How long as it been since you updated the copyright date on your website? I don’t know about you but I see this as one of those little things that is important. Same as a company blog that hasn’t been updated in months. Did you know that you can keep the copyright date on your site up-to-date with just one simple line of code?

Yep, all you have to do is use the following code:
<?php print date('Y'); ?>

That’s all it takes for your site to display an up-to-date copyright date. Blogging isn’t quite so easy but you should really get rid of the blog if you’re not going to post anything to it. You’re probably losing sales because people wonder if you’re still around. Neglected blogs make me wonder what else you neglect.

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

It’s the Little Things

Usability refers to how well people can use something. It can be anything from a sign on a door letting you know which direction the door opens (making it more likely you’ll be able to open it on the first try) to arranging the navigation on a website in a logical fashion.

Recently Jakob Nielsen posted about Progress in Usability, specifically with regard to websites. He comes to several interesting conculsions, and states that it will take us 74 years to reach six-sigma quality.

I have a couple of problems with his logic and data. First, he uses data from 262 websites that his company has collect formal usability metrics for. He doesn’t state at what phase those metrics were collected. It’s not clear if the data is collected before or after the sites have been tested or if there was any work done to improve usability prior to collecting these metrics. I’m assuming that these metrics are being collected prior to optimizing these sites. What I’d like to know is how much improvement was able to be made across these sites. Just because the default out of the box design wasn’t 100% usable doesn’t mean that subsequent generations were only improved by 6%.

Another area that Nielsen ignores is that users are getting smarter. We know that users learn and adapt over time. Are websites getting more complex and staying “un-usable” to users that are more advanced? I doubt it. So Nielsen’s number could actually be a lot worse since most of us have been using the Internet long enough to figure out a few things along the way and be more likely to successfully accomplish our goal. Or it could be that my next point is causing his data to be wrong.

My final problem with the assumptions Nielsen reaches is that he’s only got 262 data points that he’s comparing. That’s not even remotely close to the number of websites on the internet with Netcraft reporting that it touched 206 billion websites in January 2010. (In 1995 there were 18000 websites, in 2006 we hit 100 million.) The Internet has exploded in it’s size and yet Nielsen’s data covers a mere 26 websites a year. It’s hard for me to believe that we can judge usability progress accurately with such a tiny window into the massive amount of data that is the internet. I have to think that these are skewed numbers without increasing the number of sites measured proportionally each year.

Nielsen even admits that he left out 15 major websites that they conducted recent studies on because he didn’t want to bias the data. While I agree I still believe that his data is too biased to come to the grand statements he’s making.

Perhaps I misunderstand what Nielsen is trying to say but I can’t help but think two things, his slice of the pie is really too tiny to hold up against the whole of the internet and that we’re not seeing the important numbers (how much a site can improve just by working at it). I don’t know of any other six-sigma measured processes that improve with zero effort.

I believe that education is the biggest factor in improving things like this, what do you think? Did I miss something with Neilsen’s data? What tactics do you use to increase usability for your site so you can stand out among 206 billion websites?

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Is Usability Getting Better?

Recently I interacted with two different large companies about problems with merchandise or advertising. One company stonewalled and acted like they almost wanted me to never spend money with them again. The other company, however, went far beyond my expectations and won a customer for life.

When I was in retail, one of the companies I worked for spent a lot of money researching the lifetime value of a loyal customer. This company discovered that once we had won a customer’s business, the value of that customer (if we could keep him or her) was more than $50,000. That’s quite a bit of cash. That company is no longer in business, and I believe it’s because it failed to see some opportunities and because it was truly one man’s vision. Not long after that man passed away the company lost its direction, ran amuck, and soon folded. But that’s another story.

Back to the lifetime value of a customer. In our increasingly connected society I believe that the lifetime value of a customer has increased ten or even a hundred times over what it was just a few years ago. One customer who has a good experience and raves about it to his friends most certainly drives more value than the amount he could purchase alone. But a customer with a bad experience (statistically for every one who speaks up there are nine with a similar experience who didn’t) can have the same effect in the opposite direction, perhaps even more so.

