Do we still have that digital head start that we fought so hard for in the 1990s? Obviously, this blog post won’t give a definitive answer to that question. But this is my contribution to the subject of an eventual Scandinavian lead in the mobile industry and perspective on mobile tech, usability and the need for speed. How do Sweden as a nation compare to the US regarding the, once again, popular concept of “digitization”. Well, this post is a attempt to start comparing, and to give you as a reader some data to begin benchmarking your website against the really big companies of Fortune 500, and the biggest ones of Sweden.

My book, Web Strategy for Everyone, deals with the issues of both speed and user needs when on mobile. Also a lot on design principles such as mobile first, responsive web design, adaptive, single page applications (SPA) and progressive web apps. Buy the book Web Strategy for Everyone directly from the publisher Intranätverk.

This comparison is how well major Swedish companies embraced usability and website speed. Today, we’re in a mobile first setting. Often attributed to the release of the Apple Iphone back in 2007. Almost ten years ago Apple contributed to – in a major way – making the Web accessible to mobile, for the masses!

Benchmarking method: OMX Stockholm 30 duel with the financial magazine Fortune’s list of America’s 500 largest companies

Since Sweden is a pretty small country, I have selected the 30 biggest companies on the Stockholm Stock Exchange in 2016, the so-called OMXS30. In the contending ring corner, for the US, is the 500 largest US companies according to the financial magazine Fortune. Biggest based on their annual turnover. No method is perfect, this one is no exception. But on some level, this comparison is the giants from one country to the giants from another.

Since the company Atlas Copco is listed twice on the Swedish list, there’s just 29 companies. The same problem exists multiple times with the Fortune 500, for instance the different incarnations of Time Warner, and others. In addition, this type of test is blocked by the security settings of some websites. That’s why the Fortune 500 simply became “Fortune 425” in this evaluation. Still, I think there is probably enough data to suffice as an acceptable average. But of course, it’s up to you to reflect upon the precision and if it is good enough for what you decisions you intend to make based on these data.

Measuring rod = Google PageSpeed API

The analysis is based on Google’s API called PageSpeed. If you’d like to make spot checks on any single webpage Google’s PageSpeed Insights web service will prove useful. The difference is that, with the API, one can automate checks of up to 25,000 pages per day. Thus one can approach a more quantitative analysis.

For those of you who want to know how much data is the basis of the analysis, there were 2,155 webpages evaluated for the 29 Swedish websites. For the American companies I evaluated 28,162 webpages from the 425 websites.

The average values were then stored as per website, which you can inspect in the Excel file linked below. After this, all Swedish companies’ averages were calculated, as well as all US companies averages, in order to be compared. It’s the way you should regard the tables below – as averages first calculated per site, then combined averages for OMXS30 as well as for F500. This double average calculation is necessary since the sampling of the websites differed.

Below is how an average webpage looks like. Besides Pagespeed and Usability, low numbers are generally a good thing.

Potential for improvement

As a bonus, when using Google PageSpeed via the API we get figures on what can be improved. In this comparison, the relative improvement is Google’s suggestion to the average Fortune 500 company website. Averages are calculated just like mentioned above.

Low figures are to be preferred, it means that the craftsmanship of the website is a professional one. The measures are pretty much obvious to the web professional, but please refer to Google PageSpeed API dokumentation for reference.

Being a Swede, I might after all be a tiny-wee bit biased, but I’d like to claim that the almost imperceptible country of Sweden came out as a the winner of this comparison.

What do you think? Give me your best counter-arguments in the comments!

Some things on these lists are easier to resolve than others. When you do this kind of evaluation on your own website, you might find a treasure trove of easy improvements. Such as, on this list, we find enabling GZip and leveraging browser cache early on in the list. Some things are very easy to resolve. For instance, dramatically improving those two takes about an hour each. Its all about the configuration of the website in the file .htaccess for WordPress, or web.config in a Microsoft environment, for instance.

More about the evaluation

For those of you who want to inspect the data behind the result, I have compiled an Excel file. In the Excel file you can filter individual websites’ performance, or comparing metrics for the different websites. Check out the Excel file here

You’d like to learn more about web performance?

Want to learn more about the variety of tools? Well, I’m pretty biased but perhaps you’d like the book Web Strategy for Everyone. In addition to its introduction to the Web, information architecture and web design principles It also discusses web performance and tooling.

In stark contrast to most English books, Web Strategy for Everyone is more dense, rich in insight, less repetitive. That’s how we Scandinavians roll

Buy the book about web strategy and performance optimization from the publisher intranätverk

Challenge: Earn your discount

If you’d like a coupon code worth 25 % discount on all books at Intranätverk’s bookstore, all you have to do is figure out below Python rebus ( yeah, it’s a simple concatenation):

‘{}{}{}’.format('friends', 'of', 'intranatverk')

The post Mobile performance and usability of Fortune 500 companies appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.

