We love the web ltd.

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Using analytics to improve your bottom line

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:45:00 +0000

We recently stumbled across a great video from the Obama campaign on how they used analytics to improve their sign-up and donation rate.

By testing, measuring and analysing how people used the site; continously and in great detail, they improved conversion rates and donation rates by up to four times what they got with an un-optimised site. That's pretty impressive.

You can find the video here:
How we used data to win the presidential election (you tube)

Small print: we neither endorse nor repudiate the politics of the President of the United States of America, we just note that his web team was really quite smart and there are lessons here that you may find useful.

How not to do personal service

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:51:00 +0000

Just got my favourite email of the year so far from a recruitment agent.

It began:

Hi <<firstname>>,

And went on to extol the virtues of their personal, tailored recruitment service.

Avoiding spam traps

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:42:00 +0000

"Estimated daily spam volumes for 2009 were more than 117 billion emails per day"* That's over 90% of total email volume.

It's getting harder and harder to keep your legit. promo mail out of the junk folder. It's not really surprising in that context!

We encounter this all the time, so we've put together a little list of the key strategies we use to keep the email out of the spam folder and in front of your customers.

You can download it here: Five ways to improve email response rates


* Source: http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2010/01/return-path-identifies-top-10.php

Remote, distant and cold

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:20:00 +0000

Dan made it in after a heroic drive across the tops in his 4-wheel drive. Robert and I (Frank) also made it in after a heroic walk down the street. Still, the office is kind of empty today due to people not being able to get around in the snow.

Fortunately*, being geeks, we're all still online because our network is set up so that everyone can work remotely. Takes more than a bit of frozen water to bring us to a halt!



* my colleagues' perspective on how fortunate this is may differ. I speak only from the perspective of a pointy-haired boss.

Sites of the year

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:54:00 +0000

No, not the most useful ones or anything helpful like that. Just a miscellany of oddments.

Before we begin, you need to make sure your screen has been properly cleaned, inside and out:
http://www.raincitystory.com/flash/screenclean.swf

Good, now that's done, we can begin the serious business of the 'Top linky-type things of 2009'

Award for chicken-related silliness
http://www.surrealistflamebait.com/thechickening/
The Chickening is a video game about a chicken who shoots lasers. Out of his eyes.
The effort required to make a whole game from an idea this, um...
... 'niche', deserves an award in and of itself.

http://vimeo.com/8121722
No awards ceremony is complete without a man in a chicken suit.

Award for general wrongness
http://www.georgehutchins.com/
Where to start?
An effort of superlatively cohesive fail.

Timely reminder award
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QFrBnTLeAU
On a serious note, let's take a moment to remember what could happen unless we safeguard our historic right to cats on the Internet.

Bicyclic video award
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z19zFlPah-o&feature=email
Yeah, we know you've probably seen it already, but it was one of those 'holy crap, you can do that with a bike?' videos. We like bikes.

Bicyclic imagery award
http://blog.anti-limited.com/?p=1528
Big yellow chopper!

Music 'n' culcha award
http://weburbanist.com/2009/11/17/the-future-sounds-like-this-10-magnificently-modern-musical-instruments/
Honourable mentions among which go to the pencil-based theramin for being appropriately silly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV_w38ldZaE&feature=player_embedded

Award for website add-on we are least likely to use in 2010
http://www.yaoti.com/en/individual_yaoti.html
Compellingly awful. B2B sites with audio are wrong anyway: nothing says 'noodling about on the web whilst I should be working' like sound leaping out of your speakers unexpectedly. This product takes you to a new level of wrong.

Single links to videos of cool stuff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMYMC6atRoE&feature=fvw
Not new, just good turntablism.

http://vimeo.com/6686768
Pretty, pretty time lapse.


http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/80703371/
Make ravers' glow sticks in the comfort of your own home.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mm6ycEz2A8
Joy division: the steel band years

Award for summing up the futility of our creations
http://www.xkcd.com/676/

Always end on a high...

Nearly 400 orders in week 1 for Warp Film Store

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:54:00 +0000

The store opened just one week ago and has already taken nearly 400 orders. All the more gratifying since it only has 2 items for sale at the moment!

