After about one year after launching LAb[au]’s website redesign, here is an excerpt from Google Analytics:

0,91% bounce rate

The bounce rate describes the proportion of users whose next action after landing on your website is… to leave it – hence the “bounce” metaphor. That means the lower is the better.

I’ve never seen such a low bounce rate: it means most people that land on the homepage interact with it.  (Ok, I’m hearing the skeptics among us who will probably state that it’s because you actually need to click to  get to some content. Before you complain about “mystery meat” navigation, just understand this: web designers and developers are not LAb[au]’s target audience; we are reaching out to actors on the art, architecture scene, curators, public and private institutions, etc… which are used to – and expect  – creativity, out-of-the box thinking,  daring, clear cut identity profiles. Anyway.)

3:11 minutes average time on site

Now, apparently, people enjoy what they discover: they stay for more than 3 minutes on the site. On the other websites i track, it never reaches such a long time (it’s more between 1:30 to 2:30 minutes).

83,76% new visits

That mean 16,24% returning visitors.  A quick look into the Visitors loyalty screen show most  visitors are, as usual, first-time visitors. But 3.53% have returned more than a hundred time. This seems quite a lot to me (hell i don’t even qualify to that returning visit rate!).

Why such a big amount of first time visitors?

LAB[au]’s work is truly very inspiring and attracts quite a lot of attention from “niche contexts” such as architecture, digital art and cultural magazines, both online and offline. This generates a consistent and slowly but rather steadily increasing qualified traffic flow (as shown in the graph below).

How about the impact of Social media?

It’s quite difficult to get a clear picture from google Analytics in regards to social media: i wish they were integrating a specific screen that gather the relevant information. Still, part of the information is there, hidden in the mass, waiting to be mined.

For instance, the efficience of “share-this” buttons

Via the Events system, I do track the number of times people hit a “share this” link via Facebook, twitter and myspace. Basically, only twitter and facebook are used by visitors. Last month, these were hit 16 times. Not bad, i guess, since it’s increasing steadily. It’s not much not either, yet i lack comparative data so i can’t really make up my mind. Besides, i don’t use “share this” buttons myself, I mostly do cut-and-paste (i’m a control freak). Since i suppose i’m not the only control freak on the planet, this  is just an estimate (statistics are estimates). So, back to the “refering sites”, this time looking at visitors coming from Twitter and Facebook

I’m rather pleased by these statistics as the website interface was truly an experiment into a different type of navigation system, integrating hierarchical and transversla navigation. It takes some time to get used to. From what i can see from both user experience captures and traffic statistics, it’s not too difficult. Relieved i am. For now.

Feels like testing your site under Internet Explorer 1 ? Right, you don’t. But with this tool, you can.

You could do the most useful things of testing it under IE6, IE7 and IE8. Now, that’s probably what you want to do, right? Well, you can!

Here is the setup screen which tells all you need to know about this handy testing tool.

If you have any other tools you’d like to share, let me know in the comments.

In the meanwhile… Happy testing !

Check it out and let me know if it works for you!

The best solution i 've had so far is to increase php memory limit to a high value. Not clean, i know, but it works.
So as not to destroy the fix whenever you upgrade Wordpress, put it in your wp-config.php file.

I looked around for any built-in function or plugin but nothing suited my need. Eventually, i resorted to doing a specific query in the database.

Here is the query and the loop that uses the dataset, as they sit in my frontpage.php template. It results in displaying a link with the latest testimonial's image to make it stand out.

If you have any question, shoot!

I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.

Mitch Hedberg (American comedian, 1968 - 2005)

I *hate* Steve Job's permanent black turtleneck and that "i'm-a-cool-and-successful-and-easygoing-and-smart prick" look of his, and more than anything else, i loathe that worshipping tone every other mac user has when it comes to discussing ThatFruit products. But this is now official, and i'm relieved it is now out of my heart: mac Os X is a grand OS in terms of user experience. The hardware doesn't fall short not either: after replacing various parts in Acer, Asus and then macbook computers more recently, it's now obvious to me that an Apple product is blessed with intelligent, smart and creative thinking from the software that ships with it up to the very placement and design of its tiniest screw, the quality of the plastic, the amazing management of spatial assets in a thing as tiny as a macbook.

And now, dear wife, i owe you this honesty: I'm in love with my macbook. Especially with this 2x 2Gb 200-pin SODIMMs DDR2 SDRAM 667MHZ low-latency memory upgrade.

Hardware

Before that upgrade, it was 10x snappier than windows XP. After the upgrade, its 10x snappier than before, which makes it 10x10 times snappier than windows XP, with a less bragging hardware. That's what intelligence brings you: lower specs, better perfs.

Software

According to the price tag, a Macbook is more expensive, than that Aye Sir computer with more powerful hardware. that's marketing. The hardware integration more than makes up for it, and the software that's delivered is worth more than the difference. The mac os X OS, based on Linux with a powerful graphical coating and sensible interaction design provide for a global user experience that turns your computer into a transparent part of your life. With Windows, feelings of confusion and frustration are your daily lot: the good side is that you get to learn about the internals. The bad side is that what you learn is not relevant to what you really want to do with your life. That's what the Apple folks got right, at least with the OS: it does not get in the way. You stop working, close the laptop screen pane. Automatic, fast and silent hibernation. The screen backlight that lights the Apple logo on the back tells you "bye for now honey, i'm going for a nap while you're away, i'll be right there when you need me". Hours later you go back to work and lift the pane, it just starts in less than a sec, readier than you to get on with doing things.

I think Apple achieved what was described in Sci-Fi books of the seventies and eigthies: a computer that turns into an extension of your body and thus becomes transparent, goes unnoticed making computing much like breathing, an unconscious activity, whereas Microsoft just made a computer like Chrysler, GM and the others did car: bloathed, inadapted, out of touch, in need of human care to remind it of who it is all the time.

If you are serious about getting things done, about quality in general over quantity, and if you believe your inner life should get more of your time than your computer's internals, switch to mac. Trust me, i was an unbeliever for years. Oh, and this an unsponsored testimony, I just had to let it out. I feel better now, thank you for your attention.

That's an interesting way to know what's going on in the mind of the audience and how the website is perceived, and also to get a feel on how the audience reacts to the keywords you profiled the website with.

TaskSpeed is a test suite useful to compare the performance of various javascript libraries. These are usually source of a lot of discussion on which is the best library. That's a topic better left aside.

IE suck

What's remarkable instead in this speed test suite, is the obvious manner in which it appears that Internet Explorer (IE) is lagging far behind in terms of performance, IE6 particularly (but IE7 suck too, and IE8 will suck pretty soon).

Again, nothing new there, except for the fact that it outlines how library authors "try" to make it work on IE6 but it's just plain painful to watch it try painfully to render whatever animation your website has, turning animations into an experience closer to museum's still-nature contemplation.

The law of Nature

So the issue at stake is: should library authors drop support for IE6 entirely (thus removing a lot of overhead), or instead "come down" on the amount of features, since what remains the number one browser worldwide obviously can't swallow it?

My personal opinion

The natural law of things says that old and wounded ones get left behind the herd when they cannot follow the group anymore. Eventually a wolf comes eat them and oups they're gone.
The problem here is that natural selection does not act as fast in the software world: no big wolves to "clean up" the mess. Old software can linger along for as long as there is hardware and people to have it run.

We need a big bad wolf

So, maybe we should sponsor a big virus editor to roam on the internet to hunt down IE6, and when found, make IE6 unable to open up anymore and instead invite to install a clean firefox/chrome/safari/opera solution.

There we'd have our big bad wolf (or a portuguese cleaning lady if this vision fits you better).