GCD Blog

Is Pay Per Click for you?

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 16:27:13 +0100

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a form of search engine marketing where the advertiser bids to appear on search engine results pages, but only pays when someone clicks their ad. PPC allows you to bypass competition for a spot on the first page of Google results. It is one of the most effective ways of boosting traffic to your website in a short space of time.

PPC is particularly suitable if:

You want to increase your website’s traffic in a short space of time
You want to increase your company’s online exposure in a short space of time
You want to find out which keywords will convert
You want to test different messages and landing paths
You want to attract attention to a specific promotion, product or event

As you can see, PPC can be a fast and effective way of getting attention online. However if your campaign isn’t carefully managed or if it doesn’t lead to conversions, it can be very costly. It’s therefore worth considering hiring a professional to help you set up and/or manage your PPC account.

Because of the costs involved in running a PPC campaign, many companies use it as a short term strategy while they are building their organic traffic with search engine optimisation. SEO and PPC campaigns can work hand in hand to help you enhance your online presence and gain sustainable traffic.

More steps to making your website more search-engine friendly

Thu, 30 May 2013 10:33:24 +0100

In our previous post, we described the steps involved in optimising your website for search engines and users. Today we will discuss how to earn links to your website and how to develop a social media strategy.

Building links

Links to your website from other sites are one of the most important sources of ranking power. To gain good quality links, it’s necessary to promote your content and your product.

The first step in the process is to research websites that may be willing to link to your site. The more authoritative the source, the more ranking power you will gain. So, for example, a link from the BBC or a government website will have a much bigger impact than a link from a personal blog. The next step is to make your target site aware of your product.

The best link building strategy is to produce remarkable content – this will create “natural” (rather than requested) linking and encourage social media sharing.

Social media sharing

Social media sharing is becoming increasingly important in SEO. “Likes” and “Shares” are a form of recommendation, and if a friend or family member recommends a product, people are more likely to pay attention to it. A social media campaign (on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube etc.) can raise awareness of the product in a cost-effective manner.

A strong social media strategy will focus on increasing customer engagement, traffic to your website and conversion rates.

Combined with celever keyword targetting and a well-optimised website, social media and inbound links can help to drive quality traffic to your site.

Next steps to making your website more search-engine friendly

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:44:18 +0100

In our previous blog post, we described the first steps involved in making your website more search engine friendly. Today we will discuss how to use keywords on your website.

Landing page

The landing page is the page that users will click into from a search engine. A good landing page will be optimised for both users and search engines.

Optimising for the user

When planning the content for the web page, the user should be your primary concern. This means that the content contained on the page should be useful and usable. It should be well laid out, free of errors and of a suitable depth and quality.

Optimising for the search engine

There are several things to consider when optimising a landing page for a search engine. These include:

Using the keyword in the page title
Using the keyword in the meta data and on-page headings
Adding keyword alt attributes to images
Writing good copy that includes the keyword and keyword variations
Writing a good page description that will encourage users to click on your listing
Using internal links to relevant pages on your site

Writing SEO copy

SEO copy is web writing that has been optimised for search engines. Some of the features of good SEO copy are:

It contains the relevant keywords but is not “stuffed” with them to the point that it sounds unnatural
It is contained within clean and simple code
Where relevant, it is broken into subsections with optimised subheadings
It is well-researched, well-written and provides useful information for the reader

In the next post, we will look at building links and using social media to futher boost your website traffic.

First steps to making your website more search-engine friendly

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:13:22 +0100

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is an internet marketing strategy that involves improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website via search engines. In general, the more frequently and the higher up a webpage appears in search engine results, the more visitors that page will receive.

Optimising a website for SEO has two main considerations: what users search for and what search engines reward.

Why is SEO important?

A website without visitors is like a shop without customers. And because most websites generate the majority of their traffic through organic search queries, it makes sense to focus on improving your rankings in search engines.

Getting started with SEO

What is a keyword?

In SEO, a keyword is a search query that a user enters into a search engine. Websites and webpages can be optimised for keywords. So, for example, if lots of users are searching for “red top hats”, and you are offering these hats, it makes sense to optimise your website for this keyword so that you are more likely to appear high up in the search results.

How do you choose keywords to optimise for?

There are several factors to consider when choosing target keywords. The main ones are:

Are people searching for this term? There’s little point in optimising your site for “red top hats” if users are actually searching for “crimson high hats”, for example. Search patterns change over time, so it’s important to revaluate your target keywords regularly.
What is the competition like for the keyword? It’s unlikely that your webpage could rank for terms like “hats” because there is a lot of competition for such keywords.
Will the keyword bring in quality traffic? There’s little point in targeting low relevance keywords as this will draw in traffic who aren’t interested in the products.

What should you do with the target keywords?

Once you have selected target keywords, you can begin to optimise the relevant webpages for them. This will be described in the next blog post!

15 SEO quick-wins

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 12:26:43 +0100

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is, arguably, more difficult than ever. Over the last couple of years, Google, Bing and other major search engines have left website owners with few ways to reach healthy search positions other than to produce high-quality, valuable content.

Producing such content takes time, effort and money. However, there are a few quick ways to help you boost your rankings.

Run a survey in your industry to collect data, which can be used for content production. This can be a great way to gain quality links and build your reputation.
Set up Google Authorship on your site or blog and encourage your team to build their Google+ profiles.
Check for local industry events and submit a speaker pitch.
Follow up with contacts through social media, email or face-to-face. By building on-going relationships, you increase your chances of earning links, mentions and guest blog opportunities from industry influencers.
Make your photos available under a Creative Commons License.
Set up Google Alerts for your area of expertise so that when they are mentioned on blogs or forums, you can reply with your opinion (and possibly link to your site).
Run a promotion, competition or discount to get people talking and to get picked up by promo-code sites.
Reply to all comments on your site (blogs, news etc.) to help build relationships.
Ensure your company address is registered with Google+ Local. Add high quality images of your office or shop to help your local listing stand out.
Give journalists or influential bloggers a product they can test in exchange for a review.
Clean up your internal anchor text to avoid over-optimisation penalties.
Clean up any paid, off-topic or over-optimised links.
Optimise page title tags.
Search Google Images for your photos and infographics. Ask for link credits where these are not provided.
Optimise your site for mobile. This can be completed in 30 minutes by using a plugin.

**Image by matt.searles @ Flickr

How to get attention online

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0100

These days, customers have less and less attention to give. This is especially true online, where people are busy doing other things and don’t like to be disrupted. The old models of marketing and advertising are facing huge challenges, as customers increasingly view them as intrusive and annoying.

A solution for some advertisers has been to produce outlandish content in the hope that it goes viral. For example, last year a teaser for Volkswagen featured a pack of dogs barking the Star Wars theme. It garnered 14 million views in two weeks, but didn’t feature any product. Although crazy videos may attract attention, this tactic really amounts to a race to the bottom, with advertisers competing to be more and more outlandish.

A much better way to get attention online is to produce quality content. This may not be as exciting as a viral video, but it could reap long term rewards by helping to establish your brand as a thought leader. Over time customers may come to view your site as a source of authority in your industry – making them more likely to return to your site and complete a transaction.

However it is important not to slip into the trap of creating content “for the sake of it”. Content that distracts customers from their primary intent could get in the way of a successful transaction. The best strategy is to consider the customer as the advertiser – their search is like placing an advertisement. In traditional marketing, brands seek to get attention from the customer. In web marketing, the brand should be giving attention to the customer.

How to find free images for your blog

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0100

More and more businesses are becoming aware of the advantages offered by a regularly updated blog. And one of the simplest ways to make your blog more appealing is to add an image to a post. However simply selecting a photo from Google Images will very likely violate someone’s copyright. Understanding the rights surrounding an image will help keep you safe from legal difficulties.

Fortunately there are lots of images that are freely available to use.

Flickr.com allows users to share, store and search through millions of photos. However do bear in mind that not all of these are freely available to use. Different photographers set the terms, so permissions vary. Visit the Advanced Search page and check ‘Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content’, and any other licence related options you need. When you find a photo you like, look on the right-hand side for a link that says something like “Some rights reserved”, then click for more details on what the photographer allows you to do with the image. Many Creative Commons-licensed images allow you to use them non-commercially, provided you link back to the source.

FreeDigitalPhotos.net has a decent range of professional stock images that are free to use in commercial and non-commercial work. There are some excellent shots, but only the relatively low resolution versions (640 x 480) are free.

The Freerange website is great if you require higher resolution images, but the search function can be a little temperamental. You might need to play around with different keywords in order to return the results that you’re looking for.

Remember, if in doubt about an image, don't use it. Violating someone's copyright can be a costly mistake.

GCD developed GoReport shortlisted for UK wide award

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:18:57 +0100

We’re delighted to announce that our client GoReport has been selected as a finalist for the UK wide 2013 Construction News Awards.

GoReport is a mobile report generation tool for site professionals who carry out site surveys, assessments and reports on a regular basis. The user can generate professionally formatted reports automatically – cutting admin, improving report quality and significantly reducing report delivery time.

GoReport has been shortlisted in the ‘Digital Built Britain’ award category, and is the only Northern Ireland entry to feature on the shortlist.

Conor Moran, GoReport’s Chief Executive, said: “The fact that GoReport has been shortlisted in the ‘Digital Built Britain’ category is an indication that industry professionals recognise the value that the product can deliver… I’m looking forward to the next stage of the process, which will involve Dragon’s Den-style interviews with members of a 53-strong jury. Undoubtedly, this approach has been designed to challenge finalists. However, we believe that GoReport delivers tangible benefits to companies and the judges will appreciate that GoReport’s functionality has been developed to support the requirements of on-site professionals.”

The awards will be held in London on 11 July 2013. We wish all the team at GoReport the very best of luck!

GCD Technologies welcomes Alanna

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 09:12:47 +0000

Last week we were delighted to welcome Alanna to the GCD Technologies team in the role of support engineer.

Alanna has a strong background in the industry, having earned a degree in ICT from the University of Ulster. She comes to us from Prometric, a multinational company that create computer based exams all over the world. She worked with well known clients such as the Road Safety Authority, for whom she created some driver theory tests, and Microsoft Certificates.

Alanna loves new challenges and has a keen interest in PHP and SQL, which she will get plenty of opportunities to work with here at GCD!

Welcome to GCD, Alanna!

The blank slate

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:44:41 +0000

The blank slate is the state of an application without any data. It's the first screen a user sees when they start but it's often the most overlooked part of the design process, ignore it at your peril!

When we design an application we usually fill it with test data, we cram the UI full of perfectly aligned paragraphs, titles of exactly the right number of characters and pixel perfect photos of exactly the right size and aspect ratio. During the development and testing stage of a project it's easy to get overloaded with data. We spend so long testing various types of data and circumstances that it's easy to ignore the fact that during the first run experience the user won't see any of this.

We're becoming more aware of the importance of the blank slate here, it fits the user-centric design ethos we have and gives off the right kind of welcoming tone that we believe is oh so important. We're not the only ones who think so too, 37 signals have been huge advocates of the 'blank slate' and getting started with a new basecamp account is a breeze, the app is laden with helpful signals and hints which help you get started. The best part of their approach is that they show placeholders where the content might go hence reducing the effect the empty page can have.

Apple also have been keenly aware of the first run experience, they've been improving it since the early days of OS X with each release bringing better music and slicker animations.

There's a reason why these folks take this so seriously, failing to consider the first-run UI of an application leaves the user with a dry and emotionless start to their journey. It says to the user "we're waiting for you to do the work here" not "thanks for using our product, let us help you get started". So the next time you're designing a UI strip it back to the bare bones, don't fill it with perfect data and see how it feels on that first load. Is it clear to the user where they should start? Does it feel like it's been well considered or an afterthought? A little time spent working on the blank slate shows that you value the experience of the user and that can only be good, right?

How your brand can make the most of the Facebook News Feed

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:23:45 +0000

Last week, Facebook announced their biggest change to the News Feed in its seven year history. Mark Zuckerberg declared that almost 50% of News Feed content today is made up of photos and visual content. This has led Facebook to design a new, visually focussed News Feed.

This will affect how fans engage with brands on Facebook. In addition to the new design, other changes include Rich Stories, which will display visual content more prominently; Choice of Feeds, which will give users more control over the topics of stories that appear; and better Mobile Consistency, which will make Facebook more natural for mobile devices.

Here are some tips to help your brand make the most of these changes:

Publish more visual content: Rich Photos (combined with Timeline) is set to increase engagement for photos and visuals.
Keep your copy short: Instead of being displayed under an image, captions will now be displayed as overlays on the News Feed.
Focus on shareable content: As users will now be able to limit feeds to only content posted by their friends, it’s important that brands create content that ordinary users of social media will share.
Encourage users to “check in”: The News Feed changes will make check-ins more visible. Brands can gain visibility by encouraging users to check-in through deals and competitions.
Keep growing your Likes: The new News Feed make Likes more prominent. When someone likes your page, a story is created on News Feed that shows your profile and cover photo. It’s therefore also important to choose a good cover photo, as this will be seen by the friends of your new Facebook fan.

Remember, as with any marketing effort, it’s important to measure the impact of your changes. Facebook Insights offers a range of useful metrics for measuring your reach and influence.

The NSCompoundPredicate weightloss diet for controllers

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:28:53 +0000

Anyone who does iOS or Mac development knows the importance of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern within the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks. Put simply, the aim of MVC is to separate your data (the model) from the presentation of the data (the view). This is achieved through the use of an intermediate class (the controller) that is responsible for collecting your data from the model, and passing it to an appropriate view.

In theory this is a great system - your model data is completely self-contained and your view does not need intimate knowledge of the model in order to display it because the controller handles the fetching of the data. Likewise your data does not need to be concerned with how it will be presented - the controller is responsible for taking model data and inserting it into the right places in the view, or views. In practice this separation of concerns has a tendency to break down as the lines between model, view and controller get blurred.

Removing Model Logic from Controllers

While there are a number of places that the theory goes awry, one of the most common is in the link between the model and the controller. The relationship usually starts out fine - the model is simple and the controller can make relatively simple calls to get the model data it needs. With time and increasing model complexity the controller will find itself having to make more carefully considered calls to retrieve specific data objects, and possibly perform filtering on those objects before handing them off to the view.

The action of filtering the model data is what we're focussed on here as we very often use UITableViews in iOS to present a list of items before tapping to view the details of a specific item. In terms of MVC the controller (often a UITableViewController) can ask the model for a list of the items, which it can then provide to the view (the UITableView).

To narrow the focus of the list to items that match specific criteria the controller can either ask that the model only provide a filtered list or it can filter a complete list that is handed to it by the model. We are going to focus on the latter approach in this post, but both approaches are valid and which is used depends on factors that are beyond the scope of this post.

An efficient way of filtering data is to use the -filteredSetUsingPredicate or -filteredArrayUsingPredicate collection methods. Allowing the controller to perform its own filtering of the list can introduce a strong coupling between the controller and the model. Creating a predicate requires intimate knowledge of the model object's properties and how they are interpreted.

Say, for example, your application contained an array of Users that your controller needed to filter in order to produce a list of active users. Right now an active user is defined as one that has logged into your service in the last 2 weeks. To filter the array of users a controller would need to create a predicate such as the following:

NSPredicate *predicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"lastLogin > %@", dateTwoWeeksAgo];
NSArray *activeUsers = [users filteredArrayUsingPredicate:predicate];

The drawback here should be immediately obvious - if the criteria for an active User changes then any controllers that rely on this criteria will need to be updated.

A more manageable alternative is to encapsulate the process for determining an active user into the User model itself. The predicate can be constructed internally and returned to the controller as follows:

NSPredicate *activeUserPredicate = [User activeUserPredicate];
NSArray *activeUsers = [users filterArrayUsingPredicate:activeUsersPredicate];

Compound Predicates

We've established that keeping the predicate logic in the model class is a good way to reduce the dependency between the controller and the model, but what happens when the model changes and the criteria for a predicate becomes more complex? If you followed the previous advice your model can only return a single predicate so one option is adjust the construction of the predicate to accommodate the extra conditional logic. In our User example we want to state that an active user has logged in during the last 2 weeks and has made some sort of minimum contribution:

NSPredicate *complexPredicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:
    @"lastLogin > %@ AND postCount > %@", dateTwoWeeksAgo, minPostCount];

This can be returned to the controller for determining active users as before, but has become less reusable. If we want to reuse the last login check or the post count checks elsewhere it will require duplicate part of this predicate. Worse still, if we change the last login or post count criteria it may require updating multiple predicates.

Fortunately we can obviate this need by utilising the NSCompoundPredicate class. This handy class allows us to construct complex predicates by combining simpler predicates with logical conditions such as AND, OR and NOT. In our case we can use an AND condition as follows:

NSPredicate *lastLoginPredicate = 
    [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"lastLogin > %@", dateTwoWeeksAgo];
NSPredicate *postCountPredicate = 
    [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"postCount > %@", minPostCount];
NSPredicate *activeUsersPredicate = 
    [NSCompoundPredicate andPredicateWithSubpredicates:@[lastLoginPredicate,
                                                         postCountPredicate]];

The lastLoginPredicate and postCountPredicate can now be created as class methods and be re-used throughout the model safe in the knowledge that they can be easily maintained. And because NSCompoundPredicate is a subclass of NSPredicate it can be safely returned for use anywhere that an NSPredicate is expected, allowing simple conditions to be increased in complexity without your calling code needing updated to handle it.

Getting to grips with Git

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 09:47:28 +0000

I sat down to my first interview with GCD Technologies just over a year ago. It was an interesting experience – part interview, part chat, part pummelling for information about Git…

In retrospect it was obvious - I had used Git and they were interested to know what my experience with it had been like. They were heavily invested in Subversion and had been for quite some time, yet they were mighty interested in my opinion of Git. My opinion was simple - Git is a much better fit to the way I worked and I felt it could be the same for GCD.

Branch

Whilst I had used Subversion before I was pleased to start my first day with the news that GCD was intending to trial the use of Git. Even better, the first project in the trial would be my first project with the company so I wasn’t having to re-immerse myself in Subversion for a while yet.

One immediate advantage to adopting Git was that there was no real need to get too worried about server infrastructure. Getting started was as simple as creating a new project in Xcode and ticking the box marked “Create local git repository for this project”. After a few days of local commits we needed to start collaborating so we looked at the options available to us.

As Git is a distributed version control system (DVCS) we considered hosting a repo on a local machine - connecting in via SSH to push and pull commits - but it would have been foolish to overlook the availability of providers such as GitHub, Bitbucket and Beanstalk. While the popularity of GitHub had an obvious appeal, we elected to go with Bitbucket simply because we were able to create free private repositories with multiples users for the trial - something neither GitHub nor Beanstalk provided (and still don’t).

The first few weeks were a somewhat timid affair - we each worked primarily on our master branches, pushing regularly and hoping to avoid collisions. It wasn’t long before we realised that we really weren’t taking advantage of the power that Git’s low-cost branching model offered us. We quickly jumped on the idea of working on feature branches allowing us to start pushing our features up to Bitbucket so that we could keep up with each others’ work. The natural evolution to this was to adopt a pull request-based workflow in order to start performing code reviews.

Pull requests are an extremely compelling feature of services like Bitbucket and GitHub. While code reviewing is a common practice across many version control systems, the combination of integrated commenting systems and readily merged branches have really helped propel the popularity of Git.

The efficacy of the pull request system can also make or break a service. After a few months of working with Bitbucket we hit a limitation - it wasn’t possible to comment on individual lines of code in a pull request. Combined with a few service outages, this caused us to reconsider our decision to go with Bitbucket.

Merge

By this point the trial was deemed to have been successful. Our small team that had started out using Git could regularly be found extolling its virtues to anyone they could corner. Despite the danger of becoming VCS bores we successfully conveyed the key benefits to the rest of the company and it wasn’t long before we had an official GitHub account and were putting our money where our mouths were.

All current projects were migrated over to GitHub and the process of creating feature branches destined to be code reviewed and merged back in by pull request became a standard part of our workflow. We’ve seen immediate benefits from this: our coding is less of a solitary affair and more of a social experience.

People are sharing tips, tricks and advice and it’s fair to say that code quality is improving as a direct result. Bugs are being caught much quicker because we are able to check out code and run it locally for testing. While this could have been done with Subversion, the process of creating a branch and getting it merged back in was seen as a thing to fear. Branch creation and merging in Git has much less stigma attached, and suddenly branching has become the norm instead of the exception.

In some circles its considered that unless your using Git on the command line you simply not doing it right. While it is true that the command line is where Git was born and probably the only place where you can utilise all its features, we found a variety of GUI clients which make a lot of day to day tasks quicker and easier. SmartGit became a quick favourite for Windows users, while those of us running OS X were quick to jump on the excellent Tower client. It has a strange limitation of not being able to display the contents of more than one repository at a time, but the ability to drag and drop branches to perform actions like branching, merging, publishing and pushing make it a refreshing change from having to remember all the command line syntax.

Using a service like GitHub means that we no longer needed to invest as much time and infrastructure in order to maintain a local Subversion repository. This saves development time as the burden of server maintenance was removed. The fact that each project was a separate repository meant that we no longer had a single point of failure - if our Subversion repository was corrupted, everything was halted until we got the backups sorted. Even if a service like GitHub goes down for a while the distributed nature of Git means that we’ve got at least one full copy of any repo in the office that can be shared out if necessary.

Commit

It’s fair to say that we’re now firmly a Git shop. We still have our moments where the power and flexibility catches us out and submodules have taken a little bit of getting used to when moving from Subversion externals. On the whole the process of switching has been fast and successful. Our advice to anyone who is considering moving from an older centralised version control system (like Subversion, Perforce, or CVS) is simple - give Git a trial and you won’t have any regrets - we don’t!

Diving back in

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:28:57 +0000

Like riding a bike? Kind of...

It's been a long time since I've done any iOS development in Objective C. A really long time. When I last looked at it, I wasn't exactly fluent. Things were still a little alien to me. Although I was able to get through the work I had to do ok, some of the concepts, workflows and development patterns were very different to my day-to-day comfort zone in my web development environment. Going on and off a language as and when development requires is no way to learn it, so I’ve set myself a day to get back into the swing of things.

The Big Idea

I’m getting married in the summer. Yay! Really though, this is great. But what else is great is the great amount of organisation needed. Typically there’s the age-old problem of so much to do and so little time. In this industry we rely on lots of tools to keep an eye on progress. You’d probably think there are LOADS of wedding planning apps out there and you’d be right. There are individual apps for specific purposes. Like a checklist of things to do, a countdown to your wedding (yes, really - a whole app), or more useful things like the ability to create your guest list and even sort out your table plan.

What you can’t do is create a guest list, assign guests to invitations and tables, generate PDFs of invitations to be printed, create a gift list, create menu choices, give guests the ability to RSVP, choose their menu choice and view gift list online while seamlessly recording this all for reporting purposes and peace of mind on the day.

The development plan

Ok, so that’s a fairly ambitious plan given what I said at the start of this blog post about my lack of confidence with iOS development. In saying that, I guess some of the more complex things will be offloaded to the server and done in PHP (where I feel much more at home). The PDF generation for example will be done server side. The guest interaction will all be done through a web browser with a simple and responsive UI that will work well on desktop and mobile devices.

However, I want to start with the app. I put some of the “bones” of a web service in place a couple of months back when I was planning this, but I haven’t had time since that to work on it. So for now I want to concentrate on the app. Where to start? Well…

One step back, two steps forward

At the start of the year, I decided to do something drastic. I went back to basics. I subscribed to the Stanford iPhone Development series of lectures on iTunes. I’ve actually seen a few of these before (a couple of years ago), but it’s just been too long. In fairness I was very bored watching the first one and skipped past a fair chunk of it. However, getting on to the second and third one I realised there were some aspects of iOS 6 development that I would never have known about had I not watched these videos. In fairness I’ve not watched many more than the first few, even though there are 9 or so that have been released, but it’s been enough to whet my appetite.

So, a week or two ago I started putting together the core data model for my app and the storyboard of how I saw the basic, initial features working. I’m not worrying about how nice the actual “views” are at all for now, and that’s for a couple of reasons. Firstly, that is not my area of expertise at all – I’m no designer. Secondly, I’m doing it as a matter of principle. I’m going to use it as a test of how well I build this app to the MVC (model-view-controller) development/architecture pattern.

I initially want to build an iPhone app, but I can think of really useful features to do on the iPad too. Table planning for instance would be way, way better on the iPad. Since I don’t have an iPad and I’m initially doing this for my own use, I’ll leave that for now though. The point is, if I do this right and build a really solid table planner model (and to some extent the controller) my new iPad view in the future should be really easy to hook in.

Getting stuck in

So that’s the plan! It’s now half way through the day I’ve set aside to get this properly underway, so I better get moving. Realistically, I’m not going to have this ready to be a product any time soon. What I will have is the start of something I may want to “productise” at some point (probably long after our wedding), but more importantly I’ll have something that will be the starting point of what will hopefully be a long, happy and loving relationship…

… with Xcode.

