Web Design Sydney Melbourne | Wiliam Blog

Why aren't Android users browsing?

Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Let me get a few things out of the way before getting into my blog.

Yes, I have an iPhone.
No, I don’t think it is amazing and I am not hung-up on it. I don’t like Macs as a general rule.

One of our UX Designers at Wiliam has a particular penchant against Apple and the iPhone.

He’s not hung up on it, though he thinks the iPhone is overrated.

He thinks Apple is an aggressive, sometimes immoral company that fights like Microsoft and IBM in the ‘90s. (On that I certainly agree…)

He thinks the iPad has sent us sideways at best with its non-widescreen screen. Indeed, he wrote a pretty good blog about it.

Generally, his arguments are good and whilst I pretend to be an Apple fan-boy, I pretty much agree with all of his points.

Except one.

The iPhone is not overrated.

If you reread my opening points (and specifically point 2), I really don’t think the iPhone is amazing, though for what it does and how well it does it, I don’t think its overrated.

I could write all day about its limitations and why Android is so much more sophisticated, though that’s not the observation I’m blogging about.

As powerful as they are, I don’t believe Android users get nearly as much from their phones as iPhone users.

And here is why I think it, simple argument that it is.

Android is what, half the Smartphone market? Maybe a bit less, though let’s keep it simple.
If I look across the statistics of my client’s websites, mobile is consistently at least 20% of traffic. Some websites will hit 25% by June 2012.
Yet consistently, iOS devices – the iPhone and the iPad – account for 90% of the mobile traffic, equally split between the iPhone and the iPad.
It is true that there are hundreds of Android devices in the world, though collectively, they add up to half the world’s smartphones and should be at least half of the world’s mobile traffic. Roughly speaking.
Interestingly, when I look at the website statistics, Apple users make it far farther into websites as well: I’m talking about un-optimised websites too.

Why this stat?

Most people don’t care about mobile phones. They either want an iPhone because they think it’s cool, or they walk into the closest Optus store and ask someone there for their opinion.

That opinion will invariably be for one of the inexpensive Android devices hanging on the wall.

Customer walks out.

And statistically browses less than the iPhone user. Much less.

Perhaps they’re playing more games or perhaps they’re fighting Android.

Who knows, except that for whatever reason, they’re missing out on the Web unlike me and my Apple fanboy mates.

The iPhone isn’t overrated. Android is.

Wiliam is one of Australia's leading web site design and web development agencies. Our Melbourne web design and Sydney web design offices provide cutting-edge Web 2.0, internet marketing, business web hosting, email marketing software, search engine optimisation, SEO, Facebook Applications, Link Exchange and SEO Tool services.

Improving the performance of your eCommerce website (and some cool stats)

Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is one of those blogs littered with awesome eCommerce and web stats.

Admittedly, they are taken from an infographic produced by an A/B Split Testing company who have some incentive in pushing the numbers, though the stats come from credible sources and are universally applicable to anyone building or operating an eCommerce website.

Well, when I say applicable, I mean interesting.

Certainly the takeout – and it was the point of the author – is that knowing what is happening on your website and knowing how to improve it – and indeed, improving it – is utterly vital.

Improved website performance can double, triple and more, the commercial outcomes from your eCommerce website.

And all for a fraction of the cost of driving traffic to the website.

Here are the stats that stand out:

According to Forrester Research, companies spend $1 on converting visitors to customers per every $80 they spend on driving traffic to their website.
The ‘industry average’ bounce rate for a website is 50%. Anything below 40% is ‘good’ and anything below 25% is ‘very good’. (Most of us knew that anyway, though nice to have a second opinion).
According to Forrester Research, the top 6 reasons customers abandon shopping carts:

44% said shipping and handling costs were too high.
41% said they were not ready to purchase.
27% said they wanted to compare prices on other websites.
25% said the product price was higher than they were prepared to pay.
24% said they wanted to save products in the cart for later consideration.
And a staggering 22% said that shipping and handling costs were listed too late in the checkout process. (In relation to this point, I can attest this as entirely accurate based on the work I have done on client carts: get the shipping costs (as well as the voucher redemption field) right up the front – it is key to customers).

4. 66% of Amazon’s total sales are credited to repeat purchases. The industry average is 7%.

I’ve written a dozen blogs on the importance of ongoing testing and improvement.

It isn’t hard and the benefits can be enormous.

Get to it.

How wide is your next web site?

Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As an information architect, I create prototypes. My prototypes try to test the interaction concepts we workshop with clients, sometimes to the behest of the creative design and development teams. This is often because prototypes coming in all different shapes, styles fidelities.

There is however, one aspect of my prototypes that never changes:

Every single prototype I’ve created is 960 pixels wide.

