Communiqué

Over the past 11 years, iMarc has used a number of web analytics tools. Whether FunnelWeb, Webalizer, Urchin, Mint, or Google Analytics, the goal is always to understand how people use the web and make optimizations based on that usage.

Recently, we've been recommending Google Analytics. Of course Google Analytics has its limitation and problems, most notably, Javascript and Cookie-acceptance is required by the end-user. That said, Google's ease of use—especially when compared to other reporting software—made it our choice for most clients.

Once we started moving clients sites from Webalizer and Urchin to Google Analytics, we were amazed at the discrepancies in traffic numbers. Google's numbers were much lower— sometimes half, 1/5th, even 1/10th the traffic that Urchin was reporting. Luckily, though the numbers were inconsistent between software packages, traffic trends were almost identical. Moral of that story: don't change reporting tools.

However, once committed to switching from a log-based analyzer like Urchin to Google Analytics, we were determined to learn more about what was causing this discrepancy.

Earlier this year, I commented on Ubuntu's package manager, which duplicates its status in both title bar and main window:

Recently I was helping the lovely and talented Kim Jackson migrate some files to her new laptop, and I noticed that Vista does the same thing:

Note that both title bar and window content say the same thing. But here's how it's different: Vista provides a status update, not just a label. It addresses a use-case that Peter Wood described in a comment on my Redundancy blog: "I only pay attention to [window titles] in the context of switching between various tasks."

The Vista copy dialog box bar actually provides useful status information in its title bar ... so if you see only the title — say when minimize to the Start Bar — you can find out exactly what the copy operation's ETA is.

Granted, it omits the information that the operation is a copy, but presumably if the user initiated it, they'll know that. (And it's visually too busy with tons of unnecessary decoration, but some people like that excessively ornamental crud... so it's consistent with the rest of the system.)

Contrast this to Mac OS X Leopard's copy dialog, which has a title bar that is clean, simple, and not particularly informative. The actual content is clear and easy to understand...

...but what happens when you invoke the Mac's Expose feature? The rollover title that shows up is stunningly uninformtive:

By contrast, Apple's Mail application shows you your unread and total message count in this situation. (I won't bore you with a screenshot of that.)

I'm a rabid Mac fanboy, but quite frankly, here Vista wins. When you're glancing at your active tasks, whether through fancy Expose effects or fancy Windows Flip 3D effects, you want to see what's going on.

And that's our use case. Tell the user what's going on.

Logan, as is his wont, happily trotted into the bizdev office, and picked up Karin's winter boot and began happily whining and walking around with his new prize. Nils noticed and went to the rescue...

1. Nils: Want me to press the eject button?
2. Karin: Could you please? I don't want to get slobber on my boot.
3. Fred: He doesn't slobber, he just puts it in his mouth!
4. Karin: Here, take this boot and tell me what this is on it.
5. Fred: I'm not touching that.

More banter »

Tonight is iMarc's annual holiday party. Like past years, one of the best aspects of the party is seeing what madness our creative director, Craig Henry, will create for the invitation.

This year's theme was record covers. Craig and Christian photographed all employees on various days. The original photos were bland—just us iMarcians posed in awful sweaters in front of solid backdrops. Then Craig went wild in Photoshop.

The final result: eight brilliantly fake holiday record covers.

These were laid out, printed at 4by6.com, and snail-mailed as our invitations. Hopefully Craig will do one of his famous Photoshop blogs showing how they were done.

Last year I discussed how the CAPTCHA is a world class user-UNfriendly construct. It's heavily used in the fight against form-spam in an attempt to separate humans from computers by requiring humans to perform challenging cognitive tasks — typically interpreting distorted text.

It's as common as ever, but today I ran across a particularly unpleasant form on the New York Times website:

Bonus points if you can correctly identify the first word in that CAPTCHA on your first try.

Yup. Even though I have had to create a user account on the site (which requires passing a CAPTCHA), and then logged in, I still had to perform another CAPTCHA just to perform an action they want me to perform — sending my friends and family to their site to read articles and view advertising.

So, aside from requiring me to login to their site (which happens from time to time as cookies expire or are wiped out), I then have to perform a difficult cognitive task to prove I'm human after I've already logged in through an email-verified system which itself demonstrates I'm human?

The NYtimes has gone above and beyond the call of user-unfriendly. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea to someone, but it's really aggravating to users of the system.

(For the record, we still haven't found it necessary to torture our web visitors at imarc.net. We process spam the old fashioned way — based on actual content — and it works just fine.)

This morning, Karin and I met with an organization that's preparing to re-do their website. They're going about it the right way — starting with basic strategy and planning — and we were asked to submit a proposal to lead them through this process. Since that's basically what I do here, I was there to talk about it.

During some great Q&A, they asked a very, very good question:
What are the three most important things to a great website?

Karin has her answers; here are mine:

1. Focus. It's tempting to try to tell a story about everything to everyone. This is a great way to make something that's not useful to anyone. Focus sharpens content, sharpens message, and most importantly, helps your visitors!
2. Clarity. Clarity comes from focus. But even if you focus your content well, it must be well organized and presented. Clarity helps your visitors.
3. Standards. Web sites and applications should adhere to published web standards. The process of creating semantic markup that is standards compliant naturally results in a site that works well even on old browsers and handheld devices, is accessible to the visually impaired, and is easily indexed by search engines (helping people find your site). Web standards help your visitors. (Do you detect a pattern here?)
   
   And then, because really items 1 & 2 are nearly inseparable, I allowed myself a number four.
   
   
4. CONTENT! Because this is why people are coming to your site. Ultimately, this is the only reason they're coming, so make it worth their while.

So those are my top three (or four) elements of a great web site.

What are yours?

The 5^th season of LOST starts January 21^st, 2009 and the vague clues have already started. A few weeks ago, ABC released the teaser trailer for the upcoming season. More recently, iTunes added a music video for “You Found Me” by The Fray, a song will be heard in the Season 5 premiere. The video contains clips from the teaser trailer with a few new clips thrown in. Read More