Dealing with the new cookie directive

A year after it was first announced and this weekend sees the deadline for businesses to implement the new law governing use of cookies on their websites. From Sunday onwards, all sites will be required to obtain informed consent from visitors before saving cookies onto a machine.

Just to refresh our memories, what exactly is a cookie? To put it simply, they’re pieces of personal data that are stored when users browse the internet. They’re often used for the sakes of remembering user names and passwords, targeted advertising or analytics and so on. The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) breaks them down into three categories;

Session Cookies

These are short term cookies, usually only lasting during a single browser setting, they might be used for example by an online bank, and then forgotten when the browser is closed and the session ended. These are deemed to be less intrusive as they are only stored for a short period.

Persistent Cookies

These last much longer, and are remembered between sessions. They might be used by a browser to remember login details for a website, or by marketers to make use of target advertising.

First &Third Party Cookies

First party cookies are set by a site being visited and usually relate to web analytics. Third party cookies are issued by a server different to the website currently being visited, for example it might be used in third party advertising to target advertise through banners or adspace on a site.

The new legislation is aimed at tackling privacy issues, which relate to the growing use of cookies by websites without the user realising it. As briefly summed up by our Technical Director last year when the legislation first came out;

• Tracking cookies need permission before they can be used. 
• Session cookies and “remember my login” cookies are okay. 
• So basically, consent is required when the cookie is not required for a service.

The ICO has been decidedly vague about how exactly businesses should go about informing their visitors about cookies. On the plus side, this means that businesses are free to analyse their site and look at how best to interpret the new regulations to suit their audience and website. However on the negative side, it also means that some businesses are throwing themselves into it in such a way that it might have a negative knock on effect.

Many sites still have yet to adopt the new ruling; even the government has admitted it won’t be up to speed by the time the deadline ticks over. Fortunately it seems the ICO has no plans to chase rogues straight away, instead they are hoping companies will become more focused finding the most suitable form of implementation.

We’re already helping our clients with work on meeting the new cookie legislation, so if it’s something your business is keen to look into, why not come in for a consultation or talk to our Sales Team about how we can help you out.


Author: Alice Cheetham

Optimising landing pages

First impressions are important; as the quote goes “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”. The first impression a potential user has with your website could decide whether they stay and look around or dive straight for that backwards arrow on their browser window.

Your sites landing pages could be one of, if not the, most important page of your site. Here’s a few simple Do’s and Don’ts with the aim of helping lower bounce rates and up returning visitors.

 Do: 

Have a clear call to action:
The aim of a landing page is to clearly prompt towards a certain action or results. Whether it’s purchasing an item, registering or signing up for a newsletter or even simply encouraging visitors to explore your site more, it’s important to stay focused on that goal.

Your aim is to make the trip for your visitor as simple as possible, the easier or more enjoyable you make it for your customer to get to the end of their user journey through your site, the more likely they are to stick to it.

Use brand validation:
If you’ve got some big clients on your list, don’t be afraid to name drop and put their logos out there. Association can be a powerful tool and increase trust in a company, and as we mentioned when looking at site usability, trust can be a very important factor online.

Share!
Most people are familiar with social media, the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and such. Based from the common mantra that the easier something is to do, the more likely people are to do it, putting in social share icons will help spread your site around. Statistics dictates that more likely than not, the more visitors to your site then the more conversions you’ll make!

Optimise!
Keep coming back to your analytics and looking at your sales conversions, you might find that certain keywords are pulling in customers and others less so. Of course these can change constantly, so it’s important to keep doing it! After a while you’re sure to find the combinations that work best for your market, so keep reviewing.

Be design and user conscious: 
Of course, with scroll bars on windows, your site can technically be as ‘long’ as you want it, but resist the temptation to go crazy! It’s fairly well acknowledged that most people don’t pay much attention to content ‘below the fold’ (anything that users have to scroll down to view). So don’t hang around and get straight to the point at the top of your page.