* Image by tswicegood @ Flickr

The Perfect Project Management Tool - Part 2

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:13:27 +0000

In my previous post on this topic, I asked the question of whether a perfect project management tool exists, that combines all the elements required for managing a project. For us in GCD, this includes:

Document management - storage of spec docs, contracts, change lists, technical documents etc.
Resource management - being able to allocate one or more team members to a project and a set of tasks within that project
Task management - creating, reviewing, closing
Key dates - deadlines, milestones, customer meetings
Budget and time tracking
Bug and issue tracking

Providing all these requirements and more, with a slick and well designed UI, is a tough ask. I had a look at several different tools, but with very specific criteria in mind - I wanted one tool that handled EVERYTHING. I came across some fantastic tools - Mindjet, Smartsheet, Asana and Version One are worthy of a mention. But in the tools I tried, only the following seemed to cover the specific criteria I had.

Zoho Projects (http://www.zoho.com/projects/)

Positives:

Document Management - allows for upload, linkages to google drive or creation through its own document creation software. Documents can be tagged and categorised as required
Project wiki - perfect for keeping all those technical specs, server information, FAQs, common issues etc.
Powerful task management - create milestones, and a task list for meeting that milestone. Set % complete against task. Filter tasks on team member, status or priority.
Powerful bug tracking with customer interaction an option
Comprehensive time tracking with ability to record time ad-hoc or against tasks created

Negatives:

Poor multi-project overview - simply displaying task and milestone overviews
No option for storing project budgets or contingencies
Lack of any form of resource management or project scheduling
Uninspiring UI

As a multi-purpose project management tool, Zoho Projects is very impressive. Although the UI is uninspiring, it is still easy to use and I got up and running with one of my projects very quickly. There are some great features - the wiki element was particularly impressive, a simple idea but executed very well. Also it was great to see a bug tracking module integrate seamlessly with the projects. Overall, Zoho Projects is a very impressive piece of software.

Quickbase (http://quickbase.intuit.com/)

Positives:

Projects home screen that gives a very good overview, per project, of budget spent/remaining, deadlines etc. Statuses can be allocated to a project
Impressive task management - allocate tasks to a project phase, with each phase having a budget allocated to it. Tasks can also optionally have a budget attached. “Predecessors” feature means you can specify, per task, what starting that task relies on
Solid document management - upload a file, categorise it, label it
Tracks time and budget together
Amazingly customisable in terms of what columns to show on each screen
Grid option for all forms, making data entry faster

Negatives:

No resource management beyond allocating tasks to an individual
No bug or issue tracking facility
Uninspiring UI - usability has been sacrificed for customizability

Overall a very impressive system and not a lot in the negative column. The customisation options make it appear that you can make Quickbase into anything you want it to be, essentially giving you access to all the raw data and doing what you like with it. The lack of any form of bug tracking is a disappointment, and I couldn’t see a way to allow your customers to interact with any of the project data. Overall, another strong candidate but as a multifunctional PM tool it probably comes in behind Zoho Projects.

Work Etc (http://www.worketc.com/)

Positives:

Multi-project hierarchy - create a top level project, then multiple sub-projects, then projects within that if required - results in a very powerful multi-project overview
Strong emphasis on budget and time tracking
Support case feature fully integrated into a project or sub-project that could act as a very strong bug-tracking tool
Permissions based system means customers can be included as part of project team with limited access to project data
Seamlessly intergate documents, reminders, events and to-dos into any level of a project

Negatives

Clunky UI - the multi project level means you can get a bit lost and there is a lack of thought gone into speed of entry and re-organising project data across the different screens

The lack of any real negatives outside the clunky UI would present Work Etc as a very strong PM tool - this is true, but the UI is definitely a problem. It may be a case of getting used to it, but in the time I spent trialling Work Etc I found myself constantly losing where I was, lost in a multitude of options and layers. That said, over time you would assume this would become less of a problem and if this was to be the case, then Work Etc comes highly recommended as in terms of features that I was looking for, it was not lacking.

Basecamp (http://basecamp.com/)

Positives:

Fast, intuitive and attractive UI
Impressive task management that included ability to have discussions within a task, including uploading of documents
Text document feature for recording notes at any stage of a project
Flexible document management
Emphasis on collaboration, both within team and with customer

Negatives:

Poor project overview - nothing more than a gateway to access an individual project - stating you have “25 to-dos” or “3 events” is pretty meaningless
No time tracking or budget management
No resource management
No bug tracking

I really liked Basecamp - out of all the tools I trialled it was Basecamp’s interface that impressed me the most - a great example of simplicity and a minimal UI, bringing the information you need in front of you. Adding info was quick and intuitive, and there were some impressive features. However, when measured against my wishlist, Basecamp seemed to fall short in a number of areas. This is not surprising, as it is not designed to be a PM tool for software developers - hence the lack of bug tracking or time tracking against tasks. But the emphasis on collaboration was very impressive, something lacking in both Zoho Projects and Quickbase.

In Conclusion.....

It is clear the market is saturated with a huge amount of PM tools, with a mixture of those that try to do everything and those that do individual jobs very well. There was a feeling in the tools that I tried that when trying to focus on all areas, the UI and user experience suffered - individual tasks were slow to input and organise. Basecamp had far and away the best UI but was lacking in a few key areas that the other systems mentioned here were strong in.

Does a perfect PM tool exist? Maybe - but I haven’t quite found it. Combining the feature set of Work Etc and Zoho Projects with the fluid UI and experience offered in Basecamp would probably do it for me. However, I feel I have only scratched the surface of what is out there, so if you happen to come across a great multifunctional PM tool please get in touch!

The Perfect Project Management Tool - Part 1

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 13:59:45 +0000

Does the perfect project management tool exist? I suppose it depends what you are after, and there is certainly no lack of choice out there - check out http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/project-management-collaboration-tools/

In GCD, we take project management very seriously. Over the past number of years we have been improving and refining our approach, and part of this has been reviewing what tools we are using to help manage projects. We use 2 currently: Harvest and Pivotal Tracker.

Harvest (www.getharvest.com) is a time recording tool that performs its core task very well, allowing you to create any number of projects and tasks within that project, recording time for any task you are working on. The reporting facility too is fantastic, giving us everything we need to review progress on projects from a purely “time spent” perspective. As our business is based purely on time, you can see why it is invaluable to have a tool that accurately records this for us.

Pivotal Tracker (www.pivotaltracker.com) is a tool designed with agile development very much in mind, with user stories, iterations, backlogs, epics and velocity very much the order of the day. It is another great tool, allowing us to keep track of the tasks that make up a project and real visibility of project progress.

Great as these tools are individually, we felt that there was a gap in terms of some other areas of project management that are important to us, such as scheduling, resource management, document management and issue tracking. There are other great tools out there that handle these individual requirements very well, but do you want to be maintaining several separate tools for each aspect of project management? Does a perfect tool exist that combines all of these elements together, but with the an impressive UI and the same level of detail for specific areas offered in the individual tools like Harvest and Pivotal?

In part 2 of this post I will be reporting on my experience trying to find such a tool. Whilst having the right processes in place is important, supporting these processes with the right tool is also important and can go a long way to making projects run smoothly and successfully.

5 Reasons to use HTML5

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:17:25 +0000

On the surface HTML5 looks like the modern day Web 2.0. It’s flaunted on a tonne of new sites with its cool little Superman-type logo along with its funky twin CSS3. So it’s tempting to dismiss it as a passing fad, or a “nice idea” that’ll never really take off.

But it has. It’s everywhere now. And that’s one of the joys of this little thing. You don’t download the update package and run it: it’s ready to use... well some of it anyway.

You see, HTML5 isn’t finished yet and it never will be. It’s a constantly growing and evolving spec that’s based on ideas and suggestions put forward by people: people like you. But first, what is it?

Everybody has heard of HTML (Hypertext markup language). Even casual users have heard of it. To them it’s what you see when you right-click and view source. The clue is in the third letter: Markup. Content on a page needs context, and HTML provides the context, otherwise it’d just be just lines and lines of indistinguishable text. This blog entry, for example, would be even less interesting if it was just one big block of text. But it’s nicely split up into paragraphs and it has a heading at the top. All lovingly marked up by our beloved HTML. <p> tags for paragraphs, <h1> for the title. Simple! That is, for paragraphs and headings.

As the web has evolved, so has how we code it. And one word that keeps cropping up has now bullied its way right to the fore: Semantics. And now, more than ever, content requires markup which is more specific and more reusable - not an easy task! Enter HTML5.

Before, where we had an unordered list to put our navigation into we have <nav>. Seems pretty obvious, but a long time coming. Same with <article>, <header>, <video>, <audio> etc. Though what these mean is still up for discussion. <hgroup> has been in, out, shaken about, and <b> and <i> are back, but with a whole new meaning.

So, why use it? Here are five reasons:

1. Give your webpage more meaning. Maybe it seems like a waste of time to mull over which elements to use if on the browser it doesn’t really look different, but carefully considering markup means your page will be much more searchable, future-proof and accessible. That’s right, don’t forget folk who rely on screen readers and such.

2. Give your website better structure. You should know by now that web design is all about the content: strangely quite often the actual content is considered down the line. HTML5 features elements that will help you to lay out your content in a way that works. Little joys like <article> let you have self-contained chunks of code that make sense even when they’re removed from the rest of the page.

3. Give your content wings. Part of the spec for HTML5 is little things known as Microdata. You might have heard of Microformats and RDFa. But while these used existing technology, Microdata is the Web Standards version. This brings a computer’s understanding of content and a human’s understanding closer together. If, for example, you have an event on the 3rd of March. Sure you can let your friends know, but what about their devices? These prefer something like 2013-03-03. Microdata allows you to use (along with the <time> element) both formats and present the right version to the right person (or thing).

4. Goodbye Flash. Poor old Flash. You used to be cool. But now you’re despised. Did you deserve this? Well, probably. Anyway, time to move on, because HTML5 has now introduced things like <video>! Which lets you play videos right on your browser. Oh, except you need about 3 or 4 formats so you can ensure it works in all browsers and phones. And you might need a Flash fallback for those browsers who still revel in the good old days. Ok, maybe not a great sell, but it will get better. Maybe. In the meantime, YouTube and Vimeo do great little plug-ins that worry about all that stuff for you. Hurray!

5. It’s here, so you may as well make the most of it. And do make the most of it. There is stuff there, that at the moment has very little consequence, but it will - like the <progress> element. There are already some really useful tools, such as Local Storage, Geolocation, and the <canvas> element, that are worth looking at. One of the best things about HTML5 is it doesn’t mess with sites on older browsers. If something doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but it doesn’t break the page: Progressive enhancement.

API Testing with JMeter

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 09:03:40 +0000

Application programming interfaces, or APIs to their friends, have become the cornerstone of software development. While APIs were traditionally a source code-based interface, the ever more pervasive nature of the Web has made Web APIs as prominent as the traditional flavour. Many online services are keen to open up their services via the use of APIs in an attempt to drive an ecosystem around third-party applications.

At the basic level an API is a contract - it is a published means of sending and receiving data between two entities, be they modules within a single binary application or a client and server communicating across a HTTP connection. When an API is published so that clients can be written to use it they need the API to remain consistent.

Testing a Web API

Test-driven development has become an important principle in the creation of software and for good reason. A suite of unit-tests can be run before and after major code changes to verify that existing behaviour is not negatively impacted by a regression. A Web API is no different and needs to be rigorously tested as well. The best way to do so is to make calls against it with a known set of parameters and verify that the results returned are consistent between changes. A good practice would be to set up a continuous integration (CI) server like Jenkins, or Team City. The CI server can detect changes to the codebase and trigger a build, install and test cycle.

The testing can be performed by sending a series of requests to the API and inspecting the results. The testing can be simple - send a request, capture the response and check to see that it matches the expected response. A simple tool like curl could easily be used to do this on a small scale, but once you start ramping up the number of tests - and introduce conditional tests - it will soon become unmanageable. To perform more complex testing of an API you need a tool like JMeter.

JMeter originated from the Apache Foundation as a HTTP load testing tool, but since its inception has matured into a functional and load testing tool for numerous protocols. It is an Open Source project with a plugin-based architecture making it readily extendible if you know your Java. It is useful for performing intricate functional tests, as well as small to medium scale load testing.

Setting up JMeter

JMeter is based around the concept of a Test Plan that contains a series of samplers, assertions and listeners. When you open JMeter for the first time you'll be presented with an empty document containing two nodes in the tree: a test plan, and a Workbench. Your real work will go into the test plan, the Workbench is like a scratchpad for experimenting - but be warned, its contents are not saved when you hit save!

Due to its history as a load test tool, JMeter requires that you perform all of your test work within a thread group. A thread group is a container that allows you to configure parts of your test plan to run both in parallel and consecutively. This is important if you want to stress test your API or test for data integrity across concurrent transactions and can be achieved by increasing the values of the thread group parameters “Number of Threads” and “Loop Count”. If you plan to perform more complex functional tests it is better to keep the parameters at 1 otherwise you may introduce a bottleneck in JMeter and not thoroughly load test your API.

To capture the output of your tests you'll need to insert some sort of listener. You can add a listener to the end of a single thread group to capture the results of just that group, or add at the end of the test plan to capture the results from all test groups. Basic listeners that are good for capturing simple test results include the “View Results Tree” or “View Results in Table” listeners.

Creating Tests

There are two more plugin types that you will need to add to your test plan in order to perform functional testing. The first is a sampler - a sampler is used to make a request, read a log file, anything that takes a sample of data. Once you have a sample of data you need the second type of plugin, an assertion. When you attach an assertion to a sampler, you are performing a test by asserting that some property of the sample data is the same as the value you expect it to be.

To perform a test against a RESTful API you can use a HTTP Request sampler. This sampler can be configured with a wide array of parameters that relates to how it will perform the request. Say, for example, you had a resource that returned data about cars and performing a GET request against http://example.org/cars/1 returns data about the car that has the ID of 1. You would configure the HTTP Request sampler with the key values shown below:

Server Name or IP: example.org
Port: 80
Method: GET
Path: /cars/1

Performing a test on the data returned requires that you add an assertion to the sampler. There are a number of different assertion types and the one you use will often be dependent on the format of the data you are attempting to test. If the data returned by your API is XML you could use an XML Assertion or an XPath Assertion. If you want to check the HTTP response code you can use the Response Assertion.

Unfortunately if the data is JSON - as is often the case with RESTful APIs - there is no specific assertion for that yet, but there is the BSF (Bean Scripting Framework) Assertion as a fallback. The BSF Assertion gives you access to a script processor, the data from the previously run sampler, and the ability to pass parameters to a script. With this knowledge you can write some Javascript that will process the content of the response, and perform tests against it. A sample script for testing the make of the car is shown below:

try {
  eval('var apiResponse = ' + prev.getResponseDataAsString());

  var make_of_car = args[0];

  if (apiResponse) {
    var car = apiResponse;
    if (car.make == make_of_car) {
      prev.setSuccessful(true);
    }
    else {
      prev.setSuccessful(false);
      prev.setResponseMessage("Wrong make of car");
    }
  }
}
catch(e) {
  prev.setSuccessful(false);
  prev.setResponseMessage("Invalid JSON response.");
}

The BSF Assertion plugin contains a basic script editor but can also accept a path to a script on your local filesystem. We recommend using this technique - the scripts are more re-usable if you do, and the built-in script editor is, quite frankly, abysmal!

Test Coverage

The best way to ensure your API is rock solid is to create a suite of tests that exercises every potential end point that your API consumers have access to. Test every operation that can be carried out by your users - for example in a RESTful interface test every step of the Create-Read-Update-Delete sequence. JMeter is a little clunky at times and the UI has some “quirks”, but it is possible to quickly build up a large set of tests to exercise every facet of your API.

Remember though that creating your tests is only the first step. Re-run the tests frequently to ensure that everything continues to function as expected. If any of the code behind your API changes - say to improve performance - the tests should be run to make sure the API behaves exactly as it did before. If you add or remove features to the API you need to ensure your test suite is updated accordingly. In an ideal world your API consumers won't know that you've put in all this effort, but if they did they would thank you for the reliable API that comes from it.

That nagging feeling

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 09:44:21 +0000

Remember the feeling you had in school when you had to answer a difficult question in front of the whole class, the same feeling that you had handing in an important assignment, or what you felt as you handed in that major exam paper? "What if that answer was wrong?" "Did I forget to write that part?" "Will that be good enough to pass?" You start to doubt yourself the moment you realise that someone else is just about to mark, review or critique something you have done. As coders, we experience this on some level every day. Whether it be a quick sanity check or a thorough code review, there's always that nagging at the back of your mind. "Is that the best way to do it?" "Have I missed something?"

Sometimes you have a good run. Maybe the code reviewer has been very pleasant and never made your mistake out to be a big deal. Perhaps it's been a while since something has been flagged as being a problem in a code review. It could even be that you can't remember the last time you were ridiculed by your peers for a rookie mistake. You're getting comfortable and a little complacent. The nagging feeling subsides.

Recently we had been contracted to do some work for a sister company of an existing client. The project was to take part of an existing system, and provide the source code for it to be re-integrated into any pre-existing platform. That all sounds very vague, but it's not the 'what' that's important here, it's the 'who'. There were a lot of eyes on this one. Our colleagues, as usual, were looking on to make sure we were meeting their high standards. Our existing client, who had suggested us for the project, wanted to be seen as having sound judgement by their parent company. The parent company had interest in seeing two departments successfully sharing some systems or platforms that could lead to future cost saving. But most dauntingly was the customer - the party that we were ultimately delivering the system to. That nagging feeling started to come back - there was going to be a lot of people critiquing this project.

As the system we were to build for the customer was going to be delivered as source code, rather than a working website, we needed to approach this project from a different starting point than most. Having being developed over many iterations in the past 12 years Pagelets has been the backbone to all of our web applications, but with this project's need to be standalone we didn't have the luxury of the powerful and flexible tools we usually had available. This standalone system needed to be integrated into an existing website initially, with the possibility of slotting into more at a later stage. With all the prospective websites being different we started out building a very simple mini-framework to handle URL routing, global settings, database connections and templating. This 'from scratch' approach allowed us to focus on the framework being as simple to set up as possible, in any environment, facilitating the customer with the freedom to integrate the code into their own sites however they liked.

Although things were made as easy as possible to set up and get running without modifying any code, the customer still had the entire source right in front of them. They could read through the workings of every part of the system, a fact that I couldn't shift from the back of my mind throughout the duration of the project. That nagging feeling made me very aware of what I was doing. The customer will be reading this code, possibly modifying it at some point in the future. I wanted them to be impressed, not only with the system, but with the code underneath. The code didn't just have to work, it had to flow elegantly from one block to the other. It didn't just have to readable, it had to self explanatory. It didn't just have to be code, it had to be beautiful code, impressive code.

I'm sure as you are reading this you are thinking, "but isn't what all code should be like?" Or "I already write code like this anyway". Well, yes, that's the ideal. All code should be elegant, beautiful, impressive, readable, well-commented, but you know rightly that in the real world it can be hard to keep your code tidy. We all start with the best intentions, but realistically code tidiness is never going to be the number one priority, being superseded, for example, by the need to have a fully working system delivered on time, but you should try not to neglect it completely. Try to bear in mind that you may need to come back to your code at some later stage to make a change or add a feature. Your future self will appreciate all the help remembering the system as they can get.

In the end the project was delivered in a state that we were very pleased with. Not only did we build something to meet their needs, but we delivered them a code base that we were sure would impress the customer's technical team, were they to delve into it. We were proud of our code.

Since finishing the afore-mentioned project we have starting using GitHub to host our main project repositories, and have put major emphasis on Pull Requests in our work-flow. A pull request is a notification to the rest of the project team that a new feature, or change, is ready to be be added into the main code base. This process allows the rest of the team members to look over our recent code and with all additions and changes highlighted, without the existing code getting in the way and stealing focus. The code is now at the mercy of everyone else on the project, and they've been told to not pull any punches. I can definitely say that the nagging feeling occurs a lot more now than ever, but it's the nagging feeling that goes along with our pull request/code review process that makes me more careful with the code I commit and makes me double check all my changes before hitting that green "Submit Pull Request" button.

And although this nagging feeling is accompanied with a certain level of nervousness, I find it hard to see it as a bad thing. If some perceived pressure of possible scrutiny drives you to write code that you'd want others to read and impressed by, then embrace it. Try to allow a couple of extra minutes here and there to tidy something up - you'll find it easier to make any changes you need to make to the same code later on. Pre-emptively write a comment explaining what the block of code you are about to write will do - Not only will you give yourself a reminder of what you need to achieve, but you'll not need to go back add it in later. Take a step back after you finish a task and think to yourself, "Can I submit this for a code review yet?". Let that nagging feeling be your code conscience, coaxing you to write beautiful code. Code you wouldn't worry about someone else reading. Code you can be proud of.

Three GCD clients showcased by Invest NI

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 12:27:46 +0000

We’re very pleased to announce that three of our clients - OMG Software, TaxiZapp and GoReport - will be exhibiting at next week’s Technology at Work event.

This Invest NI event will showcase some of the country’s most innovative technology solutions that help to address real business challenges. It will provide a platform for local entrepreneurs to discuss how Northern Irish businesses can increase their productivity and competitiveness.

OMG Software and GoReport will be two of the thirteen elevator pitches.

The showcase will take place between 8.15am and 4pm on Tuesday 19 February at the Waterfront Hall, Belfast.

GCD Technologies welcomes Pedro

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 09:39:47 +0000

This week we’re delighted to welcome a new member to the GCD team.

Pedro joins us (all the way from Portugal!) as Support Team Leader. He’s been working in the audio visual industry as a Technical and Multimedia Coordinator for over eight years. During this time he was responsible for the company’s multimedia projects, planning and maintaining the IT infrastructure, creating in-house tools on PHP+MySQL, and providing support to his colleagues and end users. His skills in helping out colleagues and getting them out of trouble earned him the nicknames of The Screwdriver and The Fireman. We’re sure these skills will come in handy when working with our clients!

In his spare time, Pedro enjoys watching movies, playing guitar and investigating new codecs, settings and ways to use video technologies.

Welcome to GCD Pedro!

GCD developed Briefed app launches in Belfast

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We’re delighted to announce that one of our recent projects, Briefed, has had its official launch in the Ivory restaurant, Belfast.

The event was well attended by Northern Ireland’s legal community, who were impressed by the app and the difference it could make to their working lives.

Briefed is a case management system designed specifically for barristers. It offers the functionality to handle much of their admin, paperwork and schedule, allowing them to access their case papers from anywhere and make more effective use of their time.

For more information on Briefed, please visit https://briefed.pro/.

Photoshop workflow tips for web design

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 22:04:44 +0000

Photoshop has evolved over time to become the tool of choice for creative professionals working in web design. The last few versions have clearly moved with the tide and introduced features which are tailored for the industry.

I’ve been using Photoshop for web design for the past decade and over that time I’ve tweaked my workflow to help speed up and streamline the most common actions. In this article I’ll share some useful tips with you, including setting up an efficient workspace and getting to grips with keyboard shortcuts.

Your workspace

It goes without saying that more screen real estate is better when working with Photoshop and I would recommend at least a dual monitor setup. That way you can use one monitor for your active document and another for your panels.

When it comes to panels there are a few essential ones that I have visible at all times for quick access...

Layers
Paths
Character and Paragraph
The info panel
Brushes
Colour Swatches

I also find that the tool presets panel is particularly useful, use it to store some of your more common vector shape presets, meaning they’re only a click away when you need them. Just make sure to untick ‘current tool only’ to make sure they’re always visible.

General Settings

There are a few options under the hood that I would enable to make Photoshop more suitable for web design.

Make sure ‘snap to pixels’ is turned on for vector shapes. (Photoshop CS5 and below)
Turn off ‘enable flick panning’ and ‘animated zoom’ - I find this helps with performance otherwise you’re wasting time waiting for an unnecessary animation to finish
Work in pixels and points - set your units to pixels for rulers and points for type and you’ll get a true representation of how the design will appear on screen
Setup actions for doubling and halving the image size - This is particularly useful when it comes to resizing images for retina displays. I also set these actions to keyboard shortcuts to speed up this process further.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Mastering keyboard shortcuts has to be the area where you’ll save most time. These are some crucial ones that I couldn’t live without.

Selecting Tools (pressing SHIFT with these keys cycles through the modifiers)

U - shape tool
V - pointer
M - Marqee selection
T - text

Working with layers

CMD + mouse click to select layers (hold SHIFT to select multiple layers)
CMD + J to copy layers
Set hotkeys for copy layer style and paste layer style, I use F5 and F6
CMD + G to group layers
Set a shortcut to open the layer style panel (Layer > blending options)

Others

Make CMD, SHIFT + S save for web
CTRL + DEL will fill a selection for shape layer with the background colour
Set a shortcut to open the color picker (Under Layer content options, Note: this only works if the layer you are working on is a vector shape)

Other time saving tips

Take control of your windows
when working with multiple windows within Photoshop I find it useful to be able to quickly view all the windows (Window > Arrange > Tile) and then back to a single window (Window > Arrange > Consolidate all to tabs). I set these to a keyboard shortcut which give me more speedy control over my open windows.