This is an intro for you who do not yet know if web analytics is for you.

Does your website have any visitors? Do you care about what the users do and whether they manage to achieve something beneficial during their visit? If you do not work at all with web analytics or measurability, one can wonder what the point is to publish anything at all. To work actively with web analytics is your chance to know if your website-related work and investments are meaningful – take that chance!

Glossary on web analytics

• Web analytics – Methods to plan ahead, and follow up on how a website is performing. May be of a technical nature but usually it is about measurable factors of achievement.
• Website statistics – Gathering of information about what users do on the website. Common tools for website statistics is Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics and Piwik, the open source option.
• Visit – When a user visits the site. A visitor can make several visits and generate several page views.
• Visitors – A unique visitor to the extent it’s possible to track individuals.
• Page view – Impressions of a page or website. The number of times a page is displayed during a visit.
• Pageviews / visit – Average number of pages viewed during a visit, aka a user’s session on a website.
• Bounce rate – Refers to the percentage of visits with only one page view and then the visitor leaves the site.
• New visitors – Indication of how many of the visitors who have not previously visited the site.
• Direct traffic – The visitors who type the address directly in the browser, entering via a bookmark or similar.
• Referring sites – The websites that link to your website.
• Inbound link – A specific link on another website that points to a page on your website.
• Organic Search Traffic – The visitors you attract thanks to the presence on search engines. Does not apply to bought traffic on search engines, such as through advertisements.
• Page Load Time – The time in seconds it takes for a visitor to download all the material needed for a single page view.
• Click-through rate (CTR) – What percentage of users choose to click on a link or button they have on display.
• Web Performance Optimization (WPO) – The ambition to make a website perceived as fast by its’ users.

Keep in mind that what might appear as a unique visitor may well be the same visitor as a person who visited your website via a tablet, mobile, laptop and a desktop work computer. Unique visitors does not necessarily mean more than that it is a unique cookie on a browser – you can actually have several browser per device. The same skepticism can also be useful when you look at other data in your website statistics. Error occurs and there is no reason to accept anything without reflection upon what you see.

How to gather the statistics?

The activity of collecting information about visits on a website is called logging, sometimes also known as tracking. Some common variations on tracking are:

1. A piece of code is inserted on all pages of a website. For each page viewed the visit is reported to a statistics service. In Google Analytics this code even has a name, ‘the GATC’ (Google Analytics Tracking Code).
2. A most commonly invisible image is loaded on each page view. The image is loaded directly from a statistics system that this way is listening in on what a visitor does on the website.
3. Examination of the web server’s log files. Many websites log every single page view, and each picture sent, etc., and the information can be valuable in an assembled form for fundamental web analytics.

The point of analyzing a website

You might ask yourself what is meaningful to measure? Besides quantitative trends of visitors, what is worth measuring is often the achievement of operational objectives. Measuring to see what is changing, what improvements that increase the conversion rate of visitors to accomplish the goals the business has with the website. To put it extremely simplified, the aim is to eliminate the barriers between your users and the goals you have with the site.

Eliminating the problems to get your visitors to convert

If you invest time and money in having a website it is well worth the effort to try to remove obstacles the visitors’ experience. Of course, it is not exactly trivial to make a website optimized for every possible use-case, but by working with web analytics you gain knowledge in what is worth improving.

Common usability problems include for instance:

• Complicated processes checking out a shopping cart, to actually being able to reach the pay phase. Most often it is common that a majority of users disappear at the same place in a multi step process. Such a step have a  potential for improvement.
• Parts of the site is inaccessible. Still some use forms, JavaScript and other obstacles to reach all of the information on a website. A search engine do not usually cope with such barriers, which leads to that it is difficult for a visitor to go directly to the target through a search engine result page (SERP).
• Bad information structure. That it is difficult to find what you are looking for. Evaluate which information that is popular on your website and perhaps make adjustments making it simple to reach the highest priority content.

Being aware of your audience and improve your digital voice

There are several ways to get to know your visitors. Among other things by drawing conclusions about the keywords they use when searching. They do not necessarily use the terms you prefer to use.

They may prefer to navigate with menus, go straight for the search feature, or just click on links with an adjacent image.

By analyzing visitor behavior on a website, you can understand how your audience interprets the approach of the website. To evaluate what changes are bearing fruit you can employ something called A/B split testing.

A/B split testing

An A/B test involves defining a goal of visitor’s session. It can be to fill in their email address and subscribe to a newsletter. To evaluate which design proposal is most successful you have two different versions of the sign-up page for the subscription, which is shown to each user is randomly selected.