Keeping basic aesthetics and consistency is important throughout your site. A design that looks cheap and obnoxious doesn’t help a company’s credibility, and a poorly built site will not encourage users to stay and look around.

Cater for different platforms:
Smart-phones are everywhere, and now tablets too! Of course this can depend on your target audience or what your aim is for your landing page, but with more and more people browsing through their mobile devices, it’s something many companies need to take into account. There are plenty of different approaches you can take with this; from responsive design to a completely optimised website, or even a mobile application.

Don’t: 

Go overboard:
Simple designs are best; furthermore make sure your page loads quickly. An image heavy landing page may look great on paper, but in practice anything that takes longer than a few seconds to load is going to lose visitors.

Whilst we’re on the topic of design, try and keep a smooth consistent flow from page to page on your site, whether its colour palette or visual elements, you don’t want to confuse your visitor by convincing them they’ve stumbled into something entirely new the moment they stray away from your landing page.

Make it too complex:
Depending on the aim of your landing page, you might have some kind of simple functionality on it, such as a form to sign up for a newsletter and so on. Keep it simple! The quicker and easier it is the better, let the user tab between fields, use check boxes rather then drop down menus and auto-populate where you can. Avoid asking for too much detail if you can, it might be a deal killer.

Misrepresent:
People love kittens (or puppies, if you prefer) but you don’t need one on your landing page (unless maybe you’re selling kittens? In which case I guess you could get away with it...), a bit of creativity isn’t a bad thing, but you don’t need to distract your customers from their goal.

Furthermore you certainly don’t want to give your user the wrong impression; nobody likes to waste their time. Try and avoid content on your page that doesn’t ultimately point towards the visitors intended destination.


Now of course there are plenty more odds and ends that you can incorporate when looking at optimising landing pages, this is just a quick overview. Even then some of these points may be more heavily weighted then others, depending on the aim of your particular landing pages. If you'd like to read more about optimising and usability from an e-commerce point of view, then take a look at last month's light hearted take on it.

If you're interested in learning more about how Rocktime can help you, from sites to search marketing or mobile to bespoke development then why not get in contact and drop our sales team a line.


Author: Alice Cheetham

Lets look at site usability

So you’ve had an amazing idea for a website that is going to make you richer than Del Boy.
You’ve found a website design agency who’ve produced a slick, modern looking site.
Your advertising campaign has gone live. Traffic is coming to the site.
Now it’s just case of waiting for those orders to flood in....

Nothing happens, or at least nothing on the scale you expected.

You know your figures stack up and on average you should be converting 1% of your visitors into sales but your site simply isn’t achieving that. Oops!

In my mind the main thing that has an adverse affect on site performance is usability. Let’s draw some comparisons between an e-commerce site that sells ‘widgets’ and a fictitious supermarket, for the sake of argument we’ll call them ‘Freshco’.

What’s the first thing you see?

“You notice how they always put the fruit and veg at the entrance to the supermarket? You go in thinking 'this is a fresh shop, everything in here is fresh! I will do well here.' You never go straight to the bit with the toilet paper and squeezy brushes do you? ”

Eddie Izzard – Definite Article

Eddie hits the nail on the head here, first impressions really count. Your site sells widgets and the first thing a user should see when they land on your page is a picture of a widget. It should also be a nice clear picture taken by a professional photographer, not something that you’ve snapped on your phone.
If you have an adwords campaign running you should make these first impressions more specific. If a user has searched for ‘Blue Small Widgets’ take him straight to the page that has the information about ‘Blue Small Widgets’, don’t just dump him on the home page and let him find his own way there.

What’s the lighting like?

When you walk into a Freshco it’s bright, almost as bright as the sun! Even in the middle of the night they keep the aisles well lit. As a result Freshco has an electricity bill roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Venezuela but they do this for a reason.

