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13
FEB

Mobile Web to replace Apps

13 FEB 2012 | Posted in apps, HTML5, internet, mobile, website | Author Alex McLachlan | 2 Comments

Further to my previous post "Mobile web, mobile apps and mobile commerce", web usability expert Jakob Nielsen predicts today that mobile web will become preferred over apps in the long term.

Currently, developing apps for different mobile platforms provides the best user experience if you can afford it (ie if the expected return justifies the expense). In contrast, web content formatted for mobile devices is currently the cheaper approach, but often doesn't provide the richness of user interface that apps do. The increasing use of mobile phones and tablets is leading to more companies reaching the point where investing in apps becomes worthwhile.

The BBC Olympics 2012 website represents a significant undertaking. It's planned to have more than 12,000 pages with individual pages for athletes, teams and event, and thousands of hours of on-demand video. With a dynamic website of this size, the management and “orchestration” of the content is a huge challenge. Particularly when it covers reports, results and statistics, all with live updates.

28
OCT

Win-Win with Amazon Associate

28 OCT 2011 | Posted in Amazon, business value, NFP, SEO, website | Author Alex McLachlan

We’ve just received our first payment as an Amazon Associate. It has to be said that the amount won’t have a major impact on IndigoBlue’s bottom line, but we don’t really count ourselves as a bookshop. We provide links to Amazon for books that we mention in blog posts or the subjects of book reviews, really to make it easier for our website users. If someone wants more details on a book it’s much easier to provide them with a link rather than them having to copy the book title, open up another browser tab, paste the title in, find the right link in the search result, etc…

Which websites would you say are a delight? For many it's Amazon, Google or the BBC. How important is it for your website to evoke this reaction?

Mobile devices are becoming an increasingly important channel for customer contact, but as with many new technologies, it is important to cut through the hype - in this case that mobile will replace PCs and that investment should be solely directed at mobile.

The open source CMS Drupal is being adopted by more and more NFP organisations. I recently did a comparison of the charities and membership organisations using Drupal and two of the more popular commercial CMSs. I was surprised by the level of market penetration by Drupal. I was able to find dozens of sites that use Drupal. When I tried the same for the two commercial CMSs, I had great trouble finding more than a handful.

For many membership organisations, there are very good reasons for wanting forums on their own websites rather than using LinkedIn.

Some membership organisations have very successful vibrant online forums. Some other organisations I come across have spent a significant amount of money without any meaningful take up.

The winner of the UK IT Industry IT Project Team of the Year gave a talk that I went to yesterday at the BCS. The project was the complete revamp of the London Borough of Southwark's website into a highly successful, fresh, engaging and efficient online channel.

There were a number of aspects of their approach that really resonated for me ...

Using "Click Here" for hyperlink text is bad practice for usability and SEO. This post explains why and provides best practice advice for better hyperlink text.

Reviewing a company's website is part of our strategic IT reviews more often than not. We normally look at whether the website is delivering all it could for the business strategy, whether the right connectivity to other business systems is in place and whether an appropriate CMS is being used. We also look at the structure of the website, the SEO and usability, and that is where we often encounter "Click Here" used as link text.

A big thank you to our excellent speakers from the NCT and Visit London at last night's event Who's stealing my members? Threats to your membership base. It was an excellent evening which I really enjoyed.

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