101 Yoga Poses
For yoga lovers 101 Yoga Poses is the ultimate mobile yoga resource. High quality photographs illustrate each pose and the app provides step-by-step instructions. Practice yoga anywhere with your mobile yoga instructor!

Women’s Health downloadable content
Women’s Health has numerous step-by-step workouts on their website that readers can download to their iPhone or Blackberry and do at home or gym. Come on ladies, download these workouts and get in shape for summer!

FitDeck
FitDeck is an application that ‘uses digital cards to guide you through a unique and fun physical fitness program.’ FitDeck includes Pilates exercises and is perfect to use anywhere, whether it is at home or in the gym.

The Strength and Toning Deck
The Strength and Toning Deck app provides iPhone users with 50 easy exercises to achieve a toned and fit appearance and the app allows users to track their progress. Download the Strength and Toning Deck from the iTunes app store.

Now there are no more excuses, with these mobile apps it’s easy to exercise anywhere, anytime.

Through the app users can buy the latest issue of Glamour magazine for $3.99 (an exact replica of the print edition) to read on their mobile device as well as stay up to date with the latest blog posts on the Glamour blog. The app also features exclusive content like extra photos and shopping information and app users can directly purchase items showcased in the magazine. Ladies, lock your credit cards away!

In terms of advertising on the app Glamour made a clever move. Advertisers can not buy space only in the online edition of the magazine, they have to buy advertising space in the print edition too. Through this technique Glamour increased its advertising revenue by 57% (September 2010 compared to September 2009).

Through the interactive features and additional content available exclusively on the app Glamour may build a strong customer base for the app yet a few users have complained about the cost ($3.99) of downloading the magazine each month. The other issue is that at the moment the app is only available for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. What is your opinion, will you buy your favourite magazines online and read it on your mobile device?

Ideally a website’s navigation should aim to enhance visitors’ browsing experience. If visitors are having trouble finding the information they are looking for it is likely that they will click away from your website and find the information elsewhere. The goal is to make your website as user-friendly as possible. Below are a few things you can do to ensure that visitors enjoy an optimal browsing experience.

Name your menu tabs descriptively

Let users know what type of information they can expect to see when they click on a certain menu tab. In other words, once they land on the menu tab page, the information has to be relevant to the tab’s name.

Where are they on the website?

Let users know where they are on your website by highlighting the menu tab they’re currently in.

Include a sitemap

A sitemap in the footer of every page will help visitors to easily navigate your website to find the specific information they are looking for.

Make use of interlinking within your website copy

Provide visitors with easy access to more information on your website by making use of inter-linking within your website copy.

Lastly, avoid drop-down menus. In general drop-down menus are not easy to navigate and therefore not very user-friendly.

TripIt

Need help planning an upcoming trip? TripIt keeps all your travel plans in one spot and allows you to access your travel itinerary anywhere, anytime. You’ll never miss a flight again

Photoshop Mobile

With Photoshop Mobile you don’t have to wait to get to your desktop to edit photos, you can do it directly from your phone. Read more about the app or download it for your iPhone or Android OS smartphone.

Dropbox

This iPhone app allow users to store and access documents, videos and photos in the cloud. The free account offers storage space of up to 2G, if you need more storage space you’ll have to upgrade to the paid-for version. Read more about Dropbox and download the app for easy file sharing when you’re on the go.

JoikuSpot

Available in either a Light or Premium version JoikuSpot turns your 3G smartphone into a wifi hotspot. This is one of my favourite apps and while the free version has limited capabilities it is definitely worthwhile to purchase the Premium version. The app can be used on Symbian or Windows operated mobile phones, download it here.

Gravity

Gravity is arguably the best Symbian Twitter client on the market. Albeit paid-for, I think it is money well spent. The app allow you to upload photos directly to third-party sites like TwitPic or Posterous and you can easily manage multiple Twitter accounts from your phone. The latest version of the app allow you to ‘draft’ and ‘schedule’ tweets – very handy! Download Gravity here.

AccuWeather

AccuWeather comes pre-installed on most smartphones and provides you with access to up-to-date weather forecasts for most of the major cities world-wide.

Nimbuzz

Need all your social networks in one place? With Nimbuzz you easily manage all major IM networks (GTalk, Skype and MSN) and social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, MySpace). Read more about Nimbuzz or download the app.

What is your favourite app and why? Let us know in the comments!

Install Analytics software
As discussed in a previous post, analytics software like Goole Analytics will give you an idea of how people interact with your website. The statistics derived from an Analytics package can be used to improve the overall performance of your website. For instance, analytics data will indicate which page has the highest exit rate. How can that page be improved in order to provide visitors with more information and ideally convert them to a lead?

Update your website’s content to include clear calls-to-action
Do visitors know what you want them to do on each page of the website? Even if you have well-optimised copy, make sure clear calls-to-action are included on each page and continuously monitor the website’s conversion rate to determine which pages can be improved.

Newsletter sign-up button
If you have newsletter, make sure the sign-up button is clearly visible – ideally above the fold with a clear call-to-action.

Search function
Can users search your website for the specific information they are looking for? If not, consider adding search capability to your website.

Contact page
Make sure all the information listed on your contact page is up to date. If you have an online contact form make sure it is working and ensure that whoever is responsible for replying to emails from the contact form is doing it promptly.

Maintaining a website requires an investment of time and the most successful websites are the ones that are updated and tweaked on a continuous basis.

Have you used / are you using Analytics to determine how your website can be improved?

The video below explains how BMW foresee augmented reality changing the way their cars are serviced.

Uses of augmented reality like the above provide real-world benefits and it would be interesting to see how (and if) brands adopt augmented reality to add value for their clients.

*The FormFunction team is tech agnostic and we work with Java, Microsoft .NET and open source