Introduction

The time when major design decisions were made based on subjective measures, like someone’s personal taste, is behind us. At least it should be. Now you can, and should, evaluate almost everything based on data. Previously performed tests, and the insights gained from working with analytics are now readily available to intranet teams. Instead of attending pointless meetings about what shade of blue you ”like”, you can evaluate alternatives based on real users of your intranet. Users, through their clicks, provide signals on what works, how they find things and which routes they take.

This chapter is about how to get started with using analytics in an initial review of an intranet. Often no one knows the usefulness of most of the intranet content and there is little effort toward measuring the impact of the intranet on the performance of the business beyond noting the number of users. For many teams the reason is they do not have a training in basic analytics and which of all the statistics to make use of.

This chapter is a guide for those who want to start evaluating their intranet in a structured way and set tangible business goals for measuring what success looks like on their intranet.

About intranet analytics

The intranet is not just a collection of pages, images and documents. Rather, it is there to support employees in their daily work efficiently carrying out work tasks like; reserving a place on a training course; filing an application for leave or finding the phone number of a person in the human resources department. Working with web analytics for an intranet is about improving or simplifying activities like these, activities that the intranet should support. Intranet analytics is not about accumulating vast amounts of data, it is about using the data to gain insight into the users’ experience of the intranet – with the intent of improving that experience.

Brief description from Wikipedia on analytics on a public website:

”Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.”

It is easy to focus on analyzing the collected traffic data, however, all kinds of tools can contribute to getting an overview of your intranet performance and should be included in the concept of intranet analytics. Problems such as not fulfilling accessibility requirements, using unnecessarily high resolution images, and many more may be easy to identify without using statistics.

Keep reading about intranet analytics at intranetanalytics.com ›

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Executive summary

This is a summary of Region Västra Götaland’s strategy for enterprise search. Discussing the overall points for orientation of the strategy’s contents and be able to take a decision on its establishment.

Vision and mission statement

The vision is that search “will deliver the right information when it is needed.” Not necessarily is the user forced to seek to find, but also to receive feeds and be notified if anything of importance occurs. The information need to become more intelligent. The business goal for search is primarily to avoid the risk of someone acting on outdated knowledge. Secondarily to offer a complete picture to the information, not to unnecessarily develop or purchase information or things that already exists somewhere within the organisation. We should strive to make the benefits of search known and the platform well-used to realise these goals.

Application requirements and usability

We will focus on user experience and work user-oriented. This is because search is there to help finding information and knowledge – even when there to the user’s not obvious where to find it, or that it exists. Two fundamental challenges to adhere to is that users have varying digital maturity and varying expertise in the material they are seeking. Therefore, search has to take advantage of both the novice and the expert way to express themselves, but also support the usage pattern that distinguishes the digital novice from the digital savvy. Search has to live up to high standards of accessibility and usability, both from a desktop computer and a more mobile scenario.

Management and organisation

Search should be continuously improved. By reflecting on operational goals, feedback from the users as well as by insights gained working with search analytics. In addition, the organisation shall have annual priorities of the activities to be carried out and follow up on the efforts made. The organisation intends to gradually move towards a more structured information architecture which naturally affects the curation of information sources. Also, it is important to provide opportunities for personalised search results, which, when appropriate, is also displaying access-restricted material.

The search strategy

About the strategy

This is a strategy for organisational search technology, commonly referred to as Enterprise Search. That is, the tools and systems that work together to search the organisation’s own information sources, while external sources can and should be searchable in a well-functioning internal search platform.

Vision

“Get the right information when it is needed.”

• “Get” means that the information reaches the user automatically through feeds, notifications or through manual search.
• With the “right information” the accuracy, validity and relevancy is implied.
• By “when it is needed” we pinpoint that the information reaches the user in the context the user is currently at and with the tools that are available (PC, mobile, etc.)

Business goals

The primary business case for an organisation’s internal search is to help with finding information and knowledge when there is not obvious to the user where to find it, or that it exists in the first place.

Search is the tool that is offered when editorial priority or lists of content does not solve the user’s specific problem. Since search has a unique overview of multiple sources of information it can also be used to convey information between different information systems.

Reasons why it is difficult to recoup investment in search mainly revolves around that its usage is seldom part of a controlled business process. Even if were, the primary metric is time saved. Time saved is not a particularly good indicator of success. In other words, it is difficult to develop Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that define the success of search.

Industry expertise highlights that the success factors for search is to avoid risks, such as the risk that someone is acting on outdated knowledge. This can be measured quantitatively.

Another example of business goal is to look historically what opportunities were not exploited fully because of inadequate information. Such can occur during major changes in the business environment or internal reorganisation. This can be measured qualitatively.

In other words, it is not enough that there is an enterprise-wide search. It must be known among those who need it but also perform well for those who choose to use it.

Common business goals for search is to simplify access to information from known sources. For instance by increasing the reuse of information and knowledge, and to enable collaboration by making it easy to find colleagues with relevant knowledge.

Enterprise search has to bring operational benefits in the following scenarios:

1. A user on a website performs a site search, hoping to find specific information.
2. An employee is searching in what is perceived as the organisation’s intranet, ie targeted information, published documents, etc.
3. A user need an overview of what multiple sources of information contains on a certain topic, the sources may be both internal to the organisation and external provided by its partners.
4. When a specific application’s internal search is not efficient, the organisation’s strategic search platform should to take its place.
5. When information systems need access to content already in search’s index. This might happen because it may be better structured than the original source.

Strive for consistency

A big advantage with enterprise search occurs when it is established, well known and have few competitors for the attention of the users. It is common to strive to replace accompanying search features of business applications. Examples of such can be document management systems, project management, intranets, and many more applications which main focus is not the information’s findability.

A pre-condition is that the enterprise search performs at least as well as the individual application’s inherent search it intends to replace. The feature refers not only to the user interface, but also how search is managed. For instance, if someone evaluates zero results, common search queries, what is actually clicked, etc.

In a large organisation, enterprise search need to comply with the search conventions users have already learnt, but perhaps also establish an complementary internal convention. It is important that the user interface for search is consistently designed, peculiar relevance or a user experience that is puzzling. At the same time, you need to offer a logical autonomy for the divisions of the business that has a good reason to differ. If there are good reasons to deviate, those need be considered wisely to not lose the big picture.

In other words, there are a number of inherent requirements for subsequent search capabilities, whether it is a new or specialised application based on the existing search platform or an entirely different search engine. Whether or not we complement our common search platform, the basic requirements are at least to be:

1. Collecting usage data comparable and compatible with the common search’s insights. Otherwise, one cannot conduct enterprise-wide search analytics and will little by little make search less impactful.
2. Adhere to the organisation’s design-conventions for search. Consider design patterns such as the aesthetics of query-completion and its behaviour to the color the search button has. The point is recognition, of the visual and functional. A user is not supposed to ponder who the sender is.

Requirements regarding usage

Search ought to be the primary option, regardless of whether the user is an expert or novice in the she’s looking for, whether the user is digital native or not.

Search must be responsive towards integration with other information systems that follows pragmatic standards, in order to support other systems that themselves is not capable of great search functionality.

To describe the users of search we can divide them into four principal groups – in a quadrant. Describing how familiar they are in the subject matter they are seeking, and how much experience they have of the opportunities digital technology offers.

The quadrant is inspired by the book Designing the Search Experience.

Search has to consider the double novice’s needs but also offer the efficiency double experts expect without worsen the double novice’s experience. To the greatest extent possible, avoid creating new specialised search interfaces in order to not cause confusion among users about “which search engine” to use when.

Examples of characteristics that distinguish subject matter experts and novices is what words they use when searching. The expert believes that they know what something is called and may have difficulty using layman’s terms. This behaviour requires that the terminology is supporting both the expert and the layman’s way of expressing themselves.

Examples of things that differ users based on their digital maturity is that the expert can take advantage of advanced tricks she has learned from other technical environments. For example, to use complex search queries or actively control acceptable misspelling. The novice’s needs rather are met with a introductory and educational way in which she is not caught off guard by too many possibilities at once, rather, she get contextual tips when they are meaningful and the benefits are obvious.

Four modes when searching for information

1. Known knowledge. To search for already known knowledge is easy to understand, because the user:
   • Know what they want.
   • Can express what they want.
   • Have an idea of ​​where to start looking
2. Exploring. When in this mode, the user has an idea of ​​what it want to know. But the user may have difficulty expressing it, or cannot use the correct terms. The user often know when it has found the right content, but has no knowledge if the amount of information is sufficient.
3. Do not know what they need. The key concept behind this condition is that users often do not know exactly what they need to know. They may believe that they need to know one thing, when in reality it is something else. Sometimes, they visit an information source without any specific purpose.
4. Retrieve. In this mode, the user is looking for information that it has prior knowledge of. They can remember where they saw it recently, which source of information it were or they have an idea where to find the content.

Some common use cases for enterprise search is to:

• Find a specific document.
• Finding specific skills / roles / persons.
• Quickly become an expert on a topic-
• Find out everything that the organisation knows about a topic-

Usability and accessibility

To ensure good accessibility and usability search’s user interfaces has to be developed in accordance to the accessibility guideline WCAG 2.0 at least at level AA. In addition to this, user interfaces should at the very least comply with priority 1 of webbriktlinjer.se and never deliberately deviate from their guidelines of secondary priority.

Design principle to adhere to is mobile first since those connecting with a mobile device should not have a worse experience.

In most cases, when search highlights or present structured data it shall also, technically, be disclosed in a structured manner. Such as described by schema.org, where content is marked up with the appropriate level of structure.

Extremely good performance must be delivered to the user. Measured according to Google Pagespeed ​​Insights, from a mobile user scenario, never less than 80 / 100, as well as for desktop computers never below 85 / 100, unless stricter requirements exists within the organisation.

Management and governance

The management of search is important and since it’s often regarded as both everyone’s and no one’s concern it’s not easy to manage. Managing search requires a range of skills which does not make things easier. Here are the most strategically important to partake in the management.

Key figures

The groups identified below are those that have the greatest impact on search’s continuous management and development to provide the conditions for good business and user benefits.

Those who budget

A search platform need ongoing development and adjustments to deliver what users expect. To constantly develop to meet the changing user needs requires that resources are allocated accordingly.

Content creators

Everyone that may affect the searchable content are within the primary group interest. The most easily identified group is the web editors, working with content on the intranet and external websites.

Another such group is people who produce documents, such as word processing, spreadsheets or presentations. Documents are often searchable either from the website’s upload folder or document management system indexed by the search platform.

This group of key people need to have an understanding of how the results of their work affects how search is either successful or failing.

Content curators

Search is in great need of an orderly process for informatics in the organisation. The reason for this is that search is user-driven. Because the users themselves are phrasing their search queries in hope that it will deliver good results.

Search is dependent on us working with informatics – at least to some extent – for subject matter experts to use their terminology, without excluding the related information created by the laity, and vice versa.

Those who support the search platform

To not be reckless on technology-driven initiatives, a business representative (business owner of search) is to control the activity plan and its priorities yearly. Connecting the activity plan, budget and the quality of delivery to the business. It should be clear what benefits were gained.

This action plan should then be monitored and events are regularly reported to the business owner of search.

Those working as search editors need acceptance from line managers for their work with editorial tasks – manually controlling the results, deciding on keymatches, improving important metadata on others’ content, working with search’s instructional texts, and more.

It has been shown in studies that search is more appreciated if there is someone responding to user questions and managing feedback channels. This need to be formalised so users are receiving help or feedback in a reasonable time.

To have a good technical availability we need a dedicated technical support and an active IT operations, also that servers work satisfactorily.

Organisation

The most important effort an organisation can do to improve its search is to appoint a owner of search! It is an absolute minimum requirement.

This means that a owner of search must have time set aside to work with search. A few hours a week is much better than nothing. And even more important: to work with search is a long-term work, certainly not a project.

The roles and competencies in search’s management should consist of:

• (Business) owner of search
• Search technician
• Search editor and/or Information specialist
• Search analyst
• Search support

Further reading: Enterprise Search Team Management by Martin White.

Evaluation of search

Search fill its purpose when it deliver the right information, is fast about it and always available. To satisfy these requirements, the function of search is to be tested regularly and tests should be documented in test plans. Below are some of the tests that are appropriate:

• Search loads quickly, tested with Google Pagespeed Insights, with a minimum of 80/100.
• The response time of a query should be about 0.1 seconds, but never longer than 1 second, measured at the user interface.
• Search will be available 24/7 (around the clock seven days a week). Monitored by, for instance, Pingdom or Uptimerobot.
• Size of search indexes. Among other things, to see if more or fewer documents are indexed, which can provide warning signs in advance, help being proactive.
• Search’s user interfaces are accessible, tested with the W3C Validator.
• Search’s user interfaces are usable, tested against webbriktlinjer.se and W3C:s WCAG 2.0 at level AA.
• Survey the satisfaction of users.
• Reviewing search statistics and/or performing search analytics, to gain insight into how users are searching.

Search analytics

Search statistics must be collected and need to be continuously analysed to find out what works and what does not. Search analytics is used to improve search results. At the very least, frequently analyse zero-results and the two hundred most common search phrases.

By analysing the search queries that did not give any result at all (zero results) it is possible to identify what content is missing, find synonyms to use, understand which abbreviations are used and discover alternative spellings.

The two hundred most common search queries need to continually be reviewed, probably manually, to get an insight into how the experience of search is for a large part of the users. And also, if the relevance model can be improved and what content is most in demand.

Helpdesk and support

User support (1st and 2nd line support) should be handled directly by the search editor(s) and the owner of search. The reason for this is to give the search management direct contact with users and thereby gain a better understanding of what works and what does not. Users should be able to directly report their perceived problems with search in general and search results through a feedback form in connection with the search interface.

The technical support is handled like any other system.

Training

Probably everyone who use search are in need of some form of training in the offered features. At least the following user training needs to be actively disseminated and be available when needed:

• All users need to understand how search works and be able to supplement their knowledge with new handy tricks. An educational approach is to let users be activated by taking advantage of a interactive guide, where they “practice” their new skills while they seek. This interactive help in the search interface can be supplemented with links to more extensive documentation in the form of text, audio or video, for those interested.
• Content creators need to understand how they markup the information properly. It is worth to introduce an organisational quality quota regarding metadata which at least would be mandatory for professional content creators and communication professionals. In addition to this, the search technology ought to make it easier to get feedback on content’s potential findability directly when saving it – regardless of which system the creator is using.

Advantageously, a large part of the training content and documentation is available on the intranet. Also, use screen recordings to display operations that involves several interactions.

Search workshops – assistance on the user’s own premises

Search workshops should be organised regularly, a meetup where both content creators and users can met to get help and learn more about search. A search workshop can be held in a conference room, an afternoon a month.

In addition to attend this meetup, it should at the same time, for the convenience, also be possible to participate remotely. With screen sharing, voice calls or chats, remote user’s should be offered a similar support.

Information

The most important for a properly functioning search is the quality of information indexed and that the organisation has a good information hygiene. Good information hygiene pinpoints that old and out of date information is regularly culled following established procedures. The procedure is the lifecycle management of information, sometimes referred to as “the content strategy”. In public organisations the lifecycle / strategy is often documented in a so-called document management plan.

The paradox of search is that large amounts of information potentially offers great business benefits, but also hampers the ability for search to be precise – to find the right information.

Lifecycle management of information is very important for good findability. A prerequisite for findability is to avoid ROT, that is, content that is Redundant, Outdated or Trivial.

In practice this means that information available need to be evaluated in accordance with established principles, which can be summarised in the question: Should the information be archived, deleted or updated?

By categorising all the information it’s easier to decide how information should be handled. Categorisation is dictating the information’s lifetime. A guideline may be considered valid for 10 years, while a press release is archived in six months. Event and other time-based content can be archived after it occurred, and so on.

To get an overview of the sources that are important for the organisation to be searchable, a list of sources need to be compiled and maintained. The list should contain the already indexed sources, and also a priority of the sources of information to be indexed in the future.

Metadata and thesaurus

As part of a successful information management, there must be a list of the organisation’s common concepts and terms. A common ground on terms contribute to good findability. This is called different things, depending on how far the work has progressed: glossary, vocabulary, nomenclature, terminology, taxonomy or thesaurus. These concepts must be documented, made available and used by all sources of information in the organisation.

Metadata

By establishing a specification for metadata, both categorisation and use of a common terminology is facilitated. If categorisation and annotation of information is consistent across all information sources indexing becomes easier and findability is improved greatly. The use of metadata ensures good findability. It is advised to require a minimum of metadata in each source of information, for example the following metadata for each document / page / information service:

• A title.
• Description of the contents.
• A number of descriptive keywords.
• Some timestamps, highlighting the content’s lifecycle, such as when it was created, published, updated, revised and finally possibly archived.
• Status of availability. For example, if it is public, access-controlled, valid, outdated, archived, etc.
• Its canonical address. That is the original and primary URL. A so-called Canonical URL .

By using the schema.org specification and similar standards, metadata requirements can be met.

Design

Design is important. Especially today, when most people refer to Google as their point of reference when it comes to how a search should look and behave. It is important that search behaves similarly to established design conventions – for the convenience and efficiency of users who have already learned certain skills to get the job done. Of course, search’s design patterns and design principles cannot differ from users’ preconceptions. The most important thing is that the search function design provides value for the users and business.

When some change affects search’s design, a usability professional have the final say in how the design will end up.

Example of a design prototype created for VGR, person-specific search , a keymatch and the wizard to introduce the new search-GUI .

Technology

The infrastructure of search should be handled by the organisation and is one of the organisation’s strategic services.

The technical platform for search is a very important part of a well-functioning search. It should be emphasized that all the technical platforms for search (commonly referred to as “search engines”) that is currently on the market are good enough for most of us. The choice of platform(s) of search is an important strategic one. The choice should reasonably be affected by economic, technical and operating concerns.

The technical infrastructure of search cannot only consist of a search platform, but also a well-functioning integration of supporting services, at least:

• Centralized metadata management that supports the users’ language – whether it’s layman terminology or not – to connect the expert’s terminology with the novice. In addition to this you need to manage the unstructured and more agile through an orderly folksonomy management – possibly linking it to controlled vocabularies to bridge the gap between different users. The metadata management should also provide support to other information systems, or directly to the content creator, to provide up to date feedback on how findable the information will be once it is published.
• Master Data Management (MDM), Product Information Management (PIM) and reference data in order to identify the business’ physical and digital items from the abundance of information available in search.
• Directories to find people, traverse the structure of the organisation and other commonly used directories, both internal and external. Most obvious is that search should be able to compile a complete profile of every employee regardless of whether the complete picture is scattered in several specialised systems.

Collecting the information

When chosing a strategic platform for search, the range of data-connectors is one of the most important things to consider. The question to ask is: is there connectors for the organisation’s most important sources of information? The collection of information is resource intensive and to configure and develop custom connectors can be expensive, error-prone and difficult.

A connector’s purpose is to fetch (or receive) information from sources of interest for the search platform. Each connector is tailored to a specific type of information, such as databases (one connector for each different database type), file system, the Web, business applications, etc.

One method to gather information for the search index is for a crawler to visit the source of the information and see if anything has changed since the last visit. This is called crawling, a method of pulling content towards indexing. The disadvantage of this type of indexing is that it takes longer to notice recently created or updated information, making the search index less timely.

Another method of collecting information to search’s index is when the information source informs search when something have been changed or added. So-called push-driven indexing. The advantage of push indexing is that recent information quickly becomes searchable. It can be difficult to implement, though.

The perhaps most strategic solution is a combination of both push and pull. That information sources offers sitemaps, according the sitemap protocol. Search’s connector inspects the sitemap to determine what should be indexed, then the crawling connector does not need to visit all the information to find out if there is any new or modified.

Federated search – to search in several search applications simultaneously

The reason that not all information is searchable in a single search index is often about rights to source material, sometimes there are regulatory restrictions. For example, commercial journal repositories, research databases, etc. Another complication might be an individual user’s desktop search. With desktop search the material the user has stored locally on their machine, smartphone or whatever is perceived to be right by the user’s fingertips.

The search results of a federated search can be displayed in various ways. Often the results are displayed side by side, visualising that there are multiple repositories contributing.

Federated search is difficult to implement in a usable manner and the recommendation is to refrain for the time being, at least until very clearly business needs and goals allows for evaluating the potential benefits in an isolated pilot.

Security

Being able to search for access-controlled materials is important! There are two main principles for how search can make access-controlled materials presence known (for users without the necessary authorisation):

1. 1. The search result displays a content summary, that is, a normal search result, even the restricted information, for all users. To access more than the summary, the user must provide the authorisation needed. If the user does not have access to the information, she’s granted no access. This is suitable for using search for exploration, to make users aware that there is information on the subject.
2. 2. Search only shows results that the user has access to according to her authorisation. This is easier to implement.

No matter which of the principles chosen, the authorisation system should be based on the same directory service controlling each and everyone’s authorisation. Also, the roles need to be described in the same way in all the information systems. The reason is that the documents have to be accompanied by an access control list (ACL) that controls who is granted access to the information. Otherwise, the access control is certainly complicated to implement.

If there is no common directory service, avoid indexing information that need access-control until the users’ permissions and roles are widely implemented.

License – CC-BY-SA

This material has been produced by the Region Västra Götaland (VGR) in collaboration with several other public actors. It is not considered to be finished. We disseminate this information to interact with external stakeholders. The material is licensed under the CC-BY-SA , which among other things allows for further use.

Translation made by Marcus Österberg.

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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.

My Swedish edition of the book has got some recognition since its initial release in 2014. Until now the English edition has had a bit more obscure existence even though it has sold better than I expected.

Yesterday, after some vanity-searching on Google I found out that Buffer wrote an article on The Chicago Tribune – “14 quotes that celebrate a more accessible world”.

“When speaking of disabilities, the blind and their needs are most often used as an example. It is deceivingly simplistic since accessibility is something most of the population can benefit from.”
– Marcus Österberg, Web Strategy for Everyone

Most startlingly is the names of the others they chose to quote. Among others are my personal hero in usability, Steve Krug, author of the magnificent book Don’t Make Me Think. Also, the creator of the Web is quoted, Tim Berners-Lee. To top it off we also find Stephen Hawking, a theoretical physicist perhaps most famous for his work on cosmology.

Maybe the book, Web Strategy for Everyone, contains more quote-worthy passages. Find out for yourself, it’s available in print, PDF and E-book at my publisher Intranätverk

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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.

This material was left over when I wrote the book Web Strategy for Everyone. Rather than throwing it away, it is now published with some editing – though not quite as ambitious as it would’ve been in print

Search engine optimization is all about optimizing one’s web presence for search engines to take a liking to your site. It is often abbreviated SEO. Something quite different is keyword optimization – the editorial part of the process of SEO.

Search Engine Optimization ≈ Make your website’s content great according to search engines

Search engine optimization, also known in short as SEO, is your attempts to attract visitors to your website by making your site as good as possible in relation to search engines and their users. It is possible to divide SEO in lots of niche terms, but I will restrict myself to make a difference between search engine optimization and keyword optimization because, in its basic form, it’s about either technology or linguistic. This post will therefore not take up the subject about search engine marketing (SEM).

Search engine optimization is basically to have great content. What‚ then, is good content? The following features are a good start for the content you wish to attract users to:

1. Unique – same content is not available on other sites (such as through syndication / RSS, etc.).
2. Suitable length – short product texts are regarded as facts.
3. Appreciated by others – has links to itself, and many visitors (Google has access to your visitor statistics if you have Google Analytics).
4. Posted on a website that has subject-related authority – to more information about similar things are.
5. From a trustworthy source – the author is an authority in the hen write about?
6. Accessible – well put, not long chunks of text, and preferably marked up with RDFa/Microdata techniques such as Schema.org so even machines understand what the content is about.

Search Engine Land has an excellent list of the SEO’s periodic system, where you can see more positive factors.

There are also bad signals, among other things:

• Many different authors with few posts per site. At least Google does not like guest posts or suspected sponsored posts. Many writers can be an indication of a suspicious behavior.
• Outlinks to pages with low credibility, or links that lead to error 404, or hacked websites.
• Too many links. Offering hundreds of links in your content exhibit an inability on priority, everything cannot be a priority.
• Slow page views. Both search engines and users have better things to do than to wait for a slow website.

Sitemaps

The structure of the website needs to be good enough for a crawler to be able to look around, but there is still a point to submit a sitemap to the search engines. This is done by Google through their tools Search Console and Bing with it is their Webmaster Tools that apply.

SEO best practice changes over time

A common mistake among those who do not work with SEO very much is to believe that it does not change very much – it does, a lot! We notice that especially more and more. For instance on the books released about SEO that nowadays are named with the year of release, and the authors trying to delist their books a couple of years after they are released. This is the reason why I did not include a chapter on SEO in my book Web Strategy for Everyone, the subject-matter is to agile for print.

A common misconception is that it is beneficial to enter keywords, so-called meta-keywords. It is still widespread, but there are many more examples that it is important to keep on top of the updates in SEO.

The reason is attempts to spam Google…

For example, Google is fighting a constant battle against search engine spammers attempting to lure in visitors. The problem Google is trying to solve is to display only relevant hits from the original source of that which is sought after. For instance, it’s not supposed to be meaningful to build a site which largely contain materials snatched from Wikipedia, then Wikipedia is to be displayed in the list.

If you want to learn more about these updates, you can visit SEO forums, or search for animals names Panda and Penguin which were the first two major upheavals in SEO. While you’re out there and googling you can also read about the Google algorithm Hummingbird, its aim is to understand a search query’s context and provide sensible synonyms and related searches. This is what the book Web Strategy for Everyone referred to as Web 3.0, or, the Semantic Web. An attempt to make machines understand content and context, and to bridge the different data sources differences in structure.

Everyone needs to know some SEO!

The reason why all website owners, editors and bloggers need to learn a lot about search engine optimization is that otherwise they avoid customers and visitors. Compared with the physical reality a optimized site shop is placed on the street where its customers are frequently visiting. The website that is not optimized at all is like having a department store on top of Mount Everest, surely a cool concept store, but there are not many customers in the vicinity.

Keyword optimization is to make your website attractive to search engine’s and to clearly position the keywords your audience uses so the website will be easy to find. Besides some initial technical measures it is eventually those who handle the content the website shows up who have the greatest impact on the site, making for it to be keyword optimized.

Somewhat simplified, one can say that only text is searchable because it is difficult for search engine’s software to understand the content of image or video without it offering descriptive text. Although the machines are getting better at understanding images, video and speech, it will be a while before we can take a pass on the production of texts.

Glossary of SEO

• Keyword Optimization, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – The activity and know-how on how to improve websites to be easily found through a search engine.
• Search querys & keywords – Usually one or more words that a user types into a search engine in the hope of finding something relevant.
• Search results & SERP (Search Engine Results Page) – SERP is often used by those already initiated into the search engine industry and construed as Search Engine Results Page. On the Swedish search results page, that page of the search engine in response to a search term.
• Visitors – When referring to a visitor of a website, it’s about all the visits provided. Much like the visitors to a business, some are recurring others are not.
• Unique visitors – A unique visitor is different from a visitor by that we are able to identify them as an unique individual, able to perform multiple visits to a website.
• Page views – Number of times a visitor viewed a page on the site, or the number of views for a certain page.
• Unique page views – Number of unique visitors who viewed a page. For example, it is not unusual for a visitor to visit a single page multiple times, which is a single unique page view.
• Index – The search engine’s index is what it knows about and what its users can search within.
• Bot, crawler and spider – Is the search engine software searches the web for new, changed, and deleted material as pages, images and other types of documents.
• Inbound links – the links pointing to your site. So other sites that link to yours.
• Keyword Density – The percentage of text that consists of relevant keywords.

Editorial keyword optimization

Wording and editorial

The visitors you want to reach are those who are actively looking for something your website offers. Therefore, it is very important that you are familiar with how your audience express themselves and what search queries they use.
Are they looking for ‘gore-tex hiking boots’ or ‘The North Face Hedgehog GTX 2016 edition’? While both search queries perhaps are describing the same product, someone searching for one of them does not necessarily get to see the other one in their search results.

It is paramount to be aware of the words used so there is no risk that extremely rarely get a match between the words you have chosen to use and a search engine user accidentally enter to search.

Usually it is a combination of several possible words that constitute a search term. Try to naturally get the most commonly used word for each sub-page of a product. Later in this section is useful tools like Google’s keyword tool you can use to find out how many people use certain search criteria.

Heading! = Headline

Keep in mind that there is a big difference in a heading and a headline. A heading is more of a name for something while a headline is descriptive of what you can expect from the content.

Sample heading:
Tale of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf

Sample headline:
Wolf ate grandmother

Of the two examples above, only the last one is wise to use a large extent on the Web. The heading indeed talks about the kind of information – a fairy tale – and who is involved – Little Red Riding Hood and someone / something called the wolf – but it summarizes in no way what is to come. The point of instead writing that a wolf ate grandma is to summarize all the text has to tell. This way of obfuscating the content is all too common.

Writing for the Web is to write what is most important first. A descriptive title, a summary preamble when necessary and that the most important in the body comes first and then go into the details and references to learn more.

Writing page titles

The page title is the name of the page and is often reflected in the top of the browser window (at least on computers). The page title is also the clickable text in the search engine’s result page and the name in a browser’s bookmarks.

Often, the page title is the same as you choose to name the webpage. In some web content management systems you can manually write whatever you want for the page title and some other phrase for the main header of the page.

There are two common variations of how page titles are written. What divides them is whether the site’s name comes first and the unique in the page’s name comes first. To be unnecessarily obvious, two examples below:

1. Weekend trip to Prague – Travel Company Inc
2. Travel Company Inc – Weekend trip to Prague

In example 1 above, the unique information comes first, which means that the words weekend trip to Prague is more keyword optimized than the company name.

Example 2 focuses on to clearly tell who the owner of the site is – at the expense of the actual content of the individual page.

Before choosing the syntax of example 2 it is good to think through whether it is worthwhile to compete to appear on one’s brand. It is often enough the case that users are looking for what a business does or offers rather than the company itself. Moreover, it is common to be ranked really high in search engines if users are searching for one’s brand. So I would absolutely recommend example 1.

In fact, some take this to such an extent that they only write the page name in the page title. After all, there are URL nearby on a search engine and it usually specify who the sender is.

It is worth bearing in mind that the length of a page title, if possible, should be a maximum of 70 characters. You will not get much more space in the search engine result page and, also, it is probably not that common to read much more than the first few words. Yes, users are skimming, almost all the time on the Web.

Headlines

In order to clearly divide a body of text and have a good readability, we as readers need information structure. For this we use headlines that describe the body of text below the headline. It is not enough to format a header with bold large text – the headlines must have the correct HTML code to remove all doubt that it is a headline. The same applies to the headings.

If possible, it is recommended that all important subpages has a headline and at least one sub-heading of level 2. These titles will come in the right order, sizes, in descending order, without any level is missing.

If I had a dime for every time a web editor explained why they did not use the correct heading levels, or real headlines at all, it would at least paid for a family pizza. The most common argument is that the text becomes too large, the different color, change the font or is in uppercase. It is a problem they should rather take up with their web developers.

Words in a headline are worth more than those in the subsequent body text. This is because it is more prominent. Actually, it’s logical. When sighted, blind and machines skim the text through the headlines as they act as entrances to the text which is between headings.

Alternative text for images (and other media files)

Alternative texts are for describing media files content for those who cannot perceive the content, such as those with deficit sight, the blind, deaf – and that includes search engines!

Putting alternative text on images is really for the visually impaired and those not loading pictures. The text is meant to explain the image, which for those not loading pictures can explain which of the pictures are worth to load at all.

The reason why some choose not to load images in their browsers are often due to a dubious internet connection, or perhaps that it costs money on most cellular connections, or to avoid advertising.

Although alternative texts will be used primarily to explain the images’ content for those who cannot take part of the image you have the possibility to use other terms when writing those almost invisible phrases. Consider using synonyms and suitable words that is not present in the body.

Body text

That a page contains more than images is important because otherwise there is no text to search for. It is considered by many SEO professionals that there is a critical minimum amount of text – which of course is difficult to put a static figure on. Then there is the problem search engines are increasingly trying to avoid the so-called content farms. A content farm is a website containing pages with either very targeted text and commonly content that is not unique, for example snatched from Wikipedia.

In addition, the body is the ultimate place to have a good breadth of searchable keywords. You can also put some effort with something called keyword density, thus using the same words many times over.

However, website copy is for the benefit of the reader in the first place. It ought to be a legible and comprehensible text, to please the search engines is secondary. So, when you achieved legibility you can care about SEO. Such as the body text being at least 300 words, a level that is constantly raised according to most SEO in recent years.

Bullet points and numbered lists

Words that appear in a list on a web page is considered to be of greater value than that which lies in the body text, at least compared to text in ordinary paragraphs. Besides lists visually guides the reader in a body of text – regardless of whether the person uses a screen reader or not – also for search engines lists stand out, often with containing relevant facts or summaries. This for the simple reason that lists visually stand out from the other content.

If you have a text that lists things also format the content as an ordered or unordered list. It also makes text easier to absorb, and lists are a great way to not scare the visitor away with a massive wall of unstructured body text.

Inbound links and URLs

Having many quality inbound links, especially from known or trusted sites, is important to show that the website’s content is worthwhile linking to.

Many tend to register their sites in different link directories, exchange links on webmaster forums or email their partners to get links. To a limited extent, it is still worthwhile to get the website listed in these contexts. But remember that words in the clickable text of the link is associated with the site. Therefore, send a thoughtful suggestions so the anchor text don’t become ‘Check their site here …’

Descriptive URLs are also relevant in SEO, only since they sometimes become the clickable text when some post the URL in forums, or commenting on the Web. Not to mention that it is good for those who stumble across an URL to be able to figure out what is referred to.

Example of a descriptive URL, also called “friendly URL”:
webstrategyforeveryone.com/performance-for-intranets/

Example to the contrary:
www.gp.se/sport/1.565873

The addresses of your pages are worth trying to keep as brief as possible – but still descriptive. This is something that many Web Content Management systems (WCMs) struggle with. Such as the URL syntax in Episerver, which my employer, Region Västra Götaland, uses, becomes absurdly long sometimes:

www.vgregion.se/en/Vastra-Gotalandsregionen/Home/
Healthcare/Public-Health-/Public-health-policy-Vastra-Gotaland/
Living-conditions-based-on-equity-and-equal-opportunities/
Region-Vastra-Gotaland-is-developing-a-system-to-monitor-health-
inequalities-/

Try typing that correctly when read to you over the phone…

Some addresses are so long they become uncomprehensible. Also there is the risk they do not work when sending e-mail, or when posted in forums since many system cuts “words” that are too long and inserts spaces (in order not to break their design).

Website speed – Web Performance Optimization (WPO)

That a website is loaded swiftly has become a more and more important argument in recent years. Above is a picture from Google’s tool Search Console, one of many ways to keep track of your websites’ performance. In the example, it takes an average of 0.61 seconds to load a page which is not great but also not alarmingly bad.

The speed of a website is one of the factors that influence whether a website is ranked high on search engines. Therefore the website speed is not only an usability metric, considering users converts to a higher degree on fast websites, but also since it’s one of the ranking factors of Google since a couple of years.

If the website has poor performance it is commonly one of the reasons below:

• Slow web host. Is the site on the website host’s budget class? Then you cannot  expect particularly good performance – at least not for a website based on a content management system like WordPress, etc.
• Poorly optimized website. WordPress is among the most common systems nowadays. The problem with WordPress among others is the ease of adding plugins that negatively affects performance. Often the website get an additional stylesheet and an extra Javascript file. Also, the plugin is of varying quality. Evaluate whether there are better versions of the plugins you need.
• Too many, or too big, files. To upload lots of pictures of high quality and have lots of Javascript features affect performance significantly. A user usually cannot download more than 3 files at once from your website. If you have more than three files in total, a queue is there for the remaining files. That queue is fairly long on most websites, unfortunately.

A lot of tricks and my own experiences regarding performance optimization is available in Web Strategy for Everyone.

Common solutions to performance problems are:

• Optimize images so they do not take as long to download. An image file size can be optimized in Photoshop, for example using its feature ‘Save for the web’, using applications such as Imageoptim for macOs, FileOptimizer for Windows or web services as Smush.it.
• Ask the web developer to combine stylesheets and Javascript into as few files as possible. The Javascript library Jquery is often used on websites. Instead of having the file on your own website, you could use Google’s so-called CDN (Content Delivery Network). If you have many Javascript files you can look for CDNs offering to serve your unique files as well. This is often free, perhaps you’ll like Cloudflare (as much as I do).
• Change web hosting. Often small hosting companies are faster than the big ones for about the same cost. How come is the topic for another blog post, though. If you have plenty of money for your web project, maybe consider a Virtual Private Server (VPS), or even a dedicated server. If so, this is the time to talk to web developers or involve an experienced web consultant. If you’d like my advice just post a comment to this post.
• Evaluate the code behind the website and review any plugins. Not infrequently, there is code that can be improved and other plugins that provides better performance.

Meta description of pages

The description, or ‘meta description‘ for the technically minded, is a, to the browsing user, hidden text that briefly summarize what the webpage is about. The meta description should always be unique to each page of the website, otherwise there is no point in having them.

The picture above shows one of the few cases when a user can view the meta description text. Next to the page title when showcased on a search engine’s results page, its SERP (Search Engine Results Page). The meta description is supposed to summarize the content of a webpage and need to be well-written to attract the users to your website.

The meta description is placed in the source code between HTML tags <head> and </head>. It may look like this:

<meta name="description" content="List for those who want 
learn the latest on substance X. Here you will find advice and
tips from the professionals X. "/>

If you’d like to see what your competitors are using for their meta description texts, choose to view the source code for each webpage, and early in the code, you will find something like the above.

Keywords (is really not that important in external SEO – the last 15 years)

Keywords was once important to reach out in the search engines. They are still used today in some search engines. But because of the proportion who use Google as their search engine, and since Google does not care about keywords, it is not always worth the effort to work with keywords on your website.

The reason that Google, and probably other search engines, do not care about keywords is since its ease of manipulating the keywords in a massive scale. Spamming search engines with keywords have simply led to them not considering its use any longer.

If you still choose to work with keywords (mainly for your own internal search engine) you are recommended not to put all general words on all pages. Try to keep it unique for what each page contains.

For large organizations that have their own search engine, or a internal site search, keywords can definitely be worthwhile to be used on their own search engine.

If you’re looking for the keywords in the HTML code, look between <head> and </head> like in the code below:

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, etc." />

Validation

The website’s underlying code is supposed to validate the code standard it is claiming to adhere to. Anything else is sloppy coding. However, all mishaps are not critical to how well your site performs in the search engines. Still, everything that is easy to fix (or deemed serious) is good practice to fix. If your website’s code is not even close to validate it can prove difficult to interpret for search engines and other machines you rely upon.

To find out if a website validates according to the web standard, you can go to the web standards organization W3C and enter the address you want to check – validator.w3.org

Useful tools and methods

Create a list of priorities words and search terms

Open a spreadsheet and enter the keywords you think are relevant to your website. Also, rank them in their relative importance and how descriptive they are.

Using Google Keyword Planner, see below, you can get help and insight regarding accompanying words used and see how much volume the search terms have.

Google Keyword Planner

With this tool you can enter the keywords you want to find accompanying words and see the search volume for the search term. Really good when you need guidance on the wordings and expressions to choose when writing web copy.

Keyword Planner is part of the Google Adwords platform, but it does not require an account or active keyword campaign to dig into the keywords. Try Google Keyword Planner ›

Plugins for your web browser

There are lots of browser plugins, at least for Firefox, that help you out with search engine optimization. Two of the most appreciated for novices is SEO Doctor and SenSEO.

With SEO Doctor, Firefox can review every webpage you browse, even your competitor’s webpages. Clicking to open the SEO Doctor plugin shows a dialogue with details explaining the score. You also get hands-on guidance on what can be improved with the individual page, such as including a sub-heading or meta description for instance.

SenSEO is advantageously used to evaluate how a particular word is optimized on an individual webpage.

In other words, when you have found a word you want to rank better in the search engines is then SEO tool to see what can be changed.

Performance Measurement

There are many online services that assist in analyzing how quickly a website can present itself to the users. If you are not inclined in web tech, it is worth talking to a web developer to get some perspective on the reports.

One of the services is WebPagetest that looks like the picture above. Another is Google Pagespeed Insights, another is Sitespeed.io for those feeling a little more technically minded.

Validation

W3C is the organization that writes the recommendations for many web technologies. They offer a service to see how well a website adheres to the standards they’re claiming to follow.

