In celebration of Earth Day I’d thought it would be appropriate to direct you to some resources provided by one of our clients The Climate and Energy Project. Digital Evolution Group led the design, development, and deployment of their website this year — and we thought it would be great to refer you some of the helpful information they provide.

Happy Earth Day from Digital Evolution Group!

» Tips to Save Energy
» Go on a carbon diet - Lose a Ton!
» Questions about CFL lightbulbs and Mercury

The intention of the “DEG Tech Update” series is to respect your limited time by putting together a succinct digest on news within the online space directly relevant to consultants, managers, and engineers. These are intended to facilitate discussion, discovery and foster the continuous drive for innovation for all audiences.

Google Website Optimizer
So you’ve redesigned and launched your website and you’re left with questioning if what you’ve designed is going to be effective. Will it achieve the results you want? There are two methodologies you can utilize for design analysis; A/B and multivariate testing. A/B tests and multivariate tests are methods in which you can conduct different types of experiments for optimization of a website. Ultimately you are trying to identify what approach will better help you meet goals such as keeping visitors on a site longer or engage in transactions.

A/B tests = testing two entirely different versions of a page. Generally speaking, with A/B testing — the following is true:

• You don’t get a lot of page traffic (less than about 1,000 page views a week).

• You want to move things around on a page or try a different layout.

• You want to alter the overall look and feel of a page.

Multivariate tests = testing different combinations of content on the same page. Generally speaking, with a multivariate test — the following is true:

• You get a high amount of page traffic (more than 1,000 page views a week, roughly).

• The layout and overall design of your page will stay the same.

• You want to change specific parts of your page, like a headline or image, simultaneously.

Google has a tool that enables you to conduct both of these types of testing, called Google Website Optimizer.

More information here:
» http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer

Video here:
» http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/overview

Urchin Launched for Download
Google has updated Urchin (an analytics tool), a for-fee product when downloaded and installed on a company’s server. Urchin is the tool that is basis of Google Analytics. So what’s the differences between Urchin and Google Analytics? Why would you want to purchase something that’s already free?

Urchin Software benefits (vs. Google Analytics):
* Not necessary to tag web pages with JavaScript code.
* Control the processing schedule of traffic logs, including the option to process data immediately.
* Analytics can be extracted on traffic prior to the “install” of Urchin (re-process and post-process data).
* View all website traffic, including images, downloads, robots, status codes (e.g. 404s, 500s), and referral errors, including outdated links.
* Create customized reporting for different types of visitation data.
* Report data can be easily audited by 3rd parties.

Google Analytics benefits (vs. Urchin):
* Represents the latest in web analytics technology, and includes many advanced features not found in Urchin Software
* Is updated automatically when new features roll out
* Is tightly integrated with AdWords reports from the AdWords user interface.)
* Allows unique visitor drilldown - view session/path, platform, geo-location, browser/platform, etc. data for individual visitors (anonymous).

» http://www.google.com/urchin/download.html

It should be noted that analytics are only as good as the your ability to consume, interpret and act upon the information and insights.

Concept: “Every Page Is Your Homepage”
Consumers finding your content, primarily through a Google search box, that drops them somewhere in the middle of a big and bloated website is only going to do one thing, and Avinash describes their experience best: “they come, they puke, they leave.”

“The premise is simple: every page of your Website must now be considered a homepage. The hours spent tinkering on your current homepage needs to shift into ensuring that every page is a brilliant representation for the keywords and external links that drove someone to your site. Fewer and fewer consumers are coming in via the homepage. They could also care less about what your company does or the other products you sell. They were searching for something specific, and if it’s not there after they’ve clicked on a search result link, they’re you’re road kill on the information super highway.”

» Source: http://www.twistimage.com/blog/archives/every-page-is-your-homepage

Google Apps has been integrated with SalesForce

More information here:

» http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=490&tag=nl.e539
» http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/google_salesforce_deal_shows_google_not_insane_microsoft_disruption_continues

–

Digital Evolution Group Consultant
mohsenr@digitalev.com
www.twitter.com/ramseym
www.linkedin.com/in/ramseymohsen

The intention of the “DEG Tech Update” series is to respect your limited time by putting together a succinct digest on news within the online space directly relevant to consultants, managers, and engineers. These are intended to facilitate discussion, discovery and foster the continuous drive for innovation for all audiences.

TECHmeme
During it’s early years, Digg.com was established as the source for anything breaking in regards to technology news. Its arguable that today, this is no longer the case. Enter, www.techmeme.com. This site is driven by a software agent to surface news story links in real time. Links are derived from a mix of industry insiders, passionate independents, and established journalists. If you bookmark or subscribe to one website as your daily source for Technology news, Techmeme is the place to get it.

