Whether a user is currently travelling, at work, in a meeting, at home, watching TV, or lying in bed will all affect their behaviour, expectation, and current personal objective for using the Internet at a particular time. As Internet users’ behaviour develops the offering to audiences must continue to reflect not only people’s expectations but their browsing environments. Internet connectivity speed, browser device capability and individual situational objectives need to be taken into account if you, the provider of content and utility, are going to achieve your own objective of effective communication and transaction.

Some of these tips are new, whilst some have been around for some time, however changes in technologies or user behaviour have made the latter important in the current climate.

1. Learn three new things about Analytics. Whether you use Google Analytics or another client side statistical analytics system, it’s imperative that either you personally, or whoever reports to you, are including more detail and consideration of new areas of statistical analysis. Mobile activity will probably be included in this but there are other more in depth areas to analyse.

Google Webmaster Tools - Site Perfomance

2. Load times. One of the factors Google uses to influence rank position is page load time. This fact attracts attention but probably a more important issue is to make sure your site is faster than a majority of other sites. After replacing an old site in 2010 and reducing total page content load times from 10+seconds to 2-3seconds, we noticed an immediate increase in direct sales of over 50%. Better navigation, design and usability obviously helped here, but the most obvious change was simply a consistently faster site. It can be difficult to achieve, particularly if a graphic designer without any more advanced digital knowledge gets to design a site without any technical advice or guidance. However, it’s seriously important. Make sure you get the right balance here!

3. Screen size and small screen navigation. Different phones, pads, laptops, notepads, desktops, and monitor sizes will display proportions of any website. Also remember about touch screen navigation which requires larger navigation buttons and clickable menus as opposed to hover-over menus. Borrow an iPad and iPhone as a bare minimum and ideally test at least 5 different screen sizes and aspect ratios.

4. Get your business listed on Google Maps, Google Places and Google Local, at least. The listing costs nothing, and if set up carefully you can really position your business to gain far greater levels of traffic and visitor numbers. Just like valeting a car, you can do this yourself, pay a vacuum cleaning equipped general handyman, or pay a specialist to maximise the results. Remember, the work is normally done only once but your appearance there will last for years. Our advice is to invest very little relative cost in getting this done perfectly.

5. Content is, and will always be, king. For every minute you spend thinking and considering the design and look of your site, spend at least the same on ensuring you have great content. So £1000 on graphic design means at least £1000 on content whether it’s copy or photography and if it’s video content then at least a factor of 3 should be applied.

6. Mobile. Apart from the technical layout and usability of designing a site or multiple sites for mobile devices, try and think what your audience will be looking for whilst using a mobile. If there is a predominant common content set then you may wish to consider a dedicated site with this content at the forefront. For example, a train company will get a lot of mobile visitors looking at live departure and arrival times.

7. Geo-location Social Media placements. This is really simple. If you have premises or a place of work, just register your location using 4Square and Facebook Places at least. There are numerous others available if you like, although the usual advice about quality over quantity prevails. This follows into making sure you monitor, engage, and follow all other advice any good Social Media specialist consultant will keep you informed of.

8.  Google Search Preview. Users now have the option to see a small page preview of your webpage along the side of search results. How enticing does your website look when a smaller screen view of the page appears? This creates another issue for the web designer and should be taken in to consideration.

9. Consider video content seriously. As mentioned quality content not only draws additional direct traffic but also holds people’s attention for longer. This can potentially benefit your natural search engine positioning.

10. Appropriate social media usage. Promoting a Twitter feed, a Facebook page or a content library with your content on will fail if you simply don’t have enough of the right type of content being posted through each of these. It’s very important to ensure you use Social Media feeds appropriately. Again, the highest quality specialist advice you can afford will pay off in the longer term.

We hope you find these useful for reflective purposes. There may be instances where they are not appropriate, but, we feel they should at least be considered for all projects in 2011.

And this perhaps is the crux of the situation with regard to IT projects which are widely regarded as difficult to manage and commonly exceed budgets or fail to achieve the expected objective. The importance of ensuring that the whole project is nailed down to an actual detailed specification may well be the reason why so many IT projects fail.

The fact is that no one has a crystal ball and no end user, project sponsor or stakeholders are actually capable of detailing the project from start to finish in enough detail to ensure that the project actually delivers what it is hoped to achieve. If you were building a house from the ground up, would you be able to know exactly which shades of paint are required in every room, on every door and on every window, before you actually stand inside the room and get a feel for how much light is entering the room and the other colours that you see looking out through the windows? The choice of furniture and carpets all affect the final decision to choose the best colour so how can someone prescribe a detailed specification of absolutely every part of every house before its built? Possibly, although it’s quite a task to expect any non-expert.

IT projects where the end result is relatively abstract, unlike houses, the ability of anyone to accurately predict and specify in absolute detail simply is not possible. This is well recognised by Agile methodology practitioners who break projects down into bite size chunks and allow project sponsors to have choices throughout the project as to exactly what details are required after each iteration. This approach creates freedoms to choose what is and is not needed at various stages of a project importantly allowing budgets to be kept closer to what is needed and not what was predicted to be needed.