Imagine how much harder it would be to go shopping in the dark. All this light makes it easy to see things without having to strain your eyes and your website should be no different. I’m not suggesting that you make your design a white so bright that you could get a tan from looking at it but you should be able to read text easily and the images of products should look as crisp and well lit as possible. (Usually you’ll find manufactures are happy to supply you with good, isolated images of their products.)

Where’s the beef?

At Freshco the beef is in the beef section. The beef section is in the fresh meat aisle. The fresh meat aisle is in the refrigerated area of the store. Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

And that’s not only at Freshco. If you were to drop anyone (with the possible exception of vegans) into the middle of a modern day supermarket they should be able to find the beef easily. The same should be true of your widget store.

• Have a search box that can search product name, description and code easily. Stick it somewhere obvious near the top of every page.

• Navigation. Make it simple, straightforward and intuitive. Use both horizontal and vertical navigation if need be.

• Use a sensible hierarchy of products and categories.

• Make sure that there’s a ‘Basket’ and ‘Checkout’ link in an obvious place.

 Put the high profit items at the end of aisles.

Yes, that’s what they do at Freshco. Believe it or not they’re not putting the most useful value for money products at the ends of aisles, they’re putting the ones that have the higher profit margins there because most customers will pass by these area.

Ok, so an e-commerce site doesn’t have physical aisles but there are areas on the page that could be used to push high profit, or end of line products that relate to the rest of the page. If you’ve got 100 orange widgets that you want to get rid of, it doesn’t hurt to promote this fact on pages relating to red and yellow widgets.

Everybody hates forms!

Unless you’re applying for credit at Freshco you can take your shopping to the till, pop in your card, key in your pin and you’re good to go. You don’t have to become a member. You don’t have to give your address. You don’t have to give a daytime telephone number.

Granted there are certain pieces of information that are important, such as delivery address, but try to make this easy for the user. Don’t force users to register if they don’t have to. If possible and budget allows use a post code look up that pre-populates the address fields. You should definitely have the ‘Is the delivery address the same as your billing address?’ functionality. Keep the information that you ask for to a bare minimum. You can always have a text area that allows for any other comments should someone wish to explain the intricacies of catching the train from platform 9¾ at King’s Cross.

Don’t look shifty!
 
We all know and trust Freshco. Unless you’re lucky enough to have built a large household brand there’s a good chance that users won’t know exactly who they’re buying from the first time, and when it comes to money, people are careful. Having the logos of the cards that you accept will help a little but there’s much more you can do.

• Having a ‘Shop safely with us’ type page will allow you go in to detail about how you ensure that users details are safe and secure, link to this page from somewhere prominent either on every page, or at the very least from the basket page onwards.

• If you’re a limited company put the registered number in the footer of the layout. Widgets Ltd Registered in England and Wales No. 1234567 looks better than ‘Make all cheques payable to Dave T Geezer... discounts for cash!’

• Display a telephone number, even if it’s likely to go to answer phone.

• Put a physical address and not just a contact form on the site.

• Make sure the site looks good, works and that the copy is spelt correctly. A lack of attention to detail can result in a lack of trust.

Check your stats.

In Freshco, even the untrained amateur can spot the useless check out attendant from 30 yards away, you can see clearly if an item is out of stock or if the tills aren’t working. This is because everything is under one roof.
Your online shop is slightly different from this. Your customers are more than likely sat on a sofa wearing nothing but underwear and scratching themselves, with Hollyoaks on in the background. You don’t have the luxury of being able to watch their experience but your stats can give you an idea.

If, for example, there are thousands of users who get through to the final checkout page but don’t complete the transaction have a long hard look at that page to see if anything could be improved. If the bounce rate is through the roof, on a certain entry page, scrutinise that page, tweak it, and see if that makes a difference. If there’s fewer visitors than you would like hitting a particular page, than make it easier for them to get to, perhaps by placing it on the home page.

Your stats aren’t just a meaningless set of numbers to show the bank, they can help you get an idea of how to improve your users experience.

