There’s loads of speculation about the impact. People are suggesting you only need optimise your website for the first few letters of a search term now! Nuts.

More interestingly I thought of the following: 1) how server intensive and therefore bad for the environment this is, 2) what will the impact be on advertising (Adwords) and 3) the impact on the levels of insight from analysis.

Most interestingly yesterday when it was being beta’d for a while Google Suggest showed nothing but letters!

Here are my highlights from around the web:

Google Webmaster Central annoucement – stating the potential for increased impressions amongst other things

26 Biggest Winners from Google Instant – SiteVisibility’s early big brand testing to who ranks well for first, second and third letter searches

SEO Lives On Despite Google Instant – thoughts on the impact on the tail of search

Here’s a round-up of SEO community thoughts from ex-colleague Saurav Rimal

You can check the referrer (for the time-being) to test to see if you are getting traffic from Google Instant

Using Google Analytics to segment and filter – test for the impact across channels and between brand and non-brand

…and my favourite: How to turn off Google Instant

What do you think?

Our most recent improvements are in our sprint structures. Improvements are geared towards increased flexibility in the delivery of requirements as inevitably business needs change during development. Always keen to test new processes that benefit creativity, innovation, client servicing, and ultimately a cracking product we are moving towards a new, third way, a natural evolution of previous methodologies, which embraces the benefits of both agile and waterfall methodology, and hopes to deliver none of their failings.

So how are we evolving our methodology?

Sprint Cycle
The sprint cycle in agile development can vary in time length, depending on the size of the team and the nature of the project. At Cubeworks our sprint has been short, lasting only 2 weeks. While this has benefits in terms of continuity and expectations management it can often put unrealistic pressure on the development team to not only complete that cycle but also to ready the demonstration for the client at the end of the sprint (the reality is often that coding continues right up until the client demo which can lead to an unsatisfactory presentation and poor customer satisfaction). Due to the nature of the user stories we work on, it makes 2 weeks a very short sprint to deliver a done and completed list of features.

Processes
It’s no easy thing to shake a magic wand and facilitate this transition overnight. Luckily for Cubeworks we have a more than competent Technical Director in Alan Saikale who, along with Senior Business Analyst Natasha Richards, have drawn up a new process for the team to follow. Here’s an outline:

Development: there are now two distinct functions within the development team, one that we are calling the Swat team, and the other the project development team. The former keep their heads down to the complex coding for delivering new projects, the latter who will deal with live projects and support;

Support and Maintenance: we use an issue tracking system for scheduling tasks within a sprint and Zendesk for ticketing support items. When the tasks are scheduled they are prioritised by the project managers and clients and automatically scheduled into the developers calendars.

To delineate we have settled on tasks that fall in at under 10 hours sitting in the maintenance category. In this case scheduling is automated into a maintenance queue in our issue tracking system.

For the development team the whole ethos of the change is to facilitate 6 important steps to successful project delivery: Stop, Think, Evaluate, Learn, Apply, Iterate.

As this new style cycle allows the development team 3 weeks to complete the sprint we are looking at a different terminology and have settled on a football analogy, calling the new sprint The Game. To ease the transition to the new way Alan & Natasha will become coaches!

All the usual checks and balances that our internal systems and peer reviews provide will still apply to the improved methodology but we are hoping that the longer, deeper engagement within the development phase of the cycle will bring greater rewards in a more efficient way and benefit our projects and our clients.

We can deliver on time and to budget through agile development, and can promise to deliver the ‘must have’ requirements.

What sprint cycle do you use? What issues have you encountered with agile development?

. Agile Development – Manifesto for Agile Software Development
. Waterfall model – Wikipedia definition

To give you a detailed picture of my time so far with Cubeworks I thought it might be best to start at the very beginning and explain how I came to be a Cubeworks intern and why I felt it was of benefit to go for an internship as opposed to looking for my first job within the digital marketing industry since graduating this year. I’m hoping this will give everyone a bit more an insight into me and what I hope to achieve at the end of the six week placement.

The Sussex Internship Programme was how I first came to hear about the internship here at Cubeworks. It seemed ideal as it can be difficult to get a first job in a marketing role and although I have previously completed a six week internship at Mindshare, a media planning company and enjoyed what I did (which was largely a social media role), I wanted to try something different. Having completed my third year at university in which I studied interactive media strategy, I had decided that digital was where I wanted to be. In particular, SEO and digital marketing and even maybe one day working for a creative digital agency.