Changing the character style of multiple text layers
Select the text layers and change the options in the character panel.

Switching between point and paragraph text
Right click on the text layer and you’ll find the option in the contextual menu that appears.

Change the opacity of a layer by using the number keys.

These are just some of the methods I have developed over the years to help streamline my Photoshop workflow. Hopefully you’ll find them of some use when it comes to your own process.

When, not if

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:08:54 +0000

If you are a fan of high-profile security breaches then 2012 was a bumper year for you. During a particularly fertile period in May and June the breaches came thick and fast, approaching a rate of 1 per week. It would be nice to think that this was an anomaly but the number of security incidents is increasing. As more businesses and services go online, there's a bigger risk that they will be compromised.

Businesses

Suffering a security breach is a major headache for any company regardless of size. When a breach is discovered it must be immediately closed off to the outside world in order to prevent any further losses. A large amount of manpower needs to be spent to determine how the leak occurred, how much information was lost, and if there is any more risk. Closing a site to your customers will result in a direct loss of earnings, but the losses only start there.

When Sony lost the details of 77 million of its PlayStation Network customers in 2011 it lost a whole lot more in the form of its reputation. Customers lost faith in Sony as a company, a place they previously trusted with their personal details and their wallets. The stock markets also lost faith in Sony immediately after the leaks - after all a company that cannot look after its customers is not exactly a sound proposition.

It's not just the act of losing your customers' private data, it is also how you handle the loss. A company that owns up straight away and takes the appropriate actions in plain sight is more likely to retain its customers than one that tries to deny and downplay its problems. When you lose the trust of your customers you should do everything you can to gain that back as soon as possible - complete transparency in the aftermath of a leak is the first step to regaining that trust.

Bear in mind that security leaks are not just for mega-corporations. As smaller businesses go online they often risk their income and their customer trust through a lack of experience and a reliance on off-the-shelf solutions that may be poorly designed or that are not properly maintained. It may be tempting to set up your own online store in five minutes but the sales you might make could be completely offset by damage to your reputation.

End Users

As end-users of websites and online services it is easy for us to be complacent about these security breaches because we rarely feel the effects despite such huge numbers being bandied about. For a long time we either didn't know or didn't care about such leaks because they happened to someone else.

In May this year I emailed the support department of Last.FM to inform them that I was receiving spam email to an address that was used exclusively with their service. They denied there was a problem. In June Last.FM announced that they had a breach that yielded over a million email addresses and passwords. A few weeks earlier a dump of over 6 million passwords from LinkedIn was made available on the web along with tools to check to see if your password was included. Luckily mine wasn't but my wife's password was.

It may seem innocuous - after all what is a little password here, an email address there? Unfortunately many users are complacent about security and use the same login credentials in many places. A breach on one site could lead to your credentials being used to gain access to your account on another site. Even the ability to access your email is enough to allow clever hackers to gain access to many of your other accounts.

This is what happened to tech writer Mat Honan earlier this year - with a bit of clever social engineering his mail account was compromised allowing the hackers to issue password reset requests to a number of his other online services. It made for gripping but harrowing tale that resulted in Mat losing the contents of his computers and a number of online services. He lost every digital photo of his daughter as well as many other irreplaceable personal documents. Consider the potential costs next time you re-use a password when you sign up for a new social media account.

In Your Hands

The lesson to be learned from the mistakes and misfortunes last year is that security breaches are no longer a case of if they are going to happen to you, but when they happen to you. The advantage to thinking this way is that when you are on your guard, the if becomes more likely that then when.

Whether you're an end-user of online services or a business trying to make money online then you need to think about security up front. If you're about to re-use the same login credentials on a website why not look into ways of using a unique password with every service. If you're about to create a new website or online store why not look into getting a professional solution custom-made for you.

Image by marsmet481 @ Flickr

GCD Grand Prix!

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 23:14:57 +0000

There were thrills, spills, spins and even an engine fire at the inaugural GCD Grand Prix held last week at Formula Karting in Newry. Twelve of GCD's finest sidled up to the track for a night of hi-octane speed racing.

Installed as the early favourite (for no reason other than saying "I'm going to win") was Sean Mulvenna, before showing his true colours by announcing "I'm scared" and clocking consistenly the second slowest lap times (for the slowest, look no further than Sean's designer colleage Paul "steady as she goes" Woods).

There was plenty of controversy in the early rounds. Recent second-time-round father and all round nice guy Mo Kelly was cynically rammed off the road by GCD's Managing Director Andrew Gough. "WHAT RULES???" is what an emotional and tearful Mo reportedly heard Mr Gough screaming as he roared away.

Meanwhile, Scott McMurray, who surprised nobody by arriving with his own crash helmet with a camera fixed on top, was trying to convince everybody that the organisers were deliberately slowing his car down. "they do that sometimes" said Scott. As it turned out, they weren't.

After the early heats and knockout rounds we moved to the final which saw the 12 drivers whittled down to 6 for a dozen laps of intense action. Ryan Kilfedder, who only joined GCD within the last six months, sped into an early lead. As he flew round the bend to complete his first lap, the sparks from his kart demonstrated pure speed and determination. However, it soon became clear that the sparks were actually coming from his kart's engine, which was, quite literally, on fire. The ever increasing lead as he completed each lap was simply down to those behind him not wanting to be too close to the impending fireball.

However, Ryan and his kart remained in one piece as he triumphed in first place, the clear winner. "As a relatively new employee of GCD I was desperate to show up my colleagues and impress the bosses" was what Ryan was very careful not to say, although he was almost certainly thinking it, forgetting the number one rule of letting your boss win as he blazed a major trail ahead of Andrew Gough, who limped home in third place. "My kart wasn't right, I would have won if I had a different kart" is what Mr Gough was telling anyone who would listen as he grudgingly accepted his bronze medal.

Overall a great night's craic all round, and what surely must become an annual event!

The Art of Subtraction

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 12:49:29 +0000

More is less. People don’t want lots to do. They do enough already. As web designers this is

important to know, yet it’s most often a losing battle, since it’s much easier to add stuff than take

stuff away on our little websites. I’m a big fan of minimalism but, as you will see, it’s not about

taking the easy route. In fact, it takes bravery, brashness and brutal honesty with one’s self and

it will shake you to your core. Okay, maybe a bit over-dramatic.

Minimalism isn’t the easy option

Forgetting about it as a style (flat colours, white space etc.), minimalism as a concept is not an

easy one to implement. Simply put, it exposes what the essence of an article/page/company is.

As such the content has to be strong enough to stand up for itself. A page has to exist for a very

good reason. A company’s core values need to be valuable enough that they don’t need to be

camouflaged by “features”.

Websites have traditionally been cluttered with stuff. Is it that people are afraid of empty spaces,

or is it that they are embarrassed by the space that’s filled?

Here’s the crux: quality. Quality doesn’t need stuff around it. People don’t really care about

Twitter ‘Follow’s, Facebook ‘Like’s, Google ‘Plus’s; they are only interested in what the page is

actually about - so the page needs to be about something.

If someone does happen to hit a Share button do they want to share the clutter, or do they want

to share the content?

Minimalism isn’t easy. It causes you to challenge the core of what you’re doing. Is there a point

to it? Not having widgets on a page is unthinkable for some companies. But quite often these

companies exist because of gimmicks and unfortunately gimmicks have a short life span.

Keeping a user’s focus

Google surprised people when it launched. It was the alternative to Yahoo. But what an

alternative! Yahoo spoilt us with a catalogue of what it had to offer. It had so much on its

homepage - where to begin? So much choice! And then there was Google. A box. What to do?

Well there was only one thing to do: type something, and boom! Wow!

Google drew the user’s focus to it’s one and only function: searching the web. No category lists,

no widgets, no hit counters, no marquees. Just a logo, a box and a button.

Google are now one of the biggest companies in the world. People loved it because it was so

simple. The search box hid a massively complex underbelly, but the interface was minimalism to

the extreme and even today it’s pretty much the same.

So user focus is important. In fact I would go as far as saying it’s right at the top. The most

common type of feedback is when a client says something like “the Sign-Up box doesn’t

stand out enough”. Quite often this is the case when a page is already cluttered with lots of

things fighting for attention. That’s where the Art of Subtraction comes in. What does this page

REALLY need. And be brutal: this is not clearing out the attic and deciding that everything is of

too much sentimental value to throw out. Forget sentiment. Get the pruning shears out and go

mad!

What you end up with is a page that is more manageable, clearer and from the end user’s point

of view, valuable!

Conclusion

Content is a ruthless king. And as king, everything around it works for it. In these days of

internet on your mobile, fluff and stuff can’t be tolerated. It needs to go. If you strip everything

away and what you’re left with is a bit... pathetic, go and have a long hard think. But if it’s

quality, let it shine.

More is less. People don’t want lots to do. They do enough already. As web designers this is important to know, yet it’s most often a losing battle, since it’s much easier to add stuff than take stuff away on our little websites. I’m a big fan of minimalism but, as you will see, it’s not about taking the easy route. In fact, it takes bravery, brashness and brutal honesty with one’s self and it will shake you to your core. Okay, maybe a bit over-dramatic.

Minimalism isn’t the easy option

Forgetting about it as a style (flat colours, white space etc.), minimalism as a concept is not an easy one to implement. Simply put, it exposes what the essence of an article/page/company is. As such the content has to be strong enough to stand up for itself. A page has to exist for a very good reason. A company’s core values need to be valuable enough that they don’t need to be camouflaged by “features”.

Websites have traditionally been cluttered with stuff. Is it that people are afraid of empty spaces, or is it that they are embarrassed by the space that’s filled?

Here’s the crux: quality. Quality doesn’t need stuff around it. People don’t really care about Twitter ‘Follow’s, Facebook ‘Like’s, Google ‘Plus’s; they are only interested in what the page is actually about - so the page needs to be about something.

If someone does happen to hit a Share button do they want to share the clutter, or do they want to share the content?

Minimalism isn’t easy. It causes you to challenge the core of what you’re doing. Is there a point to it? Not having widgets on a page is unthinkable for some companies. But quite often these companies exist because of gimmicks and unfortunately gimmicks have a short life span.

Keeping a user’s focus

Google surprised people when it launched. It was the alternative to Yahoo. But what an alternative! Yahoo spoiled us with a catalogue of what it had to offer. It had so much on its homepage - where to begin? So much choice! And then there was Google. A box. What to do? Well there was only one thing to do: type something, and boom! Wow!

Google drew the user’s focus to its one and only function: searching the web. No category lists, no widgets, no hit counters, no marquees. Just a logo, a box and a button.

Google are now one of the biggest companies in the world. People loved it because it was so simple. The search box hid a massively complex underbelly, but the interface was minimalism to the extreme and even today it’s pretty much the same.

So user focus is important. In fact I would go as far as saying it’s right at the top. The most common type of feedback is when a client says something like “the Sign-Up box doesn’t stand out enough”. Quite often this is the case when a page is already cluttered with lots of things fighting for attention. That’s where the Art of Subtraction comes in. What does this page REALLY need. And be brutal: this is not clearing out the attic and deciding that everything is of too much sentimental value to throw out. Forget sentiment. Get the pruning shears out and go mad!

What you end up with is a page that is more manageable, clearer and from the end user’s point of view, valuable!

Conclusion

Content is a ruthless king. And as king, everything around it works for it. In these days of internet on your mobile, fluff and stuff can’t be tolerated. It needs to go. If you strip everything away and what you’re left with is a bit... pathetic, go and have a long hard think. But if it’squality, let it shine.

What Facebooks new Graph Search means for businesses

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 11:26:55 +0000

Yesterday Facebook made a “big announcement”: the launch of a new kind of search engine called Graph Search. This function will let users search four categories – people, places, photos and interests.

Zuckerberg described it as the site’s “third pillar”, after Timeline and News Feed. “Graph search is a really big project,” he explained. “Eventually… we want to index all the posts and all of the content on Facebook.”

Facebook will utilise social signals to create a truly social search experience. The goal is to deliver more relevant, more personalised search results. This is similar to what Google tried to achieve with Google+, but because Facebook has a much wider reach, it stands to have a much bigger impact for digital marketing.

Users can search Facebook for businesses that their Facebook friends “like” or have checked into. They can also make social queries such as, “London hotels that friends have been to” or “Italian restaurants that friends like”.

This new functionality could make it easier for people to find your business on Facebook, and it could also play an important role in brand discovery – helping you to connect to new audiences.

In order to take advantage of Facebook search changes, businesses should:

Maintain a strong Facebook page (although you could still get found in search results without a page if your customers or someone else has added your business as a ‘place’).
Review the name, category and information you share in the ‘About’ section. These can all help people to find your business.
Ensure your full address is given so that you will appear when someone is searching for a specific location.
Give your fans a reason to interact with your page.

Although the Search Graph its very early stages and businesses are not likely to notice much impact in the near future, it does have the potential to become a powerful recommendation engine that could change the way people think about search and lure users away from Google.

Image by ramseymohsen @ Flickr

Were hiring! Support Team Leader and Support Engineer wanted

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 11:15:31 +0000

Are you a technical support professional looking for a new challenge? Or a Computer Science graduate eager to get your foot in the door? GCD Technologies is currently seeking talented and motivated support engineers to join our growing company.

The successful candidates will get to work with some of Northern Ireland's best known websites, innovative SaaS platforms and software solutions.

We're looking for people who aren't afraid of a challenge, who can work to their own initiative and who are capable of pushing the boundaries.

Interested? Check out our full list of desired criteria and some insider perspectives on what it's like to work at GCD.

Simple steps to improve usability

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 16:13:22 +0000

We encounter usability, good and bad, pretty much every day of our waking lives and to most of us it passes by without a second thought. Take the humble lightswitch for example: simple in design but offering no clue as to which switch turns on which light. This example of poor usability won’t cause us to rip out the switch and replace it with something more usable, we just put up with it and move on.

On the web, however, things are a little different. The increasing number of alternatives to most websites means that we don’t need to persevere with poor usability - with the click of a mouse we can be off to another site. Poor usability can result in lost sales, bad customer experiences and a negative perception of your brand, but it’s something that can be fixed cheaply and quickly with some simple steps.

What is usability?

Usability, as the name suggests, is simply how easy an interface is to use. Jacob Neilsen, the godfather of usability on the web, distills it into five basic questions...

1. How easy was it for users to complete basic tasks?
2. How quickly did they complete those tasks?
3. Did they remember how to complete them next time round?
4. How did the system handle errors or mistakes from the user?
5. How satisfied are our users on the whole?

Some of these are more easily measured than others but they’re useful questions to have in the back of your mind when designing or developing any project.

Simple steps to improve usability

Unless you have the luxury of a massive budget with a sizeable chunk dedicated to usability it will be the job of the designer or developer to build in good usability practices as they work through the project. If you’re not familiar with Jacob Neilsens 10 usability heuristics or Joshua Bokardo’s principles of user interface design then this would be a good place to start; they outline some specific usability principles that can be applied to any project.

Here at GCD we try to take this learning and compress it into a few steps that work across all our projects whether web, mobile or software.

1. Know your users

It’s vitally important to know who will be using your site or app before you begin to design. Carry out some primary research and try to discover exactly the type of person who’s going to use your product. The next step is to create some basic user personas. Putting together user personas means that you can design for a person rather than an anonymous group and this lets you focus on a user’s goals and needs.

2. Establish Design patterns

When we tackle a design problem we first ask ourselves if an existing design pattern has already been established. For example, placing the site search box in the top right hand corner or sticking with the advisable tap area of 44px on an iOS device. If there is, and we agree with the approach, then usually it’s the best option to go for as the user doesn’t have to relearn anything.

Sometimes we decide that creating something new would be more beneficial, which is fine as long as the user can learn and feel comfortable with it after only one use. Take for example the price picker we developed on propertynews.com. It’s a completely new concept but it’s one that we felt could save the user time and would easily be understood. It turns out that it was such a nice little feature that a competitor decided to copy it!

3. Bake in usability as you go

It can be difficult sometimes to convince a client about the importance of usability. This usually means that little or no budget is dedicated specifically to usability, leaving it up to designers and developers to make it part of the build process. We find that it’s useful to try to promote a culture of usability and help everyone get to grips with some of the basic principles. It helps to have an enforcer though, someone who can uphold the highest standards in usability and oversee the output.

4. Continually test and gather feedback from real users

There ain’t nothing like the real thing and that’s especially true when it comes to user testing. Having real users evaluate your site doesn’t have to be costly either: testing with only 5 representative users is recommended to catch the majority of usability problems on your site. An increasing amount of user testing services are popping up all the time. Sites like usertesting.com, usabilla and intuition hq offer services to help get valuable feedback from users.

We often find that being engrossed daily in a four month project can muddy your thinking a little and watching real people use your site or app can be a refreshing (or soul destroying!) experience.

Conclusion

There’s no one fits all method for improving usability, it’s a way of thinking, a philosophy that should be embedded into the way we design and develop stuff for the web. Maybe the study of usability on the web doesn’t seem as important as in some of the more established design industries, like engineering or architecture, but as we move deeper into an age where we rely more and more on the little computers we carry in our pockets the usability of the sites and apps on these devices will start to make a difference to our lives. It’s up to us as designers to make sure this difference is a positive one.

5 New Years Resolutions to improve your search engine rankings

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 12:45:47 +0000

Want to boost your site’s traffic in 2013? Here are five New Year’s resolutions to help improve your search engine rankings…

1. Target the right keywords – Many website owners are targeting the keywords that they think their customers are looking for rather than the keywords that the average user actually does search for. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. It’s therefore important to dedicate time to researching keyword options, competition and traffic volume.

2. Produce great content – Traditional link building campaigns are no longer sufficient to build website authority. If you want to drive qualified, profitable traffic to your website, you’ll need to produce high-quality, shareable content. In this way you’ll earn a natural link profile that’s future-proof.

3. Stop caring so much about Google – Your starting point should always be your audience, not Google. Research your audience, pay attention to audience feedback and social media comments, identify their problems and offer a solution. If you know your audience better than your competitors, you’ll produce better content than them, and you’ll be rewarded by strong rankings.

4. Eliminate duplicate content on your site – One of the easiest and most effective things you can do to improve your search engine rankings is to eliminate duplicate content on your website. This can be content repeated on your own site and content copied or duplicated from another site (for example, a manufacturer’s product description).

5. Make the most of Google's free tools: Google Trends, Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Analytics are all completely free and can give you invaluable insights into your website, your target audience and your market.

Remember that it takes long-term effort to reach the top of rankings and stay there, so don’t expect to see permanent results by the end of January. However with a little time, patience and work, you should start to see improvements in your search engine rankings.

What's it like to work at GCD Technologies?

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 15:13:04 +0000

So you’re wondering whether or not you should apply for the Software Developer jobs at GCD. Maybe if someone who has been at GCD for a few months could let you know what it’s like... Well I’m going to do just that. I’ve been with GCD since the summer, so I think I’m in a good position to do so.

Within the first couple of weeks I was put to work on a very exciting project called “Briefed” – a system to allow barristers to manage their work and the business side of their job. I worked on this alongside my Project Manager, Al. This was exactly the sort of challenge I moved to GCD for, so that was good. A great thing about working on this project was the fact that developer feedback was welcomed.

This brings me to something that I think is really really positive about working for GCD. The Directors and Project Managers are also software developers. This means they have an understanding of the work that you’re doing. They understand why it’s bad if you don’t get a reasonable amount of time on something fairly involved. Equally they understand if you need to get away from a project for a moment.

I’ve also contributed to the Property News Site Admin / Property News Web Edge Projects. These systems will allow Property News and the Estate Agents around Northern Ireland to keep the Property News site up to date with the latest homes to buy and rent.

Football

In my old work, there used to be a weekly game of football amongst some of the staff. I enjoyed this immensely, so whenever I arrived in GCD and there wasn’t a weekly game, I organised one. We sometimes struggle a bit to get enough players and we often have to rely on ringers, so you’ll be welcomed with open arms onto the football pitch if you get a job here. It really doesn’t matter how good you are, it’s just a bit of fun.

Lunch

Maybe football isn’t your thing. If you prefer a video game, then you’ll prefer lunch times. Bizarrely this is taken more seriously than the football. Well, it’s bizarre to me, but then I’m not really a gamer.

Get involved

One of the great things about working at GCD is that you will have opportunities to do more than just work on the projects that you are assigned. That could mean writing something for the GCD blog, improving the core PHP libraries we all use or even showing us something impressive in a tech talk. The job is what you make of it, so if you get it, make the most of it. Learn new stuff and show us new stuff.

Stretch yourself

Whenever GCD say they would like their employees to be “language agnostic”, that is because they mean it. This means that there are opportunities to work on a platform or with a language that you’ve never worked in before, if you learn it. I’m currently learning how to program for Android. The good thing is that once I’m up to standard the company will have a use for that newly acquired skill.

The Commute

I can only tell you what the commute is like from Belfast - so here's what I've discovered:

The Lagan Tow-Path is a great cycle during the summer months.
Working in Lisburn and living in Belfast is much better than working in Belfast and living in Lisburn from a commute point of view. The Hillhall Road is a nice relaxing drive during the winter, unless it's flooded or something. Then it's bad.

In short, if you want to learn new skills, work on interesting projects and have fun doing it, then let us know!

Getting to MAMP quickly (Part 2)

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 15:06:23 +0000

In the previous post we looked at the process of getting MySQL installed on our OS X development machines through the Homebrew package management system. Apache is installed by default on new Macs so to get all the way to a MAMP development environment we just need to enable PHP (and give it a few extra treats by way of Homebrew for good measure).

Activating PHP

Apple don’t enable PHP by default on OS X so you will need to edit your Apache configuration file (located at /etc/apache/httpd.conf) - you’ll need admin permission so make sure your user has access via sudo. In the httpd.conf file you should search for the following line:

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Remove the comment from the start of the line so that it looks like this:

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Save the changes and create a php.ini file from the sample file supplied with OS X:

$ sudo cp /etc/php.ini.default /etc/php.ini

You can now start Apache using:

$ sudo apachectl restart

Browse to localhost and you should be presented with the default page for Apache on OS X. To test that PHP is enabled correctly you should replace the default page with a page containing a short PHP script:

$ cd /Library/WebServer
$ sudo chmod g+w Documents/
$ cd Documents
$ sudo cp index.html.en index.html.en.backup
$ sudo mv index.html.en index.php
$ sudo chmod a+w index.php
$ sudo echo "<?php phpinfo() ?>" > index.php

Return to your browser and refresh localhost - if all went well you should see the output of the phpinfo() command. This is enough to get started with PHP on OS X, but here at GCD we like to be able to use xdebug in order to be able to step into our code on occasion. OS X does provide an older copy of xdebug (version 2.1.3 with a build date of 2009) so to grab a more recent version we look to an external source in the form of Homebrew. We also rely on mcrypt to provide some cryptographic support for our products so we need to get hold of the PHP module for it also.

Installing PHP modules

In the previous post we used Homebrew to install MySQL and we will use it again to get our extra PHP modules. The modules we are looking for are php53-xdebug and php53-mcrypt and they are actually part of an additional feature of Homebrew known as taps. These are external repositories provided by Homebrew contributors (in this case Jose Gonzalez). We can find out more by executing a search command:

$ brew search xdebug

This will return a number of matches but the one we’re really interested in is josegonzalez/php/php53-xdebug (as the installed PHP is version 5.3). The long path indicates the tap that the package lives in so we can pull in that tap (and it’s dependency dupes) using:

$ brew tap josegonzalez/php
$ brew tap homebrew/dupes

We can now install php53-xdebug using the following command:

$ brew install php53-xdebug --without-homebrew-php

This will start the process of downloading the php53-xdebug package. Crucially it will also grab all of it’s dependencies taking the responsibility for satisfying these out of our hands. Once it has completed building it just needs to be referenced from the php.ini file as follows:

zend_extension="/usr/local/Cellar/php53-xdebug/2.2.1/xdebug.so"

If you need other modules it is worth checking Jose Gonzalez’s GitHub repository to ensure that he hasn’t already done the hard work. He not only provides PHP modules for PHP 5.3 and 5.4, but he also provides the core PHP modules for Apache if you need an alternative to the default supplied with OS X.

Similarly we can install php53-mcrypt using the following command:

$ brew install php53-mcrypt --without-homebrew-php

To utilise mcrypt you should just need to add the extension to your /etc/php.ini file

extension="/usr/local/Cellar/php53-mcrypt/5.3.18/mcrypt.so"

Restart Apache and check the phpinfo() output at localhost:

$ sudo apachectl restart

If you see xdebug and mcrypt support support mentioned, then you’re now fully MAMPed!