Make it as easy as you can for people to part with their hard earned cash!

This pretty much summarises it. The whole journey should be...
1.    Go to site
2.    Find Product
3.    Add To Basket
4.    Repeat if necessary
5.    Pay

Anything outside of that, any additional clicks or processes will slow people down and make it more likely for them to go elsewhere.

On a slightly more serious note, whilst talking about our hypothetical Freshco is one thing, putting all this into practice is quite another. Whether it's starting from scratch or improving for an already existing web development, why not get in contact with us here at Rocktime, and our Sales Team will be more than happy to talk strategy and solutions over tea and biscuits.


Author: Foz

Improving your 404 Error Message page

Image credit goes to NetDirekt and their 404 page design.

When a user lands on your 404 pages, it means that something went wrong. Either the user clicked on a broken link, or they may have mistyped your URL. For more information on what exactly a 404 page means, why not take a look at our "What's in a 404 page?".

Whatever the reason, landing on a 404 page is by no means convenient for user, or website owner. While a little humour – “WOOPS try again, click here” could be added to the 404 page, it's important to stress that the main message should be to let the user know that they haven’t reached the end of their journey and to provide useful options/navigation posts to help them find the page they seek.

Rather than just saying, this page can’t be found return to home page, we advise our clients to:

• Include a simple / apologetic statement.
• Add a site search box to the 404 page.
• Add a link to most popular category pages along with a list to the website onsite sitemap.
• Provide a link to a contact form, so that users can reach out to you directly.

Our favourite usability expert Jakob Nielsen, termed by U.S News and World Report as “the worlds’s leading expert on web usability” states that all error messages must be;

• Written in plain language that is easy to understand for non-technical users and that does not imply that the mistake is the user's fault
• precise in specifying exactly what was done wrong (that is, not be generic or vague)
• constructive in suggesting steps the user can take to correct the problem.

We advise our clients to regularly check their analytics to monitor the amount of times people have seen the 404 pages. If the error page is in your top 20 content pages, then there is a clear problem with your site's design or navigation.

The Flashlight team regularly send each other good looking 404 pages, please check out one of our favourite lists for creative error pages, although these 404 pages ooze creativity, some do lack some of the usability / useful features that Jakob talks about above.

One we particularly like from HootSuite includes the below:

• Starts with a simple / apologetic statement
• Explains: why the user has landing on the page
• Highlights where they could go next

If you think your website could do with some improvements, and not just in terms of 404 pages, why not get in contact with our sales and web development team here at Rocktime.


Author: Aysegul Yigitbasi

What's in a 404 page?

If we’re going to establish what makes an effective 404 error page it makes sense to start by explaining what an error page is. Now as error pages aren’t exactly the most exciting of subjects so in the interests of keeping you entertained as well as informed the following may not be exactly how things happened...

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away pixies invented something called the internet. The internet was a magical, wonderful place where people from all over the kingdom could go to do anything their imaginations could conjure up. They could play games, speak with people from across the kingdom and even settle up household utility bills with companies that, thanks to a big sell off of national interests in the eighties, are now essentially foreign owned.

Now as everybody knows pixies are very wise indeed. They had the foresight to realise that, given the fact the internet was a global phenomenon based on a network of millions of computers running over telephone lines and administered by humans, it was inevitable that things would go wrong. So the pixies gathered the wisest wizards from across the land and over a feast of unicorn pizzas and the juice from a magical red bull they came up with a list of standard laws that should be obeyed by everyone in the land. If something was ever to go wrong on the internet a page would be displayed with an error message. In order to help fix the problem these pages would have code numbers which would explain what had gone wrong so that other wizards could fix the problem.

Ok, so it’s not exactly how it happened but it’s close enough.

When your computer accesses a web page it will receive something called a response code. These codes are essentially three digit numbers. If this number begins with a 1 or a 2 then everything is pretty much hunky dory and as such the chances are you’ll never be aware of these responses. Anything beginning with a 3 signifies that the page has moved a 4 suggests client error and a 5 means that there’s a server error. These last three response codes usually result in an error page being displayed.

