At the end of last week, Google announced that it is going to combine the Android app store, Google Music, and the Google eBookstore into one solution which will be named “Google Play”. The service is going to work similar to Apples iCloud. The promotional video gives you further insights into Google Play.
I don’t know a lot of people who use Google+. I suppose roughly 10% of my Facebook friends also have a Google+ account and most people I talk to don’t know a lot of other users either. Actually, I thought this was only an “Austrian” or “European thing”, but according to a recent comScore report, the use of Google+ worldwide seems dramatically low: It states that the average number of minutes a user spends on Facebook per month is 405, whereas Google+ is used only 3 minutes per month – which is even lower than MySpaces 8 minutes. The data caused the Wall Street Journal to call Google+ a “virtual ghost town”. You can read the full report here: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-user-time-low/40726/
Since last week, we have a new scrum master in our company. Last week, she had her certified scrum master course held by Boris Gloger (I also took the course in 2008 and really liked it, I would recommend Boris Glogers courses to anybody who wants to know more about scrum). Enthusiastically, she came back in the office and compared the theoretical lessons of her scrum master course to how we do it in the company. As she already encountered that estimations are not always easy and we regularly get quite high estimates from our developers, she discussed this topic with other participants and also read her first blog entries on how to make estimates more precisely. At the moment, the highest estimate we accept has the value of 40 story points, but some of her discussion partners said that they only accepted 8 or even 5 story points as the highest value – otherwise, the story is still not precise enough and needs to be split into smaller ones. I totally understand that smaller stories can have a positive effect on the planning security, but I’m just not quite sure if this works for us too or if the discussion about how to split a story into various smaller ones will take lots of time! I guess, I’ll have to let myself be suprised. I’m going to give you an update in another blog entry as soon as I found out more!
If you don’t already know my XING profile https://www.xing.com/profile/Johannes_Mayer3, please feel free to add me! From now on, I’m also on Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/pub/johannes-mayer/47/5a7/434. So, if you also use Linkedin, just let me know and also add me there!
In the past I have already experienced a number of evaluations for content management systems for different purposes, including a couple of personal websites, small company websites or even large online portals. Of course, the content section of your website or your website as a whole (if you fully run it using a content management system) should be optimized for search engines as good as possible. Most of the current content management systems have options for SEO already implemented, for others there are lots of plugins that help with this matter. But as I have made some really bad experiences with age-old content management systems in the past (where you automatically got an ugly URL with tons of parameters and were not able to define your favored title, h-tags, description, etc.) the SEO aspect of a CMS is even more important for me. That is why this article about five important CMS tips for lage companies from a SEO point of view was really interesting to me: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/5-content-management-cms-tips-for-large-enterprises. I found tip number 3 quite nice: Including brief infos for your online editors on how to use several tags, find the perfect title, write a good description, etc. seems like a really helpful thing to me!
“Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one…” (Michael Degusta, theunderstatement.com). Full article on http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphans-visualizing-a-sad-history-of-support – very interesting read, compares different phone models sold in the US during the last three years and how long they have been supported with the latest OS versions.
The father of many highly successful products as the iPod, the iPhone or the iPad died of cancer at the age of 56 – RIP, Steve. http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/
Last week I visited the Google Analytics Conference 2011 in Viennas Schönbrunn Palace, which was organized by the SEO/SEM consultants e-dialog, elements.at and webalytics. The event started with an opening keynote from Clancy Childs, who is the EMEA Manager for Google Analytics – very interesting and entertaining. After that, elements.at and e-dialog held their presentations about the V5 of Analytics, its newest features and how to benefit from them in your daily web analytics business. Interesting, but not quite as lively and entertaining as the guys from Google managed to hold their speeches. The closing keynote was held by Trevor Claiborne (@tclaiborne on Twitter), who is a Product Marketing Manager at Google. Being a Product Manager myself, his presentation was the most interesting for me and I really liked it! After that, the audience was able to raise questions at the guys from Mountain View. All in all, in interesting event which I might be attending again next year.
Today, I received an eMail from the hosts of on online media congress I visited some weeks ago. While the first question just had two options to choose from, the second question (asking how I found out about that congress) already was a multiple choice question with over twenty checkboxes and a bunch of text fields to add further details. I immediately left the survey and I’m pretty sure a lot of other users also did. My opinion for a higher conversion of your online survey: Start with some simple questions that are really easy to answer and consider this as a warm-up, before asking questions that require a much higher level of consideration and involvement from your respondent.
In my opinion, the most important factors in SEO are content, backlinks and structure. Building a new website with a well-thought site structure will help users as well as search engines to smoothly navigate through your site and spider one page after the other. Quite nice, but no matter how clear the site structure may be, I would always recommend creating a sitemap.xml. This is a file which lists the URLs of your pages in a way that bots can handle them properly and also gives them additional information, e.g. how often the pages are updated, how important they are compared to the other pages of your site, etc. The sitemap.xml follows the XML schema for sitemap protocols which all major search engines agreed on. You can find it here: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php. Depending on the system you use, there are different ways to create such a sitemap.xml file: If you build the website by yourself, you can create and update the sitemap.xml file manually using a web development tool or a simple text editor. Going this way, you always have to keep in mind that you have to make every change (e.g. creating new pages, deleting old pages, etc.) manually. Remember, always stick to the XML schema for sitemap protocols. Otherwise, bots are not going to be able to read your sitemap.xml. You can also implement a service that generates a current version of your sitemap.xml in a time interval that you define. Using a CMS like WordPress, it’s much easier: There are many helpful plugins for this job – you will find a sitemap XML generator in a few minutes. Most plugins offer various customization possibilities – e.g. to define the time interval in which a new sitemap.xml is being generated, to exclude certain page types, etc. Using Google Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters) you can inform Google that you provide a sitemap.xml for your site. In my next blog post, I will tell you why it is highly important to have a robots.txt file and how to connect it with your sitemap.xml file.