The version where most are enrolling is crowned the winner. A/B tests also provide valuable feedback for future changes of a website.

Preparing for campaigns and other potential high traffic peaks

Not all websites can handle the onslaught that a successful campaign can cause. In theory, most of us probably think that we have the capacity to cope with what we can imagine.

The question is whether the media, counties and authorities were prepared for the information thirst at September 11, 2001, for instance? Or the tsunami of Christmas 2004? Or students applying for education through the Web on the last day of registration? Or all of us declaring our revenue via the Web just before midnight on the last day?

Most of us have probably tried to visit an established organization’s website and it has been down. By actively working with web analytics we can focus on efficient service, including sending the information necessary and at as low a cost as possible.

Examples of common mistakes in web performance:

• Not optimizing published pictures, video and other media files for the Web. This can lead to a traffic jam that brings down your website.
• Failed to put life expectancy of files, also known as time-to-live (TTL). If there is no TTL then every single file is sent again, even if the visitor already have the files in their browser’s cache. Simply put, your system design is inefficient regarding bandwidth.
• Sending the information in an uncompressed format. Not rarely, when we fumble with GZip-compression it lead to a page becoming up to 20 times as heavy to download. Under normal circumstances it is not likely that you notice this – especially if you are connected to a high-speed connection at work. See picture above, from the Boston Globe, as an examples of a more or less temporary mishap regarding Web Performance Optimization (WPO).
• Popular pages have a technical complexity behind the scenes and therefore is loading slowly. If you swiftly assemble a campaign that drives traffic to a page that requires a lot of webserver performance you’re gambling that it will stop working when the campaign is excelling.

Now we will switch focus a bit. A bunch of questions for all of us working with the content of website. To get to know your website and its’ users you have som homework to do. However, these metrics are not worth reporting upwards in the organization. They are for you and others who are actively working with the website’s content.c

Where are visitors coming from?

A public website are often in the range of 75-95% acquiring traffic through search engines. If it is below 75%, it may be that it has managed to gain valuable inbound links from important sites. Otherwise, the website can probably improve from a search engine point of view – read the introduction to search engine optimization, for instance.

Bounce rate per traffic source

To display the list of referral traffic according to evasive users is one of the most interesting views. Sort the column of bounce descendingly, which source of inbound links are most repulsive to its users?

Some websites that link to your website may not link to the right destination anymore, perhaps the some users are redirected to the home page. Or is the information being sought after not simple enough to detect?

Investigate the extreme case of bounce rates, that which attract a lot of visitors, and think how come the statistics is the way it is. Such as in the image above, why 77% of mobile Facebook users bounce.

Additional questions:

• Missing any website which ought to be sending some visitors? Maybe some related organization should be requested to place a link to your website.

What keywords are used to find your website?

In addition to learning which keywords that performs well, it is important to think about which words that are missing. The words may be absent for several reasons; they are not used, other sites out-perform yours in the search engines, or that the search engine is not capable of language you’re using (if not in English, this is unfortunately quite common).

Resources:

• Google Keyword Planner can be useful to see which keywords are actually used, what competition there is and comparing popularity between different words.
• Google Trends to see a historical trend between different words. However, Google Trends is not perfect for us mainly communication in other languages than English.

What keywords are used on the website’s search?

In addition to knowing what is popular sought after, it is relevant to at least to sample the searches that can be considered important or frequent. It is not uncommon that, according to the visitor, obvious concepts are resulting in poor search results. You should check the common queries and work editorially with search so that relevant content is accessible via the search function.

What content have high bounce rate, and why?

That a page has a high bounce rate is not necessarily because it is bad. However,  often pages worth improvement is found when looking for a high bounce rate. One way to take advantage of this view of information is with Google Analytics, see Behavior -> Site Content -> All pages.

The default list view shows how the various parts of the website is used and is sorted by most pageviews. With a little sense of what each page on the website consists of, and is intended to be used for, one can wonder if the numbers are as desired. If not, what needs to be changed?

Consider this example on news on a website:

1. News that has very little text and a link to another website. A topic interesting to a few.
2. News with some text, multiple headers and paragraphs, images, and about a topic that applies to virtually everyone. Links to pages on the same website.

The first example probably have a lower average time on page and higher bounce rate. Simply because there is not that much content and visitors are enticed to click links to other websites.

The second one should have longer average time and a lower bounce rate because there is more content to absorb, and the links are internal within the website. In other words, there really is no right or wrong. What you should check for is whether visitors are actually using the website’s content as intended.

If putting great effort on comprehensive information and the webpages have relatively short visiting time there probably is potential to do better.