In my recent customer experiences, the manager of the first store I dealt with claimed that the salesman would never have made a mistake because she’d been working there for too long. She then suggested that if I wanted the original discount I’d thought I was getting, I should just come back and spend more money in her store. She never once offered anything except reasons why she couldn’t or wouldn’t help me. But if she had gone above and beyond even just a small amount, I would have left the store a much happier customer–perhaps not a raving, satisfied customer but not a customer who warns everyone he knows to shop elsewhere.

The second company, on the other hand, had no obligation to me and yet bent over backwards to have things done earlier than promised, reordered product so that items could be swapped out, and was very careful to make sure that I was satisfied. The one company has earned my respect and repeat business as well as recommendation while the other company has earned my distaste and adamant warnings.

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Is your company like a bull in a china shop?

An example of follow-through from an icon that is currently experiencing the reflection of his previous actions.

Recent events have brought to the front of my mind the importance of follow-through. While I’m not much of a golfer (and I’m pretty sure games like Wii Golf were designed specifically to humiliate me), I do know that one of the most important aspects of the sport is the follow-through. There are two things about follow-through that are important. First, if you don’t focus on the end of the stroke, the follow-through, you’ll lose a tiny amount of contact time between the ball and club, which can make a big difference in the outcome of the swing. Second, follow-through, whether great or poor, is really just a reflection of the actions taken previously, a culmination of the full swing.

Have you ever been to a great concert? The concert is really just the follow-through, a reflection of the time and energy that went into preparation for the concert. It’s the result of hard work, hours of practice, and years of school. So often we focus on the end result and are amazed by it. What’s truly amazing is the journey to get there starts with simple steps and is often the result of the things that we hate doing the most. The little day-to-day tasks really do add up to make an amazing impact.

• What processes do you work hard on so that good follow-through happens?
• Are there tasks that you’re neglecting that you shouldn’t be?

Being organized and disciplined in small things really does make a difference in bigger things!

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Why Follow-Through Matters

Merry Christmas! A very special thank you to all of our customers, friends and family for an amazing year. It’s rare for a small business to do so well so early on and especially with the economy the way it was this year. We’re looking forward to a great 2010. Here’s wishing you and yours an awesome new year!

Doug Cone (for the Nullvariable team)

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Merry Christmas!

Recently I’ve been moving the Nullvariable web servers into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. This means our customers will be getting some great benefits in increaced speed, better backups and future scalability.

AWS is a fantastic platform but it’s not for just anyone. Recently I wrote a couple of tutorials on setting up Drupal sites within the AWS cloud. I’m currently using the fantastic Pantheon project as a basis for some of the projects that we’re running in the cloud now.

If you’re a coder or a Drupal user you might find these tutorials helpful in taking full advantage of the AWS platform.

• How to setup EBS with Pantheon’s Mercury
• How to setup EBS with RAID0 for Pantheon’s Mercury project

Using these tools and techniques along with the Pantheon project we’re able to launch fully redundant servers that can easily scale into the thousands while handling traffic at lighting speed. (In a recent benchmark that I ran, a single Drupal server that we configured was able to serve 10,000 sequential requests in just 5.43 seconds!)

Want more? Check out the Pantheon and Amazon Web Services groups over on drupal.org. Nullvariable.com goes live using AWS next week!

What’s your take on cloud technologies? Are you using AWS or another cloud service?

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Cloud Computing with Amazon and Drupal

It used to be a problem when short links (tinyurl, bit.ly and other services that shorten URLs) were first introduced. People would hide affiliate links, goatse pictures and all sorts of stuff using them. We trained ourselves just not to click on those links and they quickly dissipated when people learned we didn’t trust them. Now with the advent of Twitter and other services that similarly limit posting size, shortened urls have surged in popularity. They often offer cool features like stats tracking (see my post about Understanding Bit.ly) and make it easier to share URLs that are really long or have lots of gobbly-gook in them.

The increasing problem with these URLs is that spammers and the like are once again using these URLs and abusing our trust of them. Here are some quick and easy tips to KNOW for sure where that URL is going.

• Turn on TweetDeck’s short URL preview.
• Grab the LongURLPlease bookmarklet.
• Grab the LongURLPlease FireFox extention.
• Add a + at the end of bit.ly URLs.