» http://www.techmeme.com

Jargon Watch: “meme”
A meme is any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Memes evolve by natural selection. So with memes, some ideas will propagate less successfully and become extinct, while others will survive, spread, and, for better or for worse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme)

Adobe Media Player
This week Adobe launched a Media Player that leverages their Adobe Interactive Runtime (AIR) program. The media player allows users to watch video online and in some cases, download them.

» http://www.adobe.com/products/mediaplayer/

Google App Engine
Google App Engine has been released to Beta. This is an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance.

What does this mean? Google App Engine is designed for developers who want to run their entire application stack, soup to nuts, on Google resources. Amazon, by contrast, offers more of an a la carte offering with which developers can pick and choose what resources they want to use. Google is not trying to provide pure utility here — they are trying to provide utility tethered to their infrastructure.

» http://code.google.com/appengine/

Google Analytics Data Sharing Option
Available this week if you login to Google Analytics accounts you’ll see the option to a) share your web Analytics data with Google, b) share your data anonymously, or c) do not share data at all. This new sharing feature will allow you to have access to features Google has developed for it’s users:

Benchmarking = A service that shows how your websites statistics compare to other similar size websites in your field and see how you stack up.

AdWords Conversion Optimizer = A feature of AdWords that can automatically adjust your bids to maximize conversions (cost per acquisition) at the minimum price.

» http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-au&answer=87515

Flickr Video
Flickr launched video service to its users. It is limited 90 seconds in length and 150 MB in size. While this service isn’t any different than other Flash Video sharing services — it should be noted Flickr can be resized and scaled to whatever dimensions you wish.

» http://blog.flickr.net/en/2008/04/09/video-on-flickr-2/

Jargon Watch: “social graph”
The Social Graph is the representation of our relationships. In present day context, these graphs define our personal, family, or business communities on social networking websites. Unfortunately, we’re duplicating our same Social Graph information on websites with social features, it’s annoying to manage and inaccurate across sites. These disparate and disjointed social graphs will not scale, ultimately resulting in a fragmented user experience as we use multiple websites.

DEG Facebook Page
Digital Evolution Group launched a Facebook page! Be sure to “Fan” us!

» http://www.facebook.com/pages/overland-park-KS/Digital-Evolution-Group/10454517222?ref=nf

–

Digital Evolution Group Consultant
mohsenr@digitalev.com
www.twitter.com/ramseym
www.linkedin.com/in/ramseymohsen

This viral video has been making it’s rounds for the past couple weeks. It’s actually really well done and covers web standards and best practices in web design.

LYRICS
Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry
easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can’t find what you want it causes frustration

a clear Call to action to increase the temptation
use appealing graphics they create motivation
if you have animation
use with moderation
cause search engines can’t index the information

display the logos of all your associations
highlight your contact info that’s an obligation
create a clean design you can use some decoration
but to try to prevent any client hesitation

every page that they click should provide and explanation
should be easy to understand like having a conversation
when you design the style go ahead and use your imagination

but make sure you use correct color combinations
do some investigation, look at other organizations
but don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction

follow these instructions when you move into production
your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time

make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat

tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css
now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won’t validate

check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly
some use IE, some others use Flock
some use AOL, I use Firefox

title everything including links and images
don’t use italics, use emphasis
don’t use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that’s old and wrong

when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker
they stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
and then they convert now that’s the real kicker
make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker

design and code right man I hope you get the picture
what I’m telling you is true man it should be a scripture
if it’s built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
everyone will want to follow you like twitter
competition will get bitter and you’ll shine like glitter

if you trying to grow your company will get bigger
design and code right man can you get with it

Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old was interviewed on 60 Minutes in regards to the status of the company and it’s most recent controversial release, Facebook Beacon. The interview does not reveal anything everyone in the industry doesn’t already know, but does do a good job of simplifying some concepts and major points:

* Facebook is doing well, but they are aggressively looking to make more money (through advertisements).

* The idea of Facebook as a ‘portal’ to the internet is very much a likely future use-case scenario for end-users. Utilizing Facebook as a start page could a future major release for the company. This includes performing searches that return suggestions your Friends within your social network recommend.

*  Facebook Beacon, which allow users to share information from other websites for distribution to their friends on Facebook is FAR from being perfected. Like the release of ‘Facebook Newsfeed‘, there is still refinements that need to be made to ensure acceptance to this type of sharing is understood clearly and executed appropriately (possibly in phases).

>> You can watch the full interview on CBSNews.com here.

–
Ramsey Mohsen
Digital Evolution Group Consultant
mohsenr@digitalev.com
http://www.twitter.com/ramseym

Occasionally there are instances with eCommerce and SPAM that cause you to want to remove an indexed page within Google. This video gives you a highly technical description in how to best use techniques like the “robots.txt file”, “no follow”, and “URL removal requests” properly.

Today Yahoo released several lists of the Top Trends of 2007. Yahoo analyzes search queries based on a number of factors, including absolute volume and growth versus previous periods. The top queries of the year on Yahoo are:

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Paris Hilton
4. Naruto
5. Beyonce
6. Lindsay Lohan
7. Rune Scape
8. Fantasy Football
9. Fergie
10. Jessica Alba

Yahoo also has an expanded list to include top ten searches by category which you can view here.

–
Ramsey Mohsen
Digital Evolution Group Consultant
mohsenr@digitalev.com
http://www.twitter.com/ramseym

Facebook recently announced that 44 websites are using a new featured called “Facebook Beacon” to allow users to share information from other websites for distribution to their friends on Facebook. The way this ad-system works is that if you’re currently logged-in to Facebook, then certain interactions you make on any of the 44 participating sites (from ebay, Blockbuster, CollegeHumor, to Overstock.com) have the option of being published on your Facebook mini-feed, so that any of your Facebook “friends” will be alerted of such actions.

For example: “John Doe” has purchased an “iPod Touch” from Overstock.com.

Users are required to be logged into Facebook, then visit a participating site, in order to receive a prompt asking whether to they want to share those activities with their friends on Facebook.Facebook cited an example in their official Press Release that “eBay plans to use Beacon so eBay.com sellers will be able to choose to include their eBay listings in their Facebook News Feeds. This will allow them to share the items they are selling with their network of friends. In doing so, eBay.com sellers can leverage a new way to drive potential bidders and buyers to their listings.”

While Facebook provides users privacy controls so they can decide if they want to distribute specific actions from participating sites with their friends, there has been some uproar in the release of this feature. MoveOn.org posted a blog post entitled Facebook has “ruined Christmas”, claiming because Beacon publicizes purchases at participating sites on a user’s Facebook “news feed”, friends and loved ones are inadvertently being told what they can expect for Christmas.

There has also been criticism that this dimension in terms of sharing of information regarding interaction can inadvertently or explicitly share information with the outside world. More specifically, while publishing this information is optional, you have to explicitly opt-out (per site or per interaction), rather than choosing to opt-in, in the first place.

While this feature is especially exciting for Ecommerce businesses, it does again prompt end-users to ensure they understand the implications of their actions and how their data is being published and used.

Its clear that Facebook’s earlier release this year of its Applications Platform and now Facebook Beacon are natural extensions to the popular social network, demonstrating the companies ability to evolve with the ever changing web and proving out to be more an end-users portal to the internet and not just a temporary fad.

–
Ramsey Mohsen
Digital Evolution Group Consultant
mohsenr@digitalev.com
http://www.twitter.com/ramseym

I came across an insightful video in which Matt Cutts of Google discusses how best to optimize your site for Google search results pages. The video gives a break-down of a ’snippet’ (each item instance within a Google search result page). It’s helpful in understanding the technical side of how one part of the results page works. While the search algorithm and page rank Google uses still remains a closely guarded complex secret, it’s helpful that Google is starting to provide internally produced videos with insight on SEO best practices.

–
Ramsey Mohsen
Digital Evolution Group Consultant
mohsenr@digitalev.com
http://www.twitter.com/ramseym

Today marked the launch of Google’s OpenSocial network. Essentially it is a networking platform, that has a set of APIs that will allow developers to create applications that work on any social network. These applications, created by third party developers or your company can sit on top of these existing thriving communities of connected people.

Google explains, “OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.”

What does this mean for companies? Lets say you have an existing website, and you want to create a mini-application that shares your information, product or services across ALL of the social networks that have agreed to participate in OpenSocial (e.g. MySpace, Bebo, SixApart, Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn) — your mini-app will interact with all of these social networks and can benefit from ratings, sharing, recommendations, etc. Translation? Companies can now reach large new audiences in which you do not have to ‘build’, with a greatly reduced development curve.

…leaving everyone to wonder what does OpenSocial mean for Facebook and it’s Application platform?

–
Ramsey Mohsen
Digital Evolution Group Consultant
mohsenr@digitalev.com
http://www.twitter.com/ramseym