Getting to MAMP quickly (Part 1)

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 10:20:58 +0000

Here at GCD we have traditionally deployed our web solutions on a LAMP stack, yet we have never really embraced the idea of using Linux-based development environments. We primarily used Windows-based machines running WAMP in order to do our development but in the last year an increasing number of our developers have been migrating to Mac OS X, facilitated by the foresight of choosing Apple hardware as our development platform.

There are all-in-one solutions (such as the MAMP product) that we could use to provide our development stack but fortunately a default installation of Mac OS X comes with Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.3 so there are just a few extra steps needed to get MySQL installed and PHP running. In this post we’ll look at how to get MySQL installed, and we’ll revisit PHP next time around.

Setting up Homebrew

There are various ways to get software onto a Mac, but a good approach here is to use the Homebrew package management system - a third-party system for installing UNIX tools. Installation is a matter of downloading and executing a Ruby script in one step:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"

This script installs the Homebrew library and tools into /usr/local and also performs some extra steps such as making the directory group writable. Make sure to follow the instructions afterwards and execute brew doctor so that Homebrew can check it has everything it needs to compile and install packages.

Note: that it is important that you perform these operations as a user with admin privileges on OS X.

The software provided by Homebrew is usually supplied as source code rather than compiled binaries so it is important that a recent version of the Xcode Command Line Tools has been installed on the machine. These can be obtained as a directly installable package from the Apple Developer site - you need to have an Apple ID to do so and you will need to agree to some developer related Terms and Conditions but you don’t need to sign up to any paid-for developer programs. Once installed the Command Line Tools provides you with the requisite tools to build the software provided by Homebrew.

MySQL

We use MySQL a lot, and it is very useful to be able to quickly install a version on our Macs to test against. Homebrew makes it extremely simple to get a freshly compiled MySQL onto your Mac and (almost) ready to use. To start the process off simply execute the following Homebrew command:

$ brew install mysql

After install you’ll need to set it up as per the instructions presented by the Homebrew formula. For a first install you need to get your tables set up:

$ unset TMPDIR
$ mysql_install_db --verbose --user=`whoami` --basedir="$(brew --prefix mysql)" --datadir=/usr/local/var/mysql --tmpdir=/tmp

You can start MySQL using the following command:

$ /usr/local/bin/mysql.server start

Once started you should secure your installation by running the following command:

$ /usr/local/opt/mysql/bin/mysql_secure_installation

This will prompt you to perform actions like set a root user password for MySQL, restrict root login access to localhost, and remove the test databases. This isn’t essential but it is a good practice that we strongly endorse.

If you want MySQL to start automatically when OS X boots then the Homebrew version comes with a convenient LaunchAgent script that can be set up as follows:

$ mkdir -p ~/Library/LaunchAgents
$ sed 's/mike/mkelly/' < /usr/local/Cellar/mysql/5.5.27/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist \ 
    > ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist

The sed operation will update the default username of “mike” to “mkelly” - you should use your own username of course. The final step is to activate the service:

$ launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist

MySQL should now be up and running and you’re at MAM with only P to go!

A how-to guide for advertising on Facebook

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 12:29:21 +0000

Last month, the number of Facebook users worldwide hit the one billion mark. This in itself presents a massive opportunity for advertisers to reach their customer base. What’s more, advertising on Facebook allows companies to engage with people who are most likely to be interested in their business.

Facebook Ads target audiences using the information people share on their profiles. Advertisers can target broad demographic and geographic preferences, they can target users with specific likes and interests, or they can target users with specific education and career profiles.

In addition, if a friend of the user has liked the page, the user will see their friend’s name in the ad. This social element gives Facebook Ads the potential to be very powerful – a user is 68% more likely to remember the ad if they see a friend’s name on it.

Ads are made up of a title (a maximum of 25 characters), ad body text (a maximum of 135 characters), a destination URL (the web address the ad to links to) and an image. Advertisers can then set a campaign budget and ad schedule to control the costs and delivery of the ad. There are two different bidding options for Facebook Ads: Cost Per Click (CPC), where advertisers pay when someone clicks their ad; and Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM), where advertisers pay based on the number of people who view the ad. CPC is the better option for advertisers who want to drive a specific action, while CPM is the better option for advertisers who want to raise awareness among their target audience.

Once the campaign is launched, advertisers can track its performance through Facebook Ads Manager. This shows metrics such as the number of clicks an ad has received, the number of times the ad has been shown to a user, the click-through-rate for the ad and the average cost per click.

Here are some tips for success for Facebook Ads:

The first step is to identify your goals. This will determine your cost structure, target audience and content of the ad. Common objectives are the promotion of a brand, raising awareness of a special offer or increasing the number of sales on a website.
Keep your ad copy short and to the point – a compelling image is often the best way of attracting attention.
Your ad can either direct to a landing page on your website or a Facebook fan page. If your goal is to drive sales or generate leads, directing the ad to a campaign-specific landing page on your site is often the more effective option.
Segment your target audience carefully. With the right targeting, you can ensure that the people who see your ad are highly qualified. This helps you to get the most out of your advertising budget.

Finally, make the most of the metrics on campaign performance available in Ads Manager. This information can help you to tweak your copy, swap the image, adjust your bids and determine which ads work best for which audiences.

*Image by Kenya Allmond @ Flickr

GCD Technologies welcomes Mark

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 11:01:05 +0000

This week we’re delighted to welcome Mark Goody to the GCD Technologies team as a mobile and web developer.

Mark has a very strong background in the industry, having been bending computers to his will from the age of nine.

Outside of work, Mark is kept busy by his two small boys. He says: “I'm learning that parenting seems to consist of a series of narrowly avoided disasters! When they're asleep, I'll either be playing with computers again, or on the sofa with a semi-trashy genre novel.”

His expertise will be a real asset to our development team and we’re very happy to have him on board.

Welcome to GCD, Mark!

Our client nijobfinder scoops top industry award

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 13:48:05 +0000

GCD developed nijobfinder has been awarded the Best Regional Job Board in the UK at Wednesday night’s NORA awards.

The NORAs are hotly contested awards that seek to recognise the very best in online recruitment. This year, they received over 164,000 nominations.

Regional recruitment websites have seen phenomenal growth in recent years and nijobfinder beat off stiff competition from finalists like s1jobs.com and justlondonjobs.co.uk. nijobfinder has gone from strength to strength over the past three years and delivers in excess of 300,000 job applications per month.

10 ways to earn links to your website

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 16:42:00 +0000

Links to your website are an important source of search engine authority. If high quality, relevant websites link to yours, search engines will judge that your website has something valuable to offer. Here are ten ways to earn links to your site…

1. Become a guest blogger: Writing high quality, relevant guest posts for a high quality, relevant blog can increase your visibility among your target audience. Many blogs allow guest bloggers to include a link in their byline or in the post itself.

2. Create strong social media profiles: While links on social media sites do not pass on direct link authority, they can be a great source of traffic and of reaching new audiences.

3. Run competitions and events: Competitions and events tend to attract attention and publicity, and therefore can be a great way of building your company’s reputation and link profile.

4. Ego bait: Writing an article about a popular company or industry professional can be a great way to reach out to them and gain a link or two. Ask them to read a draft to see if they have anything to add. By establishing a relationship, you’ll increase your chances of gaining a link.

5. Interview influential bloggers: Publishing a strong interview with an influential blogger can generate high quality links when the blogger mentions it and their audience reads and shares it.

6. Create amazing content: Whether it’s an article, video, meme or infographic, if you can create something awesome that no one else has created, and if you can promote that content correctly, you could gain dozens of high quality links.

7. Share your site's address as much as possible: Use your web address in your email signature, social media platforms, business cards etc. The more eyeballs on your site, the more chances that you’ll gain a link.

8. Leave insightful comments on relevant articles: A well written comment can help to build a relationship with bloggers and industry professionals. Don’t be spammy and drop your link in with every comment – establish your reputation, then link when relevant.

9. Give something away for free: A free ebook or whitepaper, or a free plugin is a great way of attracting links.

10. Keep an eye on your competition: Check out your competitors’ link data to see who is linking to them and whether they could also be linking to you. This is a good way of uncovering missing link opportunities.

When building links, remember quality is more important than quantity. Google will penalise spammy and unnatural links, so it’s important to earn links rather than pay or barter for them.

*Image by rubybgold @ Flickr

Dealing with genuine negative reviews

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 18:04:08 +0000

Online negative reviews can hurt. No matter how much attention you pay to quality or customer service, the chances are that once in a while you’ll receive a negative customer review. So it’s important to have a good plan in place to deal with them.

1. Monitor your online reputation. It pays to monitor what’s being said about you. As well as checking social media channels, you can set up Google Alerts on your company name.

2. Assume that urgent action needs taken. Never ignore a bad review. Bad publicity can take a long time to disappear on its own, so engage with the reviewer as soon as possible. This will also send the message to your customers that you care about their opinions and are paying attention to what they say.

3. Acknowledge the problem. Even if you disagree with what the reviewer has said, the chances are that it contains at least a kernel of truth. Show them that you understand the issue and the reason that they are upset. Make your apology sound sincere.

4. Offer an explanation. Explain any mitigating circumstances that might help to placate the reviewer and reassure readers.

5. Offer a solution. If the case has not been resolved, try to come to a satisfactory solution with the reviewer. This may involve contacting them directly if it’s not appropriate to discuss the solution on a public site.

6. Thank the reviewer for their feedback. It’s hard to be too upset with someone who says thank you.

Responding to negative reviews can be difficult, but if you engage with the reviewer and handle the situation in a fair and professional manner, it can be a good way of learning from your customers and managing your brand identity and reputation.

Dealing with false negative reviews

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 11:10:46 +0000

Websites that offer reviews, such as Google and Yelp, can be a great source of information for potential buyers. Businesses that earn positive reviews can often find new customers through these channels. However they can also be open to abuse. Because anyone can leave a review, competitors or pranksters can leave false negative reviews that could very well damage your business.

If someone has left a false negative review about your business, there are a number of steps you can take…

Contact the site that the review was posted on and ask them to remove it. If you have any evidence that the claims are untrue, send it. UK defamation laws exist to protect people and businesses from being injured by lies.
Hosts of the site will not give out information on their users. However as soon as they receive notice of a defamatory review, they must take it down or assume the same responsibility as the review poster. This means that you don’t have to trace the person who left the review in order to have it removed or seek damages.
You can post a “Notice and take down” response to the review on the website, so that people reading the review will see that you have disputed its claims.
You can also make a less formal response to the review. In some cases, you may decide that it is better to apologise and suggest a resolution than it is to claim that the poster of the review was dishonest. This may seem unfair but it may be less harmful to your brand if you don’t have solid proof that the review is untrue.
Unless you have concrete evidence that the review is false, plus proof that the review has been damaging to your business, it is unlikely that a formal case against the site or the review poster will be successful. However sites will generally remove a potentially defamatory review as soon as a genuine claim of defamation has been made. If you do wish to pursue legal action, remember that there is a one year time limit within which the claim must be brought.

There are a number of different routes you can pursue to deal with false negative reviews. The most successful (and least risky) route is usually to contact the site admin to see if they are willing to remove it, and if they’re not, to formulate a response to post alongside the review. However if the review has been particularly damaging to your business, you may wish to pursue legal redress.

Getting more from your online content

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 10:14:26 +0100

Generating high quality, original content is time consuming. However the rewards can be substantial. By recycling your content, you can get more from your research and your time. Here are a few ideas for different content opportunities…

Whitepapers: The purpose of a whitepaper is to present original research as a foundation for decision making. It may be composed of industry reports, consultations, surveys or studies. A whitepaper shouldn’t be a sales pitch but can help your company and your team gain a reputation for being experts in your industry. In this way, it can be a strong promotion tool and one that can help get your brand name recognised by new audiences.

Blog posts: The research for one whitepaper could fill numerous blog posts – the key is to find a number of different angles. These blog posts could be hosted on your own site or submitted to other sites as high quality guest posts. This is a great way of gaining valuable links to your website from other sites. Blogging is also a good way to promote the original whitepaper.

Webinars: A webinar can allow your company to present its findings to people anywhere in the world without the expense of hosting or travelling to attend a conference. Webinars generally take the format of presenting research and allowing for feedback and questions. They usually last for an hour or so and can be a great way of collecting the contact information of interested parties.

Social media: Interesting statistics tend to do very well on social media. The findings from your research could be summarised, or interesting parts could be isolated, to make for great, shareable social media content.

Infographics: Infographics are visual representations of content. They tend to be hugely shareable and, with the right promotion, can be picked up by authoritative sites who are willing to link back to your site. This can give you a significant boost in search engine rankings and spread your message to new audiences.

By making smart use of research and repurposing it in a number of different forms of content, you can get maximum value for your investment.

*Image by Aivar Ruukel @ Flickr

What will the iPad mini mean for your app?

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 12:38:17 +0100

The iPad mini, a downsized Apple tablet, will go on sale at the start of next month.

However many businesses with an iPad app are concerned about how their app will look on the downsized iPad. After all, many apps are designed to look best on a particular screen size and resolution.

Apple’s website states: “If it’s made for the iPad, it’s made for the iPad mini.” All apps developed for the iPad will work on the smaller tablet and will be presented in full screen – on a 7.9 inch display – and with the same resolution as the iPad 2 (1024 x 768). Because the iPad mini maintains the same aspect ratio as the iPad, no updates are necessary. iPad mini apps will simply be shrunk down versions of regular iPad apps.

According to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, shrunk down buttons will be approximately the same size as buttons of the iPhone, so usability shouldn’t be a problem.

The lower price (£269 for 16GB) and increased portability will appeal to a wider audience and encourage people to carry their iPads with them more often, creating some exciting new opportunities for market expansion. For example, the lower price may appeal to a younger audience and the increased portability may result in more people using iPad apps on the go.

*Image by sam_churchill @ Flickr

GCD developed GoReport wins IBM SmartCamp award

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:19:26 +0100

We’re delighted to announce that our client GoReport has scooped the IBM SmartCamp Derry award.

GoReport is a pioneering solution for mobile report generation, allowing professionals to gather qualitative and quantitative data on-site and generate a fully formatted report in minutes.

Last night’s ceremony recognised some of Northern Ireland’s smartest start-ups, with investors, industry experts and business experts teaming up to offer mentoring and judge the competition.

The next step is the IBM SmartCamp European final in Berlin next month. We wish the very best of luck to Conor and the GoReport team!

How Google Tag Manager could benefit your site

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 11:30:52 +0100

Google recently launched a new feature for digital marketing: Tag Manager. This allows marketers to add or remove tags used for marketing and analytics without the need to change website code.

Many marketing tools (including conversion tracking and web analytics) depend on adding tags to your website. These are snippets of code that need to be incorporated into the site. However because each of these tags is connected to different third party services, they can slow your site down. It can also be time consuming for the IT department to add new tags.

Google Tag Manager consolidates website tags into a single snippet of code and allows you to manage them from a web interface. This gives marketers the flexibility to add and update tags without rewriting the site code. It also helps to speed up website load times.

It’s possible to launch new tags with just a few clicks. Supported tags include AdWords, Google Analytics, DoubleClick, GDN Remarketing, custom image tags and custom HTML tags. Google will be adding templates for non-Google tags in the near future, including AB testing tags.

Google Tag Manager is free and can be accessed at http://www.google.com/tagmanager/. To get started, you’ll need to know what tags you currently have on your site. Once signed up, you’ll be asked to create a container. A container holds all the tags for a website, and a container snippet is provided for each container. Copy and paste this snippet on to every page of the site, then use the web interface to add, edit and delete tags.

Some of the features include asynchronous tag loading for faster load times, tag templates for ease of use, and error prevention tools for debugging and making sure that tags won’t break your site.

Google’s upcoming tag vendor programme could be another interesting development as it would allow third party systems to be easily integrated into the sites of non-technical users. Tag Manager could soon become a “must have” for digital marketers.

Getting your ecommerce site ready for Christmas

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 15:48:40 +0100

The fourth quarter is the busiest for most ecommerce sites, which makes planning your marketing efforts in the run up to Christmas very important. Here are some top tips for getting your ecommerce site ready for Christmas…

Gift vouchers – Offering gift vouchers (usually in the form of gift codes) can be a great way to convert shoppers who are just browsing. Buying for others can be tough, especially if the gift-buyer isn’t familiar with your products. A gift voucher option can help you to avoid losing their custom if they’re feeling overwhelmed or can’t find exactly what they’re looking for.

Offer a range of shipping options – Ensure that customers are in no doubt about Christmas post deadlines. The Royal Mail website has a list of last shipping dates to different locations. There will always be shoppers who leave gift buying until the very last minute, so consider special delivery options for anyone who’s missed the regular cut off dates.

Run promotions – Now’s the time to run promotions, such as free shipping, discounts and buy one get one free offers. At this time of the year everyone is looking for a bargain, and some clever promotions could bring a spike of visitors to your site.

Bolster your marketing campaigns – Get your digital marketing campaigns prepared ahead of schedule. SEO, link building and content marketing can take several months to kick in. If you want to advertise for Christmas, begin your campaigns as soon as possible.

Gift wrapping – Offering a gift wrapping service can be a real selling point in the run up to Christmas. Several major retailers offer gift wrapping services free of charge at this time of the year. This can help to increase your visibility and set you apart from competitors. However a paid gift wrapping service can also help to boost your profits, and you’ll probably find that customers are willing to pay for convenience.

Gift ideas – Bundling products into gift ideas can make a great “window display” for your website, and inspire browsers to make that purchase. You might, for example, arrange products into categories like gifts for her, gifts for him, stocking fillers, toys etc. Flowcharts and quizzes can also help to channel uncertain shoppers towards conversions.

In addition to these measures, the lead up to Christmas is a good time to ensure that your site is running smoothly and showcasing your products as best as possible. For example, now is a good time to consider:

Are the photos high enough quality and are there enough of them?
What percentage of shoppers are abandoning their carts and what could be the reason for this?
Is your SSL certificate up to date?
Are there any unnecessary barriers to purchasing (such as sign ins or registrations)?

*Image by jcoterhals @ Flickr

How content marketing can help your business

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 15:51:12 +0100

Traditional marketing methods centred on developing a marketing message and then bringing it to the target audience through advertising, direct mail, email marketing and other outbound tactics. However content marketing drives your audience to you. It’s about creating and distributing relevant and valuable content that will engage the target audience and drive profitable customer action.

Content marketing is a non-interruptive form of marketing and one that communicates to a potential customer base without selling to them. Instead of pitching products or services, the content marketer positions themselves as an authority in their industry.

It’s being used successfully by some of the world’s largest companies, such as P&G, Cisco Systems and Microsoft. And many small companies have got in on the act too, developing thought leadership in competitive industries ahead of larger rivals.

But why would a company choose content marketing above traditional marketing? It’s because consumers have largely turned off to traditional marketing. They’re filtering out junk email, fast-forwarding through TV advertisements and using the internet to find the services they need rather than waiting for the services to come to them.

Smart marketers are therefore looking for a way to attract customers to them, and content marketing is one of the best tactics for building trust, loyalty and brand awareness.

However, as with all marketing campaigns, content marketing will only be a success if the content itself is consistently high value. This can be time consuming, but it also tends to be cheaper than creating and running a traditional advertising campaign.

There are other benefits of content marketing too – such as attracting links to your website from other websites. This can help your site to rank better on Google and other search engines. And the more high quality content on your website, the more potential customers you’ll attract through these search engines.

Image by Gavin Llewellyn @ Flickr

Product Descriptions: 7 mistakes youre probably making

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 15:54:15 +0100

Few product descriptions sell the product as well as they could. All too often, online merchants copy a manufacturer’s product description and think that it will be sufficient. However they’re rarely the only ones copying and pasting this description, and that means that there are likely dozens of retail sites describing the same product in the same way. To stand out from the crowd, online retailers need to avoid these common mistakes…

1. Not making the description unique: As we’ve already stated, one of the most common mistakes in ecommerce is relying on the manufacturer’s description. Google may penalise sites that copy product descriptions from competitors or that use the exact descriptions provided by suppliers. Unique content adds value for the buyer and means that your site is more likely to rank well in Google. Encouraging comments and reviews from customers is also a great (and cheap!) way of adding valuable, unique content to the product description page.

2. Making it all about specifications: Specifications are important. The customer needs to know sizes, numbers, materials and technical details. But few customers buy a product for its specifications – they buy a product for what it can help them to accomplish. Whether you’re selling shoes, sofas or software, you need to sell the benefits and focus on what the product will do for the buyer.

3. Not knowing your customers: The best product descriptions are the ones that are written with a specific niche in mind. Are your customers young, old, male or female? Are they professionals or students, budget shoppers or luxury shoppers? Understanding your target audience will help you to relate the product to their needs.

4. Not thinking about keywords or links: A few well-chosen keywords and relevant internal links peppered through the product description should help you to rank better in search engines, and is a great way to cross-promote other products or product categories that you think buyers will be interested in.

5. Using jargon: When you’re dealing with products every day, you’re probably going to pick up some jargon and industry terms. Always make sure that product descriptions use commonly understood language and that they’re intelligible to people outside your company and industry.

6. Being unnecessarily verbose: You’ve probably come across product descriptions that use empty words like “state of the art”, “cutting edge”, “exciting” etc. Cut out clichés and unnecessary adjectives and make each of the words in the product description count – your customers’ time is short, after all.

7. Not being pragmatic: If your site has thousands of product descriptions that you haven’t given much thought to, writing new copy for each one probably seems like an insurmountable task. A more realistic strategy would be to identify the products that are of highest value to you (the best sellers or the ones with the highest margins, for example), and work through a prioritised list. As daunting as the task of writing unique product descriptions may seem, it can be done.

No good deed goes unnoticed on social media

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 09:32:30 +0100

In the last few weeks, an act of kindness by an American café chain has generated a huge response on social media.

The story goes like this: Brandon Cook from New Hampshire was visiting his terminally ill grandmother in hospital. She told him that she really wanted soup, but not the ordinary soup that the hospital served – a bowl of her favourite clam chowder from Panera. The problem was that the chowder is served only on Fridays.

Brandon posted on his Facebook wall: “…I called the manager Sue and told them the situation. I wasn’t looking for anything special just a bowl of clam chowder. Without hesitation she said absolutely she would make her some clam chowder. When I went to pick it up they wound up giving me a box of cookies as well. It’s not that big of a deal to most, but to my grandma it really meant a lot. I really want to thank Sue and the rest of the staff from Panera in Nashua NH for making my grandmother happy. Thank you so much!”

Brandon’s mother shared the story on Panera’s Facebook page, and so far the post has generated more than 850,000 likes and 35,000 comments. The lesson is that good deeds often do get noticed, and in some cases they can generate significant attention for a company. Genuine acts of kindness have the potential to do far more for a company than a marketer or social media strategist can.

Panera aren’t the only ones giving something back to society. Many companies have been able to advance goodwill while building impressive businesses. For example:

The Body Shop is regarded as a pioneer of corporate social responsibility and publishes regular reports on its efforts in causes such as human rights, animal rights and environmental protection.
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, founders of Ben & Jerry’s, also founded the Business for Social Responsibility organisation and donate 7.5% of all their pre-tax profits to charity.
Starbucks created CAFE practices to help them achieve quality, economic accountability, social responsibility and environmental leadership.

Whether large acts of corporate responsibility or small gestures of kindness, good deeds can send out big signals about who a brand is, what they care about and why people should want to affiliate with them.

*Image by Samantha Celera @ Flickr

Does email marketing still work?

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 08:46:09 +0100

In the last few years, search engine optimisation, display advertising and social media have become prominent strands of digital marketing, and this has led many in the industry to wonder whether email marketing can still compete when it comes to return on investment.

Social media in particular has opened new routes for companies to communicate messages, interact with their customers and generate brand awareness. However measuring ROI can be difficult, because fans and followers are generally less valuable than contacts on a targeted email database. Email marketing remains one of the most measurable and straightforward methods of achieving a goal or conversion.

If email marketing has fallen out of favour at your organisation, here are five reasons to reconsider.

1. Email marketing can be highly targeted: By implementing proper data collection, such as asking subscribers a few important pieces of information upon signing up, you can create highly targeted, segmented email lists that allow you to send the right message to the right people at the right time. It’s possible to customise each message with dynamic content, so for example you could send different messages to people who have previously made a purchase and those who are new to your site.

2. Email subscribers are committed: People who subscribe to your newsletter are not only interested in your products or services, but committed. Signing up for an email newsletter or alerts requires a higher degree of commitment than “liking” or “following” an organisation. When someone takes the time to subscribe to your email list, they are ready to hear more about what you have to offer.

3. Email newsletter content can be repurposed: Publishing your email newsletter on your website can give its search engine rankings a boost. Content can also be repurposed as a blog, whitepaper or social media updates. And vice versa: content from your blog and social media can feed your newsletter.

