Beantin webbkommunikation

EU Cookie law in Sweden

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:16:00 +0100

Slowly but surely we’re getting a picture of what is expected of website owners (and indeed application providers) in respect of the Swedish response to the EU directive on online-privacy.

The Cookie Law

Photo by Timm Schneider

Most of us are calling it The Cookie Law, but it’s broader than that. The Swedish Electronic Communications Act covers (amongst other things) the storage and reading of information on a terminal device and how you must obtain consent from the user prior to reading or writing such information.

A terminal device isn’t just a desktop or a laptop computer - it could also be, for example, a mobile phone, tablet, internet TV, or even a game console.

For the majority of websites, the data the law refers to is in the form of HTTP cookies, but it also includes Flash cookies, Silverlight cookies, HTML5 web storage, and other similar types of data transferred back and forth across the internet.

Some cookies are excluded from the law. These are cookies (or other such information) that are essential for the provision of the service you are accessing.

The most straight forward example is that of a shopping cart on an e-commerce site. You’ll have to come to your own conclusion about what is essential and what isn’t on your website.

What’s the response so far?

At the time of writing, most websites are either saying nothing or following the previous law from 2003, SFS 2003:389, which required website owners to declare that they used cookies.

A relatively small number of sites have taken steps to comply to the new law. The ways in which they have tried to comply varies from token gestures through to large consent banners covering the prime real-estate of the website.

Screenshot of polisen.se featuring an opt-in banner

An onslaught from PTS?

PTS have a fair bit of information on their website to assist website owners. There’s no need to panic, the PTS isn’t going to jump on websites and close them down. Their normal routine, if they receive a complaint, would be to communicate in writing with the website owner, containing some advice and the chance to correct the situation.

During the 8 year lifetime of the previous Cookie law, only a handful of websites were warned, and no website was prosecuted. I expect it will be a similar situation this time round too.

The Swedish trade organisation, IAB Sweden, has produced guidelines as to how to comply to the law. It was stated during the preparation of the new law that best practice should be developed by website owners, the IAB’s recommendation is an expression of such best practice.

The IAB recommendation

What IAB recommend, and a recommendation I endorse for Swedish websites, is that the browser settings can be used to imply consent - but, that consent can only be inferred if the use of cookies is described and explained in a way that is easily understood.

All cookies, including third party cookies, should be explained. Information should also be given explaining how the user can withdraw the consent (by disabling cookies in their browser).

The “We use cookies” icon produced by IAB

IAB have produced an icon that can be used to clearly signal that your site uses cookies. They’ve also produced a website, minacookies, that helps explain to users what cookies are as well as providing a home to their recommendations and guidelines.

Audit, be transparent, explain

So, if you are a Swedish company or organisation, targeting a Swedish audience, then you pretty much know what to do - audit your cookies, be transparent, and explain the choices.

You should also do your best to tidy up and remove any scripts and features that you don’t need. (This is not only good housekeeping, but it also helps improve performance and speed of your website.)

It’s even a good chance to check the effectiveness of certain website features? Put measurements in place and assess them (if you don’t already). That Facebook like-box might not actually be worthwhile after all…

Targeting countries outside of Sweden

Sounds simple so far? Well, what complicates matters is that each EU country is putting in place their own interpretation of the EU directive. Some countries are going to have much stricter interpretations of it than Sweden.

European law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse has produced a really useful table giving a country by country implementation status and a synopsis of the legal requirements.

If you are actively targeting people in other EU countries, then you will almost certainly need to comply with the relevant cookie laws in those countries.

Visits from non-targeted countries?

Visits from people in countries that you are not actively targeting are, in my opinion, a bit of a grey-zone.

Technically, you are transmitting and storing data on the user’s computer if you are using cookies - but having a website that specifically complies to all the laws in all other EU countries is going to be awkward at best, impossible at worst.

There’s no guarantee of a one-size-fits-all solution being possible, with the possible exception of the hardcore implementation - no use of cookies on your website.

Nordic and Baltic countries

For Swedish companies, one positive thing to note is that most of the countries neighbouring Sweden - namely Denmark, Finland, Estonia, have implemented the law in a way that is no more strict than the Swedish law. The exceptions to this are Latvia and Lithuania, where a strict prior opt-in (not implied by browser settings) appears to be required.

Red require strict opt-in, Green via browsers settings.

Norway is not an EU country and is therefore not required to implement the EU directive. That said, Norway often implements them anyway - but at the moment, no formal proposal has been made, and no change of law has been implemented.

Business with integrity

Suffice to say, the Swedish cookie law isn’t out to get normal, honest, websites. It’s there to catch the abusers; the less honest. So those of us running businesses with a fair dose of integrity have nothing to worry about.

Of course, the content of this blog post is just my opinion, you should obtain specific legal advice for your own company.

It would be great to hear in the comments section below what your company has decided to do to be compliant…

James Royal-Lawson+ is a digital strategist and web manager based in Stockholm Sweden.

The Beantin Index

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 07:00:00 +0100

Last week I launched The Beantin Index, a site where Swedish websites are graded and ranked!

After a number of months of planning and preparation (as a side-project) The Index has, at last, seen the light of day.