I was in the fortunate position that after going for three interviews all for similar SEO intern roles, I was offered the chance to work with all three companies. The decision was actually fairly taxing and I am sure family and friends became tired of me because for a few days all I seemed to talk about was weighing up these companies and what they had to offer! It was a tough decision because I guess as much as you do your homework and research into the companies and find out more about the roles, you never know what it’s going to be like until you get there. That’s why a big deciding factor for was the interviews and the feeling and vibe I got from visiting the companies themselves and being able to discuss more in depth what I would being doing for the company and what I would be achieving. Cubeworks stood out because Tim told me all about the re-brand and how he was there to help build more of a digital marketing offering for the company. It seemed liked the most exciting prospect and something that I wanted to be part of.

From being an intern last summer I had a fair understanding of what to expect and what likely job tasks I may be given, which is handy because I think when you first start an internship having never done one before, you have an unrealistic expectation of what day to day work will be like. Remember what it was like transitioning from the cool year six kid, oldest of primary school, to the year seven, secondary school newbie? Well, it’s a little like that. You think everything will easily transfer and that everything you’ve learnt will be valuable when really, in my case, you come from an advertising and marketing education know-it-all to a know-not-so much intern, nonetheless eager to gain experience. I hope that I am transitioning into my role and into the company dynamic well. As I begin to attend meetings and receiving more projects and work tasks, I understand more everyday about how Cubeworks runs and what the client base is like. I enjoy being around the Cubeworkers and Tim, who always seems happy to answer my questions and explain anything from agency lingo to database formatting. I must admit at the first Monday meeting I have no idea why the little ferret-like creature Meerkat was being mentioned so much!

My first week complete, to fill everyone in on what I have been up to, one of the main tasks I have been doing is helping Tim to create SEO audits for clients to help point out what we can improve. These are very handy for client meetings for giving a general overview of things and also great for me knowing that I have contributed to something that helps gain potential new business. I also have been doing some SEO for the Cubeworks site by updating meta descriptions and titles in an effort to make them more highly regarded by search engines. Here are examples of before and after:

As you can see the title is a lot less cluttered and so more visual stimulating and easier to read. The description before only explained what the site contained and didn’t describe what Cubeworks does at all, which is the aim. Firstly, it should be easier for search engines to read as it’s more likely to be relevant to the content on the site and secondly, for potential clients it explains more clearly about what Cubeworks do and the range of clientele. In addition I have created a competitor report that looks at what backlinks they have and what anchor text they are using to gauge what areas of competition there are.  I also looked at likely keyword searches for Cubeworks and what the levels of competition are like there and where we are currently ranking. This should all help when the web site comes to be updated and optimized in the near future.

So I am sure there will be many more questions that I will need answering along the way and I am hoping that as time goes on I can get more and more involved with Cubeworks, particularly as they are at the start of what seems like an interesting journey of defining more closely what the company stands for, expanding an offering in SEO and starting to market and express their core services more effectively as this happens. I feel lucky that I am able to work with Tim as my mentor, as he has already taught me a lot, and glad that Alex has given me the opportunity to work here with the team. I look forward to my future in digital and know that whatever happens in my six weeks time here, I will have learnt valuable skills and have the privilege of adding a reputable and friendly web design company in the busy seaside town of Brighton to my CV.

I’m delighted to announce the launch of the redesigned JISC Collections website!

The team has worked hard on this for 18 months and we’re excited to bring it to everyone’s attention, as it represents some of our finest work to date.

JISC Collections brings a great variety of digital content to the academic market. These resources are now sold in a marketplace that brings publishers and end-users together.

Here’s a brief list of highlights:

• A hugely improved and useable catalogue, with filters and sorting
• A very bespoke basket and checkout process
• Many business processes, invoicing and reporting brought online and integrated
• Customers can now manage their subscriptions and account online
• Categorised news and events and a smarter search
• A very powerful and flexible CMS in EPiServer

This project has certainly provided us with a challenge, but one I think we’ve met brilliantly. Here’s why…

A separate specification phase

Cubeworks were originally asked to document JISC Collections’ requirements and form them into a rigorous specification and invitation to tender.

We interviewed users, exhaustively modelled the organisation’s internal and external systems, described everything in use cases, and then had the pleasure of responding to our own beautifully-written brief.

Great communication

We used a novel approach that saved time and maintained clarity during the exploration phase of the project by getting the Business Analyst and UX expert to develop their initial models physically sat together at a single computer. It was like a tag team.

We ended up with many micro-iterations and the quickest turnaround of mature interactive wireframes I’ve ever seen.

Testing times

We launched the site as a closed beta back in April. Real users were invited to join up, given full account privileges and a set of end-to-end test scenarios to work through.

We received a host of feedback concerning the smaller details – an extra catalogue filter here, a new payment note there, and numerous improvements to labelling and naming conventions which combined to take a good user experience and make it great.

EPiServer

EPiServer was our CMS of choice for such a complex website. JISC Collections were delighted because EPiServer proved to be much more flexible than their old CMS. This is was in part down to the excellent EPiServer Composer module, which allows the client to create their own page layouts in-house; new template creation is probably the most requested maintenance task ever! We also integrated their entire admin system into EPiServer so that they could edit their content, administer their catalogue and manage financial reporting all in one place behind a single login.

Form follows function

In traditional software projects there’s an approach called Big Design Up Front, where the whole solution is thought about, picked apart and agreed to Up Front. The problem is that on complex projects you often don’t know what the whole solution should be Up Front, and can spend more time figuring that out than you would have spent just building it. That’s why we use Agile methodology.

For the first time we fully applied Agile methodologies to the design process. This can be problematic because on an Agile project the solution is changing all the time. It’s a bit like decorating the interior of a house while it’s still being built and assembled – at best it’s hard to maintain overall consistency, at worst it causes large chunks of rework.

Our answer was to focus on getting a quality foundation and structure in place (the HTML – easy to chop and change) and wait until the dust has settled (after prototyping, running tests on business rules, user feedback, validation and accessibility checking) before getting out the decorating gear (Photoshop + CSS).

Here’s an example:

Using an Agile design process saved time and, crucially, meant a better end solution as everyone could focus on how the site should work separate fromwhat it should look like.

We think the result is outstanding. What do you think?

I don’t work in local government, nor am I a social innovator, but I find the subject fascinating as both a citizen and someone who has worked in social media and digital service design for years. These are my reflections on the day.

It’s not about new tools… but gosh they are fascinating

One of my favourite lines for putting social media in context is “it’s not about new tools, it’s about new behaviours” and it featured here from the speakers. Yet in the group discussions afterwards the tools still dominated. Twitter this and Facebook that. Given the imminent public sector budget cuts it strikes me that the conversation really needs to urgently move on from tools and to behaviours.

What needs to happen now? Someone needs to start to put all this stuff in the context of social marketing and behavioural economics. I’m sure someone has. Can they please come to the next event?

Social innowhatnow?

The social innovators who shared what they’d achieved were really inspiring, but again there seemed to be a huge gulf between where they and local government people were at in thinking about social media. A feature of the innovators’ presentations was the impressive diagrams showing the success integration of social media into an overall service to deliver social impact. Great. However, in the group discussion the question that got people most animated was “how can I get my councillor to start tweeting?”

Why was this? My intuition says three reasons: it’s an easier place to start; marcomms people outnumbered service delivery people; and people tend to focus on tactics rather than strategy.

What needs to happen now? A local government technology leap. Skip all the marcomms stuff and start building social innovation and service design capacity on the frontline instead.

Risk, meet Agile. He’s your new friend

Social media brings lots of exciting new risks for local government people to think about, with its magic combination of immediacy, permanency, and ubiquity. Also, the general approach of social innovation tends to conflict with traditional ways of managing risk such as command and control management and policy designed to guarantee certain outcomes.

Some suggested agile methods as a way to manage these risks while keeping the iterative approach needed for solving novel and complex problems. +1 to that. However, as I know from personal experience, this is not an easy sell to procurement officers and finance directors.

As a sidenote to this: given the perceived risks of social media it was surprising how few local councils had a social media policy.

What needs to happen now? A common framework for local government to implement agile methods, including agile contracts with suppliers. A collaborative effort to produce a simple, shareable, social media policy for local government wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

These reflections and suggestions are offered up without the in-depth knowledge of the domain that I’m sure many others attending possess, so please feel free to add, amend or delete.

This article was first posted on my personal blog.

Flash – the good parts

Flash is a plugin that is available for the majority of web browsers on all the popular Operating Systems (Windows, Mac OSX and Linux). It was originally acquired (and rebranded from Futurewaves’ product FutureSplash Animator) by Macromedia in 1996, before they were bought out by Adobe. It was originally intended to be a platform to add animations to websites, but this remit gradually expanded and it is now used to create video and audio players, as well as games. The best aspect of Flash is that once you’ve created your flash file it will display on all devices that have the flash plugin.

Of course that “best aspect” is likely to be the platform’s downfall:

Lack of compatibility in modern browser platforms

With iPad sales having broken the 2 million mark in just 2 months, and a significant rise in iPhone shipments in Q1 2010 even before the iPhone 4 was officially announced on Monday it’s fair to say that Apple’s mobile devices form a not-insignificant portion of the browser market. This is bad news for sites using Flash, as it is not supported on the platform.