At UKNetWeb we have followed both PRINCE2 and Agile Methodologies. During this time we have found it’s quite simple: Agile as a system works and is the right solution for IT projects and those that try and keep everything in control using PRINCE2 end up with less control as the project system prevents any real ability to achieve detailed requirements.

We welcome discussion on such project management issues and are happy to explain more to both current and future clients.

There are only 2 conditions to getting a free ticket:

• Your business must be less than 12months old
• You must be entering at least one of the awards.

If you meet these criteria and would like a ticket please contact Jeni on 01872 555933 or contact Toby directly over Twitter – http://twitter.com/tobyparkins – (The offer is available on a first come, first served basis).

If you are not sure about entering then please do let us know and we can talk through whether we think you have a good chance or not, and how you should go about entering. It’s going to be a great night and we look forward to spending it with some great, new businesses.

After several years of development and implementation UKNetWeb are pleased to announce the launch of their Augeo Ecommerce System.

“No it can’t do that. No it can’t do that. No it can’t do that” is too often heard when discussion about how to improve a website. Augeo is a framework allowing customized functionality to be incorporated into sites according to exact requirements.

A one size fits all approach to displaying products, presenting navigation, optimizing pages for organic search or optimizing Google product feeds simply does not work. To gain greater market share requires businesses to innovate and create bespoke websites designed specifically around their customers needs.

“There are lots of off-the-shelf ecommerce systems available for online shops and many are very suitable for basic shops or start up businesses. Augeo is designed for online businesses that aspire to grow or have already out grown their existing ecommerce shopping systems.”

The launch will occur on 20^th July 2010 at 5000ft above Cornwall in a chartered aeroplane.

“Cornwall is a great place to launch this solution because of its expected European investment in next generation fibre-optic broadband allowing speeds up to 100Mbps. This development is seen as vital for businesses who are aiming as high as we are.” said Toby Parkins, Director of UKNetWeb.

The recruitment follows steady expansion for UKNetWeb which has made a number of appointments over recent months as a result of sustained growth both inside Cornwall and further afield.

Chris Kay-Ayling and Piers Roberts join the company as web application programmers, bringing with them their combined experience of 16 years in the IT sector and 36 years in programming roles.

Piers moves west from a previous position at a National ISP company based in Bodmin and Chris has moved from an in-house programming department within a national level ecommerce company.

Commenting on their appointment, Technical Director John Thornton said “In working with large ecommerce companies it is vitally important to have skilled and experienced staff within the team. The real world knowledge that these two bring to UKNetWeb cannot be underestimated, where a mistake can literally make a difference running to many hundreds of thousands of pounds in company turnover.”

“As a company we are continuously in demand to develop greater numbers of complex ecommerce sites and online shops. Quality and detail are paramount in these site builds to ensure that every client attains the growth rates expected. With these new appointments I am confident that we can continue to meet the demand in this area.”

Managing Director Toby Parkins added, “We regularly see ecommerce clients with businesses growing between 50% and 400% each year. This success does not occur through chance, it requires continued investment in innovation and development of their existing online stores combined with meticulous levels of Search Engine Optimisation.

“This form of web development requires higher standards of programming than many companies can offer due to the difficulties in finding the necessary staff. I am delighted that we have been able to attract such talented programmers as Piers and Chris from within Cornwall” he added.

During the course of the first 2 week period traffic from Facebook.com has increased by around 250% over the previous 2 week period, fan numbers exceeded 800 and Facebook.com has risen to become the second highest (non search engine) referring website.

Facebook currently have in excess of 400million active users and in any 24hr period over 200million users will login. Whilst we would often encourage use of a number of different social media channels, the share of the population and the sheer numbers and that Facebook represents means that it will, for the foreseeable future, be quite a force to be reckoned with.

It is available below for reference.

We are really hoping to find some time to do some again soon. Notifications will occur through the UKNetWeb Facebook page – http://www.facebook.com/uknetweb or via Twitter at @uknetweb or @tobyparkins

The full webinar recording is viewable by clicking below:

Social Media Webinar - UKNetWeb and Tonick Media - Aren Grimshaw presenting

The Social Media for Business Taster Webinar delivered by UKNetWeb with Tonick Media was an outstanding success. This was the first in the series of taster courses to be entirely delivered through a webinar platform following a series of physically located seminars based in St Agnes, Cornwall.

The event was almost entirely marketed digitally with over one third of attendees discovering the course through Twitter. Most attendees were located in Britain and the United States of America although there were attendees from Finland and Canada.

The event was designed to be a small more intermit style of webinar with a target of 20 guests keeping a Social Media Webinar – UKNetWeb and Tonick Media – Aren Grimshaw presenting
more informal and discussional feel. Normally, such webinar events expect to convert 25-35% of registrations to actual attendees. This event actually attracted 25 attendees out of 38 registrations (65.8%).

Audio and screen presentation recordings were made and is available as a video at this address: http://www.uknetweb.com/blog/technology-and-commentary-blog/business/social-media-taster-webinar-recording/

Similarly, the simultaneous chat amongst between attendees was also recorded and is available for review at this address: http://www.uknetweb.com/blog/technology-and-commentary-blog/business/social-media-taster-webinar-chat-recording/

The main presentations are viewable below or on Slideshare:

You can skip sections by using the slider control at the bottom of the video clip.