4. Email marketing can build customer relationships: An email newsletter can be an effective way to build a relationship with customers and prospective customers, providing them with useful content no matter what stage of the buying cycle they are in. Newsletters are a soft approach that still remind the subscribers of your presence and your value.

5. Different people are reached through different channels: Not all of your customer base will have or use social media. For some, email will be the first choice for communications from you. By using a range of different communications channels, you’ll be able to reach a wider audience.

*Image by RambergMediaImages @ Flickr

The value of having a mobile version of your website

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 08:35:31 +0100

About half of the UK population own a smartphone, and smartphone owners spend an average of 25 minutes per day surfing the internet. This is a trend that website owners can no longer afford to ignore. Here are some of the top reasons for investing in a mobile version of your website:

Brand visibility: By making your website and its content more accessible to mobile users, you will be increasing your brand visibility and the chances that the growing number of mobile visitors will visit your site, make a transaction on your site or share its contents.

Load times: Consumers expect your website to load just as fast on their phone as it does on their PC. The majority of mobile visitors will be browsing your site over the 3G data network, which means that loading a full website can take a long time. A slimmed down, mobile optimised site will help to reduce load times and user frustration.

Design: Modern mobile browsers on iOS and Android can display full desktop sites, but they can look strange and be hard to navigate on a mobile device. A mobile specific design provides a user-friendly experience for visitors with a small screen size.

Competition: A mobile version of your website can give you the edge over your competition. If your competitor doesn’t have a mobile friendly site, customers could get frustrated by text that’s too small to read and buttons that are too small to click, and come to you instead.

Enagagement: A mobile website can engage with users with mobile-specific features, such as mapping functions and click-to-call. A mobile site can also improve your visibility through location-aware technology that will find your site when users are in the geographic proximity.

Cost effective: Because mobile websites are universal to all modern smartphone browsers, they are more cost effective that mobile apps, which often require different versions for different platforms. On the other hand, some functions are better suited to an app format – but having a mobile optimised website is a good first step towards a strong mobile presence.

If you’d like to learn more about developing a mobile-friendly website, please contact us to discuss your needs.

*Image by BASF @ Flickr

5 ways to humanise a brand

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 11:19:34 +0100

The most successful brands are often those that interact in a human, authentic way. People do business with people they know and trust, and many brands elicit personal feelings from their customers beyond the usual transactional relationship.

Here are five ways to humanise your brand…

1. Use social platforms to interact with customers. Whatever business you are in, the chances are that your customers are on Facebook and/or Twitter. Social media provides a great channel for reaching out, having conversations and establishing relationships with customers and potential customers. Engaging with people in this way is a great way of building reputation and trust.

2. Use your About Us page effectively. All too often, About Us pages are filled with dry, lifeless copy that portrays the business as a faceless corporation. Use the page to tell people who you really are, what you do, and why you think it will be interesting to them. It’s also a great opportunity to show off your values as a company.

3. Use a real person’s name in your company email. A company doesn’t produce content and send an email, people do. Including a person’s name and their role at the company in the email signature can go a long way towards making the message more personal. Likewise you can sign or initial social media updates.

4. Introduce key members of staff. Use your website to let customers know who does what in your company, and how they can contact them. Photos and short bios can let customers know about the faces behind the brand.

5. Encourage employees to share company content. This not only gives the content more reach, but also lets customers get to know the names and personalities behind a company, and lets them know that these people care about the company they work for.

*Image by ws23 @ Flickr

Increasing efficiency and productivity with new coding methods

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:42:26 +0100

Over the past six months or so we have fully adopted SCSS as the primary method of creating our stylesheets. Looking back now it seems like we must have been incredibly unproductive before SCSS came along, and this is strangely encouraging as I believe that when you can reflect on old methods in the shadow of newer and better ones, it shows that you're improving.

Using SCSS

For those who aren't familiar with SCSS, it's basically a supercharged meta-language based on CSS. It extends the functionality of CSS by including some common programming constructs like variables, mixins (functions) and nesting, and it compiles down to a traditional CSS stylesheet. If you'd like to know more, here's a good place to start. In a nutshell, it means being able to write faster and more efficient code, saving you time and money in the process.

SCSS isn't perfect though - one drawback is the enormous length your style sheet can grow to if you're taking advantage of nesting your selectors. To overcome this organisational nightmare we separate our SCSS into separate files for typography, layout, variables, mixins and sometimes even individual features or sections depending on the scale of the project. We then use @import to pull the files together into a single CSS document. That means there’s just one request for all our CSS, which is a big plus for performance.

Add zen coding to the mix

Writing HTML and CSS can be a chore sometimes. It's likely that we use around 20 or 30 selectors on a regular basis so it makes sense to try and find a way to optimise the repetitive task of typing these hundreds of times a day. That’s where zen coding comes along, Zen coding is an editor plugin that enables high speed coding through the use of shorthand abbreviations. For example typing bdb:n and pressing tab will output border-bottom:none; or typing m:0 will output to margin:0; Once you overcome the initial task of memorising the abbreviations it can massively increase the speed you write HTML and CSS.

Putting it into practice

As a quick test I've timed myself and analysed the results of coding this really basic navigation block. Method one, the traditional method, took a total of 8 minutes. The second method, using SCSS and zen coding, took only 5 minutes - that's 37.5% faster than method one. When this is scaled up to a week’s worth of coding, let's say 30hrs, it will save around 11 hours.

Although rudimentary, this simple test shows the significant increase in productivity that can be achieved by adopting these two methods. I think it reinforces the benefits of not getting too comfortable with methods you've always used. To master any craft you need to be proficient with your tools and making them work for you and not against you will help you achieve your goal quicker and more efficiently. SCSS and zen coding won't make you a master craftsman but they will pave the way on your path to becoming one.

What website owners and bloggers need to know about media law

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The internet is often viewed as a lawless medium where freedom of speech reigns supreme. However, as well as a number of high profile cases of Twitter users being prosecuted, there has been a steady increase in the number of more “routine” cases such as libel and copyright.

The nature of the internet makes it easy for people to self-publish on a whim, which has removed the traditional safety net of editors and advice from legal experts. Website owners and bloggers should be aware of the following basic UK media laws:

Copyright: Unless a copyright holder has given permission for content to be shared, copying is illegal. In the UK, copyright applies automatically to original work as soon as they are fixed in a tangible medium. This means that, unless you have permission, it is illegal to use photos, substantial blocks of texts, graphics or any other original works posted online. Many website owners think that if work is on the internet, it is in the public domain and safe to use. In fact, using content without permission almost always constitutes a breach of copyright.

Libel: Problems may arise from anonymous libellous comments on articles or blog posts. As soon as the host of webmaster is given notice of a defamatory comment, they must remove it immediately or they will assume responsibility for the content. Libel laws are yet to adapt to an increasingly online world. For instance, the lines between slander and libel have been blurred by the fact that many things that were once vocalised are now written down through social media channels.

Fraud: Misleading or giving an untrue representation of a person’s identity online could be considered fraud. For example, setting up a fake Facebook or Twitter profile under someone else’s name may be considered fraudulent if the person who has been impersonated suffers loss or damage as a result.

Data protection: Data protection laws protect against the processing of personal information without permission. There is therefore a risk that data protection laws may be breached if consent is not obtained before revealing someone’s personal information.

Malicious falsehood: Publishing content with the intent to hurt another’s commercial interests through false statements will amount to a malicious falsehood. The injured party could claim for damages for compensation and for distress.

Online content raises important issues about privacy, free speech and copyright. In order to avoid costly lawsuits or damaged reputations, it is important for both commercial and non-commercial publishers to understand the basic risks associated with media law.

10 amazing smartphone statistics

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0100

There are already more than 1.08 billion smartphone users in the world, and this figure looks set to expand rapidly over the next three years. Here are some smartphone statistics that may surprise you…

1. Smartphone users spend an average of 25 minutes per day surfing the internet, 17 minutes on social networks, 16 minutes listening to music, 14 minutes playing games, 12 minutes making calls, 11 minutes checking or writing emails and 10 minutes text messaging.

2. In many developing countries, the majority of internet users are mobile-only. 70% of web users in Egypt are mobile only, 59% in India, 55% in Ghana and 54% in Kenya.

3. 39% of smartphone owners use their phone instead of a separate camera, 28% use their phone instead of a laptop, 11% use their phone instead of a games console, 6% use their phone instead of TV and 6% use their phone instead of reading physical books.

4. 44% of mobile users in Western Europe own smartphones. 49% of the UK population have a smartphone.

5. 57% of all new Android and iOS apps are downloaded in the USA, 12% in China, 4% in Taiwan, 3% in the UK, 3% in China, 2% in Australia and 2% in Hong Kong.

6. 50% of Android Smartphone and 43% of Apple iPhone users are below 34.

7. South Korea and Japan are the leading countries for mobile broadband penetration, with 91 and 88 active mobile broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. The UK and US are ranked 21^st and 24^th respectively for mobile broadband penetration.

8. 89% of smartphone owners use their phone every day.

9. 10% of all global web page views are from mobile devices. 13% of web page views in Africa are from mobile devices, 18% in Asia, 5% in Europe and 9% in North America.

10. 79% of online advertisers still do not have a mobile optimised website.

Sources:

http://mobithinking.com

http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/

Best practices for writing online press releases

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 +0100

A press release can be an effective tool for generating publicity about a product, service or event. Journalists are more likely to use a press release if it is written in a particular manner. When writing online press releases, keep in mind the following points…

Who, what, when, where, why

Your press release should be written like a news story. Include the basic five Ws of standard journalism. This will help to catch both journalists’ and readers’ attention. Write in an “inverted pyramid” structure, keeping the most important and interesting information at the beginning of the press release.

Have real news

Is the information in the press release interesting? Is it useful? Is it sharable? If not, the goals of the press release will probably not be met. Write for your audience and convey information simply and directly, without using technical jargon or vague buzz words.

Ensure you have all relevant permissions

If your press release mentions a client, ensure that you have their permission before distributing or publishing it. Likewise ensure that all information is confirmed and final – a premature press release can cause embarrassment and a loss of credibility. You should also avoid quoting anyone who isn’t available for another interview; journalists will need to verify stories and quotes.

Include images and visuals

A study by PR Web shows that including multimedia (such as images, infographics and videos) increases the time spent on page for an average of 30 seconds. Given that most of these can be found or produced online at a low cost, it makes sense to enhance your press release with these elements.

Optimise for search engines

A well optimised press release will be indexed by search engines for target keywords. Choose one primary keyword that is relevant to the story and to your industry and optimise the release for it. Longer press releases can also accommodate three or four secondary keywords.

Think carefully about where to publish

Large, well-known companies rarely distribute traditional press releases anymore – instead they publish on their blog or website and media sites will link back to this original source. Other companies send press releases directly to their customers through email newsletters or social media. A third popular option is to send press releases to online distribution channels such as PR Web and Real Wire. Smaller companies often build successful relationships with industry journalists in their region. Choosing the right platform for your news takes planning and research.

Other quick tips

Ensure your press release is no more than two pages long
Use the last paragraph to give background information about your company
If you are emailing the press release, ensure that any image files aren’t too large
Include notes to editors, such as contact details and whether photos are to follow
Don’t rely on email attachment as the only way to distribute your press release – it may be marked as spam and never received
Headlines should be as short and interesting as possible
Don’t use nonsensical tie-ins to connect your news with current events

Linking and the law

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 13:05:38 +0100

Linking to other websites can have legal ramifications. Despite the “free linking” ethos of the first users of the World Wide Web, web links from one site to another can be unlawful.

According to the W3C:

There is no reason to have to ask before creating a link to another site
Linking to a site doesn’t mean that you owe them something
Linking to a publicly readable document is not an infringement of privacy unless some confidentiality agreement has been made

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, said: “The Web was designed to be a universal space of information, so when you make a bookmark or a hypertext link, you should be able to make that link to absolutely any piece of information that can be accessed using networks. The universality is essential to the Web: it loses its power if there are certain types of things to which you can’t link.”

The act of including a link does not convey endorsement or ownership of the contents. Instead, it is the context of the link that implies these things. For example:

"<a href=””>Joe Blogg’s blog</a> makes a great argument on this topic."

"My <a href=””>photographs</a> show a similar phenomenon."

By extension, it is possible that the context of the link could be defamatory. For example:

"Everything that <a href=””>Joe says</a> is a complete and utter lie, designed to destroy the internet."

However, in cases such as these it is not the link itself that is defamatory but the context. So where is the problem with linking?

Passing off: Passing off refers to deceptive marketing in which one party attempts to pass off its good or services as those of another. Linking can create problems when content is not properly attributed.

Trademark infringement: Trademark infringement occurs when one party uses the mark of another in a way that is likely to create confusion or deception. Any link that leads the end user to falsely believe that the page author is affiliated or approved by the trademark owner could constitute trademark infringement.

Derivative works: If the web page containing the link incorporates the linked page in some substantial form, it might constitute a derivative work. For example, some links instruct browsers to retrieve images from the page linked to. The creation of a derivative work without the required permission is copyright infringement.

Frames: Frames are used to subdivide web pages and can present data from several sources as part of a unified display. This can cause issues in terms of copyright infringement, passing off, defamation and trademark infringement.

Linking from one site to another rarely creates any legal problems, but it is possible, so it’s important to note the above cases. In most circumstances, sites welcome inbound links as a source of traffic, prestige and search engine authority.

* Image by RambergMediaImages @ Flickr

DuckDuckGo's Bang Syntax - The pick of the crop

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0100

As you might be able to tell, a few of us in here are intrigued by DuckDuckGo.

For the most part, I use it as my main search, set as my default search engine in Chrome. This isn't because I'm paranoid (I don't even have a tinfoil hat!) about my search habits being tracked, it's because the bang syntax - and the quick view of information - makes DDG an insanely useful tool for daily work, and evening play.

Searching for common methods/functions in programming languages will usually pull information from online manuals, and other programming related searches will usually grab a useful article from Stack Overflow.

But it's the !bang search syntax that really makes DDG impossible for me to leave behind. Using it couldn't be simpler, just pop your search query in and follow it with !wiki for Wikipedia search, or even !stackoverflow for a SO search.

And it's not just for geeks - users from many other walks of life have a massive array of tags to make their daily browsing faster and more enjoyable. !image will do a Google image search and !lyrics does a lyric lookup for a song.

It's this utility that makes DDG the search engine of search engines. If you want your search term to go straight to Google, Yahoo, or Bing, just pop !google, !yahoo, or !bing at the end, and DDG will obey.

So with this all in mind, and having spent more time than's probably sane browsing the DDG Bang Syntax glossary, here's my pick of the crop.

Language Tools: !define, !translate (the first does a definition, the second one translates the string automatically using Google Translate)

Shopping: !ebayuk, !auk (Ebay, and Amazon UK)

Programming:!stackoverflow, !msdn, !android, !php, !py, !java, !jquery

Fun, Internet & Social: !meme, !imdb, !facebook/!fb, !download, !twitter, !reddit

This is a fairly condensed list, there are thousands of tags for DDG, and chances are if you just take a guess you'll probably find it exists.

A to Z of digital marketing

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 16:23:00 +0100

A is for Adwords, Google’s main advertising product and the largest platform for PPC advertising.

B is for Bounce Rate, the percentage of visitors who only view a single page on your site before leaving.

C is for Click Through Rate, the percentage of people who clicked your ad or link compared with those who viewed it.

D is for Dynamic Search Ads, a method on Adwords for targeting relevant searches with dynamic ads generated on your website.

E is for Email Marketing, a form of direct marketing which uses email to communicate messages.

F is for Facebook, a free-access social media site that companies can use to interact with their customers.

G is for Guerilla Marketing, a term used to describe daring and unconventional forms of marketing and advertising.

H is for Hits, the number of times a website receives a request for a piece of information.

I is for Inbound Link, a link to your website from a different website.

J is for JavaScript, a programming language used to create dynamic, interactive websites.

K is for Keywords, the words or phrases that users search for and your website is optimised for.

L is for Landing Page, a custom page designed to convert visitors into leads or sales.

M is for Meta Tags, the codes that identify the content of a page for search engines.

N is for NoFollow, a HTML attribute instructing search engines not to rank certain web pages.

O is for Outbound Link, a link directing visitors to a different website from the one they are visiting.

P is for PPC (Pay Pay Click), a method of online advertising where publishers are charged every time someone clicks on their ad.

Q is for Quality Score, an estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords and landing pages are in relation to your ads.

R is for RSS Feed, a system that allows people to receive constantly updated information collected from many sources in a single reader.

S is for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website.

T is for Twitter, a social media site that centres around microblog posts, primarily for self-promotion.

U is for User Generated Content, the material and media on a website that is produced by users of that website.

V is for Viral Marketing, the idea that people will share compelling and entertaining content.

W is for Widget, a tool on a website or user’s desktop.

X is for XML, a markup language that facilitates the creation of common information formats between applications and between organisations.

Y is for YouTube, a video sharing site on which users can upload, view and share videos.

Z Is for Zoning, the method of dividing a project into different segments or teams.

*Image by cambodia4kids @ Flickr

What the new Facebook recommendation bar means for website owners

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 08:47:24 +0100

Last week Facebook launched a Recommendations Bar, which allows people to find articles based on what other people in their network are reading and sharing.

When website owners install the social plug-in, visitors will see a small pop-up on the lower right hand corner of their screen. It suggests more articles and prompts the reader to “like” them. The recommendations are based on what friends have explicitly liked and shared on that website or app. If a reader hits the Like button, the story gets published on their timeline and their friends’ news feeds.

Early findings suggest that sites saw three times the normal click through rate on stories suggested by the recommendations bar than through the old recommendations box.

This allows website owners to tap into the social networks of their readers. A Facebook spokesperson told Mashable: “The recommendation bar is another option for websites – particularly blogs and media sites – to be more social and active, keep people on the site longer, distribute content across Facebook and benefit from referral traffic.”

Integrating the plug-in is straightforward – Facebook have provided a few lines of code to copy and paste. Alternatively it is available as a Facebook or Wordpress plug-in.

5 ways to get more from Google Analytics

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:36:35 +0100

Google Analytics is a free tool for tracking visitors on your website. It helps you to understand how your website is performing, which of your web pages are most popular and how visitors are finding your site, among other things.

The chances are that if you own a professional website, you’re already using Google Analytics. However there are a number of tracking tools that can help you get more out of your Analytics reports.

1. Event Tracking

Event tracking allows you to record visitor interaction with certain elements of your website – for example, clicking a button to watch a video or download a PDF file. Adding a simple piece of code to each image, button or graphic allows you to discover how visitors are interacting with your site, rather than simply the navigation paths that they follow. This can help you to improve buttons that are being ignored and streamline conversion funnels.

2. Page Load Tracking

Google are passionate about site speed. A slow loading page can be detrimental to both user experience and your search engine rankings. The Analytics site speed report allows you to measure loading times and identify potential problems. Page load time is automatically enabled in Google Analytics if you are using the latest version of the script. However by default only 1% of visitors are sampled for the calculation of this metric. If your website receives a low volume of traffic, you can add a line of code to change the sampling size to up to 10%.

3. Site Search Tracking

If your website has a search functionality, tracking site searches is invaluable. Site search reports can help you to analyse how people use the search function, what they are looking for, the words they are using to find the information and how they are converting. You can use this information to identify the best keywords to optimise your website for.

4. Funnel tracking

Funnel tracking allows you to track the stages visitors make to achieve a specific goal. So, for example, on an ecommerce site the funnel will consist of every page visitors will see on the way to completing a purchase. Google Analytics makes it easy to see where visitors are dropping off along the buying funnel. This data will help you to strengthen weak links in the chain.

5. Advanced segments

Advanced segments lets you track the behaviour of different groups and traffic sources. So, for example, you can segment visitors by organic visitors, visits from Facebook, first time visitors, visitors who searched for a particular keyword etc. By slicing and dicing your data, you get a better understanding of trends and common behaviours.

Browser usage in GCD

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 15:55:16 +0100

As Google Chrome is now the most popular browser in the world, having recently knocked Internet Explorer off the top spot, we thought it would be interesting to take a quick survey about which browser GCD employees used most day in day out.

20 thought-provoking digital statistics

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 09:40:07 +0100

These 20 statistics help to give a better understanding of consumer needs and behaviour in 2012.

1. In the past year, UK companies increased their Google Adwords spend by 59%

2. 73% of digital shoppers expect online prices to be lower than those in physical stores

3. 22% of web pages contain Facebook URLs

4. Social media is the top news source for 16-24 year olds in the UK

5. 20% of all YouTube views are from a mobile device

6. 38% of tablet users in the UK spend more time on their tablet than watching TV

7. The fastest growing segment in social media is 45-54 year olds

8. 53% of smartphone users make purchases through their phone

9. 40% of mobile searches have local intent

10. 83% of customers who complained on Twitter were happy with the company’s response

11. Facebook accounts for an average of 26% of referral traffic

12. LinkedIn accounts for an average of 0.2% of referral traffic

13. 35 million apps are downloaded everyday

14. 84% of internet researchers will make at least one online purchase in 2012

15. Google accounts for 84% of all global searches

16. 62% of search users click a link on the first page of search results

17. Organic click-through generates a 25% higher conversion rate than PPC click-through

18. Google Chrome is the world’s most popular browser, with 33% of market share

19. 48% of Europeans use the internet while they watch TV

20. 88% of UK shoppers consult reviews before making an online purchase

*Image by Thos003 @ Flickr

What the Ulster Bank meltdown can teach businesses about communication

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 10:44:04 +0100

Tens of thousands of Ulster Bank customers were left in financial turmoil following a technical failure on 19 June. Salary transfers and social welfare benefits were not received, direct debits and payments were not made, and more recently double charges were taken from accounts.

Ulster Bank expect that this week will be the final week of significant delays for customers. However their lack of a clear communication strategy has caused unnecessary frustration, suspicion and panic that will have repercussions well beyond the repair date.

Here are some lessons in business communication based on the recent crisis:

1. Develop a regular notification system

One of the major criticisms directed at Ulster Bank was that their statements were irregular and infrequent. For example, despite on-going problems, their last press release was on 4 July. In it Jim Brown, Ulster Bank CEO, said: “We appreciate the patience that has been displayed and we will keep everyone informed as we make progress.” Releasing a daily progress update would have gone some way to alleviating fears and reducing the number of people queuing outside branches to get information.

2. Know your audience

Ulster Bank were slow to engage in social media and online conversations. Twitter is a valuable real time platform for updating customers, and journalists frequently use it to disseminate information through other media sources. The @UlsterBank_Help account wasn’t opened until 1 July – 11 days into the crisis.

At the other end of the spectrum, Ulster Bank have been criticised for relying too much on releasing updates online. Community worker Neil McNickle told the News Letter that older customers were left out of the loop. He said: “They are just not up to speed with social media and the internet and cannot get information from the Ulster Bank that way. They do know how they are able to draw their money at this time. They could have targeted a mailshot to people aged 50 to 60 and over.”

3. Combat misinformation and rumours

Due to the lack of a strong communication strategy and a failure to engage in online conversations, rumours abounded. For example, internet rumours spread that a new IT employee in India accidently deleted data – making it seem that Ulster Bank were prioritising profit over competence. Because Ulster Bank were not forthright with an explanation for the crisis, customers were understandably suspicious.

There were also rumours that withdrawals were not being recorded against accounts, prompting some customers to take out more money than they had – including one man who withdrew £42,000 from a Belfast ATM.

4. Avoid conflicting stories

Conflicting stories can lead to mistrust, panic and ultimately, the loss of customers. One stream of conflicting information was the date that accounts would be updated. Some customers reported they were being told in-branch it would be a couple of days, while information released online changed from the 2 July to an unspecified date to the week ending 15 July.

5. Don’t avoid the tough questions

Even after joining Twitter, the bank faced criticisms for not replying to customer questions. Many questions under their latest update, including those asking for clarification on dates, have gone answered. Others have been answered in a way that seems to prioritise PR over the solid information customers want. For example, Kimberley asks: “What caused this problem? Your customers need to know. Who do we complain to? Will we be reimbursed for our time & phone calls? You have the email details of all internet banking customers – why have you not contacted us?” The RBS Moderator replies: “We are committed to ensuring that no one will be left permanently out of pocket as a result of this and be publishing further details on how we will ensure this. We apologise again for the significant inconvenience we know this incident has caused.”

6. Show some empathy

Ulster Bank have issued multiple apologies for the technical failure. However at the same time families were talking about missed mortgage payments or borrowing money for the groceries, the Chief Executive of RBS – Ulster Bank’s parent – said that he might still accept a £3m bonus: “Bonuses are reviewed at the end of the year and are based on a whole bunch of different factors. If I’m entitled to a bonus then I’ll make that call at the time. I won’t exclude the possibility either way.” Hours later he performed a U-turn and said that he would not take the bonus, but the damage had already been done.

7. Show no favourites

RBS and Natwest were also affected by the technical failure, but these were rectified within days. This left customers in Northern and southern Ireland feeling like they ranked lowest on the priority list.