Why have we got more / fewer visitors?

In addition to obvious things that you changed address or archived large parts of the website the reasons are usually not that hard to find. First, one should look at what contributed to the change, for example if it is because of:

1. Search Engine traffic
2. Referring Sites
3. Direct Traffic

Look for changes in trends, segmented for instance on source of traffic.

Google Panda and changes of algorithms

One example of algorithm that affected search engine traffic to a great extent for many websites happened during the summer of 2011. Google changed the order in which pages were listed on their search engine (the so-called Panda update). The aim was to provide more relevant results and leave out websites that were not considered to bring something of quality or unique. One practice that got punished  was copying parts of texts from Wikipedia or other established sites that Google already knew about.

A not entirely unusual phenomenon is that other websites affects your traffic to a great extent, at least sometimes. If a site with huge number of visitors links to your website it can, in addition to getting a lot of visitors, cause problems for the website to stay online and responsive. This is often called, among web developers, for slashdotting. Named after a very popular website, slashdot.org, that sometimes bring other websites down if they are not ready to take care of all the visitors.

Direct traffic is usually a very small part of a website’s overall traffic. Something we have seen in recent years is that the percentage decline as people started to use Google’s browser, Chrome. That’s because if you enter a URL in the address bar you’ll sometimes end up on Google Search – hence a common trend that more and more are searching for the address of one’s website. Moreover, people appear not to use bookmarks to as big an extent as in the past.

What external factors may have influenced the website?

Clues can often be quickly found in the website statistics automatic alerts. They assemble notifications of found deviations of past trends, such as suddenly gaining more visitors from a particular geographical area. This feature in Google Analytics has been around a couple of years and is getting pretty good in its precision (as in not bothering you with uninteresting details).

Do we reach out with the information we consider important?

First you need to figure out which parts are important and if they are placed in a way that makes it easily possible to find them. To reach out with important information the content needs to be advertised on relevant places on the website, preferably pages that already have a lot of visitors.

A common misconception is that most visitors will enter through the home page. Even though many actually do, it is still common that a large proportion never see the home page and thus may miss information that is only highlighted there. The argument “but we put it on the home page” may not be sufficient in all situations.

Click-through Rate (CTR)

In order to measure a news story, for instance, during the time it has been in the news listings and start pages we can measure its click.through rate. To check how many people actually chose a individual news story. Low click-through rate (to get visitors to click on the news when it shows up) can be caused by things other than that the users have not seen the link. Linguistic choices might make as big a difference? Inspect your content and you might find patterns of what works and what needs to be improved.

How is the website for mobile users?

Depending on how you take care of visitors using a mobile or tablet site may be perceived as more or less helpful. In the picture above it can be concluded that the site in question is not appreciated as much by the mobile visitors, at least they have a behavior of less page views, less time on the site and higher bounce rate.

As the image above illustrates, with the various mobile devices, it differs how a website is used depending on the device a user has. Partly it has to do with the screen size but also the quality that is on the screen.

With a tablet, it is easier to use a website that is not adapted for mobile visitors, at least compared with a smartphone. This conclusion can be drawn based on bounce rates and pages/visit when you compare Ipad and Iphone. Nowadays the difference is much smaller since most websites adhere to responsive web design.

Create custom user segments to compare the different user groups among themselves

You can use this feature to create custom segments to filter out only mobile visitors, and over time, monitoring how they behave on a site. Or create multiple segments to compare with Apple mobile against those with Samsung.

Compare Iphone and Ipad, side by side:

Because of the mobile phone’s small screen, a non-responsive website is like trying to read the screens from a couple of meters away. The user need to pinch & zoom, they may struggle to hit the links and navigation is difficult when you do not have the overview. Unlike a tablet where the experience usually works decent but still not optimal.

Today, many websites follow the design principle of responsive web design. But still most websites is not equally good on all kinds of devices visitors choose to use. A change in chosing devices can make a big difference in how successful your website is.

How did our campaign perform compared to last year?

By comparing the two periods with each other, we can draw conclusions about things such as seasonal variations, gift ideas or when the seasonal flu is likely to return. However, it is important to filter the parts of the website or service that is concerned, so we’re comparing things that are equal.

For example, you can measure how many visitors were reached through search engines with pages designated for specific keywords. In my case, working with healthcare, pages designated to topics such as the norovirus been present in the page name. This can be done using the tool for segmentation in Google Analytics. Then select the start and end dates for the two periods you wish to compare.

What parts of your site is perceived as slow of visitors?

One of the newer additions to Google Analytics is to monitor which pages are slow. No important webpages should take more than 2-3 seconds to load. Pages with several images takes longer to load since a single image often take longer to download than the rest of the content.

