Some 55% of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection at home, according to a May 2008 survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The percentage of Americans with broadband at home has grown from 47% in early 2007 and 42% in early 2005. Among individuals who use the internet at home, 79% have a high-speed connection while 15% use dialup. - Pew Internet

The report also shows that broadband has dropped slightly for households with incomes less than $20,000, which is not unexpected with the economic downturn.  Take this information into account when you decide what features to add to your website and whether your customers will be viewing it mostly at work (where most have broadband) or at home. If your customers are in a lower-income bracket, they may have a slower dial-up connection or no connection at all at home.  Websites which have lots of graphics and Flash may turn away customers with slower Internet connections.

In the web’s earlier days the cool kids were the Macromedia Flash Developers. They had that mystical quality to them; a special blend of tech voodoo and creative style. A great Flash artists could bring any early browser screaming to its knees, but inbetween dropped frames and hung processors you swore you were looking at the future of the web. Flash Developers were the Rock Star developers of the web a decade back.

Now we try to use Flash in moderation as if it were a controlled substance. Most business websites have a pinch of flash to spice up the bullet points and mission statements, but it all seems perfunctory and subdued. In the business world, Flash has been relegated to bit parts like tie-ins or transitions, back seat functions to the AJAX revolution. Sure, the media industry is still addicted to their Flash applications as is the online gaming and advertising sectors. For most development houses, however, Flash became an unfamiliar tool used sparingly.

Adobe buying Macromedia has successfully righted that ship, in my opinion. They’re first all Adobe take on the Flash franchise was to relicense a little thing called Flex. Flex was originally a Macromedia product targeted for upper echelon corporations. Flex was and is Flash for programmers. Plain and simple, Flex lets your code slingers write decent Flash applications using tools they understand, namely programing languages. When Adobe got ahold of the property, they wisely saw the potential for curious geeks to adopt this new shiny thing, promote it within their communities, and build it up to a viable web solution. Flex 3 SDK (Software Development Kit) is free to to download and licensed under a open-source friendly Mozilla Public License. Adoption of the Flex 3 platform has been impressive, thanks in no small part to adobe’s marketing of the tools as they have.

N ow the geeks are sitting side by side with the cool kids at the web table. I would say we now have to work on the Jocks (DBAs), but that just might be a bridge too far.

In upcoming posts I will review Adobe Flex and Adobe Air.

Technorati Tags: adobe, adobe flex, adobe air, B2B, B2C, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting, B2C internet consulting, business internet consulting

What do RoR, APIs, Interactive Media, Mashups, and Product Communities all have in common? Well other than they all make up the bottom row of this year’s Buzzword Bingo card, all five are technologies that you aren’t using but should be.

Here’s a truism - Really good websites create buzz about your product or service. To create that excitement, you have to find a compelling feature, function or attribute that causes a positive reaction. When Macromedia’s Flash first came out, people were unimpressed. So it was a web animation tool for advertisers to make monkeys move really fast back and forth in a banner ad, big deal. It only became a big deal when really talented designers began making sites that generated attention. That attention separated the really good sites from the no talent hack imitators, solidifying their product and/or service in the minds of their viewers. The same can be said for each of the technologies in that list. Used properly and in moderation (as with most things in life) you can create some truly impressive results. Those results, in collaboration with smart marketing, will never fail to deliver the all important buzz.

In what looks to be a longish series of posts, I hope to convince you that one or more of the above can help your business website stand out.

• Ruby on Rails (RoR) thinks it can, and does
• Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) and why they aren’t just for geeks
• Interactive Media talks back
• Mashups = Your chocolate in my Peanut Butter
• You can make a community about anything these days (Product Communities)

You may not realize it yet, but the Internet boom has created a global audience for your products and services. How is your website viewed by your potential customers in other countries? Is it annoying? Insulting? Inappropriate? Designing your websites properly for the culture of your audience can increase your traffic and your profits. Aaron Marcus (Aaron Marcus and Associates) presented an overview of these cultural considerations and how they influence the design of a website for different cultures.

