ITV’s coverage of the greatest bike race on the planet starts tonight at 7.00pm and the race kicks off tomorrow in Monaco with a 15.5km individual time trial (a great chance to see how space age cycling has become).
I have been following it ever since I can remember and for me, the Tour IS summer. The official site is looking pretty good this year.
With 21 stages, this year we can enjoy…
- 10 flat stages
- 7 mountain stages
- 1 medium mountain stage
- 2 individual time-trial stages
- 1 team time-trial stage
Found a good video of the route…
There is a beginners guide and TV schedule on the ITV Sport site if you fancy giving it a go. You can download the official map and details of the stages here.
The latest, greatest version of Firefox was released on the 30th June and so far, so good. Touted as the fastest (benchmarked twice as fast as V3), safest and smartest version yet. So what can you expect from the new version?
What’s New in Firefox 3.5
Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:
- Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
- Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
- Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
- Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
- The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
- Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
- Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
- Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.
Developers can find out about all the changes and new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.
Reviews
The first tranche of reviews seem favourable – noting how solid and fast the release is. Here is a mini review from the Register and another from PC Advisor.
An interesting collection of pretty clever logos.
My favourite for the Guild of Food Writers…
Get over to the Email Standards Project for the story. Then take a look at fixoutlook.org to get the message to Microsoft.
Please!
The children’s website S8080 recently launched for Lee Valley Regional Park featured some funky little characters call Leevs.
We have just been sent some photos showing how these little guys have been brought to life…
The Leevs will be used as mascots around the park helping to promote to the children’s website and the interactive fun and games it contains.
My kids love these fellas!
More young people’s sites on the way
We are just about to start work on a very special young people’s website design for a large police force out of the back of a suite of children’s and young people’s websites for South Wales Police. More about both of those projects soon.
If you have a children’s or young person’s website design project you would like to discuss, please get in touch as we have lots of case studies to show you 
Here is an article about some software designed to assist with the knotty problem of managing your PC’s power consumption.
Google recently announced Google Wave – “a personal communication and collaboration tool”. It’s quite hard to describe but is, in a way, a combination between e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking.
A ‘wave’ is a real-time collaborative conversation – it looks a bit like an e-mail, with participants (instead of recipients), and threaded conversations. However, anything can be edited at any time – you can re-write things you’ve already posted, and you can also reply to other people’s comments in-line (i.e. you can write a comment in the middle of someone else’s message). And because it’s all real-time, if multiple people are looking at the wave at once, they’ll see your changes as you type. Waves can also display images, maps, and much more. And did I mention that you can rewind and re-play conversations so you can see what changes happened when?
As I said, it’s rather difficult to explain. Andy Ihnatko of the Chigaco Sun-Times summarizes this fact quite nicely:
I imagine that there are as many pitfalls to defining and explaining Wave as Westinghouse and Edison found when trying explaining the concept of the electrical grid to the masses. You plug a light bulb into the socket and the crowd oohs and aahs and assumes that Electricity is all about illumination; it’s a marvelous way of producing light without the open flames or soot of candles and oil lamps. Technically that’s true, but it misses the point.
Check out his article on Google Wave for a great description of how Wave could be used in the Real World (Ihnatko describes a situation involving him submitting his column to his editor, and they both work on it and view the changes in real-time).
Wave has the potential to take off big-time. Google are hoping it becomes the ‘next generation of e-mail’. As such, they’re open-sourcing the whole thing, so that anybody can develop for Wave, and anybody can run their own Wave server (and any Wave server can interoperate with any other Wave server) – just like e-mail. We’ll be able to see whether Wave matches the hype when it launches to the public at the end of this year.
For another overview of Wave, take a look at Google’s introductory blog post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/went-walkabout-brought-back-google-wave.html. You can also see Wave in action, in this video of Google’s Wave Developer Preview event, where it was unveiled:
Interesting times ahead!
- James
Just read this nice article by Graham Charlton on Econsultancy.com on the impact of Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode, and how the poor usability and poor customer communication of these schemes is resulting in higher drop out rates in online checkouts.
Amazon still will not add the Verified by Visa scheme.
For more information see Graham’s the full article here: http://econsultancy.com/blog/3887-verified-by-visa-a-conversion-rate-killer
Pick up any usability book and it will say (rightly so) that considered usability, information architecture and user experience work will save money and get your site performing better whether it’s a Charity Site, NGO information site, E-commerce store or FTSE 100 site. Here’s a couple of usability tweaks, not redesigns, which have had big impacts:
Jared Spool (www.uie.com), usability guru suggested a tweak on Amazon; this added an estimated $2.7 billion to Amazon’s revenue. Jared and the team found that products with more than 20 reviews had a much higher sales conversion rate, so by adding a question ‘was this review helpful to you’ and then tweaking the site to place the most relevant reviews at the top, meaning more conversions – a real big winner for Amazon.
See the full article here: http://www.uie.com/articles/magicbehindamazon
I’m sure you’re frustrated when you have to register to actually buy something on an online store which you probably won’t return to? Here’ another example by Jared Spool (www.uie.com) on a different e-commerce store where a minor tweak increased to site’s annual revenue of $300 million per year!
In a nutshell users would have to login and register after they had filled their shopping cart but before they could actually enter delivery and credit card information to pay for their goods – sound familiar?
Jared and his team found that first time shoppers didn’t want to register – they just wanted to pay for the goods quickly and leave, in fact the users tested really resisted registering. Jared and the team also found that repeat customers didn’t find the process helpful either – with 45% of all customers having multiple registrations. The solution was simple, and one that many sites are now taking, remove the register button before the actual check out but add a message:
“You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”
And what about the money?
“The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.”
See the full article here: http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/
Giving exact ROI figures is always going to be more difficult for non transactional sites, but with Google Analytics we can quickly benchmark and show improvements (using metrics such as reduced bounce rate, increased average time on site, increased page views, increased page visits and higher Google Adwords conversions if you are using them).
I’m always great to that sometimes a minor tweak to the user interface, labelling or say the process of filling in a form can make huge differences to the usability and performance of web sites.