What do search engines think the website is all about?

Search engines are often compared to a multi-handicapped person while being omniscient. It cannot understand the meaning of most images, figure out the video’s content or use advanced and modern on the Web.

However, search engines excel in tracking virtually all text on a website. In fact, a search engine probably knows more about a website’s content compared to the web editor. Through all the words the search engine finds it tries to understand what a website is about, if the website can be categorized and which keywords are more relevant than others.

Google Search Console lists the words the search engine thinks is relevant to a website. Not infrequently, one becomes surprised by the words that is common. Sometimes there are words which ended up there by technological mistakes when developing the website. It is preferable that popular keywords related to the website is high on this list.

High on the search engine results page but few visitors?

There are many possible reasons for this. Most common is probably that it is a keyword few, if anyone, uses. To figure that out you can check Google Keyword Planner and search for the search term to see how many hits you get. Another reason may be that your information does not show itself from its best side in the search engine’s results page. It may be that many people see your link, but chooses something else. This requires that you work actively with your click-through rate, that is, to change something and follow up if you attracted more people, more who choose to click through to your website.

To measure this, you can use Google Search Console (see picture above). The CTR column indicates the percentage who click on your link in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

A common solution with great impact is to change the page title of the designated page, you know, the clickable text that pops up in the search engine. The title performs best if it is less than 70 characters, as early as possible stating the most important keywords and feels understandable to the person you want to attract. Check out tips from Moz.com about how to write efficient page titles ›

Tools

In addition to using Google Analytics, and other statistical tools, you can find out more details about what could be better if trying additional tools. Here are some suggestions.

Try some measurement tools

As an editor, few are expected to have more than a basic knowledge in web technology. Luckily, there are plenty of educational and simple tools that help us identify issues that can cause problems with the site you’re working with.

Woorank

Woorank provides a review on lots of quality factors for a website. If you want a single number to compare sites then Woorank is a good option.

YSlow, Google Page Speed & WebPagetest

Yahoo’s YSlow and Google Pagespeed controls how good the performance of a webpage is. This is especially important for mobile visitors, or to prepare for a campaign.

YSlow is added to the browser Firefox, but if you cannot install you can use Google Pagespeed directly in the browser. Or WebPagetest.org that has useful features like visual comparison of the two sites’ speed, and that they can measure over an actual cellular network.

SEO Doctor

SEO Doctor is an extension for Firefox and give a single value of how good a page is optimized for search engines. For example, it informs if a page has a too long page title, description texts are missing, etc.

Senseo

SenSEO is an extension for Firefox that helps out if you want to check how individual keywords are performing in relation to search engines. The tool also discusses things that are difficult for an editor to influence, as to whether the address is made up of small or big letters.

Google Trends

Google Trends helps you get an idea of what word among synonyms or concepts that people use when they search on Google. The service is not spot on for smaller languages, such as Swedish, but for the most part it works well and for English it’s excellent.

Checklist for web analytics

• Relate website content to the business goals, and attempt to measure visitors’ fulfillment of those goals on the website.
• When starting or stopping a campaign (or make a major design change), make a note in your tool for web analytics. Then it becomes easier to follow up later on.
• Try to find the information you published a while ago. How does it look? Is something in need of change?
• Make sure media files are optimized for small file size. For images, you can do this with the service Smush.it
• Consider using synonyms of important keywords. Synonyms are often used in headlines. To see which words to default to you use the tool Google Trends.

Not fed up about analytics yet? Late autumn 2016 a book, an anthology, about intranets is to be published – I have contributed with a chapter on Intranet Analytics. Check it out ›

Also, check out the extensive blog post about introducing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for beginners. And of course, if you like my writing please consider buying the book Web Strategy for Everyone ›

The post Guide to Web Analytics – an introduction appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.

Both Lara Callender Hogan and Ilya Grigorik is credible when talking web performance optimization. Lara’s book, which I enjoyed from cover to cover, is introducing a lot of great concepts. One of the memorably things is when she explained how her employer, Etsy, evaluated how images related to the bounce rate of visitors. They found out that 160 Kb of images increased the bounce rate with an alarming 12 %.

Introduction on web performance

Lara’s book is a great introduction for noobs on web performance optimization, or maybe if you’re trying to speed up your intranet. When ready to make your next leap, perhaps Ilya’s more technical perspective seems logical.

Ilya is working as an performance advocate on Google- He also is participating in a lot of great podcasts – for instance, talking about HTTP/2 on The Changelog podcast. Ilya’s specialty is networking on the web, or according to some, the infrastructure or architecture of the Web.