I don’t want this post to be another breathless Apple-adoring missive, so let’s take a step back and look at the wider issue. Flash isn’t going to be supported by Apple because it’s not a web standard, and in 2010 the main use cases for Flash can be implemented using web standards such as HTML5 and Javascript. Apple won’t be the last technology creator to turn their backs on proprietary platforms, and there’s absolutely no reason that [insert the big buzz gadget for 2011]  won’t support Flash either. So essentially, you’re setting yourself up to lose visitors by using Flash.

What you can do to replace Flash on your site today

There’s plenty that you can do to replace, or augment, Flash on your website today:

1. Stop using Flash video players and replace them with the HTML <video> tag. You can do this today, and use Flash as “Fallback content” for users in old browsers, guraranteeing you maximum compatibility.
2. Do the same as above with Flash Audio players by replacing them with the <audio> tag
3. Use javascript for animations. There’s a huge amount of knowledge available on the web showing how to use javascript, or javascript platforms such as jQuery to easily add animations and effects to your site without using Flash.

So there’s really no reason for you to not ditch Flash and embrace web standards – your visitors will thank you for it.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

It seems to be the perennial question for clients: should I reveal my budget?

My answer is a most definite YES, and here’s why.

The problem of not revealing your budget

Before I explain why I think this makes complete sense, let me just address an understandable concern. The primary reason I hear for not specifying a budget is that some clients think it will encourage suppliers to just quote that figure. Surprise, surprise, that’s exactly what happens. But that’s a good thing; because by not specifying the budget, you’ll receive widely varying proposals and you’ll be comparing apples with pears.

If you’re buying, let’s say, 50 desks and chairs for your office of a specific make and model, then you can be pretty sure supplier proposals will be directly comparable. So you can buy based on price. Simple.

But if you have 5 proposals for a complex, creative website project ranging from £30,000 to £100,000 – all proposing slightly different services, software and technologies – how can you be sure you’re really getting the best possible value? Quite frankly, you can’t.

Don’t risk eliminating the best suppliers

Let’s extend the above example a little bit further to illustrate the point. Having assessed the five proposals you’ve received, let’s say you decide that you should probably look at the proposals around £100,000 and below. This eliminates two higher-priced suppliers, and leaves you with a shortlist of three.

Let’s deal with the suppliers you’ve eliminated first. Believe it or not, this could be your loss (as well as theirs, obviously). Fine, you can’t afford anything above £100,000 but, had that supplier known your budget,  they could have potentially delivered the best  £50,000 website, so half the price. By not being clear on budget, you could just have eliminated the supplier who would have delivered the highest ROI. Would you rather spend £25,000 and get an ROI of 200% or spend £50,000 and get an ROI of 500%? I know what I’d prefer.

Adjusting the project approach to fit your budget

“How could a supplier halve their costs from £100,000 to £50,000 and still do the project justice?”, you justifiably ask. Primarily, by reducing the amount of time involved (though they might also discount for you) but without compromising quality. This might, for example,  involve setting parameters such as:

• Less design time, but more focussed
• Rather than multiple rounds of prototyping  and usability testing, they could offer one round of guerrilla usability testing, which still makes a big difference.
• Delivering technical requirements more simply or using ready components

This doesn’t mean they are offering a less effective proposal than other suppliers, it just means they are offering an alternative approach to the one they proposed when they didn’t know the budget.

Most importantly though, it means their offering can now be compared to other £50,000 proposals.

Getting a feel for the right budget

If you’re going to set a budget then, naturally, you want to make sure it’s realistic. If you’ve run web projects before then you’ll probably have a fair idea; but if you are new to this game or the project is much bigger than any you’ve run before, just pick up the phone and call a few agencies. They will be able to give you a ball park figure to work with and if you like the sound of them, add them to your shortlist at the same time.

My advice

So, to get the best use of your budget, my advice is:

1)      Speak to a few comparable suppliers to establish a ball park budget

2)      Specify a budget range in your brief or tender document

Have you produced briefs and ITTs? Do you agree with this approach? I’d love to hear your comments.

Image credit: HowardLake on Flickr

An Innaproprtiate Solution to an Irrelevant Problem

Text-only companion sites were de riguer in the 1990s, when the web was a very different beast. The vast majority of us were accessing the net on 56k modems, and most sites were built using HTML tables and/or Adobe’s nascent Flash platform. Then Google started its inexorable rise to ubiquity and publishers (or webmasters, remember them?) started to realize that content was king: quality content was the best way to get to the top of the search results and thus attract more visitors.