In a statement, RBS said: “Unfortunately for our customers in Ireland, Ulster Bank payments follow in sequence after those of Natwest and RBS. This is because of the way the technology was set-up at the time the three banks were integrated. It in no way reflects the priority we attach to our Ulster Bank customers.”

However the huge discrepancy in time scales has not been adequately explained.

Lessons learned

In business, mistakes happen – it’s how you deal with them that matters. The Ulster Bank meltdown illustrates the importance of openness, consistency and explanation. The right communication strategy can help to minimise the damage and minimise the strain on customer relations.

Bing takes the lead on disavowing links

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 08:30:32 +0100

Since the late 90s, search engines have used links as “editorial votes” to analyse a website’s popularity, trust and authority. Links from other websites were considered to be one of the hardest measures to manipulate and therefore one of the most reliable indicators of quality.

For years, Google has warned webmasters about attempting to manipulate their rankings through “artificial” links – from link exchanges and paid blog networks, for example. Google’s recent Penguin update targeted sites that participate in webspam tactics, including artificial link schemes.

One of the recommendations that Google made for recovering from Panda penalisations is to have spam links removed. However because these links are located on other websites, this may not be an easy task. Furthermore if low quality links can damage your site’s rankings, what’s to stop your competitors buying lots of them and pointing them at your site?

One solution would be to implement a system to allow webmasters to disavow spammy and low quality links. Google would then ignore the link as part of their ranking algorithm. This would benefit both the webmasters who could prevent negative links from hurting their rankings, and Google who would receive frequent spam reports.

Earlier this month Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, said: “People have asked questions about negative SEO for a long time. Our guidelines used to say that it’s nearly impossible to do that, but there have been cases where that’s happened, so we changed the wording on that part of our guidelines. Some have suggested that Google could disavow links. Even though we put in a lot of protection against negative SEO, there’s been so much talk about that that we’re talking about being able to enable that, maybe in a month or two or three.”

Now Bing have beaten them to it. There’s a new tool in Bing Webmaster for disavowing unwanted links. Bing say: “These signals help us understand when you find links pointing to your content that you want to distance yourself from for any reason. You should not expect a dramatic change in your rankings as a result of using this tool, but this information shared does help Bing understand more clearly your intent around links pointing to your site.”

This is a really useful tool and one that we hope will spur Google into action on negative SEO.

A simple guide to copyright and web content

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 09:17:19 +0100

Masses of information is freely available on the internet, but that doesn’t mean that it is free to copy. Almost all online content is protected by copyright, and this can pose legal dangers to website owners. For example, you risk breaching copyright if you:

^{Use images from Google search}
^{Copy a substantial amount of text from another website}
^{Copy and paste logos, images or icons from other websites}

Copyright is a type of intellectual property law. It applies to websites and the internet in the same way that it applies to other media. However by nature, online content is easy to access, copy, manipulate and distribute. It is therefore important to be aware of the potential pitfalls of using other people’s web content.

In the UK, copyright applies automatically to original works that exhibit a degree of labour, skill or judgement. There is no need to apply for copyright or pay a fee – original works (such as photography, drawings, diagrams, maps, logos, video footage and text) are protected automatically.

This allows the copyright holder to protect their work and prevent it from being used without their permission. It gives them the right to take legal action to stop others from using the work and/or to seek damages as a result of copyright breach.

The copyright holder is usually the original creator of the work. One common exception is that work created by an employee during the course of their employment is usually held by the employer.

If you want to use copyright material on the internet, you should ensure that you have the permission of the copyright holder. Remember too that copyright applies to any medium – so it would be a breach of copyright to scan and publish a photo on the internet without permission of the copyright holder.

Of course, copyright will also protect any of your original work that exhibits a degree of labour, skill or judgement. You can prohibit your work from being copied in any way. It is important to note, however, that copyright doesn’t protect names, titles, slogans or short phrases as these are not usually considered substantial enough to be eligible for protection. These may be eligible for registration as a trade mark (which does involve an application process and the payment of a fee).

Because copyright is automatic, you don’t need to take any action to protect your work. However to help enforce copyright, you may want to mark it with the copyright symbol, your name and the year the work was created. To help prove the date of the copyright, you can send yourself a copy of the work by special delivery (which gives a date stamp on the envelope) and leave the envelope unopened. This can help to prove that the work was in your possession on a given date.

Many issues of copyright and the internet are still not resolved - for example deep-linking and embedding videos. However to avoid infringement, the best option is to assume that unless material is clearly marked otherwise (for example, with a Creative Commons license), it must not be copied without the permission of the copyright holder.

*Image by MikeBlogs @ Flickr

Solving real business challenges

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 14:20:31 +0100

Like many great ideas, Conor Moran’s came from his own business frustrations. During his 16 years as an engineer, he found producing reports to be very time-consuming and wondered if a tool could quicken the process.

That’s how GoReport was born. And just a year on from Conor’s idea, GCD will have the first product ready for user testing.

GoReport is a reporting solution for on-site professionals. It allows them to capture audio, photos, sketches and other data while on location, then generate custom reports within 24 hours.

Conor attributes much of his success to the support of Northern Ireland’s innovation network, including the technology community at the Northern Ireland Science Park. Read more at Ulster Business.

8 common SEO myths dispelled

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 14:35:10 +0100

When it comes to search engine optimisation, myths abound - and misunderstandings can lead to wasted time, money and even penalisations. Here are eight common SEO myths… dispelled.

1. A good SEO firm can guarantee rankings

Some SEO firms guarantee that they can get you to the first page of Google, or that they will make your site rank first for a given number of keywords. Although this may sound tempting to a small business looking for a measurable return on investment, it’s best to steer clear of SEOs that make these sorts of promises. The reality is that Google and Google alone control who gets top spot. There are hundreds of factors that affect your rankings, and no one company or individual can control all of these.

2. Google use your Analytics data against you

One of the most popular SEO conspiracy theories is that Google uses your Analytics data (such as bounce rate and time spent on page) in their ranking algorithm. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of web spam, has attempted to lay this myth to rest several times, and even the most cynical of webmasters would admit that it would be a huge PR disaster for Google if word got out that they DID use analytics data.

3. On-site SEO doesn’t matter

Title tags, internal links, on-page keywords and other on-site factors are used by search engine algorithms to calculate the relevance of the page. It’s therefore crucial to optimise them correctly.

4. A sitemap will boost your rankings

Google will use your sitemap to help discover pages that it might have otherwise missed, or to look for canonicalization hints. It’s therefore best practice to have one. However the suggestion that your site will rank better or that individual pages will be assigned more page rank is simply untrue.

5. Keyword meta tags are important

Matt Cutts has made it clear that keyword meta tags don’t matter. He said: “Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in our scoring at all. It’s just a waste of time to throw a lot of phrases into the keywords meta tag. It would be a better use of your effort to do things like speed up your website, because that can directly improve the usability of your site even independently of SEO.”

Google rarely disclose ANYTHING about their algorithm, so this declaration makes things pretty clear: don’t bother with keyword meta tags.

6. Personalisation has changed everything

Google personalises search results even if the user isn’t logged in to a Google account. This has led many people to believe that there’s no such thing as ranking number one anymore. However the differences between personalised and non-personalised results are usually minor. Add &pws=0 to the end of the Google SERP URL to see for yourself.

7. Crawlers don’t read CSS

Googlebot and other search engine crawlers will scan CSS for spam tactics like hidden content. Presenting something that is substantively different to a search engine and a user is very bad practice.

8. Ranking first is the most important thing

The end goal of SEO is not to get better rankings. Ranking first on Google is great, but it won’t necessarily guarantee conversions. Identify the KPIs that matter to your website rather than fixating on rank.

*Image by Hubspot @ Flickr

How to improve your websites readability

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most important considerations for web writing is readability. Content that is easily read and understood is more likely to meet its goals. Below are some simple tips for enhancing the usability and readability of your website’s content.

Use subheadings to break up chunks of text

A study by content management expert Gerry McGovern showed that users tend to inspect pages in blocks and sections – something he called “block reading”. Breaking up long articles into logical sections can make the page easier to skim. Keep headings simple and descriptive so that users can easily access the information that they’re after.

Use an inverse-pyramid model

The most important information should be at the top of your article. In effect, the conclusion of the article should be contained in the opening paragraph. This way the user can instantly understand what the page is about and decide whether they want to read on or not.

Use one idea per paragraph

Assigning one idea to each paragraph is an effective way to organise content in a scan-able manner. Users can skim from paragraph to paragraph without fearing that they will miss something important.

Use descriptive link text

Link text stands out. When this link text is out of context (for example Click Here or Read More), it doesn’t make sense to users who are scanning the page. Don’t make your readers trawl through the text to understand where the link will lead to – use link text to describe the destination of the link.

Use bold text sparingly

By bolding important words, you can help users to locate important information quickly. However if you try to draw attention to too much you’ll effectively draw attention to nothing. Choose two or three words that illustrate the main point of the paragraph.

Use lists

Users tend to fixate on bulleted lists, making them an effective way to get across important information. Lists are less intimidating, allow for faster reading, break information down into key parts and highlight keywords and phrases.

Keep it concise

Web users tend to have short attention spans and often don’t read articles in their entirety. A usability study by Jakob Nielson claimed that a 58% increase in usability could be achieved by cutting out half the words. Keep sentences straightforward, words simple and get your point across as concisely as possible.

Is PPC useful for small businesses?

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 09:35:06 +0100

Over 20% of all advertising in Europe is now digital. And with over two billion internet searches made every day, the chances are that your customers are “Googling” something for which you would like to show up.

Pay per click advertising can be intimidating for small business owners. It can seem difficult to compete with the marketing budgets of large companies. But a smart strategy can compensate for a low budget. Here are some tips to help get results from a Google Adwords campaign…

1. Don’t rely on Google’s default settings

Google’s Adwords platform makes it easy to set up and launch advertising campaigns. However the default settings are designed to maximise revenue for Google, not for the advertiser. Take some time to look at each option (the network type, whether you want to target mobile devices, scheduling etc.) and consider how they can be optimised to better meet your objectives. There are lots of options that make for better targeted campaigns.

2. Make your keywords as targeted as possible

The more relevant your keywords, the more qualified your audience will be. It’s better to bid on a large volume of highly relevant but low trafficked keywords than a small amount of high trafficked but low relevance keywords. Adding some negative keywords can also help to focus your keyword targets. For example if you own a florist selling fresh flowers and plants, you might want to add negative keywords like “artificial flowers”. This will weed out undesirable clicks and make sure that the clicks you pay for are the ones that are most likely to convert.

3. Make the most of geographical targeting

One of the most common PPC mistakes for small businesses is to target too broad an audience. If your products or services are limited to a certain geographical region, make sure that your ads are too. Adwords allows you to restrict your ads to certain regions, town or post codes. This means that they will only appear to searchers within a specified distance of your targeted area.

4. Write good ad copy with a strong call to action

Attention grabbing, appealing copy can easily triple the number of clicks your ad receives. The higher the click-through-rate, the better Google will rate your ads. And the better Google rates your ads, the less that you will pay for them.

5. Keep testing and improving

The best way to improve the efficiency of your campaign is to test every aspect of it. Test different ad copy, different bidding strategies, different landing pages, different calls-to-action and different keyword targeting. The Adwords interface makes it easy to track and compare key performance indicators over time, allowing you to closely monitor your campaign’s performance.

Running an effective PPC campaign takes time and effort. However when done correctly, online advertising represents a strong opportunity for small businesses to compete with the big fish and gain market share.

*Image by wwarby @ Flickr

Cultural considerations for an international website

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 13:04:21 +0100

The internet has made it easier than ever before for businesses to reach international markets. Companies of all sizes can use their website to sell to a much broader audience than traditional modes would have allowed.

However website owners must carefully consider the messages that they’re sending out to such a wide audience. As well as the technical challenges – such as languages that are read right-to-left or different browser use in different countries – there are cultural nuances to consider.

Colours

Colour associations vary from audience to audience. For example, red is associated with luck and happiness in Eastern Asia, where brides often wear it on their wedding day. In the Middle East, however, red is associated with danger and evil. Yellow is associated with cheerfulness and joy in many Western cultures, but with death and mourning in Latin America. Blue is considered to be the safest colour for a global audience, which explains why it’s so prevalent in social media sites.

Aesthetics

Aesthetic preferences vary from culture to culture. In many Asian countries, there’s a tendency to fill backgrounds with images and colours, while in many European countries, a simple and minimal design is considered to be more “professional”.

Imagery

An image that’s acceptable or appealing in one culture could easily be outrageous or offensive in another. The obvious example is the use of provocatively dressed models – which is common in many Western cultures but considered shocking in more conservative cultures. A less obvious example is a Saudi advertisement by a well-known American telephone company. The ad showed a businessman talking on the phone while resting his feet on the desk – with the soles exposed. This is considered offensive throughout much of the Middle East and southern Asia. Likewise a cosmetics company were puzzled as to why an aftershave advertisement – featuring a man and his dog in a pastoral landscape – was a flop in the Middle East. A little cultural research would have revealed that dogs are considered unclean in the region.

Translations

Standard dictionary translations are not enough for international websites – colloquialisms, abbreviations or an entirely different word or phrase might be more commonly used. When Pepsi entered the Chinese market with their slogan: “Come Alive, You’re the Pepsi Generation”, they didn’t count on the literal translation holding the meaning: “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave”. And the Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux clearly didn’t read up on American slang before launching their US campaign with the slogan: “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.”

Tone

The tone of the copy should be written with cultural considerations in mind. An irreverent tone may seem warm and friendly in the UK and USA, but could seem rude to a German audience. Humour should be used carefully – what’s funny in one culture won’t necessarily translate to another.

Conclusion

When it comes to expanding your website internationally, language is only one barrier. A cultural faux pas can be enough to ruin your brand’s credibility and reputation, so it’s worth investing in thorough market research before launching.

*Image by Loren Sztajer @ Flickr

GCD Technologies welcomes Ryan

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 15:42:12 +0100

This week we’re delighted to welcome Ryan Kilfedder to the GCD Technologies team as a Web Developer.

Ryan comes to us from Tibus, where he worked as a PHP web developer for almost six years. During this time he worked with a number of clients, including The Bank of Ireland and Activity Breaks.

His interests include: “Formula One (I can remember Nigel Mansell leaving Williams after 1992 so I’ve been watching that for a while), following the misfortunes of Norwich City Football Club (supporter since the early 90s, so it’s been mostly misfortune), cycling (although I’ve just started to do that after a 10 year hiatus – so we’ll see how long that lasts) and music (consumption).”

Ryan’s expertise will be a real asset to our web development team and we’re very happy to have him on-board.

Welcome to GCD, Ryan!

The latest tool to improve your Adwords campaign

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 11:05:07 +0100

For the first time, Google is letting you see who is competing for your keywords and how your ad performance compares to theirs. The new Adwords Auction Insights tool allows advertisers to make better strategic decisions based on competitor analysis.

Google’s description explains: “See how you’ve been performing compared to other advertisers. With the Auction insights report, you can see how successful your keywords are in terms of impression share, average position and other statistics, in relation to those of other advertisers who are participating in the same auctions.”

The new report offers five different metrics:

Average position – This data was already available at a keyword level. It shows how high your ads tend to rank in comparison with your competitors.

Overlap rap – This shows how often you and the competition make simultaneous impressions.

Top of the page rate – This shows how often your ads appear above the organic results, as opposed to appearing in the side bar.

Position above rate – This shows how often your competitors appear above you.

Impression share – This is probably the most useful metric of the five. Impression share was previously only available at ad group and campaign levels, and the ability to analyse impressions at a keyword level has the potential to greatly increase campaign efficiency.

Together these metrics provide a direct insight into how your advertising compares with competitors at a keyword level. They allow you to compare your own bids and keyword strategy, honing in on high value keywords, identifying areas where you are over or under-bidding, and improve the overall effectiveness of your campaign.

You’ll also be able to gauge opportunities by keeping a close eye on competitors. If, for example, one competitor is showing month-on-month growth, it’s probably worth taking a look at their ad copy to see if you can learn anything from it. If a competitor has a high average position but a low impression share, it could be an indication that they are restrained by budget.

Google are keen to stress that the information your competitors can gather about you is no different to the information that is already publically available.

“No actual campaign settings are revealed, it’s the same data you can get in the Google search results,” says Bhanu Narashimhan, Group Project Manager of Adwords. “This report just makes it easier to access and understand the information.”

There are currently a few limitations to Auction Insights, but given that it is a new tool these may be temporary. The first is that the metrics aren’t available for the display network, although this isn’t much of a surprise given that any keyword data has historically been very limited for display. The second is that you can only download the report one keyword at a time – an inconvenience that Google will hopefully rectify with a future update. The third is that data is only available when the keywords reach a certain threshold of traffic, and Google being Google, they don’t reveal what this threshold is.

Ultimately the additional data will increase competition for the most popular keywords – which is probably the reason why Google released it. However by focusing on bids on a keyword level rather than an ad group level, there is great potential to make savings and improve the efficiency of your entire campaign.

Web writing lessons from a great Ad Man

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:06:47 +0100

David Oglivy, ‘The Father of Advertising’, remains one of the most influential figures in modern copywriting. The principles he laid out in his books and through his work can easily translate to web content writing, particularly his four-step mantra of research, professional discipline, creative brilliance and results for clients.

Here are some of his other nuggets of wisdom that offer valuable web writing lessons:

“On average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

Web “headlines” take multiple forms: the page title, the H1 and H2 tags, the anchor text, the social media synopsis, the Adwords copy… There are lots of snippets that browsers, searchers and scanners may come across before they decide whether or not to read the body text. This makes Oglivy’s emphasis on headlines more important than ever.

“I don’t know the rules of grammar… If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.”

Good web writers probably know the rules of grammar, but they also know when to break them. As Oglivy emphasises, it’s important to understand your target audience and write not just with them in mind, but specifically for them. Language should be tailored for that audience – as Oglivy told his employees in a famous memo: “Never use jargon words… They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.”

“Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline – exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?”

Oglivy didn’t privilege creativity over discipline, and neither should web writers. Writing effective content involves drawing together multiple practical elements, including SEO keywords and anchor text. That doesn’t mean that the copy has to be dry fodder for search engines. Beautiful things can be created around the rules.

“There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract 50 per cent more readers.”

People don’t like sales pitches. That’s why comment spam, unsolicited email marketing, cold calling and pushy sales copy don’t work. Web writing is an important element of inbound marketing, and inbound marketing is all about establishing your website as an authority for your industry. A free eBook or informative blog post may not look like an advertisement, but by generating traffic, raising your brand profile and establishing yourself as an expert in your field, content can be one of the most effective sources of advertising there is.

“Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.”

Great sales copy is no substitute for a great product. All too often web copy is filled with unsupported claims and hyperbole. Web content should be informative, accurate and transparent.

“Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”

Analytics data is an absolutely invaluable tool for web writing. Metrics such as bounce rates, click through rates, referring websites, social media shares, length and depth of visits and number of visitors can all provide fantastic insights into the effectiveness of your copy. Write, test, optimise and repeat.

“When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative’. I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, “Let us march against Philip.’”

Great web writing, like great web design, is invisible. The visitor should be free to concentrate on the content of the material rather than being distracted by convoluted sentences or clever word plays. To paraphrase another famous Oglivy quote, it is the content and not the form of the message that sells.

5 steps to improve your Calls to Action

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 16:16:36 +0100

Nearly all websites have an objective – whether that is selling a product or service or getting users to register for an account, download a file or sign up for a newsletter. Effective calls to action have the power to grab people’s attention and direct it towards your target webpage.

Here are five simple steps to help you improve your CTAs and increase your conversion rates.

1. Identify what your users are looking for

Unfortunately this isn’t as straightforward as it first sounds. Users aren’t all at the same stage in the sales cycle – some may be ready to download a free trial or buy a full product, but others will simply be looking for further information. The best strategy is to create different landing pages for different user profiles, and tailor your CTAs accordingly. There’s rarely a one-size-fits-all-solution.

Make full use of your analytics data to identify offers and pages that have performed well in the past. Analysing user behaviour on your website will allow you to make an educated guess about the type of information users want to see.

2. Keep the number of CTAs small and make them distinctive

Keep your CTA focussed. A single, consistent CTA is often the strongest, although a clear primary and secondary CTA may be a more suitable option for your site. Try not to have more than three CTAs on any one webpage – this can detract focus, make for confusing navigation and generally weaken the CTAs.

If you are going to use more than one CTA, make sure that the purpose of each is clear. Similar CTAs can cause unnecessary confusion and complications. In addition, users are less likely to click on a button if they don’t know exactly what to expect – so make sure that your CTA copy is simple and transparent.

3. Use active language

Active language encourages a user to take action. Words like register, buy, subscribe, donate and watch tell the user what to expect when they click the button and make it clear what the offer is. Your CTA copy should also create a sense of urgency. Draw attention to a limited time offer or use words like “now” or “today” to encourage users to click through to your landing page.

Another good practice is to make the copy specific. Statistics and numbers convey credibility and can increase click through rates significantly.

4. Draw attention to it with size, colour and positioning

A big button gets noticed, as do strong, contrasting colours. Ideally your CTA should be placed high on the page and in a prominent position. White space around the button will help draw attention to it.

5. Collect insights and optimise

Keeping track of key metrics can help you to improve your CTAs and increase their click through rates. Two of the important metrics to measure are the click through rate and the conversion rate.

Conclusion

Finally, don’t forget to optimise your landing page for conversions too. No matter how great your calls to action are, a weak landing page will leak potential leads.

Should you moderate comments on your website?

Thu, 31 May 2012 15:45:38 +0100

A growing number of websites are interactive, allowing user generated content in the form of comments or reviews. But many website owners aren’t aware that they are potentially liable for this user generated content.

If you allow any form of user-generated content on your website, you should ensure that you have a moderating policy in place. There are three main options:

No moderation

Ironically, there is less liability associated with no moderation because the website owner assumes no responsibility for the content. Websites are generally defined as publishers under the law – making them jointly liable for infringing content. However if the website owner solely hosts user content, they may not be considered a publisher. Under Regulation 19 of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002, websites can be defined as hosts if the content is posted directly by third party contributors without any intervention.

There are a number of qualifications: the website owner would have to prove that they did not moderate content in any way (including spam removal), that they removed any potentially infringing material as soon as practically possible after receiving a complaint, and they had no reason to suspect that infringing material would be posted. For example, a site that invites users too “sound off” about their local MP could be construed as inciting defamation or libel.

Websites should clearly display terms and conditions for content posting, and implement a process that makes it easy for users to report an offensive comment or other user generated content.

Pre-posting moderation

Unfortunately a sizable percentage of comments are spam or lazy attempts at SEO. Low quality and out-of-context content can affect the reputation of the website. This means that not moderating user generated content is a quality-control nightmare. Many websites therefore choose to approve or reject content before it is published.

If you choose to pre-moderate you are deemed to be the publisher (and possibly the editor), making you as accountable as the person who wrote the content. You should therefore be very careful that the content does not infringe any laws (relevant ones may be contempt, data protection, defamation, cyber-bullying, copyright etc.).

After-posting moderation

Apart from a few notable exceptions (such as the BBC), after-posting moderation is the industry standard. This encourages commenting by users and maintains some editorial control. As moderation does occur, websites are deemed to be the publisher and/or editor and can be held liable for the content.

However a 2009 High Court ruling suggested that publishers might not be held liable for user generated content as long as they removed the potentially infringing material as soon as practically possible.

To moderate or not to moderate

Ultimately it’s one or the other: if you choose not to moderate you can’t exercise any editorial control at all, and if you choose to moderate you accept dual responsibility for the content and must exercise careful editorial control.

Due to quality issues, most websites will choose to post-moderate. However understanding the legalities surrounding user generated content can be very complex. In a defamation or libel case, the website, internet service provider and the writer can all potentially be sued. Whatever moderating policy you choose to implement, it’s a good idea to:

1. State your policy in user terms and conditions, and include your legal jurisdiction

2. Avoid publishing anything that might incite infringing content

3. Make it easy for users to report a potentially infringing comment

4. Act immediately to take down the content while you investigate the validity of the claim

5. Keep abreast of any changes to the law

A final word of caution: when moderating comments, showing bias towards your brand by removing negative comments could be construed as false advertising – another legal minefield. When in doubt, contact a legal advisor.

What web writing and poetry have in common

Mon, 28 May 2012 16:17:03 +0100

Most web writing is bad. It’s filled with clichés, bloated with keywords and often tossed together hastily. However when done well, writing for the web has much in common with writing poetry.

Condensing

Poetry is essentially very condensed prose. Each word has to earn its place; convey a meaning or an image or a sentiment. Every element of a poem – every word, every space – has a purpose. T.S. Eliot once said: “The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.”