There are plenty of awards handed out to Swedish websites every year, but I felt as if something was missing. I wanted something where I could compare sites; quantify how good they are based on a set of critera.

To create a score that gives an indication of how well a website is managed, how well it complies with various standards and recommendations, and how good it is to use..

The Beantin Index fills that gap.

It’s only the beginning, but I’m intending to add new sites to The Index as often as I can mange. The review process itself takes a couple of hours, then it takes an hour or two to write up, prepare, and publish the final result.

Want your site rated?

If you’d like your website rated, please get in touch. If you’re a little bit afraid of hanging out your dirty laundry in public, then don’t worry - I can do private ratings (for a small fee), then once you’ve made some improvements I can re-assess the site (for free) and add it to The Beantin Index.

I hope you find The Beantin Index both interesting and useful.

James Royal-Lawson+ is a digital strategist and web manager based in Stockholm Sweden.

How many Twitter users in Sweden 2011

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:49:00 +0100

At the beginning of this year, Itellecta Corporate presented the results of their Twitter Census, based on data collected in December 2010.

This week Aitellu has presented their research, based on data from the last week of November 2011.

They found that there were 146995 Swedish Twitter accounts.

What counts as a Swedish account?

Twitter bios were analysed and profiles with Sweden as their location or one of 20 Swedish cities (including certain recognised abbreviations) were classed as Swedish.

Also included were profiles with a bio written in Swedish.

Who gets missed?

As with Twitter census, this method of counting misses anyone who hasn’t filled in their bio or location, as well as anyone tweeting in another language than Swedish during the sample period (such as English). It will though include people with protected tweets that meet the above criteria.

Any Swedish account that isn’t followed by another Swedish account will also be missed due to the way accounts were crawled.

This figure also includes Swedish businesses, organisations and non-human accounts as well as people.

How many active Twitter users?

According to the information given in this tweet 83029 of the 146995 Swedish Twitter accounts have tweeted during the past month (which presumably is the month up to the 20th of December 2011).

The number of active Twitter accounts according to Intellecta’s study was 35993 - but these two figures are not comparable as Hampus Brynolf used a much narrower definition of what was active.

Growth

Even though the methods used to measure differ between the two studies, it’s reasonably safe to say that the number of Swedish Twitter accounts has increased during 2011. At the moment though, it’s difficult to come to any conclusions on the number of active Twitter users.

Let’s hope that Aitellu release some further details, including some figures that are more comparable with the Twitter Census.

Update 2012-01-18

Aitellu hasn’t released their own further details yet, but Ajour has been given a preview. They have revised the number of Swedish accounts upwards slightly to 153,000 and come up with a figure of 87,000 active Swedish accounts - which according to Ajour was produced using the same critera as Intellecta.

It’s can be exactly the same critera due to the different methods used to collect the data, but it is never the less possible to say that there has been a signficant increase in the number of active Twitter accounts here in Sweden during the past year.

James Royal-Lawson+ is a digital strategist and web manager based in Stockholm Sweden.

"Have your ever used that system? Well, I wish you luck. It’s so difficult to understand that I..."

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:13:26 +0100

“Have your ever used that system? Well, I wish you luck. It’s so difficult to understand that I lost my temper today and began to cry”

- A user on a system they have to use as part of their job. It’s unacceptable what we make people put up with. Stupid bloody system as Jonas Söderström puts it.

Social Intranets & digital natives

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 17:42:00 +0100

One particular statistic from the Swedish internet use report for 2011 was how everyone in Sweden in the 16-25 age group uses social media.

For a fair while we’ve been discussing the expectations of young employees in the workplace, but this statistic is about as big as a wake-up call as an organisation can get.

It’s time for companies to stop slacking, pull their intranet socks up and get social.

Digital natives

Let’s paint a picture. Jesper is 25. Not long out of university and has spent pretty much as long as he can bother to remember using MSN instant messaging, texting, and socialising with his friends via Facebook. All the time.

He’s been receiving constant feedback, answers, and opinions around the clock. At the same time he’s been giving feedback, answers and opinions to his peers around the clock. It’s a totally natural part of his life. A digital native.

Social media sites blocked

So what happens when he enters the corporate world and sits behind his laptop at work? He replicates his natural behaviour outside of the workplace. He expects to be able to network with his colleagues and his professional contemporaries in the same way as he does naturally outside of work.

But your organisation hasn’t embraced social business. The intranet is still a place for pushing news articles from internal communication. Facebook access is blocked. Internally, email is still the king.

Jesper is starting to regret accepting this job and realises that next time, he’s going to do his company culture homework a lot better.

He then pulls out his iPad from his bag and opens up all his normal social networks, invites all of his colleagues to be friends, or follows them, or connects with them and starts working.

Carry on regardless

Circumnavigating your attempts at blocking sites, working outside of your firewall, he has filled in the gaps. It doesn’t matter any more whether you think it’s a good idea to have a social intranet, or haven’t budgeted for one - the digital natives in your workplace are going to network regardless.

Providing social and collaborative tools inside the firewall (or within the realm of the organisation) will help you retain some of Jesper’s knowledge though his social behaviour and turn it into a digital asset for your company.

