earlier this evening will probably have frustrated a load of other people (unintentionally on his part).
Jaiku has been offline for most of today, which is a pity. It looks like they're having hardware or database issues again. Pity, as its interface is so much nicer to use than Twitter.
Travian UK have restarted server 1, so hopefully I'll fare a bit better. I'm currently being slaughtered on the speed server :(
While I can appreciate that StumbleUpon is free and useful it's got some really annoying UI / "user experience" glitches.
Why does the main page invite me to "join" when I'm already logged in?
Why does the "invite friends" screen insist on sending emails to people instead of actually searching for them? There is an option to find people via their email address, but it's well and truly buried.
The invite friends email isn't particularly well crafted either. Instead of sending you to a page to join OR login it forces you to signup, so Bernie's emails earlier this evening will probably have frustrated a load of other people (unintentionally on his part).
Jaiku has been offline for most of today, which is a pity. It looks like they're having hardware or database issues again. Pity, as its interface is so much nicer to use than Twitter.
Travian UK have restarted server 1, so hopefully I'll fare a bit better. I'm currently being slaughtered on the speed server :(
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