The same is true for web writers. The internet encourages short attention spans. Visitors don’t want to read screenfuls of text when they’re just a couple of clicks away from chatting to a friend, watching a movie or cooing over photos of cute cats. A good web writer has to convey their message as succinctly as possible. There’s no room for superfluous adjectives or meandering hyperbole. Web content needs to be honed and refined to its simplest, most potent form.

Rhythm

Poetry involves rhythmical patterning. The number of beats per line and the arrangement of syllables matter. Good web writing needs rhythm too. That’s because most visitors aren’t readers, they’re scanners. Studies consistently show that visitors tend to skim web pages, picking out individual words and sentences. Good rhythmical composition can be a scanner-stopper. When web writers arrange words to form a rhythmical swing, they compel visitors to absorb every word.

Poetic devices, like alliteration and repetition, are frequently used in good web writing to encourage readers to engage with the content with the same attentiveness that’s inherent to reading poetry.

Tone

A poem is like an image that captures a feeling. Unlike traditional prose, how something is said matters more than what is actually said. Likewise web writing often relies on tone to resonate the meaning. The voice and tone of web content can be used to great effect, often to express a brand identity or vision.

Layout

With traditional prose, the significance is the sentence and not the line. Many poems work on visual patterns – such as the balanced arrangements of line lengths. Thoughtful web writing is also organised into patterns, almost like verses. With proper consideration for content shape and layout, the line becomes just as important as the sentence.

The shape of the text can help to emphasise meaning, draw attention to certain portions and encourage user engagement.

Conclusion

Although most web writing is commercial in nature, good web writing is an art. It allows you to play with the rules in a way that’s normally associated with poetry. As with most disciplines, content writers stand to gain from studying the techniques of the masters.

*Image by Nils Geylen @ Flickr

Congratulations to Cork Radiothon

Mon, 28 May 2012 09:19:19 +0100

Congratulations to all at the Mercy Hospital Foundation for the huge success of the 2012 Cork 96fm Radiothon.

A total of over €397,000 was raised over 3 days from 24th - 26th May for cancer services in Cork.

GCD are proud to have been associated with the Radiothon for the past three years, having developed the website for processing one-off credit card donations and direct debit signups as well as the interface for call centre staff taking donations over the phone.

For more information on the great work of the Radiothon team and the charities they support please vivist www.radiothon.ie.

Examples of EU cookie law compliance

Thu, 24 May 2012 16:25:02 +0100

This is going to be interesting. Today is the last working day for website owners to prepare their sites for the new EU cookie law.

It’s becoming clear that the vast majority of sites will not be compliant in time. Dave Evans, group manager of ICO (the body responsible for enforcing the law) told the BBC: “Up until now, if we received a complaint about your website we would point you in the direction of our guidance.

“Given that everyone has had a year [to comply], we’re going to shift from that kind of approach to one which will be very much focused on those people who don’t appear to have done anything and ask them ‘why not?’”

However with even the government admitting the majority of their sites won’t be ready by Sunday, it doesn’t seem likely that the ICO will take immediate action over non-compliant sites.

Mr Evans continued: “We never said that if you’re not compliant by 27 May we will come and get you. What we want is good compliance, not rushed compliance.”

But what exactly constitutes good compliance? The ICO haven’t exactly been forthright with practical guidance. That’s probably the reason why lots of websites haven’t implemented cookie consent tools – because they’ve been waiting for some concrete advice or some good examples from the “big players”. With that in mind, we’ve taken a look at some of the early cookie law solutions…

Infographic: Facebook vs Google as advertising networks

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:45:55 +0100

So Facebook's gone live on the public market, and it's trading roughly around what everyone seems to have expected. But it's been a tough couple of weeks for the social media giant, which has come under some intense press scrutiny in the UK and further afield. The critics are all seeming to focus on its main revenue source: advertising.

Google are the only advertising network that can surpass Facebook in sheer volume, and now WordStream.com have created a fantastic infographic taking an impressively deep look into how both companies fair up against one another in this field. Google come out on top, but Facebook are tailing behind by just a bit.

Link to original article.

Fantastic resource for user interface design

Wed, 16 May 2012 09:04:02 +0100

Check out this fantastic resource from Joshua Porter at bokardo.com outlining 20 key principles of user interface design.

It’s a powerful rundown of design principles reflecting Joshua’s philosophy that great design is invisible. For example the first principle is:

1. Interfaces exist to enable interaction

Interfaces exist to enable interaction between humans and our world. They can help clarify, illuminate, enable, show relationships, bring us together, pull us apart, manage our expectations, and give us access to services. The act of designing interfaces is not art and they are not monuments unto themselves. Interfaces do a job and their effectiveness can be measured. They are not just utilitarian, however. The best interfaces can inspire, evoke, mystify, and intensify our relationship with the world.

Joshua certainly practices what he preaches - there are only 13 CSS rules to the whole page. We’re keeping this one on hand for ready reference!

* Image by http://archive.dconstruct.org/

Analytics cookies may be mercenary but theyre not unethical

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:12:47 +0100

Since 26 May 2011, the vast majority of UK websites have been breaking the law. By the end of next week, the one year “grace period” will expire and these sites could be liable for fines and penalties.

The EU cookie law means that all UK websites must offer an opt-in consent tool for non-essential cookies. We’ve discussed the law elsewhere, but today we’re going to focus specifically on what it means for analytics cookies.

The ICO guidelines make it clear that analytics cookies are not exempt from the law. Technically this means that every website should display a pop up like the Information Commissioner’s does, asking visitors for their consent to use Google Analytics. To a user who doesn’t understand what cookies are, this can be intimidating.

Since the ICO implemented these changes, 90% of users chose not to opt in to the Google Analytics cookies. This means that they can only track 10% of all visits. It’s no wonder that a cookie-less future is a scary prospect for web marketers and owners of small online businesses.

The loudest argument put forward by webmasters regarding the necessity of analytics is that it helps them to provide a better service to users. This may be true in some circumstances, but it ignores the fact that analytics data is absolutely essential to the successful running of a business. And there’s nothing unethical about this – as long as the data is anonymous and in aggregate, as is the case with Google Analytics.

Let’s take a “real life” analogy. A restaurant manager will probably want to keep track of how many customers dined in her restaurant at different sittings, what dishes sold well and what didn’t, and whether menu changes result in better sales. Yes she can use this information to provide a better service to customers, but first and foremost she can use this information to benefit the business – choosing the most profitable opening times, menus and pricing.

Counting diners and sales figures isn’t an invasion of privacy because it is anonymous and in aggregate – just like Google Analytics.

Now if the manger were to follow diners home from the restaurant, identify individuals and keep records of their favourite foods, this would clearly be an invasion of privacy. This scenario may sound far-fetched, but it’s no more ridiculous than lumping first-party analytics cookies together with intrusive third party cookies.

These intrusive cookies are what the legislation is primarily concerned with – particularly networks that gather information about visitors to target advertising at them without their consent. However the law completely misses the point. Cookies aren’t a threatening technology – more often than not they’re used for helpful and benign purposes.

Instead of differentiating between “essential” and “non-essential” cookies, the law should distinguish between “harmful” and “harmless” ones.

The cookie law is using a sledge hammer to crack a nut. Google Analytics may not always be some altruistic service to users, but it in no way violates their privacy either. It’s essential for the efficient running of a website and for ensuring that online businesses remain profitable. Collecting anonymous statistical information about your own website isn’t harmful or unethical, and shouldn’t be illegal either.

*Image by Search Engine People Blog @ Flickr

5 basics for saving money on Adwords

Fri, 11 May 2012 10:48:47 +0100

Adwords is one of the fastest and most effective ways to attract qualified leads to your site. However if a campaign isn’t carefully managed, the cost per click can quickly exceed the value per click. Here are five basic steps for saving money on your PPC spend…

1. Focus on Quality Score: Google don’t want to lose searchers by serving up bad ads for bad sites. Therefore they reward relevant, quality ads that direct to relevant, quality landing pages. If you have a high quality score you’ll pay less per click. One of the most effective ways to save money on Adwords is to optimise for Quality Score. Work to drive up your Quality Score by testing and improving ads and landing pages. If a keyword still isn’t performing after these measures, pause it. A few low quality keywords can drag adgroups – and even campaigns – down.

2. Use negative keywords: Your Adwords campaign isn’t just about generating traffic to your website. Your Adwords campaign is about generating the right kind of traffic to your website. Negative keywords are a great way to weed out unqualified traffic. “Free” is a good starting point for any costed product or service. Searchers looking for “free productivity apps” are going to have a much lower conversion rate than searchers looking for “productivity apps,” so it makes sense not to waste your PPC budget on their clicks.

3. Implement conversion tracking: If you are selling a product or service, set up conversion tracking. This is one of the most insightful metrics Adwords provides – you can see which keywords are driving conversions and which are just driving traffic. You can calculate just how much each click is worth to you by comparing profit margins, CPCs and conversion rates. And you can optimise your campaign (through scheduling, geo-targeting, device type, network type etc.) for conversions rather than just clicks.

4. Experiment with different match types: There are three match types on Adwords: broad, phrase and exact. Broad match means that your keywords can be shown in any order with any other words e.g. the query “top Chinese restaurants in Belfast” could trigger an ad for the keyword “Belfast restaurants”. Phrase match means that the keywords will be shown in that order, but may have other words included e.g. the query “South Belfast restaurants” could trigger an ad for “Belfast restaurants”. Exact match means that keywords appear in that order with no other words included i.e. the only query that will trigger ads for an exact match keyword “Belfast restaurants” is “Belfast restaurants”. As this example suggests, broad or phrase match types could deliver unqualified traffic. However changing all your keywords to exact match type could dramatically dent your impression share. The best tactic is to initially include all three match types for each keyword and monitor their performance.

5. Look out for click fraud: Click fraud gets a lot of press attention, but it’s not as common a problem as the reports would have you believe. However it does happen, so it’s definitely worth keeping an eye out for. There are two main types of click fraud – the first is when a competitor repeatedly clicks your ads to waste your money. The best way to stop this fraud is to pause the adgroup and file a report to Google. The second type involves webmasters attempting to cheat the system with Adsense. This is only a problem with the Display network and can be quickly solved by blocking the sites that you don’t want your ad to appear on.

GCD Tecnologies offer full Adwords account set-up and management. Learn more about our PPC advertising packages.

Protecting your business from assorted Google wildlife

Wed, 09 May 2012 11:09:41 +0100

If web forums are anything to go by, Google’s Panda and Penguin updates were designed to wipe out small businesses. Even if you survived relatively unscathed, there’s constantly the danger that a merciless algorithm update named after an innocuous black-and-white critter will obliterate your traffic and crush your profit.

Of course web forums aren’t much to go on – they are dramatically skewed towards the losers rather than the winners. Google doesn’t have some sort of grand masterplan to eliminate all search results apart from Wikipedia, YouTube and Amazon. Their aim is simply to return the results that are most relevant to the search term.

When Google roll out major algorithm changes with the aim of improving these results (which they do on a regular basis), millions of sites are affected. Because organic search is part of most modern business plans, and because Google has a virtual monopoly on search (sorry Bing), this puts millions of businesses at the mercy of their rankings.

So what can businesses do to protect their organic traffic from future updates – perhaps Dalmatian, Skunk, Zebra or Badger?

1. Stop using spammy SEO tactics

There are lots of honest businesses that use spammy SEO practices. They may have done so with the best intentions – perhaps they were misadvised by a bad SEO, for example. And for several years, spammy tactics worked. Keyword stuffing, duplicate content, cloaking etc. could produce real results. But times have changed and continuing to use these tactics will see your site penalised or even de-indexed.

2. Pay particular attention to backlink quality

A lot of Google’s recent focus has been on links. In mid-March, several link-building networks were delisted. In late-March, Google sent out warnings about “artificial or unnatural links”. And a major component of their Penguin update, unleashed on 24 April, is believed to be backlink quality. Likely culprits include an extensive low quality link profile, a high proportion of exact-match anchor text, blog spam and low quality article marketing.

Backlinks are the backbone of search engine rankings, but managing them is a difficult task. This is part of the reason why Google gives them authority – because they are hard to manipulate. However this also means that it’s difficult to remove bad links. Dr Pete Meyers has called for a “no-follow” equivalent at the receiving end of the link, which would allow webmasters to reject bad links.

However Google ignores bad links to a certain extent already. That said, it’s worth doing what you can to remove low authority bad links from suspicious sites – sites that look like spam or contain “toxic links” (gambling, payday loans, Viagra etc.). Of course the type of websites that link spam probably aren’t the type to hand remove links on request. Evidence of emails to webmasters can at least show Google that you attempted to clean up your link profile.

3. Accept SEO is hard

SEO is harder to do now than ever before. There was a time when clever on-page optimisation and a few directory submissions could almost guarantee a traffic boost within a couple of months. But today’s shortcuts will probably be tomorrow’s penalisation targets.

Getting permanent, non-paid links takes time and effort. It’s a long, slow process that requires you to produce and promote quality content. Four future-proof SEO tips are:

Create a company blog and consistently add valuable content
Share your content on social media
Write legitimate press releases when you have something important to announce
Only link to valuable resources that will benefit your readers

The bottom line is to think long term rather than shortcut. Google are serious about improving search result quality, so give them quality results for searchers.

*Image by K W Reinsch @ Flickr

The new and improved nicarfinder goes live!

Fri, 04 May 2012 15:45:36 +0100

It’s been a busy few weeks at the GCD Technologies offices as we worked to put the finishing touches to nicarfinder.co.uk.

We’ve been working on this project for a number of months, with the goal of enriching the user experience and streamlining the site design.

But all that hard work has paid off and we’re delighted to announce that, as of this week, the site is live and fully operational.

As well as a visual makeover, we’ve incorporated a range of new features including branded dealers’ areas, improved search tools, enhanced slideshows in brochure viewings, and social media integration.

We’re quietly confident that users will be as pleased with the new site as we are. It’s been a very rewarding project for all involved.

GCD Technologies welcomes Maurice, our newest team member

Fri, 04 May 2012 15:06:04 +0100

This week we welcomed Maurice Kelly to the GCD team as a Mobile App Developer.

Maurice describes himself as a “software engineer, computer enthusiast, music nut, husband and father.”

After graduating from Queen’s with a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, he decided that his interests and skills were better applied in the field of software engineering and development. He has a very strong background in this industry, and experience working with numerous technologies including Push Notification systems, custom software developments, policy management systems and product configuration interfaces.

Maurice comes to us from Openware Systems, where he worked on Service Mediation gateways in the role of Principal Software Engineer. These gateways are responsible for providing internet access to mobile devices such as phones and dongles.

His skills and experience will be a real benefit to GCD as we continue to expand our offerings of mobile applications for iOS, Android and other platforms.

Welcome Maurice! We’re delighted to have you on-board.

Our latest web project goes live!

Tue, 01 May 2012 09:32:55 +0100

We’re delighted to announce that our latest web project, The Crafty Fox, has been launched and is available for online shopping across the UK and Ireland.

The Crafty Fox is a home and giftware boutique that began as a single County Down store back in 2010. Since then the business has seen rapid expansion, and last year a sister store opened in Belfast.

With interest in their collections spreading right across Northern Ireland and beyond, the owners of The Crafty Fox were keen to explore the opportunities represented by ecommerce. GCD Technologies offered an online shopping solution that showcased their unique pieces and incorporated a user-friendly checkout system.

We designed and developed the website to reflect The Craft Fox’s quirky, “shabby chic” style – and we’re sure their customers will be pleased with the results!

Time to ditch Google for Duck Duck Go?

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:48:37 +0100

Something strange is happening in the world of search. Until recently, when most people thought about internet privacy they thought about Facebook. But the January changes to Google’s privacy policy caused a media outcry that just might be enough to edge the search giant off its pedestal.

That might not be any time soon, of course. Google is still the most visited website in the world and totally dwarves its nearest rivals, Bing and Yahoo.

However upstart search engine Duck Duck Go has shown that there’s still room for innovation when it comes to search. And it’s gaining momentum fast.

Duck Duck Go makes four main promises: “Way more instant answers, way less spam and clutter, lots and lots of goodies, and real privacy.” If it can deliver on those promises, these are probably strong enough reasons to leave Google behind.

Privacy is the major reason to make the switch. Many people still aren’t aware that Google collects user information to serve personalised results. Say, for example, I search for “Amsterdam hotels” on Google. My friend has mentioned an Amsterdam hotel on Google + some time last year. Even if the hotel isn’t a leading one, and even if my friend didn’t recommend it, Google may still decide to show me its website because of our social connection. That’s a little creepy, right?

You don’t have to be logged in to a Google account for personalisation to kick in: Google still uses your search and clicking history to determine results. The marketing geniuses at Duck Duck Go call this a “filter bubble”. They argue that if your search results are filtered using your search history, opposing information and points of view will be filtered out in favour of things that Google thinks you’ll like.

Duck Duck Go doesn’t track searches or log user information. Results aren’t personalised in any way, and advertising is conceptual rather than targeted.

And speaking of advertising, Duck Duck Go’s SERPs don’t bombard you with ads – or maps or shopping results or local results or news tickers… They’re pleasantly clean and clutter free. Results are presented in one continuous page with infinite scroll. This not only allows users to browse for alternative results without clicking through pages, but it also gives sites with a lower rank a better chance of being clicked.

Google won’t be too worried about their new competition – Duck Duck Go only has a tiny fraction of the overall search volume. However if Duck Duck Go continues to grow in popularity, it could serve as a wakeup call to Google that personalised search doesn’t automatically mean better search.

Has Googles smartphone crawler solved the mobile SEO conundrum?

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:51:24 +0100

Most people know that mobile search is growing incredibly quickly; faster than desktop search in fact. And most website owners are therefore conscious of the fact that they should be optimising their site for mobile users.

However, there’s a conundrum that Google have been slow to address: launching a mobile-friendly website does not necessarily mean that it is optimised for mobile search.

Because mobile internet is still in its infancy, a number of grey areas still exist. There are essentially two camps: the “one URL fits all approach” that holds responsive web design should be used to serve different versions of the same site according to the device used to access it, and the two URL approach that holds that separate sites should be developed for mobile and desktop users.

As a content strategist, I’m an advocate of the latter. Mobile users require a specifically mobile user experience, and too many sites deliver content that is written for desktop sites. Simply serving up a smaller version of your page won’t cut it: content delivery should be catered to the needs of the user.

For starters, people search differently on their mobiles than on desktop computers. A quick look at the Adwords keyword tool (which allows you to filter mobile volume through Advanced Features) shows that certain keywords are better for mobile sites than desktop sites – “journey planner” has a high search volume through desktop devices and “bus timetables” has a high search volume through mobile devices, for example.

Calls to action should also make sense in the context – will a mobile user really want to “Sign Up Now” or “Request a Demo”?

Then there’s the matter of the bread-and-butter content: the images, the product descriptions, the articles… How do websites serve this content on a four inch screen with tiny fonts?

Sites with one URL tend to offer the entire text that’s found on desktop sites, often with screens and screens to scroll through. A better user experience would be tailor-written bullet points – which are more digestible on a small screen – or “More info” type links which keep the screen clutter to a minimum without depriving the user of useful content.

However, this causes a problem for traditional SEO. How can we resolve the need for keyword rich content with the need to maintain an efficient mobile site? Largely due to their lack of unique content, mobile URLs tend not to have much link equity. In addition, creating two different URLs for desktop and mobile potentially splits the link popularity. So it seemed that making your mobile website user-friendly and optimising it for search were two different matters entirely.

That was, until the launch of Google’s new smartphone crawler. Although a number of questions still remain, particularly regarding feature phones, the crawler indicates the direction that Google are taking with regards to mobile sites – a direction that’s been far from clear in the past.

It’s long been known that Google algorithmically attempts to prioritise content that will work well on the searcher’s device, serving different results to mobile devices than desktop computers. They even serve different results based on the handset you are using.

Last year Google’s search quality head, Amit Singhal, revealed that Google are strongly focusing on getting the mobile user experience right, aiming to return fast, relevant and simple results. But this didn’t address how best to optimise for mobile search.

With Google’s new smartphone crawler, desktop sites can carry the weight for mobile sites. Page-to-page mobile redirects should transfer the ranking power to mobile URLs, and mobile content will not be treated as duplicates.

This means that, for now at least, mobile website owners are free to concentrate almost entirely on the user experience – the page weight and speed, mobile-tailored content, simple site navigation etc. I’m stressing “almost entirely” because it still makes sense to implement basic optimisation like mobile keyword research and keyword rich page titles (remember that you’ve only got 55 characters to play with for mobile as opposed to the 70 for desktop). And ultimately a better user experience will lead to a lower bounce rate, which may positively affect rankings.

The smartphone crawler therefore appears to have cleared up a number of mobile SEO issues. Redirecting mobile users to mobile URLs with mobile-specific user experiences could soon emerge as the accepted practice.

* Image by Johan Larsson @ Flickr

How cloud-based solutions are transforming the way small businesses work

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Modern cloud-based solutions are transforming the way that small and medium sized businesses work. Not so long ago, custom software was the domain of big businesses with plenty of cash to invest. Now cloud computing means that it’s no longer necessary to invest in costly hardware or software, which has created exciting new opportunities for businesses of all sizes.

Take, for example, our recent project for Christies Direct. Christies Direct is a pet grooming specialist who came to us with an interest in expanding their offering to customers.

We developed a custom software solution that streamlines groomers’ business processes, reduces appointment no-shows and saves them time. Affari 247 incorporates industry-specific features like a “pet map” that groomers use to highlight skin problems or matted fur requiring special attention.

The result is that small grooming parlours can benefit from a professional interface that’s tailored to their requirements, allowing them to focus all of their attention on their core business.

By working on cloud-based software, small businesses can respond to changing market needs and internal demands, as well as the arrival of new technologies. And because software-as-a-service (SaaS) removes all the complexity of installation and maintenance, it provides instant gratification – users can be up and running within seconds.

Of course one of the most obvious benefits of cloud-based solutions is that they can be accessed from anywhere, anytime, as long as you have an internet connection. Then there’s the fact that the cloud shifts responsibility (in terms of service, support and system management) to an accountable third party.

All in all, cloud-based solutions offer small businesses a range of opportunities and resources that just wouldn’t have been available a few years ago. It’s no wonder that more and more conventional applications are moving to the cloud.

* Image by opensourceway @ Flickr

Why the EU cookie law is hopelessly impractical

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:59:41 +0100

The clock is ticking for website owners. Next month, a new law is to be applied that means all cookies will have to be consented by the end-user. Yet last week a survey of 55 UK organisations, including several within the FTSE 100, found that only one was compliant.

So come 26 May, will we see a crack down from the Information Commissioner’s Office, the quango tasked with enforcing the law? Or will we see a rush of last minute changes to make websites compliant?

The answer to both is no. That’s because the cookie law is not only inconvenient for site owners, but totally impractical as well.

The law, well intentioned as it might be, goes far beyond any reasonable expectations to increase online security and data privacy. One of its most controversial aspects is that its guidelines specifically state that cookies for analytical purposes would require user consent. Analytics cookies have a very low level of intrusiveness, being first party and tracking visitors anonymously.

However it’s highly unlikely that when given the choice, a majority of visitors would choose to “opt-in” to analytics tracking. That’s because despite the fact that the vast majority of cookies are completely harmless, legislation like this can spark paranoia among website users who don’t fully understand their purpose.

The end result would be a worse experience for the user. As Paul Walsh of Infinity Tracking puts it: “[Analytics] might not be strictly necessary for doing business online, but it is strictly necessary for doing it well and successfully.”

The matter is made even more complicated by the fact that one government agency seems to have completely contradicted another over the analytics question. The Government Digital Service claimed that analytics are “fundamental” to the services that websites offer, and stressed that regulatory action on first party cookies would be “unlikely”.

So even though analytical cookies fall foul of the new EU rules on consent, the ICO are not likely to take action against websites that use them. This highlights the shaky ground that the directive is sitting on.

For one thing, the law is at the mercy of success factors that are outside of EU control. Realistically, it is dependent on the progress towards a more robust Do Not Track implementation on browsers. And there’s little chance that that will be completed by the end of next month.

Then there are a number of small but significant headaches for the ICO. Take the Facebook “Like” button, for example. Any website with social media sharing buttons is non-compliant under the existing regulations because an exchange of cookies occurs when a user visits the site.

The ICO guidance is far from explicit about how this, or any other related problem, can be dealt with technically. Their guidelines mention the use of pop-ups to ask for consent, but pop-ups are not only disruptive to the user experience but often blocked by browsers anyway. And presumably if a user denied permission to the cookie, they would see the pop-up again every time they refreshed the page.

A splash page would dramatically increase the bounce rate. An on-page message would probably be ignored by the majority of users. SEO Consult’s examples of elegant implementation of the EU cookie law opt-in is probably the most enlightening solution so far.

The ICO don’t pretend to have the answers. Their current advice is for companies to demonstrate that they are taking steps to become compliant, even if they are not compliant yet. This could involve updating your Privacy Policy and undertaking a cookie audit. Ultimately, it’s going to be difficult for the ICO to enforce a law before they can tell people how to abide by it.