James Royal-Lawson+ is a digital strategist, web and intranet manager based in Stockholm Sweden.

This blog post was born over a beer and a chat in Stockholm with intranet pioneer Mark Morrell and Martin Risgaard, Social Media Strategist at Arla Foods.

Swedish internet usage 2011

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:32:00 +0100

.SE (Stiftelsen för Internetinfrastruktur) has released their yearly report (in Swedish) about Swedish internet use. It covers a wide spectrum of internet use, from file-sharing through to social networks.

I’ve previously written about the 2009 report with specific focus on Swedish blogging statistics. This time I’m going to give a more general summary of interesting findings from this year’s report.

Internet usage

86% of the Swedish population over the age of 18 use the internet. This has risen by just 1% in the last year. Additional people are still coming online, but they are largely limited to the over 65 age group.

In 2011, 69% of adult Swedes are using the internet daily.

Amongst Swedish internet users, two activities are so widespread that they could be considered to be done by everyone. Those are searching using Google (97%) and reading/writing email (95%). Searching for news (92%) and timetables (90%) are not too far behind in their popularity.

49% of three year olds are occasional internet users (64% within the 3-5 age group). The age-group in which the majority have used the internet has become younger year after year.

That the “start age” for internet use has reached such a young age as three is perhaps connected to the rise of smartphones and the mobile internet, as well as tablets such as the iPad.

More intensive internet usage - that is to say daily usage - amongst 3 year-olds has remained relatively constant (2-3%) during the past 3 years, whereas it has risen for every other age between 4 and 9.

Swedish blogging

46% of internet users read blogs (up from 37% in 2009), with 8% writing a blog (up from 6% in 2009). 16% of women and 5% of men read blogs daily. The number of young girls reading blogs has increased dramatically in recent years. 52% of Swedish girls between 12 and 15 read blogs daily. The equivalent figure for 12-15 year old boys is 1%.

Blog reading is predominately a female activity for every age group until the age of 76+. Reading blogs on a daily basis is overwhelmingly a female activity from 12 year-olds up to 45 year olds.

Social Media usage in Sweden

Half the population, 52%, use social networks. All of them have a Facebook account. This figure has increased 10% each year in recent years, and shows no signs of slowing.

In the 16-25 age group, the use of social networks has reached the point where you can say that pretty much everyone in that age group (95%) now uses social networking.

35% of those who use the internet use social networking sites daily, with Facebook obviously dominating. 7% though said they have used Twitter at some point, with 2% saying that they use it daily.

Digital natives

The age group that dominates in so many of the statistics in the report, is the 16-25 age-group. This generation is undeniably the digital generation. Many activities and usage patterns of this group can be routinely described with phrases such as “everyone” or “majority of”.

Despite high overall levels of adoption, the internet in Sweden is far from being a level playing ground. This is important to bear in mind in your digital activities.

Update: 2012-01-13

Swedes and the Internet 2011 has now been released in English.

James Royal-Lawson+ is a digital strategist and web manager based in Stockholm Sweden.

Stop using QR codes!

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 20:19:00 +0100

This autumn the use of QR codes in advertising in Stockholm has exploded. There are more codes visible now than ever before. Unfortunately the majority of them are poorly implemented.

If the QR code doesn’t add to the user experience, don’t use them!

In this blog post I’ve collected together a number of recent examples of QR codes in the wild here in Stockholm, Sweden.

Almost every single code took me to a standard desktop website (or campaign site). Most of them led to a page that was not designed or adjusted for handheld devices.

If a fishy bites, hold on!

QR codes are not going to be scanned by a large number of people - irrespective of the hype, most people don’t know what the hell they are, don’t know how to scan them, or don’t care about scanning them.

When you get someone who does know what they are, and does bother to scan them - you want to make sure you hold on to them! This means what happens once they’ve scanned the code needs to help them take the next step in a relevant context.

Build for the context

By and large this means always think mobile when you are using QR codes. This is the context your target audience are in when they scan. Anything other than mobile-ready content or service will make their interaction more difficult. This will reduce their happiness, reduce the chance of meeting your goals, and potentially damage your brand.

QR Codes in the wild

Nokia N9

The code leads to the full desktop website. No handheld or responsive version available.

FV Seleqt

Scan this product packaging and you are taken to a desktop site showcasing their products.

Krusovice

Leads to a page that has been designed for mobiles. The page contains a form, but there is still room for optimised it to make completion as easy and as successful as possible from a touch-screen device.

Biltema

Two tiny codes, very close together. One for the Android app and one for the iPhone app. They do both scan, but you have cover up one of the codes to ensure you scan the correct one.

Scan

I didn’t manage to get this code to scan. It was very badly positioned (right at the bottom of the advert) meaning I had to get down on my knees to try to scan it. The code was also relatively small and contained a lot of data.

Norskfisk

Scan the code and you end up at a recipe, on a desktop web site. No mobile version.

SEB

Code to apply for a loan.

Stockholm Film Festival

This year’s film festival site is really quite good, but shame they used a code that pointed straight to the desktop site. No mobile site is available, but there is an iPhone app.

Skanska

This code was featured on an advert on the Stockholm metro leads to a desktop website.

