http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog en melanie@electricputty.co.uk Copyright 2010 2010-02-15T16:43:48+00:00 http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/happy_belated_new_year/ http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/happy_belated_new_year/#When:16:43:48Z Yep, we're six weeks late in our felicitations but it's been busy in Putty Towers.We've launched a couple of new sites; the CFS portal for the Money Advice Trust and a wee microsite for Fair Train which was launched in record time (about four days). We're busy on the final push on two other sites which we're hoping to get complete by the end of February too. So, happy Easter - thought I'd get that one in a little early. Electric Putty news 2010-02-15T16:43:48+00:00 http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/happy_holidays/ http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/happy_holidays/#When:10:55:57Z It's been an interesting year with a number of exciting new projects as well as plenty of ongoing work with some of our longest standing clients. We'd like to say a big thank you for choosing to work with us throughout 2009 and we look forward to more of the same in 2010. Office hours over the festive period Our office will be closed from 24 December 2009 and reopen on 4 January 2010. If you have an urgent support query during this period please use the contact form on our website. Christmas donation We won't be sending Christmas cards this year, instead we will be making a £50 donation to the wonderful resource that is Wikipedia, a truly useful website. You can read why Wikipedia needs money here. Some of our favourite things of 2009 January: Inauguration of Barack Obama as first black US president. February: It snowed, and snowed, and snowed. March: Inspiring Le Corbusier exhibition at the Barbican. April: Political satire In The Loop film released featuring the one and only Malcolm Tucker. May: MPs called to account on Question Time over the expenses scandal, one for people power. June: Our shortlived Summer, remember the predictions for a heatwave? July: The brilliant Blur gig in Hyde Park. August: Usain Bolt breaking his own world 100m record. September: The very yummy Brighton Food Festival. October: The 4th plinth art event ends after 100 days. November: Fall of the Wall celebrations in Berlin. December: Rage Against the Machine beating the X-factor winner to number one. Electric Putty news 2009-12-23T10:55:57+00:00 http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/are_you_up_or_down/ http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/are_you_up_or_down/#When:08:25:51Z Let's face it, monitoring your website's uptime isn't a particularly interesting job but it is an important one. You should be in the know if your site goes down and for how long but you can bet your hosting company isn't going to make it their business to tell you. Luckily there are website monitoring services that send you an alert in the unlucky event that this happens.What you need to know about monitoringYou'll need to keep an eye on your uptime. This is the amount of time the server your website is hosted on is available. You want this to be around 99% . Some hosting companies will guarantee 99% and over uptimes. You also need to look at response time. This is the amount of time the server takes to respond to a request, giving an effective performance measure. This will be reported in milliseconds. Jakob Nielson, the usability expert, recommends response times be no longer than 1 second.Monitoring servicesWe use a service called Pingdom which sends us an email alert whenever our site goes down and another email when it is back up. We can also login to our account and view a number of nifty reports. Here's the overview report, which you can make public. Pingdom recently began offering a free service for monitoring one website, you can sign up here. Is it down or is it just me?Sometimes you are not sure if a website is down or you are having connection problems. Now you can check any site's uptime with this handy tool. Online tools 2009-09-16T08:25:51+00:00 http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/diy_website_user_testing_in_three_days/ http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/diy_website_user_testing_in_three_days/#When:12:22:30Z User testing has got a bad reputation in some circles as being expensive and time consuming. After all, don’t you need a lab, moderators and fancy equipment? Fortunately, times have changed and it is possible to carry out simple user testing on a budget. Follow the advice in this article and you can do it in 3 days.What exactly is user testing?User testing involves getting together some typical members of your target audience and asking them to carry out tasks on your website whilst you observe. Watching how they get on, and listening to what they say, will help you improve your site.Benefits of user testingIncrease customer loyalty by improving the satisfaction people have with using your site.Target your budget on developing features and functionality that people actually use.Make informed decisions about strategy based on real data.Gain valuable insight on issues you may not even have considered. Taking the plungeSo, you’ve taken the plunge and decided to do some testing. Where do you start and how do you keep time and costs down?You’ll need to:Decide what to testDecide who to test withRecruit participantsCreate context and tasks Test and capture the resultsAnalyse the resultsStart all over again!Planning stage - day oneWhat to testFirstly you need to decide what it is you are going to test. To keep it simple you should focus on key issues, areas of the website where you anticipate problems or any complicated processes.Example areas/issues for testing: homepage, the navigation, the sign up processWho to testWho should you recruit to test