It seems daft to even suggest it, but getting your architecture and navigation right is one of the first steps in defining a website design (or even selecting a bought or free template).  There are many good examples of working navigation out there – and everyone has their favourite, but this article on the Web Designer Depot site shows the subtle art of getting the navigation right.

Twinned with that, heat maps and analytics can show (indeed can prove) navigation and layout tweaks work (or don’t work) well

Does your site work well?

Whilst the full 300Mbps speed will only be available to ‘a minority’ of the people who can get FTTP, the technology will mean that other customers will be able to receive an 80 Mbps service; still twice as fast as the current offering.

“Who’s got the remote?
The answer is “you should all have it”. Giving your staff the ability to work remotely is essential. Have emergency mobile phones, have Skype accounts and set up remote access to emails and/or access to desktops via the internet.”

Read her article here on UKRecruiter

Just taking a look at the past month on the website compared to the same month last year, had 7.5% of its traffic from mobile devices last month.  In the same month for 2010 it was 3.6% – so it’s a significant increase and the trend is most definitely upwards at a very high rate

The advantages of a cut-down mobile version to contractors who would be nervous about using company computers to discreetly seek / apply for jobs are fairly obvious now that the world is becoming full of smart phones.

Registered candidate gets their email alert > Clicks apply on the job from their mobile > much easier, much more discreet.

Mobile Browsing Trend - Year on Year

Firefox & Chrome continue to along their recent trends with the Google browser surely on course to replace FF as the no.2 browser in the near future?

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share

Check out the new BBC Beta site (http://beta.bbc.co.uk/) . It features a horizontal scrolling panel that moves left and right to get to the various options on the site.

It seems to scroll in a very “flick-like” way and also the panels seem to be perfect for the finger pointer!

Is this a sign of design, tipping its hat to the tablet market ?  Or taking a leaf from the Windows 7 interface, which seems to be destined for the desktop PC with the rumours circulating about the window 8 GUI?
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2011/jun11/06-01corporatenews.aspx

It will be of interest to read the user feedback on this once the final version is launched…

Well this morning, I woke up to find my Networked drive not available…

• PC and NAS drive lights on – check
• Computer connection to network – check
• Heart attack – check!

After countless re-boots of the PC and the Router with no joy ,  I started to reconcile myself to losing all those DVDs and Albums I’d ripped for central distribution, hadn’t thought about the  3 years of real data  too!

Then it came to me how complacent I’d been.  I’d bought a NAS drive that had two disks for data redundancy.  Feeling smug & secure, I’d not considered that the unit may fail. What’s the point of making external back-ups, it will be ok!

I’d pondered that question myself recently and armed with the enticement of £100 off I’d ordered a new server to mitigate this exact issue.  Irony is cruel –it arrives TODAY of all days… (stop laughing)

So the moral of this story is very simple really…

Don’t rely solely on your storage device for backing up!

• Get your data onto an external device to cover the device failing
• Make sure the external device is robust
• Data very important?
  Get the external data off-site to guard against a disaster (flooding, fire theft etc.)
• Consider ‘cloud’ based backups like Dropbox, Carbonite, Mozy AS WELL as your onsite backups
• Have an offsite backup policy in case your office burns down or floods
• Have a policy, process, system in place…. Grandfather / Father / Son

Fortunately this story has a happy ending.

I’d remembered my trouble shooting classes and the OSI Layer model (detail not important!) and thought about one last go using a bottom up approach to solving the problem …first layer is physical so I checked the cable and guess what …. turns out that the network cable was faulty!

Probably another moral there too … but that’s for another blog!

It’s been in the labs for a while and now ready to be released into the wild!

Mobile Edition is an add-on to the standard FXRecruiter system. It uses the same jobs and candidate database and you can administer it using FXRecruiter. Jobs posted to your website will automatically be displayed on your mobile site as well.

People visiting an FXRecruiter website from one of the supported smart phone or mobile device will automatically be re-directed to the mobile version of the site, which is designed with the smaller mobile screens in mind.

The home page takes candidates straight to the job search as this is likely to be their primary purpose for visiting the site.

Is this an iPhone app?