Pantamera

One of the few better implementations included in this blog post. The codes lead to YouTube videos, which serves a mobile version of it’s site (or can even open directly in the YouTube app on many mobiles).

Flickr

You can find all of these QR codes (and more) in this set on my Flickr stream.

James Royal-Lawson+ is a digital strategist and web manager based in Stockholm Sweden.

Green, green grass.

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:47:43 +0200

Green, green grass.

The truth about gamification - uxpodcast

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:03:00 +0200

Episode 5 of UXPodcast has been published. This month, Per Axbom and I talk to Jesper Bylund about gamification.

It was not only good fun to have Per and Jesper round to Beantin HQ to record the podcast, it was also thoroughly educational. Jesper knows his stuff when it comes to game design and gamification.

The peak of inflated expectations

There’s an awful lot of hype about gamification now - as higlighted by Gartner in their 2011 hype cycle. Gamification is right up there in the peak of inflated expectations.

Together with the hype there is a lot of misunderstanding. In the podcast we dig into the misunderstanding and talk about what gamification really is.

Listen to the show

Take the chance to listen to episode 5 - The truth about gamification on uxpodcast.com.

James Royal-Lawson is a freelance web manager and strategist based in Stockholm Sweden.

What gets shown in Facebook's Ticker?

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 12:59:00 +0200

Facebook has rolled out their Ticker to all users as part of their September updates (if you haven’t got it yet, you soon will!).

Combined with other changes to the appearance of the news feed, this has raised a fair few questions from people about their privacy settings and what gets shown where.

I’m going to try to explain it for you.

So how does it work?

The visibility of every update you post to Facebook is controlled by the privacy settings associated to it. Using the inline audience selector you can control the privacy settings at the time you post it, and adjusted them at any point afterwards.

The news feed now just shows a selection of updates based on a number of factors (which i’m not going to go into during this post). If you want to see everything that is happening the world of Facebook as defined by your friends (and people subscribed to) then you need to take a look at the ticker in the right hand column.

The activity firehose

This ticker shows everything people who you’ve subscribed to are doing on Facebook that has a privacy setting that you are included in. You are subscribed to your friends, and all their types of updates by default.

You can unsubscribe from a persons activity, and you can even turn off certain types of activity from a specific person. So if someone listens to far too much music on Spotify that rubs you the wrong way, you can untick Music and Videos.

By and large though, what this means is that you may see more Facebook activity than you are used to seeing - if you bother to look at the Ticker in the right hand column that is!

Examples

Whenever any of your friends write someone on someone else’s wall, for example, you’ll see that action appear in your ticker.

If any of your friends comment on a person’s update who isn’t your friend, if that update has public or “friends of friends” as it’s privacy settings, then you will see not only your friends’ comment, but also all the other (non-public) comments everyone else has written.

If someone publishes a public update (of whatever kind; a status, a photo, event, action) then any comments and likes made to that public update will also be public. In this case, public means totally public. Not-logged-into-Facebook public.

Keep your eye on the grey icon

So what matters now is that you pay special attention to the little grey icon visible at the bottom of each update. If this has a little globe on it, whatever you say will be public. If it has a couple of silhouettes, then hover over the icon and see what it says. It will explain the reach of the update, and therefore the potential exposure of anything you write.

Remember though, privacy can be changed afterwards. So something you once said in private may become public (and vice versa). Even if you said it years ago…

James Royal-Lawson is a freelance web manager and strategist based in Stockholm Sweden.

Google Analytics: Updated visit definition is missing visits

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 09:15:00 +0200

Google updated their definition of a visit in the middle of august. I’ve written an explanation in a separate blog post. In general the change is good as it should make the data in Google Analytics easier for the layman to interpret.

What isn’t so good is that Google Analytics isn’t behaving in the way Google describes. It’s not only missing visitors in some situations, but it is also missing some traffic sources - the attribution is totally incorrect for some visits.

Test details

My test was as follows:

Using my Android tablet, I visited my blog a series of 4 times. I used my tablet so that it would be easy to extract my test visits (with little chance of anyone else visiting the same pages from the same sources on that day).

Visit 1

Via a link on one of my old sites, www.ccl4.org 
The browser newly opened 
Not visited beantin.se in the past 30 minutes.

Visit 2

Via Google's search results searching for beantin fishbang
A few minutes after visit 1.

Visit 3

via Google again, this time searching for beantin seo
The browser newly opened
Over 60 minutes since visit 2.

Visit 4

Via a link on another one of my old sites, 503.org.uk
Just a few minutes after visit 3.

According to Google’s new visit definition, this should have been 4 visits, with 4 different traffic sources.

What the data contained

According to my Google Analytics data, I had made 3 visits. Visit 4 is missing. Instead, you can see that the beantin seo search has had 2 page views attributed to it - which you can see from my test actions simply isn’t true.

Showing all 4 visits happened

As a way of confirming that visit 4 really did happen and data was received by Google Analytics, showing the referral from 503.org.uk, I made use of my per visit referrer script.

On beantin.se this script saves the referrer for each visit as a custom variable. The script is run on each page view, and the referrer is saved to the custom variable at the visit level.