with? Ask yourself; Who uses your website?What are their motivations?What particular needs do they have?What problem are they trying to solve?Answering these questions will help you build up profiles of your website users. If you've got time you can flesh out the information for each user to create a series of archetypal users, in user testing circles these archetypal users are sometimes called personas. Example persona: John works for a law firm based in the City of London. As CSR Development Manager he is responsible for all corporate social responsibility policies and strategy in the company. Part of his job involves researching CSR partnership opportunities with non profit organisations based in London and abroad. Recruiting participantsIn an ideal world you would use an external recruiter to find your test subjects but as this is testing on a budget you will probably end up doing it yourself. The reality is that the recruitment process can't be completed in a day so you should start looking as soon as you've made the decision to do some testing. Remember, it is better to test with people who don’t perfectly match your personas than not to test at all.To find people to take part ask around, send emails and above all, provide people with an incentive to get involved. This could be a nominal monetary payment, a prize draw, or simply the opportunity to help your organisation. Make sure you give people the full details of when, where and what so they are fully informed.Don’t recruit too many subjects; you will need no more than 5 people to get useful results. If you manage to find more participants keep them on file for your next round of testing. The length of each test should be no more than 45 minutes; this means you can easily carry out all your testing in one day. Keeping tests short is more convenient for your testers and won’t give them time to get bored.Creating context Next you'll need to come up with scenarios that explain the context of why your testers are visiting your site. You can create any number of different scenarios. They can range from quite specific to very general. Example scenario: You are responsible for your company’s corporate social responsibility plan and you are looking for a charity for your company to sponsor. You want to partner with an organisation that offers on-site projects for your employees to get involved in.Creating tasksCreate specific tasks around each scenario. Aim for around 10 tasks taking into account your 45 minute timescale. Example tasks:Does this organisation offer corporate fundraising?What kinds of projects do they run?How do you contact them?Testing stage - day twoCapturing the resultsExpensive testing often involves using a lab, two way mirrors and lots of equipment but all you really need is a quiet room with a table, two chairs and a computer with internet connection. If you want to record the testing you’ll need some additional equipment. You can either use a digital camera or software like Silverback (for Apple Macs) or Camtasia Studio (for Microsoft Windows) that allow you to record the mouse movements and the person’s face.If you can afford it then you will benefit from hiring a usability professional, if you can’t then it is better to do it yourself rather than not at all. The best case scenario would be to record the tests and have one person facilitating. If you aren’t going to record the tests it is best to have two people conducting the test, one as the facilitator and one to take notes. Practice makes perfect-ishBefore you let loose on real, live subjects you should practice the test on a colleague or other willing person. A practice run will draw your attention to any inconsistencies or other problems in the way you have presented your tasks or the test itself.Carrying out the testsBefore you start the test you should explain to your test subject what the test is about, making it very clear that you are testing the site and not them. You can also ask them some background questions which will give you some insight into their level of experience or any notions they have about the site. It is useful to ask the subject to ‘think-aloud’ throughout the test, this will help you in understanding any problems they have. During the test you should read each of the scenarios and tasks to your test subject. It might help to provide them this on a printed sheet too. Don’t interrupt or try to help them complete tasks, regardless of how frustrating watching them might be! It’s important that you remain calm, friendly and impartial throughout.Reviewing stage - day threeAnalysing the resultsYou should analyse the results of your testing as quickly as possible, preferably the next day. There’s no need to write a long report, or to cut together expensive videos (if you recorded the tests). Simply get all those involved in the project together and debrief them on your findings. If you need to write it up keep it short and sweet, a bulleted list should suffice. You should concentrate on the issues you found, recommendations on how to fix them, how easy they are to fix and how important the fixes are to your overall strategy. This will help you prioritise the right issues.Starting all over again!Once you’ve solved the immediate issues it’s time to start all over again! Studies show that running 3 tests with 5 users will yield better results than running 1 test with 15 users because you are able to test the work you’ve done to resolve the first set of issues. If you are in the process of developing your website include user testing as part of the development cycle, this will save you making expensive mistakes.If you already have a website, include user testing as part of your ongoing website maintenance. Testing regularly will keep you in touch with your user’s needs and keep your site relevant. It will also help you to decide on which new features you should implement. Test