When I introduce the subject of web performance in the book Web Strategy for Everyone, it goes like this:

“When downtown in Gothenburg, I had 16 Mbit / second downstream and 3 Mbit / second upstream with a delay of 0.048 seconds. In a cabin, out in the woods in Fengersfors, there was however a bit more modest 0.035 Mbit / second downstream and 0.4 Mbit / second upstream, with a delay of a full 1.2 seconds!

If I try to put these numbers in perspective, in my cabin it was slower than surfing with the dialup modems of the 90’s, those 56 Kbit / second modems, with over one second of lag for each file before it started sending. To make matters worse, today’s websites are immensely more burdened with large images, Javascript and style sheets, each of these files adding a second to the wait time even before starting the transfer.

Let us calculate a little how this might affect a visitor on a little too obese responsive website at 5 MB divided into 30 different files – a weight many Swedish municipalities deemed suitable with their fine responsive homepages. With the fast connection example from earlier, such a website takes about 1.4 seconds of delay plus 3.2 seconds to download. For an abnormally heavy webpage, it is quite ok that it is loaded in under 5 seconds. The same material sent through the slow connection example though instead takes 35.8 seconds of delay and 143 seconds to download. That is almost three minutes!”

Get your copy of Web Strategy for Everyone at the introductory price. Go for Intranätverk, or get your copy from Amazon Kindle ›

At the moment I’m at the cabin in Fengersfors. But for the moment on a wifi, connected to a brand new fiber to the Swedish Internet backbone. But tomorrow, I’ll be on my mountainbike out in the woods. I’d better not need connectivity to the cellular network all of the time during my exercise – there are lots of skip zones along my route.

Reading the web performance books online

• Read Lara Callender Hogan’s book Designing for Performance – Weighing Aesthetics and Speed.
• Read Ilya Grigorik’s book High Performance Browser Networking.
• Also. read Tammy Evert’s book Time is Money – the business value of web performance.

The post Designing with performance in mind – especially your intranet appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.

All in all, Firefox accounted for 15.6% and Microsoft’s browsers had 15.5%. As you might figure out, there is a giant hiding in plain sight, namely Google Chrome, which has over 60%. The really small browsers like Apple’s Safari, Opera, and others, together account for 8.4 %.

Why are Firefox successful all of a sudden?

Now I’m speculating wildly, but I think there are Windows users, mostly on Windows 10, that have noticed that Microsoft is phasing out Internet Explorer in favor of Microsoft Edge. Perhaps they are making an active change. Suddenly they notice that the Internet may not be synonymous with Explorer.

To call it success is not entirely fair. It is, after all, so that Firefox has lost a smaller market share compared with Explorer & Edge, while Google Chrome continues to increase their.

How does this matter to my website?

Presumably, this is not something that determines how you work with your website. But it is absolutely worth trying to keep track of the market shares so to make representative measurements on one’s own website.

To some extent, a change in the distribution also may affect how web users behave. Let’s say that many of those who come to Firefox for the first time, is noticing ad blocking – well, then it can start to affect some websites.

Source: Statcounter

The post Microsoft lost the second place to Firefox appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.

You can lay you hands on the e-book today, it is sent to you shortly after you check out your order. The printed book, though, will take a few weeks before it is sent. The e-book’s formats are ePub, PDF and Mobi, they cover virtually all mobile phones and tablets, and Mobi is specifically for you with an Amazon Kindle. If you’re looking for a different format I can recommend that you download the program Calibre, then you can convert to many more formats yourself.

The best offer is, I think, to purchase both the e-book and the printed book. It costs about 25 $ + VAT. Then you get 90% discount on the e-book.

Order the book at Intranätverk – from 10 $ + VAT ›

What is Web Strategy for Everyone covering?

It is 60,000 words and 80 pictures spread over 212 pages. The amount of images and the layout makes it not so burdensome to read, like many other similar books. At the same time it is written in a very ”condensed” manner and to the point, so it’s like most Swedish literature – rarely repeating itself over and over again. Or, as one reader put it:

”Recently read your book and it is an achievement how much value you have managed to put between the covers. Very good!”

– Håkan Liljeqvist, founder at Kreejt

The subject of the book may seem obvious given the title, but at the same time there is no real definition for what is meant by ’web strategy’. So I chose to make the book to cover the fundamentals in many areas a web strategist must know about. Partly, the Web’s history, a lot on information architecture, different approaches to web design, some about the increasingly hyped topic of web performance and last a do-it-yourself with hygiene factors to check on your own website.

Not just a translation from the Swedish original

The book is not really just a translation of my Swedish book. The English book has more international image examples and it turned out to be unexpectedly many cultural references that non-Swedes would hardly understand. So pretty much of the book is rewritten for an international audience.