Why 960 pixels? 960 pixels was perceived to be the maximised safe width of a web page so that it would safely display in a browser window on a screen with a resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels. 1024 by 768 being the most common screen resolution after over taking 800 by 600 some years ago.

I remember when 1024 by 768 became the standard and web sites everywhere exploded in width. Ever since then, although monitors have been getting bigger, devices have also been getting smaller and thus, 1024 by 768 has stuck around longer than we expected.

But is it number 1? Probably not.

Check your analytics! You’ll probably find that 1024 by 768 isn’t top of the list. Most likely the number 1 spot is held by something around HD resolution (1366 pixels wide). A 960 pixel wide web page on a 1366 pixel screen has noticeable space running down each side. The designers plead to make wider web pages. The web cries for it!

Why won’t it happen? Why will my prototypes remain fixed at 960 pixels wide?

It’s because in April of 2010 (well into the widescreen era), a company in Cupertino, California called Apple Inc. decided to release their iPad with a screen resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels. This was followed up with the even more successful release of the iPad 2, also with a screen resolution of 1024 by 768 pixel.

Forever locking in the 960 pixel wide web site.

Well… probably not forever, but at least for your next web site…

Annoying your customers through bad mobile design

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A few months ago I was at my local Bunnings hardware store buying an outdoor furniture setting. I was looking at spending around the three-hundred dollar mark, so not the kind of purchase that I would normally make without doing a bit of research. I’d already jumped online to check out the prices and had my exact setting picked out. Couldn’t be easier, so I thought.

Unfortunately when I arrived at the store, my confidence to buy was tested for a number of reasons. The exact outdoor setting that I was after was not on display, leaving me wondering if indeed they even had them in stock. Wandering to the back of the store, I found the area where outdoor furniture was flat packed on high shelves, and rows of chairs were stacked ready to wheel to the checkout. After finding the item that I wanted, the price tag was incorrect – fifty dollars more, from memory. There were no sales staff to enquire to, so I fired up the mobile internet and discovered much to my delight, not only did I have good Vodafone reception in store, but also Bunnings appeared to have a decent mobile site. Unfortunately it was completely useless. The Bunnings mobile site – despite having a mobile catalogue of all the products covered on their full site – did not show price points. I could find no way of accessing the full site, and so I left Bunnings, not convinced I had to pay $50 more than I should have. A lost customer.

Thankfully, it would appear that somebody at Bunnings was paying attention, and now their mobile site has been improved – this time with price points for all products. For me, Bunnings was a clear lesson that you really do need to pay attention to what your customer needs from a mobile website (at Wiliam we much prefer sites over apps, that’s a different blog topic altogether!). Was there a tactical or strategic reason for this information not being displayed in the first place? Or was it simply an oversight?

One thing is for sure – as much as anything else, bad mobile site design can really impact your brand. Just because I was accessing their website from a mobile device, doesn’t mean that I wanted or expected any lesser functionality. If anything, it should have been a quicker, more pleasurable experience than traversing the information on their cluttered full site.

At Wiliam, we’re currently producing a new mobile site for Camera House, one of Australia’s leading photography retailers. We’re looking at the way consumers are interacting with the Camera House website and have found that more and more people than ever are accessing the site from a mobile device. It has reached the tipping point where this audience share cannot be ignored, and these customers want features they can access on the road. We need to identify ways to specifically enhance the mobile experience.

In the past 12 months, Google Analytics have shown us that the portion of Camera House web traffic attributed to mobile devices as grown from 6% to 16%. The last 3% growth happened in the past 3 months alone. The graph is pointing upwards and before long we expect that 1 in 5 people who visit www.camerahouse.com.au will be from a mobile phone or tablet device.

Research has shown that tablet users have high expectations of a website. Large, vibrant screens with awesome colour and clarity; fast 3G/4G networks providing excellent wireless connectivity; a touch screen interface and the impression of ‘capability’. A tablet is seen by consumers as so much more than just a large ‘mobile phone’. There is nearly an expectation that one should be able to surf the net and perform online tasks just as easily on a tablet, as I can on a laptop or PC. Perhaps it should be an even faster, easier and better quality web experience? Given this mindset, and the increasing audience statistics, it makes a lot of sense that any serious player in the online space should be wanting to ensure that their mobile website is at the top of its game, or risk reducing revenue, increased costs and a negative brand perception.

There's an app for that

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

We have quickly learnt that there’s an app for almost anything one can think of, in fact we know it so well that in 2011 there were 31 billion app downloads to mobile devices. That’s at least four app downloads for every person in the world, if we want to look at it that way.

So what’s that in dollar figures? Well, according to data from Strategy Analytics’ Global Mobile Media Forecast, $26.1 billion is expected to be spent on the sale of apps by the end of the year and by 2016 that figure is predicted to double to $52 billion. That’s a lot of Angry Birds.

Last year saw games dominating the app market, accounting for nearly half of all downloads. Followed by social networking apps with 30 per cent, entertainment with seven per cent and news apps making up six per cent of all downloads

Overall, mobile spending is on the rise with mobile application revenue only making up 19 per cent of the whopping $138.2 billion expected globally for 2012. This will see mobile spending jump by almost 15 per cent in a single year.

Mobile viewing is too on the rise with 280 billion views expected world-wide but with so many free options the revenue will only bring in $3.6 billion.

Advertisers are latching on to these trends and will spend double on mobile advertising space compared to last year and again apps seem the way to go, Strategy Analytics says that revenue from mobile web display ads will be $934.5 million, but says in-app advertising brings in almost double raking in $1.7 billion.

Texturising the Web

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

You know how clients sometimes say "can you make this website POP?", well we've got the magic answer to that ambiguous question. TEXTURES! Yes, they are a god send and a perfect way of adding depth to any website and therefore making it pop. Adding a texture in the background can instantly lift a site.

Textures can also draw attention to elements such as icons and highlight them against a plain background. Or vice versa can be done where a textured background is used and the call to action is flat, the same effect will be created.

The thing I love most about textures is that it gives the website an vibe and personality to it. It adds a wow factor and point of difference to an otherwise bland design.

Although there are a few things to remember with textures. Don't over do it, textures are best and most effective when used sparingly. They do add something special to the site but don't forget a website still needs to be user friendly, so if the texture makes it difficult for the user to navigate, read or interact with the site, it's best to tone it down. The texture should compliment the site not detract from it.

Now I know you would be itching to play with some textures so I'll leave you with this website and two words: you're welcome.

Senior Front End Developer (JavaScript & HTML expert)

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:27:36 +0000

Are you a JavaScript ninja? Are you proud of your ability to develop pixel-perfect, highly functional HTML pages? If so – we need you!

Wiliam is one of Australia's oldest and most regarded web development firms, with a broad range of leading Australian and overseas clients.

We're looking for a talented, professional User Interface developer to build templates: HTML5, CSS, JQuery…

We need someone fast, efficient and with exceptional attention to detail to work from PSD files and build complex, pixel-perfect user interfaces. You will have the support and resources of our talented front-end and back-end development team, and work in an easy-going, vibrant office.

If this describes you, we should talk ASAP:

User Interface Web Developer, with strong skills in:
- XHTML (HTML5 preferred) & CSS
- Javascript & AJAX
- DOM manipulation
- Photoshop
- Cross-browser compliance

And if you're a:

Passionate web professional
Proactive worker, with strong attention to detail
Project-aware, hard-worker who can work to deadlines and respond to feedback quickly

Then give us a call – this position won’t wait so let’s talk TODAY.

Call Robert or Natalie on 02 9978 8888 or contact careers@wiliam.com.au.

Creative Director

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:59:06 +0000

Wiliam is one of Australia’s oldest and most respected web design agencies. We stand behind some of Australia’s most iconic and successful websites and brands and remain on the cutting edge of the industry: creativity, quality, clients and trends.

Our creative has always been regarded at the top of the industry and we are now looking for an experienced Creative Director to take us to even greater heights. This is a role that has been open only a few times in the past 15 years!

As Creative Director, you will be confident:

Leading and coaching a small team of talented designers.
Developing outstanding creative concepts and interface designs.
Leading creative sessions and securing client buy-in.
Providing quality control over concepts and projects.
Building strong relationships with new and existing clients.

Your background experience & skills will include:

10 years’ experience on large-scale digital projects.
Strong leadership skills.
Excellent working knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite.
A degree in Visual Communication or Fine Arts.
The ability to apply best-practice to interactive design.
The ability to supervise and train employees while prioritising and scheduling work assignments.

You will work with some of the web's best and brightest operators. We employ the industry’s best.

While your time will be in high demand, Wiliam’s consulting discipline is a genuine standout and there are personal and professional learning opportunities every day.

You will be responsible for shaping and directing Wiliam’s creative and that of its clients; this is a no holds barred role is enormous flexibility and responsibility.

A fantastic breadth of brands and clients will keep the role exciting and fresh, while your passion for Photoshop will give you the tools to produce outstanding designs for desktop, tablet and mobile devices.

Our studio is Sydney’s best: a purpose-designed creative space that sets an expectation of excellence from the moment visitors set foot in the door.

This really is the role for an Australian online/digital Creative Director.