This means visit 4 will have over-written the referrer for visit 3 - as Google hasn’t trigger a new visit for visit 4, but there is a page view, so my script grabs the referrer…

As you can see from the screenshot, 503.org.uk is there - meaning a visit did come from that site, and there are two page views attributed to it (the page views from visits 3 and 4).

Bug or feature?

I’ve repeated this test on my laptop and examined the cookies after each visit, and Google Analytics is failing to update the traffic source (in __utmz) and subsequently failing to trigger a “new visit” according to their new definition.

A bug or a feature? I say bug… what do you think?

Update 20110915

When researching this blog post, I focused my attention on the __utmz cookie. I’ve just taken a closer look at how both __utma and __utmz are behaving in the above scenario.

Google Analytics is failing to update not only the traffic source, but also the visit count and the various timestamps stored in __utma detailing when you last and current visits took place.

This means that even more reports in Google Analytics could be affected (depending on your visitor patterns)

James Royal-Lawson is a freelance web manager and strategist based in Stockholm Sweden.

Google Analytics: what are visits?

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:00:00 +0200

It’s all change with Visits and Google Analytics. In August 2011 Google altered when they consider a session to have ended. A small change according to their blog.

Get ready, I’m going to mention some odd sounding cookie names a fair bit!

In the old days

Prior to August 2011, If a user was inactive for 30 minutes or more, any future activity would have been attributed to a new visit. Any users that left your site but returned within 30 minutes were counted as part of the original visit.

Google made use of two cookies in keeping track of a session. One called __utmb and another called __utmc.

__utmc was a pure browser session cookie which expired as soon as the browser was closed. If __utmc didn’t exist, then it was a new visit.

__utmb is a persistent cookie that is set to expire after 30 minutes (by default). This cookie was used to register a new visit if you’ve left the site open in your browser (ie __utmc exists), but you disappeared for more than 30 minutes to do something else - perhaps to eat lunch.

Back to the future

From August 2011, the session cookie __umtc is no longer used to calculating visits and instead Google is using the __utmb cookie in combination with another cookie, __utmz, to determine when a new session begins.

__utmz is the traffic source cookie. I’ve explained the often misunderstood Google Analytics traffic sources in a previous post. This cookie only gets updated when the traffic source for the current visit is different to the traffic source stored in the cookie (excluding direct visits).

What Google Analytics does now is reset the __utmb cookie and increment the session counter in __utma (the 2-year persistent cookie storing your unique ID amongst other things) every time the __utmz cookie is updated - ie, each time the traffic source changes.

It does this whether the __utmc cookie exists or not. So, closing your browser, reopening it and revisiting a site (within 30 minutes of __utmb last being updated) will count as part of the same visit.

So What does this mean?

This means that you can’t compare visit data that crosses the date divide of August 16th 2011. Year-on-year comparisons are out of the window.

You will also see an increase in visits. How much of an increase depends on your traffic patterns - if visitors frequently hopped back and forth to your website from other sites or search engines in a short space of time, you’ll see a much bigger jump than say, a blog with a relatively low publishing frequency.

You will see a slight increase in traffic sources as the splitting of visits up into per-source chunks should reveal sources that were previously buried. Average page views per visit will fall slightly, and bounce rates will rise.

But…

My research has shown that visitors re-entering a site (within 30 minutes) via a referring site (not a search engine, or a visit with campaign tracking) are not causing the __utmz cookie to be updated, and no new visit is recorded. These visits are being considered a continuation of the original visit.

If we ignore the oddity of referring sites not being recorded properly, this change is probably going to make session-based reports easier for the layman to interpret. and a step closer to seeing per-visit traffic sources out of the box.

James Royal-Lawson is a freelance web manager and strategist based in Stockholm Sweden.

The complete website redesign: why you should avoid it

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:05:00 +0200

Never do a complete redesign & rewrite of your website in one go.

Many companies are still locked in a 3-5 year redesign cycle - a point is reached when the unhappiness with their website reaches such a level that a total redesign is ordered.

While we’re at it

A “while we’re at it” attitude comes into action.

While we’re at it…

we’ll redesign the look of the site…
we’ll change the interaction design…
we’ll rewrite all the content…
we’ll change the navigation and structure…
…and what the hell, we’ll change CMS while we’re at it too.

Sounds like a good idea doesn’t it? Well, not really. There are very few situations where I’d advise an organisation to do a complete and utter redesign, rewrite, and rebuild of their website all at the same time.

Much more complex

Not only do all those changes executed at roughly the same time require quite a sizable heap of cash, they also increase the complexity of the project by several orders of magnitude.

The increased complexity often translates into; the overunning of the project in terms of both time and money, poorly researched decisions, difficulty in making sensible decisions.

Furthermore, we’ve got the poor old user. If your repeat visitors make up a significant segment of your visitor base, consider what a complete re-working of your site will do to their world.

Search Engine impact

Finally, the big one. Something regularly under appreciated is just how symbiotic the relationship between your website and the internet really is. Everything you publish is analysed and indexed by the search engines. Other sites link to your content - perhaps many of them deep link to content beyond your index page.

Digital fingerprint

This presence, your old website, is a digital fingerprint. Google webmaster tools (and similar services) can give you an idea of what that fingerprint looks like.