early and test often, you can do it.Further reading to get you started;The usability ‘guru’ Jakob Nielson’s fortnightly emailUsability.gov - US government website with lots of advice, tips and resources for developing usable websitesTemplates for use in user testing including logging sheet and scripts from InfoDesignUIE brainsparks - blog from user experience expert Jared SpoolBuy 'Dont Make Me Think' by Steve Krug Strategy, User testing 2009-07-16T12:22:30+00:00 http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/shorthand_blogging_in_five_minutes/ http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/shorthand_blogging_in_five_minutes/#When:13:02:18Z How would you like a blog in five minutes? I recently created one using Tumblr. Even better, it's a free service.Tumblr is like shorthand blogging, you can easily share all the interesting images, videos, links and quotes you find around the web, creating a varied tapestry of content without needing to write time consuming blog posts. You simply see something you like and ‘tumble’ it and by magic it appears on your blog. If you are so inclined you can also write traditional blog posts. How can a Tumblr blog help my organisation?A Tumblr blog can be a good way to give your brand a personality, tell a story about a specific issue, be a mood board of inspiration or act as a simple reference tool. You can share what you find funny, cool, creative, inspiring or just down right weird!Blogging strategyBefore you dive in and set up an account I’d recommend spending 5 minutes (so that’s 10 minutes in total) thinking about the strategy for your blog. What’s the point of it? Is it going to help your overall business objectives? Who is it aimed at? Importantly, how are you going to maintain it? There’s nothing worse than coming across a blog that hasn’t been contributed to in a while. However, I’d also balance these concerns with the idea that sometimes you need to try something out and see how it works to find out the best way to use it. It is pretty simple to create an account and start sharing, which I think is what makes it so attractive. Once you are logged in there are lots of different ways you can 'tumble'. I use the Firefox plugin, each time I find something I want to publish I just click on the 'Share on Tumblr' in my browser. If you have an iphone you can download an app which allows you to share pictures you’ve taken on your phone. Here’s one I made earlier. Publicising your blogYou can add a badge to your main website, embed the blog or keep it as a stand alone address. You can choose a look and feel for your blog from a number of different themes (we’re using ‘minimalist’) or you can create your own. Other stuffTumblr is an evolving tool, they have social networking elements where you can follow other blogs a la Twitter, you can ‘like’ posts on other blogs and tag each of your items. I’d recommend reading the FAQs and Goodies for more info.If you are interested in creating a blog and would like some advice or help setting this up please get in touch and tell us your plans.Have a look at our Tumblr blog below: Strategy, Online tools 2009-05-11T13:02:18+00:00 http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/tools_we_use/ http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/tools_we_use/#When:13:57:06Z One of the great things about using the interweb a lot means we come across all sorts of useful tools which help us get things done and manage our projects effectively. Some of these tools we use pretty much every day and most of them we'd have a hard time doing without. Here's a list of just some of them.Project management - BasecampTask management - Remember The MilkAccounting - FreeAgentCentralWeb analytics - GoogleEmail & calendar - Google AppsEmail campaigns & newsletters - epMailerChat - SkypeMobile communication - iPhoneWebsite content management - Expression Engine, WordPressServer monitoring - PingdomHosting - OpenMind HostingIdeas, concepts, thoughts - pen and paperOne of the things about most of these little beauties is that you do need to put the time in to get the best out. Luckily we've already done that for you so we will be publishing an occasional series of three tips on using these services to help you do just that.Three tips on BasecampBasecamp is a web based project management tool which you pay a monthly subscription to use (there is also a free service for just one project). We use it for managing all of our website projects as it creates a central space where all communication around the project can live. Here are our three tips;Get your project team members buy-in to Basecamp by a bit of hand holding at the start rather than just expecting them to login and find their way around. We've found that this approach improves the adoption of the system by the team.Give as many people as possible access to the project area to improve the opportunity for collaboration but be quite specific about what you need feedback on and when you need it. We've found that collaborating doesn't come naturally to some people so they do need 'prescription' initially.Assess your needs for a project management tool, if you are looking for something with a lot of detail such as scheduling, dependencies and time management then Basecamp might not be right for you. We've found it the loose flexibility to be just right for our agile approach to web development. Online tools 2009-04-15T13:57:06+00:00 http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/wowing_with_word_clouds/ http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/wowing_with_word_clouds/#When:18:18:21Z Wordle is a word cloud generator. You add some text, a URL or an RSS feed and it will create a beautiful cloud of words. The cloud is like a word picture, giving a visual representation of the information. Once you've created your cloud you can choose different colours, fonts