Some mini campaigning

I have decided to do some ecommerce style mini campaigning within the site. Luckily my line manager tends to like my ideas and mostly says yes just do it. So I have cross matched some terms that people look for on the website like ‘autism’ and added some small ad style calls to action for pages we have about that topic (where they exist). They are single images but I have done the right thing and included underlined text on the images as we know that people click links not pictures.

The acid test will be a stats check in a while to see if traffic patterns shift in that section – I hope so because then I can roll the idea out over the rest of the site – and I like making the mini ads :-)

I guess it’s  small and simple stuff but it represents quite a shift for us; moving from a ‘traversable information structure’ to a ‘influencing platform’ is quite a big deal and once we start I think there will be no going back. At least that’s what I hope…

First thing’s first – analytics

So now that I am doing the universally loved University of British Columbia’s ‘Award in Web Analytics’ I can really start to look at our analytics use seriously.

We have both Webtrends and Google Analytics running – the first by design the second purely out of curiosity. While the former is very powerful but with a steepish ‘WTF’ curve, GA is a lof friendlier and it’s hard to think of a public sector site that wouldn’t benefit from the 12 hour ‘go to stats’ setup time and the radically less steep WTF curve.

But, first things first – what are you trying to track and why?

Of course, like all sites, we want to know the number of visits. Actually thats about as far as most people here want to know – lots and lots of visits, website must be doing Ok then. They don’t want to know about bounce rate and all the various other metrics that show a lack of engagement. Luckily I do because I want to ’sell’ them our fantastic story of decades of excellence.

My course talks about the 22 basic metrics. Some of those are pretty obvious, like bounce rate, but there are a couple that stand out as being new (for me at least):

• Scanning visitor rates – number of visitors who do visits of one minute of less
• Committed visit rates – number of visitors who engage for long periods with high page views

I have included these on my new long-term summary spreadsheet and have tracked out the last 6 months on it. And what did I find? What is interesting is the consistency on our site – nothing moves more than %5 and given the difficulty of being exact with analytics, that’s pretty much like saying nothing moves at all. So, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

You know what, I don’t know yet. I suspect it’s mostly good because of the user-testing I did on the prototype last year. But I am pretty sure that there are some issues, so I am going to set up some campaigns and figure out what is happening on the micro scale – and here I am going to set some actually useful KPIs that can show us if we are achieving our stated mission.

More on that tomorrow.

Web form hell

I have just taken up the challenge of turning a 38 page word application form into a series of web forms. Yikes!

Part of me thinks this is insane, part of me wants to show much better I can do it. And I have long been twittering (in the old sense of the world) on about this for ages – our organisations ‘touch points’ are abysmal. This form is filled out by hundreds of people a year. If I had to fill it in I would either cry or not bother.

It’s got all the classics:

• You get to section G and it asks you to amend an answer in section D if you did X here
• Sections which are not used or actioned by us but are used for ‘potential reporting purposes’
• Between five and eight signatories to authorise the submission
• Sections where you are meant to manually add up five years worth of figures

This would be unthinkable without using our Achieve Forms package, and even then it’s going to take months but hopefully we can make this a lot better – and because we will not be using our ‘technology partner’ we can use a rapid prototyping method rather than the torture of a requirements document. Achieve is veryg ood for that luckliy – nothing has to be built in stone and your draft becomes the finished product very easily. Thank heavens for small mercys…

I just woke up

That must be a record time between posts. From October 2006 to July 2007. I’ve got a cheek…

Never mind, we are back on the starting blocks and here is a report on action do far…

Launched a new site in October then I more or less went to sleep for 6 months. A lot of ‘bedding in’, a lot of discovering limitations of new system and so on. But now we are fairly settled and we have just the usual problems:

• Content not being updated
• Business don’t even get web 1.0 let alone 2.0
• Not enough hours

On the upside the project is seen as a success and people actually listen to me when I start rambling on about design and provision and so on. But just last week I kinda woke up.

Yes, this is a good website but it’s a corporate website and that means it’s pretty much dead in it’s current form. It needs to move on already, it needs to become a service website and a publicity website and a networking website. In fact our mission statement says we must:

• Provide money for people to do the work
• Train people to do the work
• Tell members of the public about our work

So at the moment we, like everyone else in PSUK, have one site that kinda covers these things moderately well but certainly doesn’t excel at any of them. And I am just scared that now we have a website that works and people like that we are going to think that that is it – no, it’s time to move forward…

Here is a selection of things that are going to happen:

• I am going to start using e-commerce style campaigning to encourage growth on the public engagement side of the site
• Some media publishing (animations, movies etc) – I have flash skills and I am going to use them!
• Blogging is going to be explored
• I am going to start using 3rd party widgets inside pages
• I am going to look into using our very smart forms package as a way of engaging audiences rather than just taking input
• Exploring the idea of using a knowledge base

So, suddenly I am alive again…web criminals and people who think their shitty corporate site is good enough, be afraid, for I am The Public Sector Web Guy!