No, this is a mobile website which runs in a browser on the device – so no downloads are necessary. It is designed to be ‘finger-friendly’ on devices that have touch screen web browsers. We have designed it to look and function very similarly to a ‘native’ mobile app as this is what users expect and it also makes it simple and intuitive to use.

Visitors to your website who are using a supported mobile device will be automatically re-directed to your mobile site.

Why a mobile website rather than an app?

We decided this way of doing things made most sense for our recruitment company clients. While iPhone apps make complete sense in some markets, we felt having an iPhone app for a recruitment company was unlikely to attract a considerable amount of downloads unless you are a high street brand or job board.

The other benefit is that Mobile Edition not only works on iPhone, it also works on Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile/Phone and some of Nokia’s and Samsung’s platforms too, so has much greater coverage than an iPhone App. If you went the app route, you would also need to build dedicated apps for these devices: this could quickly push budgets out of the comfort zone of most recruitment companies.

Research repeatedly shows the growth in the use of mobile devices to access the internet. The European Interactive Advertising Association tells us that:The reasons for going mobile

• 71 million Europeans browse the mobile internet in a typical week for almost an hour a day
• Mobile internet in now a more frequent pastime than reading a book, magazine or newspaper
• 24% of 16-24 year-olds spend an average of 7.2 hours a week using the mobile internet
• 21% of 25-34 year-olds spend an average of 6.6 hours a week using the mobile internet

Similarly OFCOM reported in August 2010 that:

• 26% of UK mobile users now have Smart Phones
• UK Ownership is up 81 per cent from 7.2 million users in May 2009 to 12.8 million in May 2010
• 23% of the UK’s mobile phone users now use their handsets to access the internet
• Surfing the internet via mobile phones is the fastest growing mobile media activity with 1 million new users during the first quarter of 2010 (taking the total to 13.5 million, compared to 9 million in the first quarter of 2009);
• A fifth (20 per cent) of the time 16-24s spend social networking is on a mobile

Habits are changing, with reports of people browsing the web on iPads, iPhones and laptops while also watching TV as well as when on the go. Android, Blackberry and iPhone sales are still strong and these usage figures are continuing to grow.

In short: if you are a recruiter, your prospective candidates may not be able to access your website during the day from a PC, but many may have a powerful smart phone with high speed internet in their pockets. Registered candidates can also respond instantly when they receive a job alert: helping the candidate and you get the job placed quicker.

The challenges of mobile

One size does not fit all! We worked long and hard to find the best technology to develop Mobile Edition with.  The pace of change in the mobile web development space is very fast and after going back to the drawing board after our first attempt, we finally settled on HTML 5 and advanced Javascript.

Although this has delayed us, we think the re-working was worth it – it provides a rich app-like user experience and interaction, and it also very fast as we have used techniques to shrink the size of the pages. Suffice to say, we are really pleased with the results.  The first client we showed it to simply said “awesome!” — great feedback!

This advanced technology also presents a problem: some older devices do not yet support this technology – and there are still a lot of those devices about.  Not to fear, we also have a more standard version that we automatically display if the browser on the device is not up to date: it’s not quite as slick but still works better than a full size website on these smaller screens.

To do this, we use technology often called “browser sniffing” that detects the type of browser that is visiting the site. That way we can present the most appropriate version of the site.

This ultimately means users will get the best experience that their mobile device or smart phone can provide.

We are heavy iPhone and Android users and feel it’s almost as good as a native app at just a fraction of the cost.

“OK Great I want It!”

If you already have an FXRecruiter website, setting it up is easy!  Our standard Mobile Edition allows you to customise the colours and fonts used; the job search filters and the information pages you want to display.

If you want more advanced customisation then we can work with you to specify and design your mobile site around our standard offering.

If you don’t already have an FXRecruiter, this is another good reason to seriously consider joining our growing portfolio of happy and profitable recruitment website owners!

Our Christmas & New Year Office Hours
Christmas Eve: 9:00am – 16:30pm
Monday 27th December – Closed
Tuesday 28th December – Closed
Wednesday 29th December – 8:30am – 4:30pm
Thursday 30th December – 8:30am – 4:30pm
Friday 31st December – 8:30am – 3:30pm
Monday 3rd January – Closed
Tuesday 4th January – Business as usual