Power Distribution (PD) is the extent to which less powerful members expect and accept unequal power distribution. A country with a high PD has centralized power in few hands. Websites designed for countries with high PD (China) have a structured access to information with emphasis on social order and focus on expertise.

Individualism vs Collectivism explores how tied-in an individual is with their family and social status. Countries with high individualism (such as the US) expect websites that maximize personal achievement, focus on consumerism, and activity.

Feminity vs. Masculinity - Men are typically focused on achievement, earnings, recognition, advancement and challenges in their work goals. Women are focused on relations, cooperation, living area and employment security. Websites designed for these audiences need to take these differences into account. If you take a look at a website geared towards women, it typically is designed around community and sharing. Websites which cater to men typically are information-heavy with little interaction.

Uncertainty Avoidance - Certain cultures feel threatened by uncertainty or the unknown. These cultures typically view teachers are experts (who know all) and have high formality in gestures and procedures. Sites designed for low uncertainty avoidance cultures (US) can be fun and whimsical, whereas sites for high uncertainty avoidance cultures need to stick to the point.

Long vs. Short Term Time Orientation - Some societies have been around for a long time and have a different view of what is important to accomplish in a time period. China, which is at the top of long term time orientation, views problems, issues, and tasks from the point of view of what needs to be done this generation whereas Americans try to solve and accomplish tasks in as short of time as possible. A website for China can be fuzzy and focuses on people, but a website for Germany is task-oriented and focuses on function mastery.

These metrics are based on older data and tend to sterotype cultures as one per country. However, these cultural considerations are important to include in your business website design to make sure your global visitors understand your products and services and can find what they need.

Technorati Tags: web2expo, usability

Just finished my first Workshop at the web2.0 Expo

This will be a quick and dirty post between sessions (and while eating a sandwich)

Web 2.0 Best Practices, authored by Niall Kennedy

Niall’s talk focused on taking the audience though the stages of web development history in order to lay down a path for the future. No matter where your web site is today, the take home from Niall is that you have homework to do. If you have a site that doesn’t have RSS distributing your content out in feeds, you need to start here. If you already have that part in place, your next hurdle is adopting microformats

Microformats is the landing pad for preparing your website for the new semantic movement, likely to be the 3.0 of web 3.0 Microformats lets you tell search engines what your content is meant to be. hCard, hCal, and hReference are all reference implementations of microformats. Using them will improve your search engine results, this is now really now debated much.

Once your site is using Microformats, it is time to extend that content out to large platforms like Google, Facebook, MySpace and others. Widgets allow you to put your content up on sites like Facebook to use their traffic to extend your content’s reach. This is usually done through proxies; your content is updated on their site only as often as your site wants. This limits your traffic burden.

Niall did a very good job with this workshop. It was compelling to see how the decisions of the past can make educated guesses on where we are going in the future. If he’s right, this really isn’t the time to sit on your latest site redesign. If you get out infront of this microformat movement and widget revolution, you can beat your competition to the punch to getting those valuable eyeballs that drive sales in an online world

Technorati Tags: web2expo, microformats, B2B

Another year has come to a close. 2007 was pretty exciting in both the B2C and B2B space on the web, as community, sharing, and using the web to find information became commonplace. On the tail of B2C sites like YouTube, Flickr, and iTunes, the B2B audience started to demand video, image and audio information. Posting only a blurb of text about an event, service or product is no longer acceptable. The B2B audience wants to see and hear to make their own observations from as much raw information as possible. Many B2B news and information websites met this need by introducing video sections, posting regular podcasts, blogging and increasing the visual information included in stories. In 2008 this will extend to B2B websites themselves, as manufacturers and service providers increase the range of information they include on their sites.

Community has been big on the web for a couple of years now and most Internet users are comfortable with instant messaging (IM), boards, blogs and sharing information. With the emergence of sites like Digg, people now have the opportunity to share links and comments to stories. B2B sites have embraced this by including more forums and adding the ability to comment right on stories. Look to see this increase in 2008 to include more B2B user generated content, such as reviews and sharing capabilities on websites.

