Plusieurs fois par année w.illi.am/ invite gracieusement ses clients à participer à des Forums exécutifs. Leur but est d’initier les participants aux nouvelles technologies et outils web et surtout de leur permettre d’échanger, en toute confidentialité, sur les problématiques qu’ils rencontrent ou les questions qu’ils se posent pour la gestion de leur actif web.
Le Forum exécutif du 10 février dernier offrait de découvrir l’intérêt des tests utilisateurs alliés à l’optimisation de site ainsi que le uLAB, laboratoire d’utilisabilité ouvert dans les bureaux de w.illi.am/ depuis 6 mois. Deux conférences et un atelier ont été donnés par des experts de w.illi.am/, Anastasia Simitsis, Directrice Expérience utilisateur et par Humberto Valencia, Directeur Optimisation.
Imagine your at the supermarket, you wonder what you will be eating next week. You pop up your iphone, look at your favorite recipe list directly from your favorite recipe website. You decided what recipe you will do, you look at the ingredients, check ingredients you don’t have, it automatically add them to your grocery list. Popup your grocery list, off you go find what you need for the week. What if you could even do this offline like a real app from your ipod touch?
No this is not a application from the Itunes Appstore, what I am talking about is a mobile web application that could work on Iphone, Ipod touch, Palm Pre, and all Droid phone.
There is a new kid in town
If you own a mac you are probably familiar with the web browser Safari, well the Safari gut called Webkit is what is powering all the devices up there I am talking about, even blackberry is working on a browser based on webkit. What so special about webkit? Well it’s cutting edge technology. They implemented every animation you could have in a real application directly in the web browser using CSS3 and it have most features HTML5 will bring in the future, today. Most notably offline website and databases directly in the browser.
With all these devices, you get the big pie of the mobile web browsing, and you get a very good browser to work with. These was neither the case before. You had Windows mobile which use IE 5.5 rendering engine (ouch!), the nokia, backberrie browsers which was actually worse and opera mobile, which is actually pretty good, but do not have a big pie as smartphone goes.
Showtime is using jQTouch for its mobile website, you can save favorite shows and get your weekly schedule
Meet jQTouch and Pastrykit, mobille frameworks
On top of that, we get mobile frameworks popping up to ease the web application development. jQTouch is based on the jQuery javascript framework. To have used it before, it’s a pretty good rapid development kit for mobile website. You can create basic website with lists and articles in a couple of hours and really feel like a mobile app. Pastrykit is the unofficial framework used by apple. It’s not officillaly released but some developers took the time to open the API to everyone.
An uncomfortable situation
As you can see, pretty much every giant step we took on the mobile web is based on the fact that Webkit is king of the mobile platform. What if the Firefox mobile would come to dethrone Webkit? Well that would be pretty bad for website based on webkit out here, most mobile framework are based only and directly on Webkit. But this is really not the trend right now, with blackberry soon switching to webkit and Google android phone becoming more and more popular (HTC, Samsung and others are developing phone on it), Webkit mobile seems to have at least some great years ahead.
It can be overwhelming to understand the production environment of websites, front-end developers, back-end developers, integration, programmings, what’s that? As client, you may be happy to understand a little bit more about the structure behind it.
So you are happy of your new design, what is next?
You just approved the design of your next website, you are happy with what has been done so far. What’s next? well a pretty long process. Upon approbation of the design, front-end developers take these designs and translate it to HTML. This means that your design is taken, decorticated and translated to a programming language. This might look like a simple task, but on the contrary, you need excellent front-end developers to translate your design perfectly.
How Complex?
To translate your design we use 2 languages, HTML and CSS. HTML is the foundation of your website, and CSS is what styles all your website, adds colors and images. It is not all, unfortunately the implementation between browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer and etc) of those 2 languages differs a bit, it creates the complex task of testing your website to all current browsers to be sure the integration is spot on. The front-end developer needs to be aware of the dependencies of every browsers and be able to turn around problem that could arise.
Front-end developer also optimizes your website the be the fastest possible, trying to use the fastest structure possible and optimizing your design without losing picture quality. This is what we call website integration.
A back-end developer develops features
When those templates are finished, generally a small round table is planned with designers in case front-end developers forgot some styling. When designers are happy with the templates, it’s ready to get implemented in your content management system.
It is the back-end developer’s job to develop all the features you need to be able to manage your website yourself. Like changing the text in a section for example. This is where front-end developers and back-end developers work together to integrate your design with all the website features you need.
Every web creation company should take great pride of doing spot on integration of website design with content management, and we, at w.illi.am/ sure do.
The second day at the Google Analytics Authorized Consultants yearly summit is the first of two days fully dedicated to Google Analytics. The day definitely started on a high note with a keynote from Avinash Kaushik who talked to us about everything but web analytics tools. Let me explain.
It was both interesting and reassuring to hear that a lot of actionable information does not come from your web analytics solution, no matter what solution you have (Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Google Analytics, etc.). Why is it interesting? Because we shared tools some of us use for measuring mobile activity and for measuring social media activity. Why reassuring? Because it confirmed that I wasn’t crazy by using KPIs that are nowhere to be found on our client’s web analytics solution.
Most of the time, we focus way too much on data that is available on Google Analytics (or whatever other tool), on how to interpret it, on how to measure it, how to segment it and so on and so forth. But there is one very significant detail that is not being taken into consideration: all of these tools work when the user is on your website. Now think about this, where do users read your content? Where do they interact with your content? Is it only on your website? Most likely not! A significant part of how users interact with your content takes places out of your website, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, RSS Feeds or whatever other medium. Now how do you track this in your web analytics solution? Omniture made an attempt to integrate Twitter in their reports (specifically, how many followers you have) but it still does not provide actionable information which actually means something. It’s like saying, “I have x amount of visitors.” Yes, you always want more visitors, but how does it tell you if you are doing well or not?
We as marketers must be creative and define the KPIs that apply to us and to our marketing efforts. These KPIs are most likely not in your web analytics solution. Is your KPI engagement? Is it conversations generated from your news? There are ways to measure this and tools available to do so. The fun part is, this is where we get to be creative.
Bienvenue sur le blog de la firme w.illi.am/. Notre équipe d’experts essayera de partager avec vous ces différentes réflexions à travers chacune de leurs expertises.