Not bad going at all.

And the download store isn't even live yet!

We're going live with the downloads very soon...

Web ad spend overtakes TV!

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:06:00 +0000

'bout blummin time!

More info here :
clicky link thing to article on web spend outstripping TV.

Still, it isn't ALL good news:
clicky link thing to article on how often we click on ads.

So undifferentiated adspew is ineffective, apparently: blimey, who knew?

Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:57:00 +0000

Producing software is hard work. Myriad technical detail can make you lose track of the basic truth that people, not technology, drive a successful project.

There's a great book I'm half-way through and thinking of making required reading for the team here: Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies. It looks at patterns of behaviour in teams and projects, identifying the productive ones and gently, but firmly, lampooning the destructive ones.

It's written for software projects, but applies to pretty much any kind of team-led project.
If you have anything to do with either team or project management, it's well worth reading.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Adrenaline-Junkies-Template-Zombies-Understanding/dp/0932633676

Javascript

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:47:00 +0000

Now there's a headline to conjure with. Just dropping the word casually into conversation at parties has young ladies flocking from all corners of the room, hanging breathlessly on my every word.

Back in the real world, javascript is the 'other' language that you are allowed to use on the web. HTML handles all the content, javascript does all fancy effects. It makes Google maps slide smoothly around the screen, Facebook posts appear without the whole page reloading, it underpins the auto-completing search on eBay and helps remember who you are when you come back to a page. In short: tremendously useful.

Unfortunately, it's awful. Total rubbish. Complete crap. Honestly, of all the languages you could have chosen to run the internet, this is the worst one, bar none.

Why?
It's as slow and unreliable as a 1975 Morris Marina, as unpredictable as an MP on acid and deliberately hamstrung by design so that it can't do anything harmful (although that hasn't stopped hacker types from finding ways to use it for evil).

This weekend, tired of being relentlessly pestered girls at parties, I decided to stay home and muck about with jQuery instead. jQuery is a code collection, written in javascript, that automates a lot basic tasks for you. We've been using it at We Love The Web for ages now as it does a lot of helpful stuff. It's useful because lots of people have spent lots of time overcoming the bugs in all the different browsers' javascript implementation.

Now: stop a second and think about that last sentence. That's right: the language that runs most of the internet works differently in every browser. So unless you use a Library like jQuery, you'll probably have to write at least four different versions of your code, each tuned to the peculiarities of a different browser. Does my ranting about how rubbish it is start to make more sense now? Imagine if you had to write every sentence on your website in Geordie, Mancunian, Received Pronunciation and Scots, just to make yourself understood. That would get annoying really fast.

So, back to my supersexy weekend. I set out to mock-up a glitchy text-based animation thingy in a few lines of code. I wanted to experiment with using jQuery and see if we could reduce our reliance on flash for motion graphics. Keep it simple, keep it fast, I thought.

The result isn't going to set the design world on fire, nor is it intended to - it's just a scrap of test code. You can see it here: www.welovetheweb.com/black3.html, neatly highlighting many of the problems with javascript in one simple page.

I'm not asking the computer to do anything hard: change the colour and size of some text. It's only about 20 lines of code. That's less than 1Kb. So why should it behave so unpredictably? It:

• Stops arbitrarily for a second or two in Firefox from time to time.
• Barely even runs in Internet Explorer 6.
• Strobes eye-bleedingly fast in Safari on a Mac.
• Looks rubbish in Internet Explorer 7, but quite cool in Chrome.
  
• Runs at completely different speeds in each browser you test it on, even on the same computer.
  
• Runs at achingly slowly on anything other than a fast, up-to-date computer.
  

Busy. Very, very busy

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:33:00 +0000

Busy enough not to have made a post in months.

Just enough time for a quick photoblog post.

http://www.ph.otography.co.uk/snow/

That is all.

Keep calm and carry on.

The big picture

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:43:00 +0000

Photography fans that we are, we like sites with big photos.
They just look so damn classy.

Here's a whole bunch of them.
80 large background websites

Go to China is particularly great if you have a large monitor.
Since we all work on two-screen setups here, it looks pretty fine.

Web designer wall (the site that published the above article) is a pretty useful site, great for tips on obscure style-sheet techniques of the sort that make technical design types salivate and the rest of us somnambulate.

We obsess, so you don't have to.

A whole lotta love

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:41:00 +0000

It's promotion time again at We love the web. Well, our first promotional activity in two years, as it happens. We've been making love hearts, and very groovy they look too.



It feels odd making something that exists in the real world though: almost everything we do is digital and so making something physical is unusual for us and not a little fun.



If you want a roll, just drop me a line: make.it.work@welovetheweb.com - you may have to wait a few days, however. They're so popular that the first batch of a few hundred have all gone!

Photo blog is go!

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:46:00 +0000

Photography for the win!

www.ph.otography.co.uk

Browser rant

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:26:00 +0000

I'm looking back over the first couple of posts and note they are both about browsers. That makes me quite an oddball as most people couldn't give two short stuffs about what they use to look at the web.

Round here, caring about browsers doesn't make me odd. The team here will wildly outgeek me when it comes to browsers and browser-based development tools. I'm way behind them with only three browsers installed on my computer to the average of about seven on any developers' machine.

We care for a simple reason: the browser is our canvas.

If the paint doesn't stick or the colours run or the texture is too rough, yer archetypal artist will get stupendously drunk on cheap vin ordinaire before ripping apart the offending cloth with his bare teeth, jumping up and down on it: then changing his mind and selling the tattered remains for a small fortune.

Sadly, that's not an option, though life round here might be more fun if it were.

What we really care about is making sites that are as good as they can be. This means we pay a lot of attention to the tools that we use. Just like a good artist, we spend a lot of time thinking about the best tool for the job and how to set things up just right so that everything flows. This means installing seven different browsers and any number of special developer tools that reveal to us how the code streams into a page and where the hidden snags are buried. To most people that sounds incredibly geeky, but to us it's what we do.

We're geeks and proud of it.

Many browsers make heavy work

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:15:00 +0000

I'd like to take you on a journey, back into time.

The year is 2004 and Internet Explorer version 6 (IE6) has a 98% market share. Web developers don't even hate it, because it's all there is. The collective geek psyche has been so scarred by the horrible piece of junk that was Netscape 4 that we're just grateful we no longer have to develop for it. The geeks we know all have myriad unprintable nicknames for Netscape. Honestly, it is so bad that we welcome a Microsoft monopoly if only we don't have to develop for Netscape any more.

So, for a while at least, life is uncomplicated. If it works in IE6, the client will sign it off.

Fast forward now to the present (complete with imagery of the sun flitting across the sky at high speed, seasons changing and all that H. G. Wells stuff).

Yesterday, for the first time, I heard the words I'd been dreading for a while: 'But it doesn't work on my iPhone.' A buttock-clenching moment for any programmer I think you'll agree, but it made me ponder recent browser developments. It couldn't possibly work, it was a flash site and Apple won't let flash onto the iPhone (yet).

Over the last few years, we've seen the trickle of new browsers become a flood.

2003: Apples release the Safari browser
2004: Mozilla releases Firefox
2006: Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 7
2007: Mozilla releases Firefox v2
2008: Google releases Chrome, Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 8 beta, Mozilla releases firefox 3 and the iPhone (v2) means some people are actually starting to use the web on their mobiles.

Now, in theory, as long as you confirm to web standards, then your pages should work everywhere.

Oddly though, the developer team here get distinctly tetchy every time I say this. Like all computing 'standards', it just doesn't work like that in real life: especially since IE6 doesn't conform to any known standard.

This is bad news for web developers: each new browser is a new thing to test against. Testing that used to take 10 minutes is now an open-ended task as we fix issues in each browser and check that the fixes in one didn't break things in the others. It can take hours. Multi-browser support is now approaching 10-15% of the cost of developing a small website. That's a lot.

We are having to explain to our clients why the same amount of work now costs more than used to. Here's an example: UK.gov recently talked about dropping support for any browser with less than 2% market share. A lot of technical people were grumpy about this, but we tend to adopt the same approach as the government: if less than 2% of the population use it and your clients can download a supported browser for free, do you really want to pay an extra thousand quid to support all those extra browsers? After all, because we build our sites properly - with a clean separation between style and content - it should degrade gracefully. In the worst case, you can always view it without the graphics: the information on the page will still make sense.