Customer-centric will be the name of the game in 2008 as the B2B audience becomes accustomed to customer-centric sites in the B2C world. Social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn have hit the news in 2007, and the buzz has started for these to be big topics for B2B in 2008. The B2B audience in 2008 will demand more user-generated content with the ability to connect and share information.

Technorati Tags: customer-centric sites, usability, community, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

It’s now been 2.5 months since the redesign of our flagship publication website. In B2B Website Usability - Does It Work? I reported:

The average weekly visits have increased 34%, average weekly page views have increased 23% and average weekly visitors have increased 36%.

Traffic has been continuing to grow every week since the launch. The publication staff posts a new issue every week, plus web-only content in blogs, video and web-exclusive articles. Since launch there has been a 80% increase in weekly visits, 40% increase in weekly page views, and 90% increase in weekly visitors. The numbers for monthly stats are very similar: 75% increase in visits, 45% increase in page views, and 85% increase in visitors. The publication is continuing to promote their new online content, and we’ve started running Google AdSense ads to promote specific parts of the site.

Technorati Tags: customer-centric sites, usability, design, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Too often I come across websites or clients who want to get as much as they possibly can into the smallest possible space. They think that makes their site look trendy and up-to-date.

The problem is that the human mind processes text in a certain way - it actually uses the shapes of words and the contrast between white space and “ink” to figure out what’s going on. When you bring up a webpage, you actually scan it starting at the top left to right and then move down and then left to right again - very similar to how we read words on a sheet of paper.

Good design takes advantage of these natural tendencies by balancing colors, text, and, very importantly, whitespace. This is called negative space in the traditional design world and it is just as important as what you put on a page or canvas (or space, etc.). So when you layout your website design, keep in mind that whitespace is important and you need to space things out a bit just so people can get a handle on what you’re trying to convey. If you don’t, they’ll just go somewhere else that is easier to understand.

Technorati Tags: customer-centric sites, design, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Since I covered an example of a bad B2C website last week, let’s take a look at a couple of good B2C websites and what makes them good.

• L.L.Bean - This site has been one of my favorite consumer websites for several years. Why? Because I can always find what I’m looking for. If I need help there are multiple different ways to contact the company: email, phone, online chat which are clear from every single page. I can find products by their catalog number, by searching, by browsing (in multiple categories). Browsing allows the ability to narrow your choices by several different types of information (dependent on what you’re looking at) - for example, on comfort fleece, I can narrow my choices by department, attributes, price and colors. When I add an item into my shopping bag, I can label it with different names if I have items going to different people and during checkout it will ask me for different addresses and gift card information. I also can save items in my bag for later if I’m considering different items or shopping around. They have details on every product including the ability to zoom in to see more detail. L.L. Bean is a catalog company so if they lose a visitor off their site, they’ve lost a sale. You can’t get much more customer-centric.
• Lands End - Also a catalog company, Lands End has many of the same functions as the L.L. Bean website (they compete on many of the same items). I think their display of items is somewhat better since they offer several different views of each product and offer recommendations on how well something will fit you (based on your personal measurements). They also offer the same great customer service options and abilities as far as finding products.

Obviously eCommerce sites are going to be very different than other B2C websites and different from most B2B websites, but they are very good at being customer-centric since they must be so to compete. Most B2B websites are also selling products, but often forget to offer good customer service and to think about what their customers want when they are on their website.

Technorati Tags: customer-centric sites, design, B2C, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

As a case study of what makes a good website, let’s take a look at a B2C site that is aesthetically pleasing, but fails to be customer-centric.

Apple is known for the design of their products and their website certainly is pleasing to the eye. If you happen to be looking for information regarding purchasing a product, you will be escorted through beautiful images, rich information, and links to their online store. However, if you are searching for specific information about fixing a problem, how a product should work, or even making an appointment with tech support, good luck. This information is buried on their website and doesn’t even always come up in a search.

Customer-centric design means trying to help your customers no matter what information they are trying to get - not just information for purchasing.

Technorati Tags: customer-centric sites, design, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting