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This is what happens when your website sucks

Here’s the first page of “search hits” from my three private blogs (hypermegaglobal.net, meltdownblog.com and krise.hypermegaglobal.net – all updated much more frequently than this one):

Search hits and keywords

All of these are from today

As you can see, most of my visitors where looking for fnapf, which is a pet supply franchise chain. That’s because I blogged about how badly fnapf’s Luxembourgish website sucks. Not only is it configured in a way that omitting the “www.” will get you nowhere, even if you make it to their website it’s difficult to locate their biggest store unless you know where to find it on a map (or keep zooming out). This quickly became the most popular post on my blog (pathetic, I know) which means that I’m obviously not the only one who had trouble finding what I wanted on their site.

So here’s a quick reminder of the very basic content you should put on your website (examples are geared towards a brick and mortar store).

The 5 friggin’ Ws – things you should definitely put on your website

Let’s simply take the well-known 5 Ws from journalism and reinterpret them from the perspective of a website visitor looking for information (which should also get us pretty close to the perspective of a search engine trying to determine your website’s ranking). Apparently these basics are so obvious that they’re often forgotten (either that or many people just have no clue of what to put on a website).

Who?

Who are you? Example: We’re “Zombie Megastore”, Luxembourg’s leading store for all you zombie needs.

What?

What exactly is it that you do? Example: We carry a large selection of… well, maybe I shouldn’t have chosen the zombie store example. Anyhow, here’s where you list the things customers can find in your shop so that 1. they’ll find you when searching for your city + a certain item or brand on a search engine and 2. they don’t have to call and ask if you sell product XYZ item before taking the trip to your store.

When?

Opening hours. If you’re closed on certain days, put this on your website. If you’re closing your shop for vacation, put this on your website (yes, I’m looking at you, Luxembourgish shop and restaurant owners who like to take long summer vacations).

Where?

Your address (you might want to include your phone/fax number, email, link to contact form, etc.).

Why?

This is the place where you might think you’ll have to come up with a wonderful story to justify why you’re doing what you do (“when my grandfather turned into a zombie, I realized there was no shop where I could buy thinks to make his… uhm… ‘life’ just a bit better”). That’s cute, but I suggest staying with the customer perspective and just answering the old basic “why should I buy from you”-question. It can be as simple as “we are the biggest store for zombie supplies in the entire state”.

That’s it, the basics. Of course a website can do much more than just answering these questions, but not answering them means you’ll lose potential visitors/customers every day.

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2009 09 28 Stephan Attempted Humor
Business Tips
Luxembourg
Marketing
Rants
Web development Comments (0) Permalink

What Google and Mr. Burns have got in common

They’re both old fashioned.

I discovered this when receiving my first Google Adsense check from Google’s bank in Germany. This sort of intra-EU payment might have been “cutting edge” a century ago. Nowadays it’s just odd and annoying, because I have to leave the office during the very restricted opening hours of my bank to cash the check, which costs me €15 in fees (or about a week of Adsense revenue). Someone at Google should look up Regulation (EC) No 2560/2001.

It’s not just Luxembourg, though, it appears Google doesn’t like smaller Eurozone countries and Greece (bad vacation experiences, maybe?):

State Population Bank transfer
Malta 404,962 No
Luxembourg 476,200 No
Cyprus 766,400 No
Slovenia 2,013,597 No
Ireland 4,239,848 Yes
Finland 5,289,128 Yes
Slovakia 5,389,180 Yes
Austria 8,316,487 Yes
Portugal 10,599,095 Yes
Belgium 10,666,866 Yes
Greece 11,125,179 No
Netherlands 16,471,968 Yes
Spain 45,116,894 Yes
Italy 59,131,287 Yes
France 63,392,140 Yes
Germany 82,314,906 Yes

Population data from Wikipedia

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2009 07 28 Stephan Luxembourg
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Add watermarks with transparent background in Nitro PDF

Adding a watermark to a PDF file is easy in Nitro PDF, but if you want the watermark to have a transparent background, things get a little more complicated.

I wanted to add our logo to a brochure so that visitors of our scales and balances shop would have a way of telling from where they had downloaded the brochure. This particular brochure had backgrounds in several colors, which is why the logo itself needed to have a transparent background.

Unfortunately, Nitro PDF Professional does not recognize the transparent background in image files (tested with version 5.5.1.3). The watermark has to be a PDF file to have a transparent background.To make matters worse, the simple graphics editor I had used years ago to create the logo had no PDF export option.

Here’s the workaround I used:

1. Export the logo in an image format that supports transparency (I used PNG):

pdf-watermark-1

2. Open the image with OpenOffice Draw (open source, free download here):

pdf-watermark-2

3. Export as PDF:

pdf-watermark-3

4. In Nitro PDF, choose Insert and Edit > Watermark > Manage Watermarks & Backgrounds:

pdf-watermark-4

5. Create a new profile and add a PDF watermark:

pdf-watermark-5

6. Choose the PDF file created in step 3 and adjust the settings to place the watermark where you want it. Don’t forget to choose Open a web link under Action if you want the watermark to be clickable:

pdf-watermark-6

7. Apply the watermark to the document:

pdf-watermark-7

As you can see, it looks pretty good on a blue background, too. ;)

Note: You can move individual watermarks around using the Edit tool, but the clickable area does not seem to move with them.

External links:

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2009 04 08 Stephan Marketing
Software
eCommerce Comments (1) Permalink

Did Google steal your Christmas?

El Reg thinks Google’s business model is meltdown proof – if Google needs more revenue, they can just come up with a way to display your ads more often. While I still think Google Adwords is great marketing tool for almost every business, I agree you have to keep a close eye on your campaigns.

Some checkboxes you might consider turning off in your campaign settings:

google-adwords-1

Search Partners? Why wouldn’t I want Google to show my ads on sites like Google product search, ask.com and aol? Well, because they’re showing on ebay, too, even though Google doesn’t mention this in Adwords help.

I asked Google last year and got this reply:

“Our global search network includes Google Product Search, Google Groups, and search sites such as AOL, Ask.com, ebay.com/ebay.de and shopping.com.”

An no, you can’t chose certain sites, it’s all or nothing.

In our case, “nothing” was the right choice. Ebay customers are not our target market and we actually stopped selling on Ebay years ago. Why would we want to display ads there?

Instead of throwing tons of money at Google Adwords, we restricted spending to a sensible level, redesigned our main online shop and invested some time into SEO. The result? December turnover increased by 50% in comparison to last year while costs for Adwords decreased by 57%.

No, Google did not steal our Christmas. ;)

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2009 01 13 Stephan Business Tips
Marketing
eCommerce Comments (0) Permalink

Microsoft Analytics Beta – exclude webpage parameters!

After almost one month of collecting data with Microsoft’s new adCenter Analytics (beta)*, I wanted to have a closer look at the many detailed reports today (and then – of course – blog about it). Turns out I’ve been collecting largely useless data because I had failed to exclude parameters like “?gclid=…” and Microsoft Analytics diligently counted all clicks coming from AdSense as calls to different pages. Stupid me, the option is right there at the top of the management view:

I’ll get back to this in another month. Click here to add your name to the adCenter Analytics invitation list and try it out yourself.

*Why didn’t I use Google Analytics like everyone else? Well, sometimes I’m a maverick, too. ;-)

Update March 2009: Since Microsoft decided to pull the plug on Analytics, I won’t be posting anything on this topic anymore. Their announcement and the comments contain links to lots of alternative web analytics solutions.

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2008 11 05 Stephan Rants Comments (0) Permalink

Content-aware resizing of pictures (seam carving)

I’m not sure why golem.de published an article on Seam Carving GUI (open source) today (maybe they have a selection of emergency posts for slow news days ;) ), but I’m glad they did because I had no idea something like this even existed.

If you have no idea of what I’m talking about, take a look this video:

Ever been in a situation where you had a picture with exactly the content (“message, meaning, …”) you wanted, but not with the right dimensions? Seam carving could have saved the day.

I used it for a stock photo today which just had to be 550×225 pixels to fit in a template (sorry, can’t post the picture because I’d have to pay for the rights again – I’ll post a link when it goes online). It worked extremely well because the important objects did not stretch along the entire length of the picture. The sky and mountains in the background were resized in a way which made it look as if the photographer had used a wide-angle lens.

Encouraged by my success, I decided to try something extremely challenging. Here’s a photo of me on the balcony of a hotel (it just looks as if I was trying to log into unprotected wireless networks – actually I was enjoying the sunshine and fresh air):

The picture above is 480 x 360 pixels. Let’s say I want to keep the width, but reduce the height to just 220px. Usually, this would mean cropping:

Notice that the top of the other buildings and the horizon is no longer visible.

With seam carving, you can keep all of this in the picture (also, it now looks as if I had a widescreen laptop):

As mentioned, this is an extremely challenging picture. Regular shapes are all over the place and if you look closely, you’ll find at least one odd area which would be noticeable even if you’d never seen the original picture (windows on the red building). Still, considering the difficulty, the software does an excellent job. You could fix the most noticeable problems in a minute in an image editor:

Pretty neat. I’m really looking forward to seeing what else will be possible with a few mouse clicks in the near future.

Here’s some additional info I scraped from the comments at golem.de:

  • If you’re using gimp, here’s a plugin for you.
  • Photoshop CS4 can do it, too (it’s called content-aware scaling)
  • For fancy online retargeting (how many names are they gonna give this?), check out rsizr. While I liked the animation, the result wasn’t that convincing (I guess it’s art):

If you still haven’t done so, go get Seam Carving GUI and have fun (did I mention it’s free and available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux?).

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2008 10 29 Stephan Software Comments (0) Permalink

Websites with and without ‘www’

Double-u double-u double-u is one of the few things you can say much faster if you say it in German (just say “v v v”). I’m German, so I continuously strive for efficiency (nah, possibly I’m just lazy), which is why it annoys me that I still have to type “www” in front of some domain names to get to the desired website!

I mean, it’s 2008, the World Wide Web has been around for a while, so please, dear webmasters, could you make sure that your website works as http://www.example.com and http://example.com?

Here’s a list of offenders from the past few days (off the top of my head):

Now before you leave a comment and say “why don’t you just use bookmarks or press Ctrl-Enter in Firefox”, let me point out that there’s more to consider: If you can actually reach the same content with and without “www”, so can the search engines. Different URIs for the same resource might mean trouble (“duplicate content”).

AFAIK, the best way to handle both issues is a 301 (permanent) redirect. On Apache, make sure the domain with and without “www” points to the same directory and place an .htaccess file with the following content there (requires mod_rewrite):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This will redirect users to URL with “www”. BTW, this code was taken from the excellent book “Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond” [affiliate link]. It also has a chapter about weblogs which I think I should read. ;)

2008 10 16 Stephan Rants
Web development Comments (1) Permalink

How long would it take you to notice that your website has been compromised?

My last post concerning mass sql hacks of websites shows what can happen if your website is distributing malware and you don’t act fast enough. In that post, I also mentioned it might be a good idea to have some sort of self-checking mechanism integrated in your CMS which would alert you if unauthorized changes were made. While I still think that’s a good idea, there’s a much easier and faster option when it comes to small, rather static websites: change detection services!

Here’s a few I found through search engines, a blog post from 2005 by Marshall Kirkpatrick and an article in c’t magazine 4/2008 (page 170):

ChangeAlarm – free, typically checks for updates once per day

ChangeDetect – free and paid membership options

ChangeDetection – free, typically checks for updates once per day, does not detect changes in HTML tags

InfoMinder – no free membership, 30 day trial available

TheWebWatcher – free for personal use, monitoring intervals starting from 1h

TracerLock – no free membership, max 20 URLs, 4 US$/month

TrackEngine – free, 19,95 US$/year for 10 “bookmarks”, 4,95 US$/month for 50 “bookmarks”, possibly includes more frequent updates for paid services

WatchThatPage – free, priority accounts available for donation of US$ 20/year. Fastest update: once per day. There seems to be no limit on the number of pages you can watch. Pages can be organized in folders. Simple keyword filtering available. Refuses to watch pages with badly mangled HTML.

Yes, I know, most of these sites scream “web 1.0″ at you and – ironically – seem to be averse to change themselves (the latest news on TrackEngine are from December 2001, Merry Christmas!). They won’t really help if you’re in charge of large websites with thousands of pages. However, they might be appropriate for small websites, like this one which has been displaying “OwNed By un alien …” for months on the “liens” and “evenements” pages.

I’ll update this post after trying out some of these services (you can subscribe to my RSS feed here ;) ). Please note there’s also tons of change detection software (running locally on your computer) which I’m not covering here.