Cross-browser compatibility tweaking is entirely non-productive work, but at least the consumer benefits from all this competition in the browser world. Tabbed browsing and RSS news feeds in your browser are the most tangible benefits: both of which are great. There's also the intangible benefit of not having Microsoft own your gateway to the web.

You could say that web developers should view this as a Good Thing because we can charge more. In fact, it's frustrating because we just want to get on with making stuff work and delivering great websites, not piddling around mindlessly trying to make it look the same in Internet Explorer as it does in Firefox.

I'm not arguing for a return to Microsoft dominance here, that was unquestionably a bad thing. It actively held us back from developing great sites. It's more a plea for standards that actually mean something: if a web page is standards compliant, it really should display correctly in all browsers. At the moment it doesn't and that's just annoying for everyone.

Chrome

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:39:00 +0000

Google's new browser could change everything about how you use your computer. This isn't really a post about their browser, however, more about who controls your business-critical data.

Chrome is the first browser that really tries to turn Javascript into a language that you can use for serious application development. Ah, that's technical and I've lost a lot of you right there: but it's important.

Google docs, Google's Microsoft Office 'killer' runs on Javascript.

We use Google spreadsheets here at We love the web, mostly for bug-sheets and progress tracking. We love the fact that we no longer have to email people lots of spreadsheets or get them to use an unfamiliar bug-tracking tool: they can update an online spreadsheet that they already know how to use and we get their updates instantly. These work well until they get to a certain size. They then start crashing our web browsers with annoying regularity. So, if Google docs were more reliable they would be a compelling proposition:

Google docs: Free, requires no maintenance, setup in minutes, instant online collaboration
Microsoft Office: several hundred pounds, complex install that requires regular patching and support, rubbish online collaboration

There are only two ways to do instant online collaboration through a browser: the flash plugin and Javascript. The flash plugin is wholly owned by Adobe and Google wouldn't want to be in hock to Adobe for a key plank in their strategy. That leaves Javascript.

Javascript is pretty awful: slow, unreliable, inconsistently implemented across Internet Explorer and Firefox, prone to falling over and not very secure. I've yet to meet a web developer who loves Javascript. You can do some great things with it, but mostly in spite of the language, not because of it.

This is the problem that Google seems to be trying to address with Chrome. It's the only real innovation in the browser for my money: a bullet-proof implementation of Javascript.

Everything else is pretty standard - Chrome is based on webkit, the same collection of code that Apple used to make Safari and a lot of the interface tweaks owe their inspiration to (have been copied from) an obscure, but well-regarded browser called Opera.

So, if Google docs would only work reliably then Microsoft really could become irrelevant: No longer would you fire up Word, Outlook and Excel when you got into the office: gMail and Google docs. would take over. Chrome is the tool that allows this to happen.

Hooray, you've saved hundreds of pounds per person in not buying Office!

Of course, there is a downside.

All your important business information would be held and maintained by someone else. Microsoft Office just provides the applications in which you work: you store your own data. Google Docs are stored, indexed and ultimately owned by Google.

Within days of Chrome's release, there was a right hoo-haa in the technical press when it was discovered that Google had put a term into the license whereby you granted a permanent and irrevocable license to Google to use, reproduce and distribute anything you uploaded through Chrome: photos, spreadsheet data; everything.

It was quickly removed, with an 'oops' style apology from Google, but that it was even there in the first place is worrying: that they ever thought this was reasonable. I don't trust anyone outside my accounts team with my financial information. Do you?

It's the same old story really: there's always a catch to 'free'. We use Google docs, and will continue to do so for lightweight online collaboration, but never for really important stuff. Think hard before you start entrusting business critical data to a third party. You never know where it could end up.






Note: There are various free office suites that work like Microsoft Office - the most famous is called Open Office, but there seems to be real resistance to it in business, possibly because many business people are nervous about an entirely free application suite that underpins the daily running of their business and isn't supported by a large company.