and shapes for your words. It's a fun tool to use and there is something very addictive about watching the words appear on the screen. We used it to create some simple business cards;It's such a joy to use I came up with a few practical uses so I've got legitimate reasons to play with it! Presentations - convey the main ideas of your presentation Mood boards - create a textual mood board to convey a theme Analysis - distil information from blogs, speeches or articles into main topicsI'd be interested to hear about any other ideas you might have or ways you've used Wordle. You can see what other people have done in the Wordle Gallery, pop over for some inspiration and then have a go yourself. Other wordle stuff elsewhere:Word Cloud Analysis of Obama's Inaugural Speech Tweets during Presidential debatesPresidential candidates weblog analysis 2009-03-11T18:18:21+00:00 http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/business_benefits_of_twitter/ http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/business_benefits_of_twitter/#When:17:51:14Z It seems that Twitter has finally reached the tipping point and everyone is talking about it, if not actually using it themselves. But what exactly is it and what business benefits can it bring?What is TwitterTwitter is a 'micro-blogging' platform where you can publish what you are doing or thinking in 140 characters or less. Anyone who is following you will see your 'tweet' in their twitter stream or on their phone.Who follows me?If your account is public then anyone with a Twitter account can follow you. Twitter sends you an email notification when someone starts following you and you can choose to block that person if you wish. Who can I follow?You can follow anyone who has a public account. People with private accounts will have to approve you before you can get their tweets.Should I go public or private?That depends on what you want your Twitter account for. Private (or protected) tweets don't appear in the public timeline. What should I use Twitter for?People use Twitter for many things; to share, collaborate, network, have fun, meet up, show off, complain, publicise, the list is endless. How can you use it to benefit your business? Listening to the conversationFor any organisation it is vital to know what people are saying about your brand, product, service or idea. You can use Twitter Search to monitor the conversation, you don't even need a Twitter account to do it. Handily, you can set up an RSS feed so that you'll receive all updates of this search in your feed reader. You can also follow topics through hashtags.org. Hashtags are a kind of tagging on Twitter, tweets can be tagged and these conversations are aggregated on the hashtags.org website. Here's the recent conversation around the Australian bushfires, tagged with #bushfires. To have your own hashtags indexed you need to follow http://twitter.com/hashtags. There is a great introduction to hashtags here.Contributing to the conversationThe next step in using Twitter is to respond and contribute to the conversation. Set up an account using your company name. Respond directly to questions, complaints and issues raised in tweets, make announcements about new services or products, link to your blog posts and share information. Publish your Twitter feed on your website and encourage people to follow you. Twitter can be a great opportunity to make connections with real people who are engaged with your business, to learn about what your customers think and to give a more personal face to your organisation. What nextThere is a round up of industry specific uses for Twitter here. Read about the 5 stages of Twitter acceptance.Learn how Twitter made Guy Kawasaki's website better.Read the Guardian guide to Twitter. 2009-02-11T17:51:14+00:00 http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/website_redesign_for_ambulance_hart/ http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/website_redesign_for_ambulance_hart/#When:17:40:14Z We're very pleased to announce the launch of a website redesign for Ambulance HART. We'd been involved with the previous incarnation as technical suppliers (we built the website and provided the CMS). When HART were looking for a redesign and some new features they approached us to do the work. The HART project recruits ambulance personnel for the Hazardous Area Response Team (HART) and the website is aimed primarily at these frontline staff and managers. The redesign needed to accomodate much more information and also be more visually appealing to the audience. It needed to meet both W3C and NHS accessibility guidelines. The website has a number of new features including; a news feed with up to the minute ambulance information, an image bank and improved resources section. It also uses the Google search facility. We're really pleased with the results, take a look! Electric Putty news 2009-01-27T17:40:14+00:00 http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/happy_new_year_2009/ http://www.electricputty.co.uk/content/blog/happy_new_year_2009/#When:17:58:55Z Best wishes for the new year. It's jolly cold here in Brighton with temperatures around freezing!I We've got lots of exciting work coming up in the next few months. We are in the planning stages of development for a new online information resource for librarians providing library services to people with sight loss. The website is a joint iniative between the RNIB, Calibre and ClearVision. We have also been awarded the contract for a new website for Villiers High School in Ealing which we'll begin work on next week. With all our existing client work and pitching on a number of other projects we're busy bees. It's always good to have lots to do at this time of year as it takes your mind off January being a pretty miserable month in the weather stakes. Roll on the Spring! Electric Putty news 2009-01-07T17:58:55+00:00