If this sounds like you, get in touch right now.

Contact Robert Beerworth, Managing Director on (02) 9978 8888 or email careers@wiliam.com.au

User Experience Designer/Business Analyst

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:44:54 +0000

When it comes to User Experience and Business Analytics; would you consider yourself to be a leader in the field? A winner even? If so, we should chat.

Ensuring Wiliam clients achieve the best solution for their business objectives and user needs will be your forte.

It will work out brilliantly between us if you’re a User Experience enthusiast wanting to expand your field of expertise and make your mark in the online space.

We only want proactive people! People with positive, can do attitudes to work with and alongside our exciting and outgoing team in this highly dynamic environment we call Wiliam.

On a day to day basis, you will be involved in some great things. A few include:

Establishing and documenting full project requirements through information gathering & analysis, ensuring a clear and common understanding of project scope.
Performing expert reviews, competitive analyses and developing strategies through consultation and discussion.
Devising appropriate solutions using the following techniques:
- Define and catalogue business requirements and rules.
- Create process flows to define business process.
- Collaborate with Information Architects and Creative Designers to produce user journeys and wireframes.
- Producing prototypes to meet requirements.

To be successful, you must have:

Four years' experience in Web Analysis/Design in a role such as an User Experience Analyst, Business Analyst or Information Architect.
A degree in Computer Science, Business Studies; or an Engineering or Science discipline with specific studies in Information Technology.
Skills and experience in gather business requirements and producing wireframes.
A strong customer service focus.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

If you think that you have what it takes to be a Wiliam User Experience/Business Analyst, then we’d love to hear from you. Drop a line, give a call or maybe even walk right through the door. If you’re right for Wiliam, we’ll snap you up in a microsecond.

This great opportunity will not last long. Please direct all enquiries (remember to include your CV) to careers@wiliam.com.au or call 02 9978 8888.

.net Rounding

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

While working on some older code this morning I found this little doozy:

My first instinct was just to delete it and replace all references with Math.Round(), but I know we usually don’t reinvent the wheel unless we find it to be a bit square. So I investigated further. I know Math.Round() has an overload that accepts and enum that specifies which type of rounding to use and I always assumed the default would be ‘symmetric arithmetic rounding’. In other words I assumed that numbers ending in .5 would always round up. However, looking at the enum told a very different story.

It seems the default is to use ‘bankers rounding’ which rounds values ending in .5 towards even numbers so both 1.5 and 2.5 would round to 2. I generally prefer this method because over a normally distributed set of numbers it will eliminate the bias that would be added by always rounding up, however this was not the behaviour I was expecting. So to put a long story short, I had to replace the method with Math.Round(amount, 0, MidPointRounding.AwayFromZero), instead of just Math.Round(amount) and learned something in the process.

How to use a microsite when the main website isn't the vehicle

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In a perfect, theoretical world, we wouldn’t need microsites.

In theory, a well-planned and flexible website should be able to handle everything thrown at it, including the design and content usually associated with a microsite.

That’s the theory anyway.

In practice, we can never foresee what we will need online, especially as the web advances and what we can do and how we do it will inevitably stretch the capabilities of even the most well-planned website.

That’s often the justification for the microsites and it isn’t a bad one.

A good example is Mortgage Choice, a large and successful Australian mortgage broker.

Their website is a typical, content and link heavy website with a consistent treatment of all content across the website. The design doesn’t appear capable of promoting, cross-promoting or highlighting campaigns or specials and if the website attempted to do so, they would be largely lost.

The Mortgage Choice Stress Test is a good example of how a microsite can be used to complement and enhance the primary website, where the primary website is not designed or capable of making the leap a dedicated microsite can.

(As aside, the vanity URL isn’t ideal though presumably it is because the main website doesn’t support embedment of the microsite content.)

The Stress Test microsite is clean, focused and simple. It really is a good example of how a microsite can and should be designed.

Interestingly, in spending time on the Mortgage Choice website, there really are some nuggets of solid content, especially around info-graphics, something surprisingly well executed and innovative for a financial services business.

I’d be considering floating that rich content to the top and depending on the flexibility of the primary website, treating the info-graphics (with supporting content) as their own microsite; they really are a good read for the new and anxious home buyer.

Optimise your emails for mobile.

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Email is back. Back with a vengeance.

Written off a few years ago because of a combination of SPAM, social media and Gen Y/Z using new, non-email ways to communicate, the email has returned truly triumphant.

In some instances, it accounts for at least 50% of sales in a well-coordinated campaign.

Ask any group-buying website what is important to them and email, and their email database will rank very highly if not at the top.