What Google (and other search engines) think about your site is made up from all the words you use across all the pages on your site, its URLs - as well as; page titles, internal links, incoming links, the anchor text of all those links, and numerous other signals.

If you rewrite all of your content, change all your URLs, and redesign all your pages - all at the same time - how do you think that impacts on your fingerprint?

Minor surgery

So if a complete redesign - a full monty - is out of the question - what should you do?

Minor surgery, rather than heart surgery. Tweak. Constantly evolve. Change a few pieces at a time. Measure and test how well those pieces work. Adjust them, rewrite them, tweak them. Measure again.

Support network

If you for whatever reason can’t avoid the big bang, or you come onboard too late to steer the ship clear of the iceberg - then make sure you’ve got the right support network. The complete website redesign is the biggest challenge web management can throw at you.

James Royal-Lawson is a freelance web manager and strategist based in Stockholm Sweden.

Sweden Social Web Camp ticket giveaway

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:47:00 +0200

When it became clear that I wouldn’t after all be able to make it to SSWC, I had to decide what to do with my ticket. What easier way to deal with it then to give it away?

No easy decision!

It wasn’t so easy at all. Not because nobody wanted it, quite the opposite - there were a whole load of people to choose from - but because choosing which one individual would get the ticket was a much tougher thing than i’d ever considered.

I’d set out my terms and conditions for the giveaway on Google+. In short I wanted to give the ticket to someone who hadn’t been in the “web” industry for years and would learn from the experience - to give someone a little lift and perhaps help them over the garden wall.

Karmapriya

After quite a bit of thought - and a number of changes of mind - I decided the ticket should go to Jessica Muschött, @Karmapriya. Jessica has been involved in the branch previously, but has spent recent years doing voluntary work in India. She’s looking at making a comeback in this exciting world of digital communiction. So, She’s going to be off to Sweden Social Web Camp 2011 as part of that climb back over the garden wall.

Thanks to everyone who nominated someone, or nominated themselves. Everyone had a good case, and I wish I could send you all. Maybe next year!

Marzipan flowers

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 19:14:13 +0200

Marzipan flowers

12 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 22-27, 2011)

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 10:59:00 +0200

For your reading pleasure this time, a collection of links (with summaries) including articles related to: web management, SEO, intranet, UX.

Web management

The web is critical. The web team is not

‎”According to a McKinsey report, From 2004 to 2009, the Internet’s contribution to GDP in mature countries averaged about 20%.” - just think how much it could be if more organisations made good, well managed use of it!

Greenpeace R2D2 QR Code

I’ve read a fair few good things have been said about aspects of Greenpeace’s “Volkswagen” campaign - but they haven’t done a good job of using QR Codes. Yes, it looks good on R2D2’s side, but (amongst other problems) the code leads to a non-mobile version of the site…

Härmed anmäler jag Riksdagen för brott mot lagen | Emanuels randanmärkningar

The new “cookie law” came into force on July 1st here in Sweden, basically making pre-approval of cookies a requirement for a website (with some fuzzy not clearly defined exceptions). Have you adjusted all your (Swedish) sites? A draft recommendation of what to do to comply is available from IAB Sweden.

The Web Is Not A Farm! It’s Time To Tear Down The Silos

All hail the generalist! Conferences covering every “Silo” seem to be talking about how the Silos that exist in web [well, business…] have to be broken down. Unfortunately a lot of time, it is the Silo topic of the conference that paints itself as “right” and it’s all the other Silos need to be broken down. Thankfully, Kristina Mausser writes some sense. All hail T-shaped people and generalists!

A Comprehensive Website Planning Guide

Some nice parts in this Guide from Smashing Magazine. Unfortunately, it’s missing some really important aspects. What about migration? Most companies aren’t start-ups with no existing digital presence. What about SEO? Keyword research? Taking care of redirects? And then a big miss - usability testing?

Five years from now, there’ll be no such thing as a webpage

Well, no - but kind of. Yes, social (networks, content & search) will continue to make huge changes to how we consume (create and share) content - but the hub of the internet will still be pages.

UX, IA & Testing

“Come as you are” - Part 1: The Reckless years

A series of blog posts sharing stories and experiences from 13 years of working with Information Architecture. Martin is currently the lead IA and UX architect for The Guardian.

Changing the Guardian through guerilla usability testing

Examples of Guerrilla usability testing from the lead UX/IA at The Guardian newspaper in the UK. Although it’s a compliment to “proper” testing, there’s really no excuse for doing no testing at all when it’s so simple, quick (and low cost) to just get out there and collect some data!

SEO

Getting “Pure” Search Results

Some tips about how to get “clean” non-personalised search results. Useful for research. I particularly like Scroogle - allows you to search Google as a “Google virgin”.

Why Google SERP CTR studies are a waste of time

We all know how “ranking number 1 in Google” is a silly phrase these days. This article does a good job of looking at patterns in click through ratios of SERPs and analysing the behaviour. You even get a reminder of some good housekeeping tips for improving your snippet.

Intranet & Collaboration

Does your intranet make a difference for your customers?

