A Funnelweb World

Today I visited ecommerce expo in London. It was interesting, not only for the presentations on social media but also to see the number of snake oil vendors still operating in the marketplace.

You know, the types of guys who’ll sell you a custom website for £4k (5 pages only, and SEO advice extra, of course) and then charge you a commission on top of it for any sales you make.

It made me think of Hector and how he gets apoplectic every time I tell him how much it costs to service my car, and what they actually do for it. “£xx for an oil change!”  and so on. But he knows a thing or two about cars - don’t most dads??

But cars are as alien to me as the web is to him. If I wasn’t looking after his website, I’m sure he’d think £4k was a bargain.

And therein lies the problem when it comes to these vendors. If you don’t know enough - just enough - about what service they are actually offering, how much work they would do etc, how can you know whether you’re being ripped off or not. How would you know whether you are paying for something that is very difficult, or something that is quite straightforward (and that you could do yourself).

So I thought about how someone could become better informed about the web. Not enough to be a developer but enough to know when you’re being taken for a ride.

In my view, its simple. Make use of all the free tools out there, build yourself a web site and practice using them. For example:

• get yourself a free web editing package (you could even use something like Aptana Studio, which you can download for free) and some cheap web space (e.g. from 1and1 hosting) and create a simple web site. It doesn’t really matter what it’s about. The aim of this is to develop your understanding and confidence of html/xhtml and css.
• If you don’t know much about those “languages”, do the excellent free tutorials on w3cschools first
• Once you’ve created your site, upload it to your web space, and have a cup of tea!

• then, learn about accessibility and web standards by running your site’s live pages through the w3c markup validation service. This is by far the best way to learn about how to debug your html and css pages and make them standards compliant and largely accessible.

• then start exploring the world of plug-ins available for your site, starting with something simple such as a google adsense or an amazon affiliate plugin. (And make some money while you’re at it

• just go to google / amazon, create an account, copy the script they give you and follow their instructions to include it in one of your html pages. This is the simplest way to become familiar with the world of javascript, because what you are basically doing is embedding some javascript into your site

• while you’re at it, include some code from google analytics

By the end of all that, you’ll know a little about how easy it is to build a standards-compliant web site, how easy it is to include plugins into it and also gain some familiarity with “presentation layer” things such as accessibility, analytics, SEO and web marketing.

And at this layer, a simple site isn’t really that much different to how big CMS systems work. They still use css for design layout, they still use html / xhtml for content rendering, they still require metadata to be added to each page (keywords etc, which are important for SEO) and they still use javascript (and sometimes also iframes) for inserting plug-ins and pulling content through etc.

So you’ll also know at a basic level about how CMS systems work at presentation layer level.

(They also use design templates, content wizards, user permissions, application script calls and so on but the fundamentals of css, xhtml and javascript remain.)

You’ll still be a long way from being an expert but hopefully you’ll feel more informed about just how “difficult” some of this web stuff really is.

The web equivalent to being able to change your car’s oil yourself or at least know if you’re being ripped off!

Folksonomies are great. In my view, they provide a richer way of sharing and finding information as you don’t need to understand how the organisational structure for a set of information works in order to do so.

[ For anyone who doesn't know, a folksonomy is a classification (or tagging) system created on the fly by "everyone" as they tag something using terms that they personally associate with the data being tagged. As opposed to a taxonomy, which is typically created in whole up front by a subject matter expert, and then given to people to select from when tagging data. ]

Folksonomies are very web 2.0, and often used on the web wherever there is data to be tagged (flickr, blogs, youtube, LastFM, etc.) And tagging is encouraged, all in the spirit of sharing.

One place where they are used is on del.icio.us - there they are used to tag websites.

OK, so where is this leading you might ask - if you’ve bothered to read this far. Well, here I am, sitting at home waiting to head off to an interview.

I did the usual stuff of googling the organisation concerned, checking out their (awful) web site - yet another which fails validation tests. Then I thought I’d search for them on del.icio.us and see how they’d been tagged by people on the web.

I also searched for some of my previous employers, just out of interest. First, here are the tags that came up for them:

PwC - advertising business internet vc research media online statistics pwc stats

(hmmm, no tags for consultants, accountants or auditors. And “advertising”??)

Next up, Conchango -scrum agile development .net blog design agency blogs methodology

Yep, that all looks quite reasonable.

Now, to the rather large retailer I am off to meet with.

finance money and banking cyprus environment plastic bags

If I was this organisation’s PR department, I’d be scratching my head given the amount of money spent on advertising over the past year or so.

Environment and plastic bags, interesting……….. do they know? Maybe I’ll ask at the interview

Well, since the relaunch a couple of months ago of the main London For Free site, this has been at the top of my list of phase 2 stuff to do. Then last month, there was an excellent article in .Net magazine, describing the basics of making your site mobile.

So finally today, I started creating the mobile version of the site.

Now the fact is, my current site is already accessible via mobile. I’ve checked it on a blackberry and also on my new phone, and it doesn’t look too bad. But it’s not optimised for mobile use.

After all, there’s a load of stuff on there that you probably wouldn’t want to try and read on your mobile. Or can’t view at all even if you did want to - e.g. the YouTube video clip on the home page.

So I did a bit of thinking about the sort of content on london for free that someone on the move might want to see. And I figure that’s basically directions and info for the most popular walks and bus tour, and links showing the locations of landmarks on them. Content they can refer to while they are actually doing the walks or tour.