Centre back returns from holiday to bolster RNIBs defence

Here’s a longish post from the UK Usability list from the RNIB usability chief defending their ‘access for all’ stance against some of the slurs on the list…

All very good, but why does their site just SUCK?!

Sites that are accessible just don’t have to look this bad – they SHOULDN’T look this bad when they are meant to be setting the bar high.

Now here’s an idea – why not open up the RNIB site for a CSS Zen garden style event so we can stop whinging about it and have a go – now that would be something useful to do Henny!

Anyway, here is the defence:

Hi All,

I’m a bit late responding to this one having just got back from leave
but would like to clarify RNIB’s position on how we promote and advise
on accessible web design.

Accessible web design is “design for all” regardless of ability or
disability. This has been at the heart of the RNIB’s Campaign for Good
Web Design over the last 6 years and a key message we flag when we speak
at conferences, give presentations, provide training or communicate
throughout the RNIB Web Access Centre (http://www.rnib.org.uk/wac) and
via our enquiries line.

While we are an organisation that represents blind and partially sighted
people we do not promote accessible web design to the exclusion of
others – that simply wouldn’t be accessible web design after all! Our
advice, and the See it Right checkpoints that we promote, encompass all
user groups. Indeed, the key to providing good consultancy on accessible
web design is to know when one solution that helps certain user groups
does not adversely affect another. Additionally some people may have a
number of disabilities preventing ease of access to the web.

And so on really… you get the idea but you can…

Crazy with waiting

Still, on and on, nothing.

An email and a call a day. They say something is fixed. I look at it and see something else wrong. They go away. They say something is fixed. I look at it and…

Still after 7 work days of this now maybe we are really near to something. Maybe. Boy am I sick of this.

Once the thing goes live there will be a tsunami of changes, so I suppose I should be grateful, However I am on holiday for a couple of weeks so no most of those changes will go undone for a while.

I really find this implementation nonsense tedious. Ten yearsof it and I am over it pretty much. Designing systems, specifications, strategy, usability all fine but this is just so dull…

She is gone, I am happy

No one mourned much, if at all. She is gone. And I am, really, happy.

I came into work yesterday and realised I didn’t have to build myself up for the weeks battle. i didn’t have to listen to her defending herself and take no blame for anything. I didn’t have to ignore a problem I can now solve it instead.

No more bully, no more passive-aggressive, no more covering up her ignorance, no more fury at her stupidity, no more pretending in meetings, no more of her taking the credit.

If you recognise yourself ever in this blog then, my dear, realise how much you were hated here.

And how useless you were.

So useless we are not even filling her position. There’s a vote of confidence.

And I don’t need to write about her anymore, I can just get on with writing about web stuff.

I am sure we are all happy about that…

Best practice

I think best practise is horseshit. How often have you watched someone hide behind this label? Usually they are a little boring, a little administrative – or wildly strategic and not at all useful. Best practice is a kind of way of appealing to a vague external power in the hope that the people you are trying to convert will accept your view point without you actually having to justify it.

The hard stuff

As I wait for tech partner to resolve issues…

What staggers me about my manager is her inability to see a problem through anyone but her own eyes.

Case in  point (BIG case in point): While being in charge of the content redevelopment process she failed to ask key people what they actually needed to have on the site. As a consequence there is material that we have said we are ‘always’ going to have on the site that is now not there – and people are going to start complaining. A lot. To me. Because she is leaving. Thanks a lot.

The thing is that she has done the easy bit (relatively speaking) and re-edited and cleaned up most of the content but not done the hard stuff: getting hands dirty and negotiating what to do with  historical or statutory information. And of course the heard bit is now going to be doubly difficult because we are now dealing with a built site.

This just makes me cross – I would prefer to be getting on with developing and tuning the site, but in reality there’s going to be a lot of going backwards…

Sigh.

And you may ask why I didn’t tell her what needed to be done. And the thing is that I did – emailed some templates for logging content, talked about stakeholder meetings at which I would like to be present (never happened) and so on. Maybe I could have pushed more but our ‘working’ relationship is so bad that this would have – almost literally – driven me mad. And she would have got very very nasty for threatening her authority. I could go on. I won’t. I’m trying to be positive.

So – I am happily looking forward to doing the basics right without her around. I only have about 15 hours in her presence and then I am free…

Ongoing: PAS78

On old link perhaps, but an interesting post from the author of PAS78 and what it is trying to be: http://www.accessifyforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=3242