Nice reminder from Jane that the intranet should be helping you help your customers. In particular I like the example at the end of the post where she quotes a large bank that broke their workforce down into 3 groups: front line, back office, and analytical. All of which have very different expectations and needs from the intranet - and require different strategies (and tactics)

The multiplier effect

A blog post on the Economist Blog about social collaboration platforms as a talent-centred ecosystem for organisations. They talk of “T-shaped brokers” with deep specialist knowledge (the vertical bar) and a desire to collaborate (the horizontal bar). I’ve dubbed a variation of such people as “super-creators” previously.

QR codes: how not to use them in your campaign

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 22:51:00 +0200

During the summer months, Sveriges Radio, the public service broadcaster here in Sweden, broadcasts a series of programmes featuring talks by guest presenters. Sommar i P1, or “Sommarpratare” (“Summer talkers”).

On my metro train this morning, there was an advert for the radio series. What caught my attention was that it featured a QR code.

Armed and ready to scan

Naturally, this meant just one thing. I had to take out my phone and try to scan it. Being who I am, I know exactly what one of these funny little square codes is - I also have a barcode scanner installed on my mobile and my tablet. I’m armed and ready to go.

I was sat on the train (which is pretty normal for my journey) and the advert was about 1.5m to my right, on the inside of the window.

On the Metro here in Stockholm, the seats are grouped in clusters of four. This meant I had three other people sat around me. Standing up and getting a closer shot of the code wasn’t going to happen - if I was going to scan this code, I needed to do it from my seat.

So, out came my phone and I pointed it discretely (as discretely as you can on a morning train into the city) at the QR code and waited for the app to focus and get a lock. Nope. Nothing. It was just too small to scan from this distance.

Linking to a non-mobile site?

Not wanting to give up, I entered the URL included on the advert. It was good that they’d included a link (as well as the QR Code) - at least this meant I wasn’t totally dependent on the code - presuming that the code contained the same link!

I entered the link into my mobile’s browser and erk! Everything ground to a halt, my smartphone pretty much locked up. I hadn’t been automatically redirected to the mobile version of the page, instead I ended up at the full standard version of the site - complete with built in radio player - was loading and trying to come to life. Not the mobile experience I was hoping for.

When I got to the office, I brought up the picture of the code (that i’d uploaded to Flickr during my journey) and managed to scan it off the screen. It decoded to the same URL as on the poster.

This isn’t helpful.

Think mobile

You always scan these codes from your mobile. It’s an advert on a train, there’s not really any other option! Any content they contain has to be useful, accessible, and relevant for a mobile user.

The saddest part of this story is that SR do have a mobile version of their website - including a programme page for the summer programme.

Offline meets online

It’s crucial that you consider exactly how people will consume your advertising. If you are going to join the offline and online worlds together - which you should - then QR codes is a good tool, but if you don’t think mobile, you might as well not bother.

James Royal-Lawson+ is a freelance web manager and strategist based in Stockholm Sweden.

Twitter users in Sweden: demographics

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 21:42:00 +0200

Intellecta Corporate have presented some additional findings based on new analysis of their data collected from Twitter during December 2010. In the previous presentation they came to the conclusion that there were 35993 active Twitter users in Sweden.

The new analysis focused on segmentation of the active twitter accounts. How many were companies? how many were people? how many were women? what professional is most common?

Location

They analysed the location given for each account. Unfortunately the majority of of the 91316 Swedish Twitter accounts didn’t give any location, or any useful/specific location. So even though there were 11000 Accounts that listed Stockholm as their location, it’s impossible to say anything more than at least 11000 Twitter users are in Stockholm.

Age

There’s no direct way of establishing the age of Twitter users, but Hampus analysed the names given - which can give you an indication of the generation of those tweeting. Many of the most common names are names that you would generally associate with people born in the 1970s. (that is a personal guess by me, without any checking of official name data.)

Gender

Next up was one of the more interesting statistics - the gender of Twitter users. Of those accounts that could be determined to be human, and that had a name where it was possible to determine the gender - 33284 accounts had a male name, and 26119 had a female name. this equates to a 56/44% male female split.

Amongst active users (those who have tweeted at least once a day during a 30 day period) the split tilts even more towards men. 61/39%. Active Swedish men on twitter made more updates, followed more people, and were followed by more than their female counterparts.

Occupation

A list of the most common occupation related words used in bios was also presented. I don’t think this can be taken too seriously, due to the way in which the bio field is used by people. Some people use it to describe themselves, others to describe why they are on Twitter (what they are interested in).

Some people have professions where there is a universally accepted term to describe that profession. Others perhaps work with something that has a large variation of titles. Never the less, journalist was the most common occupational word. Followed by student and manager. One thing I found interesting was that the list contained 6 English words, 3 words/phrases that are the same in Swedish and English, and just 3 that were exclusively Swedish.

Who Tweets?

Last up was - who is it that Tweets? 85% of the accounts analysed were people, 11% were companies, organisations and public authorities. Twitter in Sweden, unsurprisingly perhaps, is a very human thing.

The presentation can be found on Slideshare (in Swedish) and the video of the presentation (also in Swedish) can be found on Bambuser.

James Royal-Lawson is a freelance web manager and strategist based in Stockholm Sweden.

Facebook page marketing: How not to do it

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 08:28:00 +0200

A familiar shaped postcard appeared in the post the other week. A big Facebook “like” thumbs up. My kids thought it was excellent (as 3 and 5 year olds, they haven’t really been infected by Facebook yet). For me, it just sent my web-sense into overdrive.

ICA Maxi Nacka

The postcard was sent from ICA, the largest supermarket chain in Sweden and Scandinavia, or more specifically, from one of my local ICA stores that I visit pretty regularly.

This mailshot will have been sent to a large number of ICA Maxi Nacka’s customers - thousands at a guess. The Facebook page had 98 fans on the day the mailshot arrived. Today it’s got twenty more. So we can safely say that this is an example of how not how to market your Facebook page.

We’ll start with the post card itself. Where is the next step? what am I supposed to do? The advert isn’t going to magically click on a like button for me. I need some help. Where’s the URL to the facebook page? OK, perhaps a QR code to scan? Nope. A search term to put me in the right direction? Well, perhaps, but you can’t be certain. Maybe the Facebook page name is Maxi ICA Nacka?

Flawed marketing concept

The whole concept of the mailshot is flawed in this situation. I’m expected to do a series of improbably things. I’m expected to look at this and be convinced that liking this particular ICA store is going to give me something sufficient in return. They do explain that on their Facebook page “You will find inspiration, recipes, events, special offers”. Maybe that’s a big enough return for my Like-love…

Hello, what’s your name?

If that has convinced me to “like”, then I have to get myself to a computer, bring up Facebook and think of something to enter into the search box in order to find their incredibly compelling page. Perhaps if I’ve found the advert that compelling I might have taken it with me to the computer to help me (or perhaps I pulled out my tablet there and then in the kitchen, taking a pause from opening the rest of the mail).

You may remember that the postcard had “Maxi ICA Nacka” in the text. This is one of the names the store calls itself. Unfortunately for them, almost all ICA stores are known as ICA [place name], and the larger Maxi stores as ICA Maxi [place name] - and more often that not you don’t need to say the place name, there’s not that many of them nearby.

If you enter ICA Maxi into Facebook, you get a whole load of results containing supermarkets from all over Sweden. You’d have to work hard and long to find the Nacka store amongst them. So, let’s add Nacka to the search phrase giving us ICA Maxi Nacka. Surely that’ll work?

As you can see. You get two results. Both of which are Facebook Places. Joe Shopper is starting to lose a bit of the overwhelming urge to “like” this ICA store. The lack of profie pictures makes them instantly less “likable” and convincing too. They clearly aren’t the right pages.

Are we there yet?

Let’s put the phrase from the postcard into Facebook’s search. Maxi ICA Nacka. As Facebook provides instant search results, you’re going to naturally pause after typing Maxi ICA (as ICA stores appear at this point). None of them are Nacka. Let’s continue typing. Nope. It’s one of those Facebook places again.

Maxi Nacka - who needs ICA!

At this point, if anyone is still hunting, they are hunting for the page out of pure frustration and stubbournness. In one last try, we go for Maxi Nacka. Yes! Bingo! Of course! Obviously as an ICA store you are going to make sure that the main brand of your company is totally missing from the page name.

So we’ve made it to the page. Probably. Apparently this business is based in Nackawic, New Brunswick. At this point, i’ve stopped crying and i’m starting to laugh.

Despite being over the 25 fan threshold for choosing a custom name for your page, the page still has the ugly 14-digit ID number in it’s URL - 167901786576697. I understand that they don’t want to use that URL in their marketing material.

Perhaps they did think about claiming a better name, but just forgot to actually claim it. They do, after all, have a (broken) link to http://www.facebook.com/Maxi-Nacka on their Info page.

Over 150 dollars a fan?

The page had 98 fans on the day when the postcard arrived. A few weeks later whilst I’m writing this blog post, they’ve gained a well earned 20. Designing, printing and distributing an advert to a large number of your customers isn’t something that’s free. Even if i’m kind and say that the campaign cost 20000kr (design, print, distribution) they are looking at a cost per fan of 1000kr (approximately 150 dollars).

Given the amateur nature of this entire effort, I’m going to stick my neck out and presume that they didn’t have any specific, measurable, goals for the campaign. Suffice to say, I imagine they expected to earn more than 20 new recruits. I’m starting to feel I should like their page out of sympathy rather than enthusiasm!

Digital marketing is easy to execute - anyone can do it. This is both it’s advantage and it’s disadvantage. Anyone can do it, but not as many can do it well.

James Royal-Lawson is a freelance web manager and strategist based in Stockholm Sweden.

Talking podcasting tips with Jon Buscall A few days ago I had...

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 09:45:00 +0200

Talking podcasting tips with Jon Buscall

A few days ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed for a second time by Jon Buscall of Jontus Media for his Online Communications Podcast.

This time, podcasting itself was the subject. Earlier this month I took the dive, together with Per Axbom, into producing and publishing a regular podcast: UXPodcast. Jon and I discuss my experiences as a podcasting newbie and we exchange tips for those of you thinking about getting started with a podcast as part of your marketing activities.

You can read the programme notes here: How Do You Launch Your First Podcast ?