Turn on TweetDeck’s short URL preview

TweetDeck offers a built in preview feature that lets you see the title of the page and the actual URL that it’s sending you to. You can turn this feature on by clicking the settings icon and finding the setting (on the first tab) that’s labeled “Show preview information for short URLs”
Once you’ve enabled that option you’ll see a screen like this:

whenever you click on a short URL that TweetDeck recognizes. (Doesn’t do anything if it doesn’t recognize the service)
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Grab the LongURLPlease bookmarklet

If you use Twitter from the web interface one of the best ways to see the long version of a URL before clicking it is the “LongURLPlease” bookmarklet. Just drag this sucker [ LongURLPlease page to get the bookmarklet or extension.

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Grab the LongURLPlease FireFox extension

Another alternative for FireFox users is the LongURLPlease extension. It offers the same features as the bookmarklet mentioned above but also allows you to automatically expand short URLs whenever they’re encountered. You can also follow LongURLPlease on Twitter.

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Add a + at the end of bit.ly URLs

If the URL that you’re looking at is a bit.ly URL you can easily see the stats for that URL by just adding a plus “+” at the end of the url.
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Final thought

Showing the long URL is only helpful if you’re careful about what that URL contains. You can further enhance your security by using FireFox or Google Chrome as they both will block most phishing sites for you. Beyond that you can start using OpenDNS which will block most phishing sites for you too. Be vigilant! If you’re not sure if you can trust a link just take a few seconds to ask the person who sent it to you to verify that they sent it. That few seconds and make a difference in the hours of agony and lost time, followers etc that can result from clicking something you’re not sure about. Anytime that you get to a log in page, check the address bar to make sure it’s really the site you expected. Not sure? Type in the URL.

What do you do to stay secure? What advice have you given to friends and family to help them stay safe on the Internet?

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Do you know where that short link goes?

Sorry if there are spelling errors, I’m writing this from the road, some where in Mississippi, but I think it’s important to make some points about security. Just saw that MSNBC appeared to have had their Twitter account hacked. Two things I want to say about security.

First be very careful where you use your password. Better yet insist on using services that use OAuth. OAuth means you tell Twitter to allow an application access to your account instead of giving the application your password. This means you and Twitter can both easily shut down an offending application more easily. It’s very similar to how Facebook’s system for applications works.

Second, Twitter needs to offer some higher levels of security. It costs very little to do Multi-Factor-Authentication (MFA). MFA is a process where you must have a device (often a phone) register with the system that either receives a code generated on the server or the device generates the code independently and is synced with the server. It essentially prevents anyone who doesn’t have the physical device from using an account even if they have the password.

Most people are using Twitter from their cell phones anyway, it would take very little programming to send authentication codes to the users phone before they could login. Lots of scenarios on how it could work but this would be something I would pay for. (And do pay for on other accounts). It’s a tiny step that many users would be more than happy to add. I use an MFA device on an almost daily basis. World of Warcraft offers an iPhone app and a keychain device for MFA and it’s a game.

What do you think? Is basic password security education enough? As FB & Twitter grow we’re just going to see more of these types of attacks. Learning good security is a must.

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Fixing security issues for Twitter

It’s straight out of the movies. Mindless mobs of people, dead to the world hobbling around trying to eat your brains. That’s right, zombies have made their way to Twitter.

As my friend Freddy Nager outlines in his post “Hypocritical Mass: The Big Lie About Twitter” people have become obsessed with numbers on Twitter. This obsession is to the point that they can’t pay any attention to people who are trying to get their attention. Kind of like how a zombie can only focus on eating brains.

Worse, and even more zombie like than this is a recent behavioral trend that I’ve noticed, the zombie linker. They often have 5-6 thousand followers (which is mostly just a group of all the same auto-follow people) and they’ve resorted to using Twitterfeed (or a similar source) to cheat and look like they’re really active posting links. They’ll hook up Twitterfeed to CNN or Mashable or some other source (often a source that gets ReTweeted (RT’d) frequently) and then they walk away. Their streams become mindless zombie parrots of these blogs and news sites. Seriously? If I wanted to see all of CNNs stories I’d subscribe to their RSS or Twitter. I don’t know about you/them but I’m on Twitter for the personal connections and becoming a zombie so you can pretend that you’re pushing out useful/helpful information is just total BULL. If you don’t have the time to really connect with me on Twitter (or any other social media) then don’t bother. The reality is that those 5-6 thousand people are doing the same thing to appear valuable just like you and now you’re just 1 in a crowd instead of a unique person that shares unique links and has conversations. I know that you only have so much time and you’ve got real things you need to do in order to make money. We all understand that you can’t tweet 24/7.