A 404 error is served up when a file (typically a web page) could not be found, it simply doesn’t exist. This can happen for a number of reasons, the user could have made a mistake typing in the URL, the page may have been deleted or, much as it pains me to admit, occasionally links are coded incorrectly. An un-styled 404 error page can look like this:

Let’s face it, that’s not much use to anyone apart from geeks. However, the user ends up with something like the above; there is very little useful feedback and unless they’re persistent, you’ll end up losing them and their business to one of your competitors.

So what are the alternatives? Well as a bare minimum, the page should look friendlier and feel less like I’m being told off by a teacher. Next up the reasons as to why the page might be being displayed should be in clear English with an informal, non technical tone. There could also be links to the main pages of the website so I only have to click once to get back on track and in an ideal world it should look like the rest of the website so as not to look broken. (People will think twice about parting with cash online if the website doesn’t look fully functional!)

If you think you might need some internet pixies* to help with your online needs, why not get in contact with Rocktime and talk to our sales team about how we can help you expand your online presence.

*Pixies may not be included.


Author: Foz

Introduction to HTML5

HTML5 is the next iteration of the technology used to structure and present content on the World Wide Web, short for HyperText Markup Language. Although most of the elements are already defined by W3C and implementable, it is not due for W3C Recommendation until 2022.

A major advantage of developing in HTML5 is as a replacement for Flash in graphically rich websites. Currently, if you visit a site with moving or slanted graphics - it will most likely be developed in Flash. The reason for this is that HTML 4.1 and below has very little graphical functionality in comparison to Flash. A good example of this is the German HTC website: http://www.htcsense.dk/(as viewed August 2011). In classic HTML, this site would be impossible to create due to the slanted angle of all the images. HTC have decided to produce this site in Flash, although exactly the same effects can be produced in HTML5.

Over the coming years we believe more and more web development agencies will choose to produce sites in HTML5 where they would otherwise have used Flash.

In summary the main advantages of using this over flash are:

a) Expense

Flash technology is owned by Adobe. As a developer, if I want to develop a Flash website then I would need to purchase the development environment from Adobe. In actual fact the majority of development agencies will already have purchased the environment needed for Flash development. So this argument really only applies to bedroom developers and students, who will either not have the funds for the flash IDE, or not justify the purchase as these people wouldn’t see the any return.

Although the above may seem of little importance to the website business owner, from a developer’s perspective it is crucial to allow new developers easy access to such tools. Otherwise there will only be a minority of developers able to create feature rich sites, and thereby depreciating the quality of the internet in general.


b) Availability

As most techies are aware, iPhones do not support flash. This is because Apple likes to maintain a strong hold over their hardware and the software that runs on it.

As Flash is a development platform, Apple will not allow it to run on their mobile devices, so any websites that use elements of flash will not render properly. Replicating any flash elements in HTML 5 allows much greater accessibility to a site using a smart phone.
It might also be worth considering the effect mobile HTML5 could have on AppStores in terms of mobile site versus applications. Using HTML5 could potentially allow a user to develop an accessible website for a smartphone without losing any functionality, due to its wide range of tools.

If a developer could run a flash application on an iPhone they could open up a means for uploading other homemade applications onto the phone, thereby diverting traffic away from the Apple Appstore (which turned over 1.7 billion dollars last year).


Another comparison to make is HTML5 “web application” and the standard desktop application. Due to other capabilities introduced in HTML5 it has become easier to create rich functionality in HTML5 web application which previously would have only been available to Desktop application developers. Such things as Web SQL Database Storage (which allows SQL style databases to be embedded into web applications) and Web Workers (provide a means to perform processor-intense tasks) open the door for larger web applications with greater functionality, without the need for installation.