Fine roundup of the key factors of ideal domain names on http://www.promotionworld.com: The perfect domain name should be short and simple as possible, while being unique and also suggestive for your business category. A crucial point especially if your domain name should perform internationally: It should be easy to interpret and pronounce as well as being as easy to spell as possible for the users in your key markets. More on this topic here http://www.promotionworld.com/prepare/articles/article/051013howtochoose.html
Before starting a new web project, you should be aware of the factors that are essential for making websites successful. In this short series we are going to have a closer look on the importance of planning. What do you need before starting your project? First of all, find a niche in the market where competition is as small as possible but which still attracts a considerable number of people. Then, you need to develop a business plan. Just trying your luck without thinking first what your products are, how to promote and make money with them, how to recruit and retain customers, what the USP of your product or company is, etc. might work in some few cases, but chances are much higher that you are going to fail. Don’t spend weeks of consideration just focusing on your business plan – using helpful resources like http://www.myownbusiness.org/s2/ will save you lots of time. Think hard about your domain name as it will directly affect the perception of your website on the market and therefore, will have direct impact on the number of your visits. Your ideal domain name should be short, unique and easy to remember. Also, consider that choosing a high quality hosting provider is time well spent. Go for dedicated server hosting! The more reliable and faster your website, the more satisfied your visitors will be and the better for your rankings in search engines. More on this interesting topic on http://www.chromaticsites.com/blog/the-official-successful-website-checklist-challenge/
Very helpful: The W3C Markup Validation Service. Just enter your website URL, upload a file or enter the code directly in the text field and hit the “Check” button – you see what’s wrong with your code and get useful hints on how to fix it: http://validator.w3.org/
A very useful tool for those who did not know it yet: The W3C CSS validator. Just enter your website URL, upload a CSS file or enter the code directly in the text field and hit the “Check” button – in just a few seconds you get an overview about the CSS errors and warnings found in your file: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
“Don’t aim for success if you want it. Just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally.”
Very interesting article that shows 10 different landing pages of mostly well-known companies and points out good and bad elements of them http://unbounce.com/landing-page-examples/your-landing-page-sucks/
Without a doubt, Apple’s success over the last few years (especially with the iPhone and the iPad) would not have taken place without the excellent Usabiliy and User Experience of its products. For Apple, design was a huge factor that made the change from being almost dead to highly successful even possible. For most companies, design is not a must-have. It’s something that the product should have besides dozens of other things. For Steve Jobs, design is nothing less than essential. When you have a CEO who has that much focus on this subject, it’s quite easy for everyone else to understand the importance and to follow. Apple has a small team of experts who design the key products and that works together with the engineers very closely. In addition, Apple sets itself very high standards – if it’s not perfect, they don’t launch it. The best example for this rule probably is the white version of the iPhone 4 which made it to the stores months after the planned launch date. More about the role of design in this interesting company here http://uxmovement.com/resources/8-things-to-know-about-the-company-culture-at-apple/
And if something is not “perfect”, this happens: http://bit.ly/lEH1Nk. As a costumer i love Apple but because of articels, which reveal how management takes place in Apple i doubt that working for Apple (or rather Steve Jobs) is enjoyable … unless you’r outcome is flawless … all the time.
Interesting article and even more interesting comments!
Great intro to Google Website Optimizer that tackles several topics: What is Google Website Optimizer actually? What are the testing variants of A/B testing and multivariate testing and when do you choose which one? Where should you start? Which elements of your site can be tested? How do you set up your tests? First of all, don’t focus on completed sales or sign-ups. Instead of that, rather focus on converting your customers from one step of a desired process to the next one. Little improvements in every single steps will make a huge difference in the end. Identify different elements of your sites (e.g. your header, navigation, links to certain pages, etc.) and test them using a multivariate test. By doing that, you see which element performs best and therefore should be part of the final setting. Also consider creating different visitor segments. Visitors that come to your website using Google search may act different than users that come to your website via direct traffic. Always keep in mind that testing, measuring and defining improvements is just the first part – all of this is useless if you do not bring your findings to life by improving your website regularly and after that, continuing the process by starting to test again. More on this interesting topic here http://blog.kissmetrics.com/guide-google-website-optimizer/
Is it really possible to build a nice looking website with useful information in less than one hour? It sure is. All you need to do that is a) find a hosting provider to run your website, b) install a content management system (CMS) that helps you to set up pages without having to write a single line of code and c) get a template that fits your requirements and looks attractive. As far as the CMS part is concerned, WordPress is my absolute favorite. You can install it within minutes, you are able to choose between thousands of free templates and plugins and its user interface makes it fun to use each and every day. Much more information on this topic here http://blog.kissmetrics.com/build-a-company-website/
SirSherwoood are discussing. 
PJM are discussing.
SirSherwoood 00:50 on June 13, 2011 Permalink |
As always, very well written and easy to understand. Even for the non-professional!
Thanks
Johannes 16:58 on June 21, 2011 Permalink |
Well, thank you very much. Glad to hear that I was able to inspire you!