The technology is getting smarter; rather than spraying, we’re increasingly building segmented databases, sending emails based on individual user behaviour and getting smarter and smarter about subject lines and body content.

We still think of email as being intrinsically linked to Outlook and Gmail.

This has to change.

Mobile and the email

No matter the work or life patterns, we are reading more and more emails on our Smartphones and tablets.

It could be on a Blackberry between meetings or a slower paced read on an iPhone on the train-ride home, though we now see far more email on a small screen, 30 centimeters from our face.

In the same way that websites are being optimised for Smartphones, emails must also be.

After all, they are the logical start of the journey for your users; send them the offer and ideally, they click away to your mobile-optimised website.

If your email doesn’t fit the screen and take advantage of the opportunities (and limitations) of the smaller screen however, the journey is much harder to start.

And if email is so important to the sale and you know that your users are reading them on their phones, there is no excuse.

I will write another blog on what it means to optimise an email for Smartphone, though have a look at some great statistics put together by eConsultancy on their blog.

The takeouts are twofold:

Email consumption on Smartphones is growing. Duh.
Few companies are thinking about it; and therein lies your opportunity.

Pinterest is a bigger threat to Facebook and Instagram

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The meteoric rise of Pinterest has been impressive to watch.

Unlike Quora (which I predicted would collapse under both the weight of the pretentiousness of many of its users though also the equal weight of SPAM), I believe Pinterest will be around for a longer haul.

They have the usual SPAM issues to deal with and corporates are piling in fast with carefully manicured social strategies in order to gain from the extraordinary traffic Pinterest can drive to their website.

These issues and others can be managed however and it will be the fun, relevance – and general premise that Pinterest can be whatever you want it to be – that will pull it through.

It allows for amazing exploration: imagine a visual eCommerce engine.

It allows you to build a quick and visual scrapbook of recipes you’d love to cook; just by looking at photos of food and pinning them to your scrapbook.

For her birthday, my wife pinned photos of the presents she wanted me to considering buying; all I had to do was click through to the websites of the businesses that had uploaded their products/photos to Pinterest.

Facebook – which in my option is more and more spammy every day, and less and less interesting – knows that Pinterest is a serious and growing threat. Its growth would naturally be taking from Facebook.

Apart from the minor detail of listing shortly for up to US$100bn, there is the small issue if photos on Facebook.

Facebook took from Flickr. And now, Pinterest will be taking from Facebook; directly and indirectly.

It is true that they handle different photos for different purposes, though there is plenty of overlap.

Instagram makes photos look great; there isn’t a single photo it can’t improve.

And Facebook knows that.

Letting it fall into the hands of Pinterest would have accelerating a growing problem for Facebook.

Paying $1bn for a tiny, profitless company seems daft on many fronts (). Not so on others… especially if you’re Facebook.

Driving under the influence of Facebook

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Don’t eat, don’t talk on the phone, don’t apply make-up… don’t do a lot of things while you’re driving. Sounds logical. Driving is not the best time to be distracted. So why are more and more people using Facebook while driving? It’s one of the most distracting and time-consuming activities most of us engage in during our daily lives, and now it’s affecting our lives!

OK, a little dramatic there… let’s look at the stats.

An article on Gizmag makes the bold statement that “using Facebook while driving [is] more dangerous than drinking, texting, or marijuana”.

The following stats are just a few from the new research released by the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) in the UK in March 2012. The study found that a driver’s reaction time is increased by the approximations below in the following scenarios:

Hand-held mobile phone call – 45.90%
Using a smartphone for social networking – 37.6%
Texting – 37.4%
Hands-free mobile phone call – 26.5%
Cannabis use – 21%
Alcohol use (above driving limit but below 100mg per 100ml of blood) – 6-15%
Alcohol use (at the legal limit) – 12.5%

From the above we can conclude that using mobiles for social networking while driving is substantially more dangerous than texting and being under the influence of cannabis and alcohol. An interesting food for thought- imagine the uproar that would arise if 24% of young drivers were driving around drunk. Why is it then that we carelessly tolerate this detrimental yet common-place practice which is resulting in the death of thousands. Sounds extreme? In actual fact, 1 person in the world dies every 27 seconds on a road, which is dumbfounding.

“Subjects who were using Facebook while driving were unable to maintain the car's position in the lane, resulting in a massively increased number of unintentional lane departures” and “…were unable to respond as quickly to the car in front gradually changing speed”. The question is why the continuous engagement while driving when the effects are so obvious? Is it the young culprits and their naivety of being untouchable? Is it the real-time response and action that awaits on social networking platforms? The unfortunate reality is that with more and more mobile sites and apps launching each day, these stats will only increase, especially with the increased adoption of smart phones at such younger and younger ages- making technological devices more and more the norm and integrated in every aspect of our lives.

Despite the obvious dangers, which I’m sure most of us have experienced first-hand in those near-miss moments of fright, we continue to think we are invincible and are too focused to be affected. We have to recognise that we don’t just put ourselves at risk each time we look at our phone screen, read or reply to a message, or open up Facebook, but also the lives of innocent passengers and pedestrians. So next time you’re sending that smiley J face, just remember- phones don’t kill people… people (and their choices) kill people…

Feel free to download the report summary and full report for more information on the study.

The performance of eCommerce: optimising your eCommerce website for speed

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When many traditional businesses start the process of getting a website up and running which allows customers to purchase their products they start with what I refer to as the ‘Grand Illusion’. They have the illusion that users will happily invest a lot of time to understand their site and that users will see every page and pay attention to everything on every page that they do see. Typically these grand illusions introduce many barriers for users who just want to purchase whatever the business is selling. Barriers come in all shapes and sizes but they come back to one central theme; User Experience.

If users have to stop and ask themselves “How do I use this site? I just want to buy something and I don’t know how to do that” then you’ve lost a great many people except the ones with the persistence to endure a poor experience in order to get whatever it is that you are selling.

That brings me to one of the central User Experience factors that many eCommerce websites tend to forget or leave until the last minute: Performance. How many times have you heard about a deal on a daily deals site or sales on a popular e-commerce website but when you attempt to view it you are presented with a white page for a minute before you’re presented with an error? Despite the success of those websites, they have not sold as much as they possibly could have because people left the site when they couldn’t use it.

Having each page take over a minute to load is extremely detrimental to the user experience and will result in a huge amount of lost purchases. As a developer, I take it upon myself to ensure this barrier is as small as possible by developing a performance strategy for each site that I build. A performance strategy consists of multiple parts and utilises knowledge of the technology stack I use day to day, combined with projections (often bloated) on traffic and data amounts (X blogs per month, Y users per day, etc) to form an understanding of what needs to be done in order to keep page loads as quick as possible.

My performance strategy is bottom-up, meaning it starts at the database and goes through each tier until it reaches the client side. Each tier requires an attention to performance and an understanding of the role that it plays in each request made to the server. These are tiers as I visualise them, not as defined in any official application tier structure.

First Tier: Database

When designing the database it’s essential to understand the data that you will be storing. Will the field require 1000 characters or would 150 characters be sufficient? Do we actually need to keep a reference to the user who created a blog as well as the user who modified it, or do we just not care about that level of detail? Database design decisions are based on the requirements of the site, more involved sites require more involved database design, but that doesn’t mean that you have to be wasteful about it.

Ensure field lengths are only what are required, don’t introduce columns with foreign keys to tables which you just don’t need. Don’t add indexes until you know they provide a positive difference. Don’t store denormalised data until you know it’s actually required. Keep it simple, keep it clean. The most common performance problems at the database stem from developers simply not knowing what data will be put in the system. As part of the performance strategy it’s critical to find this out as early as possible. Don’t design a database to handle 3 new blogs per day when in reality it’s going to receive 140 new blogs per day. Be sensible and ask the right questions up front.

Second Tier: Data Access

Data retrieval is one of the most time-expensive tasks during page loads. If developers do not pay attention to how data is being retrieved the site will quickly grind to a halt, losing money in the process. My current favourite data access method is to use Entity Framework 4.1, Database First model. This means that I import an existing database schema (simple and clean, as described above) into the Entity Framework and then go from there. There are good ways and bad ways to use Entity Framework and a lot of developers don’t know the difference. Entity Framework is not a magic bullet and will easily introduce more problems than it solves if used incorrectly.

The two main items to watch for are proper data context scoping (not per call, not per application) and not using lazy loading (better yet, disable it inside the Entity Framework model properties). Most data access methods for the average site will be retrieval operations; GetBlog(), GetUser(), GetSomethingBySomething() etc. These calls should only return the smallest viable subset of data that is required. Use optional paramaters so that the caller can nominate what additional information they require (to be .Include()ed in the Entity Framework call, to avoid Lazy Loading).

Third Tier: Application Logic

Second to Data Access, application logic layers can be very time consuming depending on their structure. Black box CMS’s tend to have quite thick layers between the database and interface logic which take a lot of time, relatively, because they are designed to be very flexible, arguably too flexible. Typically the methods perform one logical action and more often than not, interact with the data access layer so it’s important to structure them in a way that does not make unnecessary calls into the data access layer.

Equally important is to ensure that their usage is consistent which means that they behave the same way every time they are called. Inconsistent performance characteristics will skew the developers view of the method and can unintentionally push the page time up. Any calls which are made need to be kept as simple as possible in order to allow them to be extended easily later on in development if necessary. While this isn’t strictly performance related it’s still very good practice to do so.

Fourth Tier: Interface logic & interaction

This layer is typically responsible for accepting user input, applying logic, and setting the state to be sent back to the user. This tier is very important as it interacts with HTTP requests and invokes code to perform expensive tasks. For a developer, it is important for the developer to treat every call into the application logic layer as very expensive, even if it’s not, so that they are smarter about how and when they make those calls. Complacency breeds mediocrity.

Fifth Tier: Http Request/Responses

Care should be taken not to perform too many requests. Each request utilises potentially slow resources (Network I/O on the client, processing & data access on the server, network I/O on the server to send the response back) and so any data that is required on the client side should be stored in-page where it makes sense.

Care should be taken to ensure that Ajax requests don’t return a giant blob of HTML. Instead, return some compact JSON data and construct any necessary interface elements on the client. Redirecting users from one action to another using HTTP redirects is wasteful as it involves more network I/O (relatively slow) to accomplish the same task as just redirecting the request inside the logic layer.

Sixth Tier: Client Side (Html/Javascript)

Client-side performance is every bit as important as server side performance. Reducing the number of HTTP requests that the browser has to make per page load is critical, this means using methods such as CSS sprites (combining multiple images into one larger image and then using CSS background positioning to only show the image you want), javascript include combination and CSS include combination.

Ensuring your static content (CSS, Javascript, Images) have the correct ETag and Cache expiry settings is also important as warm loads (page loads after the browser has cached content on the site) will typically involve much fewer HTTP requests and content fetching which further increases the responsiveness of the site.

Thresholds

Over the years I’ve grown to understand web application performance and based on the performance strategy I briefly described above I’ve worked out some personal thresholds that I use to determine how a site is performing.

Item	Excellent	Okay	Not Ideal
Time to generate page on server	<50ms	51ms to 150ms	151ms to infinity
Overall page load time	<200ms	201ms to 600ms	601ms to infinity
Average HTTP requests per page load	<10	11 to 40	41 to infinity
Average Page Download Size	<500KB	501KB to 1024KB	1025KB to infinity

These aren’t figures to be applied to all websites everywhere because some business requirements can increase the page load times unavoidably. Also, some flexible CMS systems have inherent page load times before you even start using them, some perform better than others. The figures above are designed to be thresholds for sites built in ASP.NET WebForms or ASP.NET MVC. Other technology stacks will have their own set of performance characteristics which are not represented in the above table.

Caching

I typically see caching used as a crutch by developers who either don’t understand the performance of their application or who are unable to control the performance of the application (in the case of black-box CMS systems). Caching used correctly is very effective; caching used incorrectly can be detrimental to the day to day use of the application.

There are a couple of different types of caching, some occur at the client, some at the server and some at the data access layer. My performance strategy tends to utilise opt-in in memory caching at the Data Access layer in order to prevent expensive database I/O. But even this approach has some issues. When utilising a CMS which manages the same data that you are caching you have to be mindful of changing data. Site owners will typically not tolerate a 1-5 minute delay when they save data in the CMS before it appears on the front end. To address this I use a connector system, when the CMS saves a piece of data, it sends an async request to the website asking it to invalidate an item in a particular cache set with that ID. In practice this works very well, providing well-cached data entities with immediate updating of changed data and the mechanisms are all very simple and secure.

Further on this, I maintain reporting which is polled from the website so that I can monitor the individual cache sets and their hit/miss ratio. A cache hit means a request was made for an item that was in the cache, which is good. A cache miss is when a request was made for an item that was not in the cache and so it has to fetch it from the source, which is bad (in terms of performance). Using the reported ratios it’s possible to tweak the cache timeout values in order to improve the hit/miss ratios, increasing the performance of the site in the process. Reporting and metrics are essential in determining if your site is performing optimally.

The use of a cache as I’ve described can have a very dramatic impact on some pages. Recently I watched a page drop from 89ms with 6 database calls drop to 18ms with 0 database calls on a warm cache. Since this page is the homepage it’s even more important as it sets the tone for what the user will experience throughout their visit. I those numbers are very small, but the difference is huge. At 89ms per page, a server can serve 674 sequential pages per minute. At 18ms, it can serve over 3,330 sequential pages per minute. If a website was running at its maximum capacity, that’s roughly 2,656 more chances per minute for users to purchase something.

Note: I’m using the word “sequential” because web servers are inherently multi-threaded, serving many requests at the same time. Real-world pages-per-minute values will be much higher than the sequential figures I state above.

Last notes

It’s important to regularly profile, or at least load test, your web application during development. As soon as it exhibits performance outside of your expected threshold you need to examine why and then adapt your performance strategy to rectify the issue. In my experience, if you leave issues until later in the development cycle they typically do not get addressed, or if they do, they do not have an outcome as good as if they were addressed earlier on. This does not apply to caching however as caching should be done late in the project once the behaviour of the users is known and the most-used paths can be cached.

Users don’t like using slow sites and slow sites only serve to turn users away from what could otherwise be a successful purchase.

Performance is a feature

Separating your social media and customer support

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When engaging with a brand on social media, research reveals that majority of customers either need to solve a problem or are looking to give feedback. The difficulty is separating your social media account with any (possibly negative) feedback your customers may have.

If customers have engaged with social media to learn more about the brand and keep up to date with the latest news, you do not want to expose them to endless support and service issues. These mixed messages will confuse and possibly scare your current happy customer base. If one of the reservations you have with creating a social media account is related to customer support then there are ways around this.

One of the biggest online fashion brands is ASOS, they have successfully resolved this common problem. ASOS have two twitter accounts set up: “ASOS .com” and “ASOS here to help”. These accounts are set up and managed by two separate marketing teams, with different messages and images on each. They have the same structure set up on Facebook.

This separation of the two social customer support channels mean there is a neat divide between the two support networks. There is always going to be a spill over but if marketing are clear on messages and support on each channel then it can work.

In conclusion if you have reservations about opening up your social media marketing due to customer support concerns, you can separate these and efficiently have the two accounts running in parallel.

Sharable Content – is it worthy?

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

People often confuse the concept of creating sharable content and the simple task of making content sharable.

Poorly researched and constructed content can lead to a very poor performing social media campaign. The process of installing social plugins is the easy part, Facebook/Google+ Like buttons as an example. There is basically no requirement for you to be technically skilled to complete this task and get your content shared.

The difficult part is managing to get people actively clicking away and sharing your content which is why you see so many sites sitting idle. So it’s worth taking the time to determine whether or not, simply because you have something to share and know how to share it, whether it will actually result in adding to your social media campaign.

Integrating Facebook Timeline with your eCommerce website

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

With the recent introduction of the new timeline for Facebook’s 845 million active users, it’s about time that your next eCommerce website harvest the potential of what it can do to promote your business.

By utilising Facebook’s Open Graph, user interactions can be automatically posted to their timeline as they interact with the site. Pinning products they love. Reviewing restaurants they’ve appreciated. Listing products that they want. Commenting on products. The possibilities are endless and the potential is there.

Startups have already begun seeing increased engagement and growth by integrating their website into Timeline. Pinterest saw a 60% increase in traffic after launching their integration with Open Graph. They focussed on the actions users most frequently do on their site – which is pin things they like and follow what they are interested in – and then they shared it. Their user’s friends then viewed it out of curiosity, and then of course, it went viral.

Your next eCommerce website can do this. It can go viral.

So, what are you waiting for?

Umbraco: Great for your content

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Wiliam development platform of choice for a content heavy site is definitely Umbraco. Within its elegant and feature-rich interface, it is easy for a website administrator to manage their content with one of the most requested CMS features; the ability to save all content as a draft and preview it, in context, within the confines of your site.One of the other most heavily requested features is user rights on specific content. It is completely within your hands to give staff members access to areas of the site administration (for example, adding new news article), but forbidding them access to more crucial areas of the site that only you as the Administrator want access to.

The platform allows developers to build content modules that can easily be placed on any page of your site. When built correctly, your site is not confined to any fixed set of rules regarding content placement. If you want to place your FAQ page elsewhere in the navigation, Umbraco can easily achieve this. You can create templates for the unique sections you require – you then have the ability to place content in these templates anywhere within your navigation!

The platform is very SEO friendly, creating a page hierarchy for your content e.g. your news section will appear as www.yoursite.com/news, and the articles as www.site.com.au/news/name-of-article. This is the default behaviour of Umbraco and allows you to concentrate on making you the best site possible, knowing that the core foundations of a content heavy website are already in place.

Umbraco 5, where it's going.

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Do you ever wonder what’s happening with everyone’s favourite CMS? There are a couple of places to get in the know.

First, check out Umbraco’s issue tracker here. This will give you access to issues, bugs and feature requests for Umbraco 5. With the feature requests, it’s a great way to see how people are using their CMS and what they want out of it.

Next, have a look at the Umbraco progress site. All of the accepted items from the issues site are listed here against the planned version they’ll release with.

Between these two sites, you’ll have a pretty good idea what’s in store for one of the best CMSs on the planet.