Bottom line, if you’re not willing to invest in a personal connection with me why are you wasting your time and mine?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with using TwitterFeed to hook up your personal blog and that sort of thing. I think that services like this should require proof of ownership of the feed before they let you use it. Of course then someone will just write another service or app that let’s people cheat. So how do we stop it? We have to educate people on how to spot deceptive techniques like the zombie. It’s the same with fighting spam, spammers will continue to spam us until we have educated people on how to report them and discern who/what is spam. Once we’ve made it to that level they’ll be forced to find new ways to deceive us or get real jobs. It’s sorta like 28 days where all the zombies pretty much die off.

So how do you spot these fakers? Here’s some examples of people not to follow:

1. Has more tweets in their stream posted from TwitterFeed or API than from other clients.
2. Has a very low number of @replies in their stream, or none at all.
3. Seems to only post quotes of other people with no context.
4. Has a very close follow ratio (5000/5100) or says they auto follow everyone. That means they’re not paying attention to you and they don’t expect that you’ll really pay any attention to them.
5. Every other link that they post has a number in it, 50 Best This, 10 Great That. Odds are they’re just cherry picking articles from around the web that they know will get RT’d. (Not to pick on Guy Kawasaki but we only need one of him & he will respond to you unlike many people that try to copy him).

How do you find someone that’s a good choice to follow if you’re trying to make new connections? Introduce yourself. Anyone who takes the time to respond to you personally (and adds value to your Twitter stream) is very likely worth following.

Don’t automate your Twitter! We already have enough zombie robots to talk to, I’ll just call the phone company or the cable company if I want to talk to zombie robots. Use common sense. Would you go to a party full of zombies? How about if the party was just a bunch of people on their phones instead of talking and connecting with each other? Can you imagine going to a networking event with a bunch of answering machines?

What’s your take? Do you mind automated feeds or basically cheating like this or does it bug you as much as it does me?

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Twitter Zombies

Recently a friend asked why one of his Twitter accounts with 3 followers had 18 clicks on a bit.ly link. There are several reasons for that and a few other things to explain if you’re new to URL shortening with bit.ly

Bit.ly is a common URL shortening service. There used to be just one or two of these and they weren’t very commonly used. As someone said recently a “back-water Internet technology.” Services like bit.ly are great when used with services like Twitter. They allow you to maximize what you can share in a 140 character post. They also make it easier to share long URLs over the phone and various other places.

A fantastic benefit of using a tool like bit.ly is the ability to see statistics on how many people are clicking the link. Bit.ly in particular will show anyone this information and will also display where it thinks the click came from. If you’re using Twitter (or any other form of social media) for business this makes it a great tool to track when your followers are active and what they’re interested in.

Now let’s get back to the issue of 18 clicks from an account with only 3 followers. Bit.ly URLs (and some others) are often aggregated into various sites to show where people are linking to. So someone might see your URL on another site, possibly even without the context of your original post. In addition while someone might not be following you they might have bookmarked your twitter page or added your stream to their RSS reader (Yes you can subscribe to someone from your RSS reader and appear to not be following them). Your social media feeds may also be scraped and added as content to another site somewhere and could be generating clicks from there also (this is a whole other blog post).

As a general rule bit.ly stats are fairly accurate but they don’t get everything. For example TweetDeck has an option that allows a user to see a preview of many types of shortened links and allows the user to click on either version of the link, not just the shortened version. Additionally most services like bit.ly offer similar preview options. You can add a + to the end of any bit.ly link and see all of the stats for that link, clicks, sources and the destination. Bit.ly also seems to make no distinction on how many times a single user might have clicked a link and will even record you if you click your own link.

Bit.ly stats are great for getting a feel for things but they’re not perfect. URL shorteners are best used as a benchmark over a final performance indicator. It’s a great way to get an idea on where outbound clicks from a social media stream are going if you don’t own the destination site but if you do then your on-site analytics are going to be much stronger.

If you own a site and need more advice on tracking the URLs you’re sharing with social media contact us, we can help!

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Understanding Bit.ly Stats