For more information, please check out our FAQs on the EU cookie law.

*Image by ssoosay @ Flickr

GCD developed Titanic app gets rave reviews

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:02:33 +0100

The “Titanic in Belfast” audio tour app from My Tour Talk has just been released on iTunes, and it’s already receiving brilliant reviews.

GCD Technologies developed the app in time for the 100^th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic - an anniversary that's set to bring an influx of visitors to Belfast. My Tour Talk’s latest app provides a great option for tourists who want to gain an insight into the city’s connection with the famous ship.

Writing for Culture Northern Ireland, critic Tammy Moore said: “A slick design, user-friendly interface and easy-to-follow directions make this app-based guide to the Titanic a pleasure to use.”

As well as lively commentary and exclusive interviews, the audio guide also contains information on local attractions, hotels, restaurants and even the best wi-fi spots.

The Titanic in Belfast app is available for £1.49. If you don’t have a smartphone, you can download an mp3 file or rent a pre-loaded mp3 player from several locations across Northern Ireland. Check out the My Tour Talk website for more details.

Avoiding trends and finding inspiration

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 10:39:38 +0100

If you design for the web you'll know how easy it is to get drawn into the 'trend bubble' - there's always the temptation to revert to tried and tested design trends to achieve an aesthetic result. It may even seem to make perfect sense as the trend wouldn't even be a trend if it wasn't pleasing to the eye.

It's my opinion however that a designer's role involves more than simply recreating the latest design patterns. It's important to have an idea of what your contemporaries are doing but it's not essential to draw your inspiration from these sources alone. In fact I would argue that the opposite is true.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton

Design on the web moves at such a fast pace that it's nigh on impossible to stay one step ahead; that's why it's essential to pause sometimes and look to the past. We need to consider the body of design as a whole and look for inspiration in everything BUT the web in order to gain a better understanding of layout, shape, colour or typography.

We should look for inspiration in the most unlikely of places: it might be the record cover design of Alex Steinweiss, the film title design of Saul Bass or the furniture design of Charles and Ray Eames. What it is, what medium it is presented in will not matter - good design is good design and is completely timeless.

So the next time you tweak that gradient or adjust that inner shadow pause for a minute to consider if that styling touch is adding real value to your design or if it is just a flourish.

Why is anyone still using paid link networks?

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:41:54 +0100

Google built an algorithm that places value on links, so it’s no surprise that businesses sprouted up to make money selling those links.

What is surprising is that the search giant took so long to crack down on these paid link-building networks. And what is equally surprising is that website owners still pay money to be included in those networks.

Last week BuildMyRank announced that the majority of their network had been de-indexed.

Their statement said: “As with any link-building network, some de-indexing activity is expected and ours has been within a permissible range for the past two years. Unfortunately, this morning, our scripts and manual checks have determined that the overwhelming majority of our network has been de-indexed (by Google), as of March 19, 2012.”

The statement added: “In our wildest dreams, there’s no way we could have imagined this happening.”

They didn’t see it coming? … Seriously? As Google’s latest algorithm updates continue to sweep through the web, penalising low quality sites, most black-hat SEOs have been feeling like their sky is falling down.

BuildMyRank have thousands of domains in their network, most of which publish low quality articles spawned around backlinks. Given Google’s long history of going after link farms, the de-indexing seemed inevitable – and actually a little overdue.

In their Webmaster guidelines, Google clearly state: “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number,” “Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings,” and, most significantly: “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s rankings or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or ‘bad neighbourhoods’ on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

So what does this mean for the website owners who paid for backlinks through BuildMyRank? Or website owners who pay for backlinks on similar sites, like LinkVana or Authority Link Network?

SEOs are split over whether or not site owners should remove their links from these networks. Some argue that because the pages will be de-indexed, the links won’t count anymore but won’t actually do your site any harm. Others argue that being associated with a ‘bad link neighbourhood’ could result in ranking penalties.

In my opinion, penalties aren’t very likely. If they were, competitors could easily engage in link sabotage by submitting your links to black-listed indexes and networks. However because these networks will no longer be passing on any link juice, it’s not a bad idea to remove the content to be on the safe side. Either way, your rankings are likely to drop due to the fall in backlink power.

The bottom line is that search engine optimisation has no quick wins. Invest time and effort into producing great content and promoting that content, and organic links will follow.

*Cartoon by dewaldp @ Flickr

Were hiring! Web developers and Mobile app developers wanted

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:12:31 +0000

Are you a web developer or a mobile app developer looking for a new challenge? GCD Technologies is currently seeking talented and motivated developers to join our growing company.

The successful candidates will get to work on cutting-edge projects, develop their skills and experiment with the latest technologies.

We’re looking for people who aren’t afraid of a challenge, who can work to their own initiative and who are capable of pushing the boundaries.

Interested? Check out our full list of desired criteria and some insider perspectives on what it’s like to work at GCD.

Please email careers@gcdtech.com for more information.

Northern Ireland doesnt need more software jobs

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:18:50 +0000

High end jobs at a time of high unemployment create great PR for politicians like enterprise minister Arlene Foster.

So when it was announced yesterday that a US company is set to create 50 software jobs in Belfast, Ms Foster and her ministerial colleague Stephen Farry were on hand to welcome the investment and proclaim its benefits to the Northern Irish economy.

On the face of it this seems like good news – CVS Caremark is a Fortune 50 company with around 200,000 employees worldwide.

However with Northern Irish companies already struggling to find qualified IT professionals, it begs the question whether the £500,000 of public money that has gone into attracting this investment could have been better spent.

The new software centre will make it even harder for local companies to recruit the right talent. Surely the £300,000 from Invest NI and the £200,000 from the Department of Employment and Learning would be better spent training IT professionals, or attracting investment in another sector where there is a high demand for jobs.

This is especially significant given the fact that the total salaries of the jobs are estimated at £1.5 million – so the public are, in effect, paying a third of the salaries for professionals who could easily be employed in other companies.

International investment is, of course, generally a good thing – but possibly not at this price and at the expense of taking talent from indigenous companies. Northern Ireland doesn’t need more software jobs, it needs more qualified software professionals.

* Photo by NICVA @ Flickr

Windows shortcuts to help you work smarter

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 09:00:44 +0000

Windows 8 was a radical departure from the other Windows operating systems we've come to know over the past 25 years. Although it works on both tablets and traditional PCs, Windows 8 is essentially geared towards touchscreen users, who can swipe and tap their way around the tiles and touchable panels.

Yet Microsoft have offered repeated assurances that they still care about their desk-bound customers. On the Windows blog, they state: "we want to make sure you can work exactly the way you want with no compromises". This keyboard shortcut guide is another one of those assurances.

If you aren't using touch, these shortcuts are a quick and easy way of getting around Windows. Happy typing!

* Image by Ceo1O17 @ Flickr

Will Googles next big algorithm update hurt your site?

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:30:57 +0000

Last week Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s search spam team, announced that Google has been working on a tweak to its algorithm that will punish sites they consider to be “over-optimised” for SEO.

During the announcement, a recording of which can be heard on Search Engine Land, Cutts explained: “We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimisation or overly SEO – versus those making great content and [a] great site.

“We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect.”

The latest algorithm change is part of a huge ongoing effort by the search giant to improve the quality of its index. Previous algorithm changes have targeted low quality “content farms” and pages with too many ads above the fold.

According to Cutt’s announcement, the changes are set to go live in the next few weeks, and website owners and SEOs will be anxious to see how big of an impact these algorithm changes will have.

Is the algorithm change really a new development?

Although this is the first time that Google have specifically talked about a penalty for over-optimisation, SEOs have been cautious about the practice for some time.

It’s long been believed that link swaps can hurt your rankings, as can keyword stuffing, meta tag stuffing and “black hat” tactics like cloaking and hidden texts or links.

However aside from the two factors that Cutts mentioned (keyword stuffing and excessive links), Google have left us guessing about what else they define as over-optimisation.

What will the changes mean for your digital marketing strategy?

If you’re doing your content strategy right, your site content should be driven by what your readers want rather than what you think you will rank well for.

As I argued in a blog post on SEO and content strategy, the most important thing to keep in mind about SEO is that your content should be developed with human users in mind first, search engines second.

Cutts advised: “Make a compelling site. Make a site that’s useful. Make a site that’s interesting. Make a site that’s relevant to people’s interests… We’re always trying to best approximate if a user lands on a page if they are going to be annoyed… All of the changes we make are designed to approximate, if a user lands on your page, just how happy they are going to be with what they’re going to get.”

This reinforces the idea that practical SEO should be worked into your overall content stratgegy. In other words concentrate on producing useful, quality content and then ensure that it is crawlable and accessible so that bots can read and index that content.

*Cartoon by Hubspot @ Flickr

Could the Digital Economy Act ultimately make individual piracy less traceable?

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:04:26 +0000

As it stands, it's very easy to pirate software, music, movies and books.

It doesn't require much technical ability, and until now there haven't really been any consequences or disadvantages other than a bit of inconsistency in quality, or the odd stopped download.

However that could be set to change. BT and TalkTalk have just lost a long drawn court battle confirming they now have to oblige requests to check IP addresses, send warning letters, and even terminate service of users who are seen as pirating by content holders.

The problem (from a content owner’s perspective) is that eventually users will start to catch on, and learn that it's actually pretty easy – and cheap – to protect your file sharing habits, either by paying for a decent VPN service that's happy with large transfers, or move to the likes of Usenet whose providers often offer an array of privacy options to keep transfers hidden.

The ultimate irony is that this might just be the push people need to take their habits out of reach of the content owners, whose attitude hasn't exactly been friendly to the file sharing community. This would mean that the publishers wouldn't be able to recoup the amount of money they have been through lawsuits against individuals who pirate.

I'm not questioning the moral side of piracy – there's plenty of forums and blogs out there who do that on a daily basis – but it's interesting that the motives behind the DEA (a great deal of which hinges on giving rights holders more access to perusing individuals) might actually put those individuals much further out of reach.

_{*Image by Mal_iri @ Flickr}

7 deadly sins of Pay Per Click marketing

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:03:21 +0000

Are you guilty of one of these campaign killers?

1. Sending visitors to your homepage rather than an optimised landing page

It’s surprising how many advertisers spend hours optimising their campaign only to send traffic to a generic homepage rather than a customised landing page. A good landing page can dramatically reduce your bounce rate and increase your conversion rates.

2. Only have one ad per ad group

A tiny change to your ad copy or display URL can make a huge difference to your click-through-rates. It’s almost impossible to predict how searchers will react to your copy, so it’s vital to test, test and test some more. Try four or five different ads for each ad group. Then once a month, remove the worst performing ad and create a new version.

3. Having huge ad groups

I’d recommend an absolute maximum of 15 keywords per ad group. If you keep your groups small and closely related, you’ll have much tighter control over your entire campaign. For high spending accounts, I usually have between one and five keywords per ad group. Yes it’s more work, but you’ll be able to tailor better ad copy to those keywords and drive up your CTRs.

4. Starting out with low bids

When launching a new ad group or a new campaign, it’s tempting to play it safe with your bids. However it’s a much better idea to push the bids a little at the beginning – you’ll need a decent impression share to be able to gauge how successful your ads are. Plus if you enter at a decent position and achieve a good click-through-rate, your Quality Score will improve and you’ll pay less in the longer run.

5. Leave underperforming ad groups active

Ad groups with a low click-through-rate can drag down the Quality Score of your whole campaign. If an ad group is consistently underperforming, it’s usually best to pause it.

6. Apply your Search strategy to a Content campaign

A Content network campaign needs a completely different strategy to a Search network campaign. Your cost per click will generally be lower for Content campaigns, but the budget has a habit of running away with itself. You’ll need to manage your negative keywords carefully, plus be on the lookout for sites that are sending high volumes of unqualified traffic.

7. Aim for the number one spot every time

Achieving the highest position isn’t the goal of your campaign. Your bids should be determined by how much the click is actually worth to you, not how much it will take to get to the top spot. Many companies achieve a better ROI in positions four to seven than they do in the top three.

*Image from kinopix @ Flickr

The new iPad brings a new challenge for web designers

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 20:11:07 +0000

Once again, one of Apple’s products is pushing the boundaries of how we use the web.

The “new iPad” may be more of an evolution than a revolution, but it has one feature that has the potential to wreak havoc for web designers: a screen resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. Compared to the iPad 2, that’s twice the detail horizontally and twice vertically.

We’ve already seen how influential Apple can be for web design through their boycotting of Flash. Since the first iPhone was launched in 2007, Apple have steadfastly refused to support Adobe’s once mighty plug-in. Since then there’s been a huge swing from Flash to HTML5 in everything from banner ads to video to interactive games.

The new iPad features the same retina display technology that was introduced with the iPhone 4 in 2010. Back then, app designers had to adapt to the new pixel density by creating two sets of images for all of the graphical elements – one at standard size and one that was twice that size. But because of the iPhone’s screen size, this pixel doubling didn’t have a major effect on website design.

However the size of the iPad screen makes its pixel density hard to ignore. Users will get accustomed to seeing crisp displays on native apps, and are likely to be disappointed with the less perfect appearance of images and logos on non- retina optimised web pages.

This begs the question: will web designers have to start producing two sets of images for every web graphic they design? Apple.com are already using JavaScript to detect the pixel density of screens and serve larger image sizes to higher density screens.

If so, it’s going to raise a lot of practical problems for web designers’ workflow. As well as the amount of time it’ll take to rework existing sites to look good on the new iPad, it may be difficult to track down the original artwork in high enough quality.

Just because the new iPad can serve high quality images and video doesn’t mean that it automatically should. For example, would a user on slow Wi-Fi or 3G be willing to endure slow load times to download the increased page sizes?

And of course, that raises the problem of excessive bandwidth costs – both in terms of data usage for the user and in terms of hosting for the website owner.

With the new iPad set for release on 16 March, we’re keen find out what level of demand there will be for retina-optimised websites.

* Image from bangdoll @ Flickr

How SEO affects content strategy

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:01:29 +0000

Search engine optimisation is an important consideration for anyone concerned with designing, developing or writing for the web. In this blog, I’d like to look at how SEO impacts content strategy.

First of all, allow me to introduce myself! I’ve recently started GCD Technologies in the newly created role of Content Strategist. One of the things that attracted me to the company is the fact that they don’t see search engine optimisation as a distinct area of business: done correctly, SEO should be worked into every aspect of web development.

Google rewards relevance

In lots of ways, Google’s aims are aligned with our own. It’s in Google’s interests to provide searchers with relevant, useful search results. If searchers aren’t happy with the pages that Google generates, all they have to do is click over to Bing or Yahoo and try again.

And it’s the same for website owners: if browsers aren’t satisfied with what they find on our pages, they simply have to hit the back button and click on a competitor.

By producing relevant, useful content we can keep both Google and our readers happy: that’s the bottom line of SEO.

Panda’s all about quality

Panda has been Google’s most high profile algorithm change to date. Although Google changes its algorithms about 10 times a week, there’s no denying that Panda had a significant impact on search results – and most notably on “content farms” who had been pumping out low quality articles to gain traffic from long-tail queries.

The Panda changes generated lots of concern from website owners, many of whom were desperate for an insight into the Google algorithm black box. But in my opinion we don’t need to know how algorithms work – it’s enough to understand what they’re for.

Google have always been crystal clear about what they’re looking for in web content: don’t be evil. Don’t try to fool algorithms with keyword stuffing or reciprocal link exchanges or alt tag spamming. Produce high quality, valuable content and it will be rewarded.

Authority is the new relevance

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. To gain a decent ranking for competitive keywords, a site has to have authority.

Back in May last year, Google released a rare insight into their mind-set when writing algorithms. Among the questions they posed were:

Is the site a recognised authority on its topic?
Would you recognise this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?

One of the best ways to build up authority is through clever content curation. Produce original analysis, research and advice on your area of expertise; do it well and do it often.

Having great content will attract precious inbound links and encourage social media sharing. Establishing thought leadership will not just improve the reputation of your brand, but improve your search engine rankings.

Crawlers still need a few hints

The most important thing to keep in mind when planning an SEO strategy is to develop your site for human users and not crawlers. Having said that, crawlers aren’t quite as clever as humans (yet) – they still need a few hints to determine exactly what your web page is about.

Don’t neglect the SEO basics like putting your keyword in your title tags, meta data and URL.

Is SEO dead?

No, SEO isn’t dead, but it’s a very different game to what it was two or three years ago. Search is constantly changing, and it’s foreseeable that at some point in the future algorithms could be so advanced that the only thing web designers, developers and writers have to be concerned about is the user experience.

But for now, SEO remains part-art, part-science and part-experimenting, analysing and improving on the results.

*Cartoon from HubSpot @ Flickr

Google Play: Why a rebrand won't stop fragmentation of app stores on Android

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 21:40:03 +0000

You've probably heard that Google has rebranded its marketplace to Google Play.

This shouldn't come as much of a surprise - a rebrand makes sense as the type of content sold on the marketplace expands.

While I quite like the new logo, at the end of the day this remains the same messy marketplace it was before. Disappointing apps, thrown together to cover almost every subject imaginable, spout through cracks in categories like ugly weeds left unattended.

It's like IE6 all over again. Just not with a browser.

Ok, so using a web browser analogy may seem a bit stretched, but stick with me...

If Google leave their marketplace standards as low as they are currently, other marketplaces will soon come along and do a much better job - much in the same way as Firefox and Google's own Chrome did at the start of the browser wars.

Google needs to act now, and fast, if they want to retain their dominance of content distribution on their own platform.

I know that this post seems like a nerd rant, and I guess it sort of is. It's just frustrating that Google have amassed this huge and fairly loyal user base but could do so much better.

Oh well, perhaps they'd be better off focusing on getting handset manufacturers to actually update handsets first...

Starbuck goes responsive

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 09:20:20 +0000

Adopting mainstream technologies and development techniques is not something we usually see from major corporations. It's a nice break from the norm then to see responsive design in full flow at starbucks.com.

www.starbucks.com

What's in a name?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:18:43 +0000

Here at GCD we have a great record in taking on projects with start-ups, or existing businesses with new ideas. When it's a brand new product or service it’s very exciting to see it take off and be part of that process from the beginning.

We recently started a mobile project with a client who had a simple but great idea; I’ll not reveal it here as the project is still in development but I’ll leave the suspense hanging. Although the client had the concept mapped out and well thought through, with a clear direction as to where he wanted to get to, there was one thing he didn’t have for his product: a name.

How important is the name?

For this project having no name was a challenge at the beginning, as well as developing the app we were also asked to come up with branding and design – quite a task without a name. There were times when it was tempting to forget about the name for now and just move on with the development – but in practice, a name can really help to define the product. Look at Google – it has become a verb when it comes to web search – “did you google it??” – and you wonder what the social networking world look like if Twitter and Facebook had different names.

So is it the name, or the product itself that makes it a success? The answer has to be both – but if a product is a great product the name can surely only be a contributing factor to that product’s success.

So back to our client – in today’s world, and especially in the industry we are in, finding a good name also means ensuring the domain is available. It can be very frustrating coming up with a great name only to find the domain is taken, and it can be even worse if you find that domain has been parked.

A great tool we came across recently is leandomainsearch.com – type in a word you want your domain to include and it will (impressively in less than a second when I tried it) return a great list of suggestions and if the suggested domain is available. At the very least it’s a bit of fun but you can see how it can be a very useful tool if you’re stuck on a name for your product or business.

Our client did settle on a name that we think works pretty well – but that was before we let him know about leandomainsearch.com! Maybe he will resist the temptation to start looking for a name again but my feeling is he might spend a few hours this weekend looking for some alternatives. And speaking of names, answers on a postcard please if you can guess what the GCD stands for in ours…..

* Image from Adam Crowe @ Flickr

Developing tomorrow's programmers

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:28:15 +0000

Last week I was given the privilege of speaking to 5th & 6th form pupils at Banbridge Academy. I was asked to speak about my experience in starting a business, about entrepreneurship and a career in IT.

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience but it made me acutely aware of how hard it is to actually prepare young people for a profession in IT. When asked what subjects one should study, I answered Maths and Physics. In my opinion they are, contrary to belief, more beneficial at that level when pursuing a career in this industry.

I never studied IT at school, even at GCSE level, so I can't call upon my own experience. I have however spoken with and interviewed many people with IT qualifications who all agree that the value to their career was limited.

Good developers in the making?

I was impressed by the head of ICT in Banbridge who is teaching his students .net and even considering an after-school club for iPhone development. This is a great step forward and is sure to garner interest, but will it produce top notch programmers who are language agnostic?

For me, learning a programming language is only a tiny part of what makes a good developer. Unfortunately it seems this is where the education system is directing most of its effort: determining how to solve problem A using language B. All too often though language B is determined before the problem to be solved is even considered.

Great developers are the ones who consider the problem, break it down and evaluate how to solve it in their own language. Great developers are the ones who adapt and pick up new tools as they emerge. In this industry we need developers who can think creatively and communicate ideas and solutions effectively. Somehow though, I don't believe that tomorrow's bright young developers are being given the best opportunity to learn the skills they need to progress.

Congratulations to Alan and Family

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Late Monday night Martha Kate Millar entered the world; no doubt with Alan’s big grin to greet her! Both mother and baby are doing well, and we wish Alan a quiet paternity leave (as if!).

Unifying Apps and the web

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 15:12:12 +0000

There is much debate in the tech industry about Apps on mobile and whether they are simply a trend which will pass, and whether eventually all apps will be web apps. I don't want to get into this argument today. But regardless of what side of the fence you sit, it is undeniable that in modern smartphones, people are using apps - and lots of them. The average iPhone user has 40 apps installed on their device. I personally use about 12 apps at least once a week, but many of them every day.

There are many different types of apps available on smartphones today, including games, utilities, converters, remote access tool etc, but for the purpose of this post I'd like to specifically consider web connected apps - i.e. apps which often replace a desktop optimised website with a more mobile friendly app that connects to the web through an an API to get data. Examples include the Engadget app, Propertynews, Twitter Clients, Dropbox, iPlayer and many, many more. Often these apps are fantastic, and offer a slick mobile optimised experience to the user which can make full use of the hardware capabilities of the device. My biggest frustration with these types of app is the disconnect between these apps and the website for actions initiated from outside the app. For example, when you get an email from Twitter telling you that you have a new follower or a mention. Clicking any of the links within the email will load the Twitter mobile website, which provides a less slick and friendly experience than the native Twitter app.

Apple do provide solution... sort of...

Apple provide a feature to developers called URL schemes, where a developer can register as part of their app that it supports a particular URL scheme. In this situation the URL scheme is the "http" bit in the link http://www.gcdtech.com, and for instance the Propertynews app could be setup to handle links like pnew://www.propertynews.com/brochure.php. The issue is that there is no way in an email or on a webpage to detect if a particular app is installed on a particular device, and out put the appropriate link, and if the app is not installed the links will simply not work at all. Also due to a lack of names spacing in URL schemes, if two apps try to retiree the same scheme the last app wins. Furthermore it is not possible to override Apple declared schemes including http, FTP and itms etc.

A better way

My proposed solution to this issue is to allow apps at point of install to register that they handle requests for a particular fully qualified domain name (FQDN). In order to prevent abusive apps requesting to handle domains which they are not associated with, a dns lookup could be made to a specific txt record on the domain which could contain a list of app bundle identifiers which were allowed to register interest in a FQDN. The user could also be prompted to accept or decline the request.

With a system such as this in place, any link to a registered domain from any external source could be passed to the associated app, which would then either choose to handle the request or if it can't, pass it back to the browser.

This would give a much more seamless experience. With the Twitter app for instance, all links from email or around the web would open in the Twitter client automatically, providing a much slicker and familiar interface. This same protocol could obviously extend across all mobile platforms and in fact could also extend to the desktop. Taking the Twitter example, I use to mac Twitter Client and when I click follow, or profile links within emails it would be preferable to stay within that familiar app environment.

This approach is very similar to mailto: links which we are all familiar with and how they open our default mail client. The idea is to bring apps and the web closer together, giving people the choice of which way they wish to consume content.

by Andrew Gough

The trouble with the cloud

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Just as I was starting to extol the virtues of Google docs as a very functional replacement for Office, this happens!

Now it strikes me that 99.99% uptime is pretty good, and in fact we've all had 'down time' with offline files too. For example opening files over network shares, file corruption, file versions etc. The most frustrating problem when a service like Google Docs goes down is that you don't know what the problem is and you don't know how long it will be down for. Right now I need to know if I should go back to Excel for the purpose of preparing my report for my meeting at 12.

What would help is if there was a phone number you could call to find this information out. But of course Google docs is a free service so I can't expect them to offer phone support.

That I think is the crux of the issue - when cloud services go down you still need to communicate properly with customers. The question is can a free service ever do that effectively?

[Update: Google docs was down for about 10mins in total. Not that long in the scheme of things. Just long enough to write a blog article though....]

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