Further thoughts on HTML5 from our technical team include the following;

• As time moves on, HTML5 will take over the internet as the generally accepted standard for webpage markup.


• Unlike the last release of XHTML from w3c, HTML5 does not try to impose rules on developers but rather increases our toolset.


• HTML5 will also allow for much cleaner and consistent coding using the new elements and attributes.

There’s already a load of great examples of what HTML 5 can do, for example this collection of experiments on hakim.se, or this fantastic take on a twitter feed by 9elements. Currently HTML5 isn’t supported by older browsers, so the above links may only work using newer versions of IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

The Rocktime Web Development Team is always working on innovations and bespoke coding to improve our client websites, microsites and online presence. Please give our Sales Team a call on +44 (0) 1202 678 777 to see how Rocktime can help you decide where using HTML5 can be of benefit within your marketing strategy.

Author: Dan Griffiths

Introduction to Favicons

This month we have a technical focus on the blog. Members of 'The Rocktime Tech Team' will be sharing their knowledge on some of the latest tech developments. Kicking off proceedings the first blog of the month comes from Foz, as he introduces us all to Favicons.
A favicon, also known as a website icon, a shortcut icon, a url icon, or bookmark icon, is a small icon that can be used in several places. A favicon will usually appear as a small icon in your favourites, bookmarks or in the address bars of most browsers.

Ideally, a favicon should tie in nicely with your companies branding. However logos and company names don’t necessarily lend themselves to working well within the limitations of a favicon, namely small and square. The image above demonstrates how it is often obvious which elements of a company’s branding can work i.e the Twitter and New Forest Hotels' favicon. However, sometimes a little creativity is needed; as in the case of both the Google and Rocktime favicon.

Your favicon will be created as part of a new website build, or can be requested should you note you don’t have one, although ideally, we encourage you to give some thought to favicons at the logo design stage.

We design favicons at a size of 32x32 pixels in the standard .ico format, which you can read more about here.

A favicon is something so small, yet so significant and there are lots of branding and bookmarking benefits from having a favicon. If you want a favicon to be added to your Google blog or website, or whether you need a logo for a web App or webclip for an iPhone, to form part of your 'online graphical elements' then please contact our Rocktime Sales Team.

Author: Foz

More British, More Homely, More cautious

The Generation Recession report from the Social Issues Research centre (commissioned by Friends Provident July 2009) has revealed that the recession has turned us all rather British and homely as we buy local (to help our economic climate) and highlights that 1 out of 3 Brits promote staying at home as the new going out.

As more people are choosing to stay at home, the appeal of social networking from your living room has increased, using sites such as Myspace, Twitter and Facebook. The study also revealed new “saving money” tactics and found that amongst those that are going out, that 21% of them make use of voucher codes to save on funds.

The report reviews (via focus groups and past recession feelings) how consumer’s habits have changed / are changing, how the British public feel about the recession, how we have all economised through nesting behaviour, how we have made cut backs in our spending habits and how our quest for the best bargain or deal has accelerated.

Another interesting point is that the study implies that the younger generation (under 25 reported to be the hardest hit by the crisis) will be moulded by the credit crunch and that formative experiences from their adolescence (9/11 attacks, London 7/7 bombings, 2004 Tsunami) will help shape Britain’s future, as perhaps they may have a greater sense of caution with finances and life in general.

There are some great comments from Poll respondents which will be of interest to a number of companies – take a look at the Generation Recession Report here.

In the meantime we have considered what the findings of this report will mean to website development and web marketing, and would like to share with you our Risdom (Rocktime Wisdom) recommending that you give consideration to the below points when outlining your web strategies:

• Review current online and offline loyalty programmes and rewards
• Social network with consumers in their homes (ie: Facebook)
• Consider using voucher codes, voucher sites for product and service promotions
• Make the younger generation feel valued online
• Make offers clear & transparent and timely online
• For larger purchases online, make it prominently clear that shopping service online is secure

Author: Sarah Griffiths