Interestingly, several Swedish friends and acquaintances are waiting to buy the English book, despite the fact that the second edition of the Swedish book have been out for several months. Many Swedes, myself included, are probably more used to read in English and may have more benefit of an English version when in a multilingual business environment.

Better English in the book compared to what I write in the blog

A first turn of the translation work was done by a Englishman who is very knowledgeable in web development and intranets. After that, a language agency also had their way with the book to raise the quality even further.

Needless to say, my publisher has really invested in the book and I think it’s going to be great even for you guys having English as you with English or American as your native language. For obvious reasons we can not afford to make the same effort with every blog post I write in this blog, so do not be too quick to review its language if you find peculiarities in my blog posts.

Table of Contents

Since we’re not going to judge a book by it’s cover over the Internet I’ll share the ToC. Perhaps this content gives you an idea if you’d make use of reading the book.

• Before we begin
  • Why you should read this book
  • About me
• The Web’s history and future
  • Web 1.0 – a network of documents
  • Characteristics of Web 1.0
  • Web design 1.0
  • Web 2.0 – the engaging web
  • Characteristics of Web 2.0
  • Web design 2.0
  • Web 3.0 – a network of data (also known as the semantic web)
  • Characteristics of Web 3.0
  • Web design 3.0
• Information architecture
  • Content choreography
  • Examples of poor content choreography
  • Master Data Management prevents unnecessary duplication
  • The importance of marking up information with metadata
  • Metadata specification makes your data more standardized and interchangeable
  • Controlled vocabulary
  • Folksonomy
  • Architecture using APIs and open data
  • Public APIs, open data and the PSI Act
  • Background to the European Union’s PSI Act
  • Some take issue with the PSI Act – cumbersome access to data
  • What then is open data?
  • The benefits of an API for a startup business or when building anew
  • Design a public API with the developers’ experience in mind
  • Friendly terms and a free license
  • No surprising the developers with unforeseen breaking changes
  • Provide data in the expected format and in suitable bundles
  • Error handling and dimensioning of the service
  • Provide code samples and showcase success stories
  • Promote via data markets and API directories
  • What is the quality of data needed?
  • Microdata – semantically defined content
  • So, what is the problem?
  • The potential of semantic information
  • Microdata standards such as Schema.org and Microformats
  • Digital Asset Management (and Adaptive Content)
  • Adaptive Content
  • Image and media banks in your publishing system
  • Personalization of information
  • URL strategy for dummies
  • Common excuses for breaking established URLs
  • Ok, how to then?
• Web design
  • Gov.uk design principles
  • Start with needs
  • Do less
  • Design with data
  • Do the hard work to make it simple
  • Iterate. Then iterate again.
  • Build for inclusion
  • Understand context
  • Build digital services, not websites
  • Be consistent, not uniform
  • Make things open: it makes things better
  • Keep it simple, stupid – KISS
  • Do not break the web
  • Persuasive web designs (PWD) – design that convinces
  • Be clear in everything
  • Be very careful of what is the default setting
  • Visual hierarchy is important
  • Focus on the common goal you and your visitor have
  • Try not to overexert your users’ attention
  • Responsive web design
  • The mobile moment
  • The elements of responsive web design
  • Arguments for responsive web design
  • Notes on responsive construction
  • Responsive typography
  • RESS – Responsive Server Side
  • Adaptive web design
  • Design with data – a data first-approach
  • Get started with design with data
  • What you know about your visitors
  • Continuous A / B testing
  • Examples of A / B tests for monitoring the website, and other communications
  • Mobile first
  • Mobile first vs. responsive web
  • The mobile opportunity
  • Mobile restrictions
  • The mobile moment – when mobile users are in the majority
  • SPA – Single Page Application
  • Design of SPA websites
  • Challenges of SPA
  • Web standards, and usability
  • Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation
  • Usability vs. accessibility
  • Gamified design
  • Design and plan for errors that will occur
  • Your website is a magazine, not a book!
• Web performance
  • Planning for the unplanned
  • Performance optimization of databases, web servers and content management systems
  • General troubleshooting
  • Planning for high load – use cache!
  • Content Networks (CDN – Content Delivery Network)
  • Databases
  • Web servers, content management, own source code and external dependencies
  • Measuring and improving interface performance from the user’s perspective
  • Helpful tools
  • Editorial performance impact
  • Technical settings for performance
  • Recoup an investment in web performance – is it possible?
• Test your own website
  • How to document your test
  • SEO
  • Indexable for search engines
  • Duplicate content
  • Page title’s length is under 60 characters
  • Page title is readable and understandable in the search engine results page
  • Page title contains relevant keywords that describe the page
  • Correct headings are used
  • Search engine friendly URLs
  • Descriptive text on all important pages
  • Reasonable number of links
  • Pictures have alternative texts
  • Structured description of the information
  • Web analytics
  • Current visitor tracking scripts
  • Tracks the use of website search
  • Performance
  • Reasonable time for loading the page
  • Compression of text files
  • Usage of the browser cache
  • Scripts and style sheets are sent in a compact format
  • Images are optimized for fast transfer
  • Reasonable number of background images, scripts and stylesheets
  • Requesting files and pages that do not exist
  • Minimal amount of scripts and CSS in page code
  • Images are not scaled down using CSS or HTML
  • Identical files are not referenced
  • Reasonable amount of scripts in the page head
  • Content networks are used when necessary
  • Accessibility and Usability
  • Website validates the chosen code standard
  • Using correct header structure
  • Anchor-texts are descriptive
  • Link titles not used for non-essential information
  • Favorite icon is present
  • Possible to navigate with keyboard
  • Texts are written to be read by a human – not with exaggerated SEO
  • Language set in the source code
  • Not depending on browser features
  • Specifies image sizes in HTML
  • Works with and without the www prefix
  • Only one domain is used for the website
  • RSS subscriptions can be detected
  • Useful error pages
  • No surprises when scrolling
  • Enough distance between links, buttons, etc.
  • Acceptable text size
  • Zoomable, also on mobile
  • Icons for the website
  • Useable printouts
  • Others
  • Forms and other sensitive information is sent through a secure channel
• Tips on in-depth reading
• Sources & references
• Thanks goes out to…