2008 09 11 Stephan Business Tips
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Chiropractors “very satisfied” with heise.de redesign

Update: Heise made some modifications while I was writing this post, so not everything below still applies.

It’s summer time in Europe, many people are on vacation, others are distracted by the Olympics – if you were planning something outrageous, now might be a good time to get away with it. No, I’m not talking about Georgia, I mean the redesign of heise.de, Germany’s IT website no. 1.

Heise.de went from a table-based, liquid layout to a xhtml 1.0 strict compliant fixed width (elastic) layout. I don’t think anyone complained about the xhtml compliance, the key here is “fixed width”. Yes, I know. Discussed to death. In the left corner, we have “long lines are hard to read” and “fixed width gives you better control over the layout, making it easier to design visually appealing sites for lazy designers like me” whereas in the right corner we have “liquid layouts adapt to all sorts of different screens, which is what the internet is all about” and “if I believe the lines are too long I can resize my viewport myself, thank you very much”. I can’t tell you who’s right (because it’s one of these annoying “many shades of grey” topics) but what I can tell you is that switching from one camp to the other is going to make many people unhappy. Very unhappy.

2 billions. That’s the number of unhappy comments in heise’s discussion forum. Ok, it’s more like 5000 and only about 90% of those express disapproval. Still, even if you consider that the heise forum is most likely the place in cyberspace with the highest concentration of negativity, that’s a lot of unhappiness.

Is it justified? Well, judge for yourself. Or just let me tell you: yes! Let’s have a look at how they messed it up:

This is how the website now looks on my not-so-gigantic 1280×1024 screen. I took the liberty of highlighting the actual content, squeezed in the lower left corner. Some people on the forum are already complaining about a stiff neck from looking to the left all the time while others don’t like the content being so close to the end of the world edge of the screen:

What I dislike most is the odd combination of a centered upper navigation bar with a main content area justified to the left. It makes me feel seasick:

There’s also the large unused white area to the right which is making readers nervous because they expect annoying flashy ads to appear at any time (the medical term is “ad premonition disorder”).

Having studied 2534523 comments, I managed to identify certain patterns in behavior:

  • “It’s not a problem if you can fix it”: These folks suggest you manipulate the css to get the beloved liquid layout back. They probably use Linux, so they’re used to fixing everything they don’t like.
  • “Couldn’t you give users an option, maybe a switch in their profile which would let them choose their preferred layout? Hey, I might even be willing to pay for it”: Windows users.
  • “You’re not supposed to expand your browser to the full size of your monitor. A good OS wouldn’t encourage you to do this!”: Smug Apple 30″ cinema display owners.
  • “I hate you and I’m not coming back… at least not until tomorrow, but I’ll just return to see if you changed the design back and to post angry comments if you didn’t”: They’ll never leave and they know it.
  • “Hey, finally something I can write about in my blog!”:Yeah, that’s… uhm… me.

This would normally have been the end of this post, except that I had an epiphany when I turned my monitor by 90° (it’s fixed on an Ergotron monitor arm and my graphics card supports this, too). This changed everything! All those print media sites like SPON, sueddeutsche.de, faz.net and even wort.lu suddenly looked great! I wonder why…

“Hey, it looks good on my screen!” (the one on the left). ;)

2008 08 14 Stephan Attempted Humor
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Totally awesome furniture (and other stuff that you can’t buy)

One of my brothers sent me this link to John Nouanesing’s catalogue after seeing one of his designs on Ehrensenf (the German version of Rocketboom).

Me: “Too bad you can’t buy anything :( ”
Brother: “I thought you had some contacts in China, this stuff is screaming to be sold”
Me: “Wouldn’t that be… you know…”
Brother: “Capitalism? ;) ”

He’s studying law, BTW (and just to make sure this doesn’t come back to haunt him when he’s about to be nominated to the European Court of Justice or something like that, let me point out that we were kidding and that it’s now 5:45 AM in Ningbo and nobody’s in the factory to pick up the phone, anyway).

The morally immaculate way is – of course – to look at the designs and let their total awesomeness* inspire your creativity.

*I don’t think I’ve ever used “total awesomeness” before, so you’d better take a look. ;)

2008 07 22 Stephan Attempted Humor
Ideas Comments (1) Permalink