Then I needed to rethink the current page layouts from a mobile angle. The average mobile screen size is - doh - loads smaller, and anyone who’s tried to navigate around a website on a mobile knows its not easy, so I knew I needed to create narrow content and lots of internal site links that are easy to get to.

And, of course, I had to consider page weight. No one probably gets the promised 3G speeds touted by mobile phone companies, so I needed to provide lots of pages with tiny bits of content, making them quick to download.

Putting it altogether, it meant identifying the most popular walks (via google analytics), chopping their content up into pieces, embedding style info within the xhtml pages (rather than using separate css files), shrinking the image sizes and including lots of nav links.

But using the same London for Free logo to try and retain the relationship with the main site in case anyone wanted to check out the full site on their computer.

Finally, like any good web site, it had to be accessible - so the code had to be totally validated.

Here’s my first attempt. I based it on the templates provided on dev.mobi.

Though the normal W3C Validator works for validating mobile sites, there is a much better alternative called readi.mobi.

It not only validates your mobile pages but it also gives you info like the speed of download to an average mobile, the cost of download in various countries, and crucially screenshots of what the page looks like in different mobile phones. For example, here’s the info they gave me for my mobile index page.

I’ve still got a way to go to get the site fully up and running for mobile - lots of content to modify, for starters. But at least I now know what I need to do.

I’m now officially between jobs and while in one sense I’m a little anxious about entering unfamiliar territory, its also exciting as I have no idea what the future will bring. I’m just going to go with the flow.

And “flowing” it is, as there seem to be lots of good online programme management roles around at the moment and I’m getting a fair bit of interest from agencies in my cv. All really encouraging.

In the past week, I’ve also had several requests for interviews and had the confidence to turn down quite a few, either because they were with organisations I couldn’t see myself working for, or because the location or role wasn’t right.

And I had my first employer interview on Friday. I can only assume it went well because the agency phoned me about my availability for a second one before I’d even got home from it. It’s great location and mind boggling money but not sure if the role is big enough. Need to understand more about it at second interview later this week. Again, encouraging though.

I also found out that I had been shortlisted for a really interesting role in digital media. Fingers crossed for an interview as I reviewed the job spec and have done / can do everything listed on it. But does that make the role not big enough - maybe. It would be something I’d go for, though, as it sounds like loads and loads of work and responsibility to stop me from getting bored, and there are new technologies to get my head around.

Then yesterday I saw “the big role” advertised. A couple of things I might not have done before but feel confident I could do, and for an organisation I’d love to work for, great location too. Tomorrow I’ll be sending off my cv for it and will wait and see.

Things seem to be happening day by day, and its only been a week since I seriously started looking. I just hope it continues.

And while I’m job hunting, I’m also going to develop my skills and use the time to catch up with friends.

This week I’m going to start building the mobile version of London For Free, having sketched out some wireframes for it in Starbucks yesterday. (Yes Gill, I know, I know but I can’t change too much at once).

And I’m also going to continue reading about RIAs and mash ups and working my way through “Here comes everybody”.

But most important of all, I’m going to hold my nerve and try and wait for the right role to come along. I know it will - yep, just got to be patient.

It was only a matter of time, I guess.

Recently I had started to receive spam emails through the web forms dotted around the new site. Thinking back with horror to the time a few years ago when I was receiving thousands of spam messages a day, I knew I had to do something to stop them.

Then I recalled reading about Captcha apps - they generate those images with either words, numbers or letters in them that you sometimes see on the web say when registering for a site, aimed at stopping spambots in their tracks.

A quick search showed loads of apps that required payment. Then I found a free app called Securimage Captcha. And it was a dream to install. Just a few lines of code in each page and formscript.

Hopefully no more spammers for the moment, at least.

After two months, the site is now almost ready to go live. This weekend I’ve been applying the finishing touches to it.

All the content is now done apart from one page which I need to give a bit of thought to - the sitemap for visitors (not to be confused with the xml “sitemap” file that I will need to generate after the site goes live and upload to google for site ranking and analytics).

And I’ve managed to crack the problem of the map polylines not showing in IE7. Seems they don’t like KML format colour codes - no idea what they use but through a lot of trial and error I’ve found some 8 digit codes which work. Thankfully.

Other prep stuff I’ve done this weekend includes checking all internal and external site links and fixing quite a few, adjusting some of the sidebar content to make the site flow a bit better, fine tuning of section widths and changing a few images.

I’ve looked at the google analytics for the site and it seems it gets the least site traffic on Saturdays, so next Saturday will be the day I finally put it live.

Should be fun - and then I can get into doing something else for a change, like reading books on agile project management!

The past few weeks have been a hard slog as I continue to review and re-write where needed, all the content on the site. To be precise, the textual info. But it certainly needed doing.

I’m just now wrapping up the Outdoors section.

One of my workmates suggested I write it for a certain persona ie. thinking about the type of visitor who is going to read it and bearing them in mind as I write. Great tip and it has made it a bit more fun to do.

But I’ll be glad when all the content has been written so I can get back to the fun stuff of doing more coding.

I work with a really talented bunch of people and last week one of them made a great suggestion for my site.

Add a comments section, they said. Perfect.

Er, but how exactly.

After wading through loads of message board plug-ins for things like WordPress and full applications that needed database support, I eventually found a great little PHP Message Board on PhP Junkyard.

It doesn’t require a database, its free and its fully customisable. It even has spam control.
And here it is, embedded into one of my new pages. Doesn’t mean anyone will comment on my walks though