Check out the Web Strategy for Everyone by the publisher Intranätverk. It costs from 10 $ + VAT ›

The post Web Strategy for Everyone released today appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.

An unusual number of interesting books has been published recently. These book I’ll be reading shortly:

1. Designing for performance by Lara Hogan
2. Measuring the User Experience by Tom Tullis and Bill Albert
3. Going Responsive av Karen McGrane
4. Responsive Design: Patterns & Principles by Ethan Marcotte
5. Lean websites by Barbara Bermes
6. Design for Care by Peter Jones
7. Service design by Andy Polaine
8. Managing chaos by Lisa Welchman
9. Content Everywhere by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
10. Search Analytics for Your Site by Louis Rosenfeld
11. Why: A Guide to Finding and Using Causes by Samantha Kleinberg
12. Relevant Search by Doug Turnbull and John Berryman

Do you have any interesting books you look forward to reading this year?

The post The web strategist’s bookshelf appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.

I usually have to point out that I, also, prefer tools like Google Analytics, but when I try to exclude my own needs out of the equation, the recommendation becomes obvious – we should focus on the visitor’s integrity, first and foremost.

In Sweden, the Swedish Post and Telecom Agency is late to come up with a guide on how to adhere to this law (which virtually all sites violate today). The origin of law is an EU directive, so the same law is probably in almost all European countries. There are plenty of material for the curious, but I thought I’d summarize it for you at EU level.

Legal interpretation summarizing the Cookie Act in Europe

During my research, I have found a pretty good summary of how we probably should interpret the law and its intent, that is, a reasonable outcome the guidance will clarify. The four points are taken from a report produced by the Data Protection Working Party wrote in 2013, it is also something that a lawyer at our national Post and Telecom Agency tipped me to read while waiting for the guidance. The following points is on how to handle the informed consent of a visitor of a website, you know, those messages asking for your consent when visiting many European websites.

1. Specific information.

To be valid, consent must be specific and based on appropriate information. In other words, blanket consent without specifying the exact purpose of the processing is not acceptable.

2.Timing.

As a general rule, consent has to be given before the processing starts.

3. Active choice.

Consent must be unambiguous. Therefore the procedure to seek and to give consent must leave no doubt as to the data subject’s intention. There are in principle no limits as to the form consent can take. However, for consent to be valid it should be an active indication of the user’s wishes. The minimum expression of an indication could be any kind of signal, sufficiently clear to be capable of indicating a data subject’s wishes, and to be understandable by the data controller (it could include a handwritten signature affixed at the bottom of a paper form, or an active behaviour from which consent can be reasonably concluded)

4.Freely given.

Consent can only be valid if the data subject is able to exercise a real choice, and there is no risk of deception, intimidation, coercion or significant negative consequences if he/she does not consent.

— end citation

Probably we’ll return to this subject in the future. If you want to start blocking content like cookies or other form of trackers then check out Ghostery for your computer and content-blockers such as 1Blocker if you have a Ios device.

Also, listen to The Big Web Show episode about digital law and web design. 

The post The European cookie law explained appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.