Having the main content of your site hidden away in the depths of nested HTML tables wasn’t great, as the signal-to-noise ratio of content to markup was pretty high, so Google ranked pages lower than it ideally should. Having the content of your site hidden away in Flash was awful – your site was effectively invisible to Google and so fell below the radar. A popular solution was to provide a text-only companion site. Easily indexable, it provided focused content and meant for better Search Engine rankings. A much-touted side effect was that the text-only version would be more accessible to users on older browsers, or those with disabilities.

Things have moved on from 10-20 years ago. Skilled web professionals have been using CSS and XHTML to provide accessible sites with a clear separation of content from styling for at least 10 years, which renders text-only sites for SEO utterly pointless. The increase in processing power and adoption of modern browsers has started to make javascript and HTML5 into viable standards-based alternatives to Flash (and Apple’s much-publicised refusal to support the platform on its mobile devices will surely be Flash’s death knell), so again, there’s precious little value in providing a text-only alternative to a Flash site when you could make just the one standards-based site instead.

Accessibility

So that just leaves the accessibility argument. I’m not buying into it. I can’t understand how a text-only site is more readable to a visually-impaired user using screenreader software. On a standards-based website it simply isn’t – the screenreader can understand XHTML and will happily ignore the structural markup. For a visually-impaired user who is still physically looking at your site, tools are avialable within the browser to make text more legible.

Other drawbacks

There’s more reasons to consider, not least of all the problem of maintainability. By keeping a text-only companion site you’re essentially creating the need to administer two sites in tandem. An immediate workaround that springs to mind is to simply automatically strip all the styling from your html site and save it in parallel, but this is fraught with complications, for example copy referring to images or links stating “click here”.

Finally there’s the SEO disadvantages. Google’s algorithms have become much more complex over the years and one technique that it uses now is to determine whether sites are trying to “game” it. It’s very likely that Google will interpret the copious duplication of content on your site as an attempt to score more highly in search results. If it does do this it will penalise your ranking, or even drop you from its index.

I’d love to hear what others think about text-only sites in the comments.

It’s a good length at 2m 25s and the animated style is enjoyable to watch. Best of all it has successfully integrated links to other videos that go into areas of the manifesto in more depth.

What’s most noticeable though is what isn’t there: Gordon Brown, the Labour Party, or any politician at all in fact. It’s manifesto as politician free zone. The thinking is presumably inspired by both the current low opinion of politicians and the chosen medium. I’m much more likely to share the video with friends if it’s unbranded. Smart decision.

The Conservatives have created a launch video too.

They have felt brave enough to stick at least one politician above the virtual parapet: David Cameron. He bookends the video with a well chosen setting that emphasises he’s a regular family man. In  a garden with a seesaw and sporting an open neck shirt, you can almost picture the end-of-the-working-day glass of wine just out of shot.

Again though the message is very much “please don’t think of us as a political party”. Most of the video features ordinary people talking about their hopes and dreams. It’s safe, consistent but perhaps a little long for the web. Unlike the Labour video it doesn’t offer a clear call to action to act or find out more.

Both parties have enabled comments below their videos, which is to be applauded.

Finally on the AV front, the Conservatives have also made their manifesto available in MP3 format so a good tick for accessibility and digital inclusion.

What about the actual documents themselves? Well of course both are available online, and again I give the slight edge to Labour. Both provide PDF versions to download as you’d expect, but only Labour has turned their manifesto into actual web pages made of plain ol’ HTML. Why is this good? Because it makes the content easier to find, reference and share. Got a particular policy you want to share? No problem, it has its own unique URL.

The Conservatives on the other hand have opted for one of those virtual documents where you get to turn the pages with your mouse. I hate these things. Maybe they have a future with the iPad but right now they’re anachronistic and a poor choice for sharing a manifesto online. A shame because I actually think the Conservative manifesto is better presented.

One last honourable mention goes to The Guardian and its annotated Labour manifesto. Browse through the manifesto and you can see commentary from relevant Guardian journalists on selected policies, each with distinct URLs for sharing too. It would have been interesting to see the parties build in something like this themselves but I imagine the risks were considered too great.

This article was first posted on my personal blog, before the Lib Dems published their manifesto and Nick Clegg became everyone’s new favourite politician. So apologies to any Lib Dems for not including you here.

Apple and Google define what the user experience is right now. Apple is all about simplicity and intuitiveness; Google is all about search and the serendipity that comes from their magical algorithms. Apple’s vision is driven by the singular ego of Steve Jobs and the genius of Jonathan Ive; Google’s by the raw power of the masses of data gathered from all our web searches.

What neither of them do is rely on a design by committee, lowest common denominator, let’s copy what our rival is doing approach. Neither should we.