Welcome to the Escape Blog

So, you are eleven years old and you want a bigger bedroom. You go to your parents and plead with them and your dad says, ‘You can have a new bedroom if you can find the money’

Do you:

1. Huff off back to your Play Station muttering, ‘It’s so unfair’?
2. Or do you create a web site competition to try and raise £30,000 to pay for a loft extension?

If you are Basingstoke Schoolboy, Connor Swain, you do the latter with prizeladder.co.uk

This follows hot the heels from 21 year-old Alex Tew, who created the, now world-famous, Million Dollar Home Page. Initially started to pay for his college tuition, Alex ended selling all of the pixels on his homepage, making the full $1 million.

At The Escape, we take accessibility to heart. Every web site we build is accessible to all web users. The UK currently has 8 million disabled regular Internet users - that’s a lot of people. That’s why we fully back the Google Word Verification Accessibility Petition.

More and more adults are now using the internet. A recent study from the National Statistics showed that 64 per cent of adults in the UK acccessed the internet in one month in 2005.

Of these people, in a three month perioid, 61 per cent had bought or ordered goods, tickets or services online.

92 per cent had used a search engine.

This growth is really becoming evident, especially with the first Christmas retail period where TV advertising was openly encouraging online purchases from major stores. It’s no secret that whilst online sales were booming, the high street was dead. It is as if 2005 saw the acceptance of this way of buying and it can only get bigger from here on in.

For all of us that run commercial web sites this poses two issues:

1. We need to spread our net to get more people to Find Us through the mass of web pages available. This will only be achieved through better web content, well built (accessible) web sites and strong Search Engine Optimisation.
2. We need to make the holes in our net smaller - become more specific. Forget about the mass of people using the internet and focus on the fact that your core audience is also getting bigger.

We often get told ‘We want to make changes to the web site ourselves when it’s finished’ when being briefed for a web site. This causes two directions of thought:

1. The client either needs to know programming, which is rare, because if they did – they’d make the site themselves.
2. The client will use Front Page or Dream Weaver to make their own changes.

One of the big problems with the second choice is that the client who will inevitably be making those changes doesn’t think like a programmer and doesn’t know the intricacies of amending even the simple things such as text. For instance, putting & instead of & (which I’ve seen today on someone’s site.

Why should that matter?

Accessibility is an issue that is really starting to sink in to most business web sites now and these innocent changes can ruin the rest of the ‘accessible’ powers of a well built site. This means that your ‘well oiled car’ could be let down by one or two rogue washers.

The third option is to build a database behind the web site. This is an excellent option for a News Section, for example where a person can log on to an admin section of a web site, add stories and upload pictures, and then this would automatically update the page that people see.

The important part of that is regularity of updates. If your news section shows ‘old news’ then that could do you more harm than good. This also defeats the point of the initial requirement. It is a common story (we’ve done it ourselves) where we added content management to our web site and then never managed the content on a regular basis. We scrapped that and went back to the old way of plain old html pages.

One more very important issue with Database Driven Web Sites that often gets overlooked is that databases run on queries. A web page will query a database for information, which is then sent back in the correct format to be displayed. The problem with many databases are that they don’t adapt to direct approach on the web. This is where a person may search in a search engine and be directed to a specific page on your web site, rather than just to the home page. From a visual point of view, this may look like:

http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/RunScript.asp?p=ASP\Pg0.asp

This means nothing to many people but is crucial. You need to make sure that people understand when they are being driven to your site. Blogs cope with this perfectly by creating a ‘Permalink’ for each individual page that they create (Blogs run on databases, don’t you know). Therefore you can create direct links into pages. For example, the permalink for this page is:

http://theescape.typepad.com/blog/2006/01/database_driven.html

Another very important point on this issue is that Search Engines like to understand your pages. The name of the actual page counts for a lot. This may relate to the database created name (as above) or even on static pages where some people (still) create pages with names such as page1.html, page2.html. Google wants to see clarity, eg.

http://www.the-escape.co.uk/ourwebwork/sallygunnell/index.asp

It’s also a hell of a lot easier when you are trying to direct people to specific pages!

I’m sure that your web design agency knows these things, but if you want people to find you with clarity - you need look after the detail.

"Sun has gone from the 99th to the 6th most popular server company,
largely because it has embraced authenticity and transparency in its
communication initiatives."

You may hear us talk about Blogs. You may agree with us, you may not. You are, for instance, reading ours at this very second.
Sally Falkow’s article about Sun, with interviews from Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO of Sun Microsystems, seems to allow us a glimpse into what can happen when you embrace these technologies.

"Schwartz said that this window into the company and the direct
interaction with its employees is what builds the trust factor. And he
emphasised that authenticity and transparency are keys to blogging
success."

We still have places on our Free Seminar next week that may give you some practical solutions on how you can apply these same techniques to your business using a Blog.

“There is no more authentic Word-of-Mouth messengers for your business than your customers and your employees. You just can’t buy the authenticity, the passion, the commitment, the willingness to volunteer their time sneezing your company’s message in their neighbourhood.”

WOMMA discuss the need for taking a look at your customer service - the fact that if you don;t make it a positive experience - it WILL be a negative one.

A study from Science Journal Nature.com claims that visitors to web sites can make snap decisions on whether they like it in just 50 milliseconds.

One key point that caught our eye was the comment from Marc Caudron of Pod1.

"For a typical commercial website,
60% of traffic comes from search engines such as Google. This makes a user’s first
impression even more critical. You’ll get a list of
sites, click the top one, and then either say ‘I’ve engaged’ and give
it a few more seconds, or just go back to Google.

Engaging people with your web site is becoming more and more key with increased competition and better user searching. This is effectively increasing the choice for all users, including your customers.

Is your web site worth choosing?

• Does it look Attractive?
• Is it Authentic?
• Is it Specific?
  
• Does it answer questions?

Not sure and want some advice?

How good are you at spotting fake e-mails?

Phishing is a real problem, we all need to get wiser to spot the fakes.

If you want to know more about e-mail, phishing, and on the other side of that coin, How to market using E-Mail, you may be interested in our Seminar running in March.

I like Google. They give me what I want. It’s getting harder to find but I know it’s in there. I also love the fact that the are getting as big as they are and are prepared to have fun with their logo.
If you visited their web site before Christmas you would have notice the five day animation with the cat and mouse. And today they celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Loius Braille.