Welcome to the Escape Blog

Most website owners recognise the value of good website content yet this appreciation can often occur when they are visiting websites other than their own.

So how does your website compare? Do you think you’ve got good website content?

To find out, ask yourself the following 5 questions:

1. Is your website content relevant and meaningful to your target audience or is it mainly spin and waffle?
2. Is your website content clear and digestible to your target audience or do they just switch off and go away?
3. Is your website content engaging and informative to your target audience or does it offer little emotional or educational value?
4. Is your website content too technical or complex for your target audience resulting in uncertainty or confusion?
5. Is your website content wedged between blocks of irrelevant or unrelated information making it difficult to find or understand?

If any of these questions describe the written content on your website, then perhaps you need to look at ways to make your information more accessible and more valuable to your audience.

Bear in mind that for your website content to carry greater weight for both site visitors and Web ‘bots, it’s all down to its MERIT.

In other words, make your website content Memorable, Engaging, Relevant, Informative and Targeted.

Quick Online Tips is a portal site offering users the chance to make life on line a little simpler with all sorts of information and tool downloads. The popular page has lists and tips on web 2.0 tools, blogging, Google adsense and Firefox to name just a few.

E-Consultancy mention a move by Daily Blog Tips to raise awareness of RSS:

The number of people using the web is increasing every day, but the adoption rate of RSS as a technology is still way down at 5%.

I personally love RSS (really simple syndication) and I love the idea of what it can do. But, then again, I am a bit of a geek. Obviously the everyday Internet punter doesn’t get it or can find easier ways of getting information - like e-mail for instance.

As much as I would love more people to adopt RSS, perhaps it’s still not simple enough for people to understand, or use?

That may sound a little patronising, but I think about my own situation with recording TV programmes and the fact that I have a DVD recorder I have never used. Why? Because I got used to Sky Plus so now I need it to be that easy otherwise I won’t bother.

Food for thought, perhaps?

The BBC report today about how the value of internet advertising will overtake TV adverts by 2009 in the UK, following a report by The Internet Advertising Bureau .

Online advertising grew 38% in 2007 to be worth £2.8bn ($5.5bn), taking its market share to 15.3%, up from 11.4% in 2006, the report showed.

The report also highlights how the paid-for-search advertising market is “not slowing but maturing” as marketers become more sophisticated in the way they use the medium.

Brands are now using search more intelligently, getting a greater return on investment through ‘key phrases’ and more accurate targeting that reflects consumer behaviour.

I found this blog post today on alpha blog designs outlining the “101 Heinous Website Sins To Really Freakin’ Annoy Your Visitors” and I have got say I could not agree more. Some of my personal favourites are:

1. Use unnecessary Flash
2. Have “Site best viewed with…” somewhere in the page. Especially IE6.
3. Have a huge header, especially of yourself.
4. Have 40 ’socialize’ icons at the bottom of each post.
5. Ignore optimizing images for the Web.

So anyone out there who wants to know how to make a user experience more pleasurable I highly suggest having a read.

It looks like we could we be memorising fewer of them in the future when using our favourite websites and online services in the future.

Open ID is a foundation formed last year to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community.

Some of the big boys have joined the board - Microsoft, IBM, Google and Yahoo - and the aim is to streamline login systems across the web.

Follow the story here.

In the modern world of web standards there is no room for the poor implementation of javascript that had swept the web during the days of ‘Ive got a dodgy copy of Dreamweaver, and now I am web designer’, which led to the increase of Dynamic HTML download sites that allowed web masters to copy and paste code into there websites to make text fade in and out and scroll (The best ones where always the big clocks following the mouse around. Superb! I am as guilty as the next programmer).

When it seemed every mickey mouse website was a mixture of animated gifs and random fading text that made you feel that you where on some kind of acid trip. Javascript then entered as Obi Wan would call it the “Dark Times” everything went back to being basic or to the overuse of bad Tweening in Flash.

Javascript has recently gone through some kind of resurgence of late with the emphasis being on “unobstrusive javascript”. What’s this? I hear you cry.

Well, if you were to think of a website as a cake (nicked this analogy from Gaz and Keith): The base of the cake would be your HTML. If you want it to taste nice then it needs to be made correctly using the right ingredients. This means semantic markup using tags that are relevant to the content i.e. using <UL> tags for lists and <DL> for definiton lists, headings in the right place and all that jazz.

When you have finished with your base and you’re happy all the ingredients are there, you can then begin to decorate the cake. Decorating the cake in this case would mean using CSS to apply styles, colours and the general design giving you something that not only tastes good but looks fantastic.

Now this in itself would be enough for 9/10 web programmers / designers. However, we could go really overboard and add a cherry. The cherry, as the title of this article would suggest, is Javascript.

Using the ingredients in place we can add the cherry to enhance the cake and make it look that little bit sexier. The beauty of adding the cherry at the end is if no one likes the cherry (i.e. if the visitor to your website has javascript turned off) then they can take it off and crack on with the rest of the cake.

There is nothing worse than taking the cherry off and finding the whole cake crumbles in to mush because the cake was reliant on the cherry holding it all together.

So in summary where am I going with this?

I am a stickler for web standards although alot of other people out there may not be and there is nothing worse than coming across a web site that relies on the end-user having Javascript or indeed Flash installed to view the content.

Javascript and Flash should be layered on top of the content of a web site to sex it up or to make the end user’s experience more enjoyable.

Scrabulous is an online version of the game Scrabble, written by two brothers, that has risen in popularity of late as a Facebook application.

The joint owners of Scrabble, Mattel and Hasbro, launched an action on Tuesday saying that the Scrabulous game was a “gross copyright and trademark infringement”. The companies asked Facebook to remove Scrabulous. (ref. BBC)

This in itself is a fair enough point, but are they missing the point? Games become popular because they get played. On the INternet, they are easy for programmers to recreate… and spread, especiallyu when they encourage a viral attitude. IE. you have to play with someone else, so you tell you friends.

For instance, Scrabulous has grown to regularly get more than 500,000 users a day playing. The interesting thing about consumers (and especially younger generations) is that they don’t understand why they shouldn’t be able to play this game online, and for free.

Subsequently, over 18,000 people have asked the same question through Jason Madhosingh’s Facebook Group - Save Scrabulous.

Surely, a more positive [brand] approach would be to agree a licence fee with the people who wrote the application?

I completely agree that they own the copyright and have rights, but they will miss out on brand recognition (500,000 users a DAY) and a passive income stream that could be utilised.

If it were me, I’d actually buy the application and create additional cross-selling.

The thing is, a bnit like file sharing platforms, it won’t be long before someone else creates a new version, and when they get shut down, someone else….

When I first discovered the Internet back in about 1994/5 I used the iconic Netscape Navigator. But, just over ten years later, it’s sad to say that it’s faded out.

The good news is that it’s not Internet Explorer that is the cause. More likely Firefox - my now web browser of choice - which is home to many of the old Netscape developers anyway.

(via BBC)

and it’s quite frustrating. I’ve got a million excuses for not remembering to do it. It poses a problem when I know I found a page once before that I’d like to view again. Today I discovered Google Web History. If like me, you have a Google account, (and it’s dead simple to create one) this nifty Google tool will give you a complete run down of the sites you visited, not just in the last week, not just last month but for the whole of this year.

I love Google.