Above is how well GP.se adheres to the code standard they chose. Unfortunately, not that flattering. Check out your own website with the W3C ›

Checklist for editorial SEO

If your should you make a checklist about SEO for your web editors, or when you write copy for your website, then check out the below suggestions.

Below is a checklist in order of priority, for which effect can be achieved through SEO.

1. The page title contains relevant keywords and is shorter than 70 characters.
2. The main header (H1) contain important (and possibly unique / new) keywords, or supplemental synonyms the website needs.
3. Subheaders (H2) contains relevant, or use supplemental, keywords.
4. Thoughtful keywords are included in links’ anchor text on other websites, those who link to your website.
5. If there are images, they have suitable alternative texts.
6. Content that is suitable for lists are placed in lists (UL / OL).
7. Important keywords are one or more times in the body, preferably also early in the text. Ideally some synonyms as well later on in the text.

More on Search Engine Optimization

• Search Engine Land on Google RankBrain
• Google webmaster guidelines
• Yahoo! Content quality guidelines
• Bing webmaster guidelines
• Search Engine Optimization according to Wikipedia

Also, check out the book Web Strategy for Everyone ›

The post SEO – an introduction to Search Engine Optimization 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.

Where I work, our public facing website went responsive in 2012, but our intranet is still lagging behind. Well, on the few occasions when I create content for our intranet I manually input code to make my images responsive. 

Why responsive images on a non-responsive intranet?

It might not make sense to everyone why you’d like the images responsive when the intranet itself is not. One argument is that you like the image to fill the available width, not caring what that width might be. Some intranets is actually fluid in their grid system, but not responsive in their imagery, making for a less than optimal design with today’s standards.

Also, some of your users might have a high resolution screen. For them some images look blurry compared to the adjacent text. You can alleviate that blurriness with an unnecessarily high-res image, which by CSS-code is made to fit the width of its container.

The code to accomplish this is actually not that complicated, at least if you settle with an image scaling down in accordance with the column width it resides in. The most difficult part of this operation might be locating the image in the HTML-code in your CMS editor.

Images are tagged with a <img> tag. Your job is to figure out of its the right image, and if it is, then look out for an existing style-attribute. If there is none you paste the code below inside the <img> tag.

style="max-width: 100%; height: auto;"

Afterwards, it can look like this:

<img src="myphoto.jpg" alt="Fabulous photo of mine" 
style="max-width: 100%; height: auto;">

This instructs the web browser to let the image use all available horizontal space and the height automatic – keeping the aspect ratio, that is.

Potential problems

Perhaps, the most obvious potential problem is that you happened to mistype or alter the code in a way that is not according to the HTML-specification. If the image disappeared when switching back to WYSIWYG-mode you probably messed up the code, then switch back to the code and look through the code carefully.

If your <img> tag is stating width or height attributes like the code example below, then you have to remove that part for the style attribute to be effective.

<img src="myphoto.jpg" alt="Fabulous photo of mine" 
height="300" width="500">

If you still struggle with making your images responsive, please post a comment and I’ll try to help out. Whether or not your <img> tag is ended with a /> or just a > is contingent if your website is using the XHTML standard or the HTML standard. When in doubt, include another image using your CMS and look for yourself how the CMS prefers it. Most tools I’ve used don’t really mind how you write code in this regard.

Going all in with responsive images

There is much more you can do to achieve responsive images. For instance, you can serve different images for different sized screens. Smaller screens often need cropped images for the content to be conceivable, while you can serve a similar image to tablets and large screens. Also, you can serve high resolution images to retina screens, especially on intranets since bandwidth rarely is an issue.

The most apparent advantage working with intranets is that you now more about the user’s context, and their equipment tend to be somewhat standardized. So going all in with high resolution images for users with big screens is a decision easier made compared to the public Web.

Some of the responsiveness need support in you CMS. To learn more about the possibilities of responsive images, and responsive web design in general, check out the brand new book Web Strategy for Everyone – initially released with an extra friendly price ›

The post Ad-hoc responsive images for your intranet appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.

 “It is all about lowering the threshold for decisions and guiding a series of micro-decisions towards the goal you have. Here the concept of dark pattern introduces itself. That, by design, you control what happens in a way that is not in the user’s best interest, or intention. It could be moving around buttons so the user happens to give an app a five-star rating in an app store, without warning, adding additional products to the shopping cart, or services sending e-mails to your contacts claiming to be you.”
– Web Strategy for Everyone, chapter Persuasive Web Design

Defining a design decision as a dark pattern is when it’s not in the user’s best interest. Thus, one can actually speak about certain design decisions being evil. Of course, it is not always entirely clear what is a dark pattern and which isn’t. To work with persuasive methods is a most natural consequence of competition.

Current example: Microsoft changes the convention of the close button

That Microsoft has a tough time now, no one can have missed. The former software giant, the ‘monopolist’, is undergoing their own digital transformation. We as users seem less and less engaged about the software platform we choose, and beyond that, Microsoft has at least 2-3 times completely failed to become a major player in the mobile space. Just yesterday they fired almost 2000 employees from the mobile division, formerly Nokia, which Microsoft bought only two years ago.

Somewhere where they still dominate is the classic desktop computer space and the software related to it. Their latest operating system, Windows 10, apparently needed a little extra boost in the number of users. Interestingly, they chose to run with the ugly trick of a dark pattern to get more people to upgrade from Windows 7 and Windows 8 to Windows 10.

What do you think happens if you click on the red button in the dialog that asks if you want to upgrade to Windows 10? Normally, the convention is unmistakingly obvious that close the dialog and you are ignoring the message, and nothing happens.

Microsoft’s creative solution, on the other hand, when the user closed the dialog the user gave their consent, which for the majority of users feels shady to say the least. Microsoft is simply ignoring the convention they would always adhere to, what the button is there to do. Since only Microsoft is to gain from such a design decision it is an archetype of a dark pattern. Shame on you, Microsoft!

In other words, as long time Microsoft journalist Paul Thurrot puts it:

Last week, Microsoft silently changed Get Windows 10 yet again. And this time, it has gone beyond the social engineering scheme that has been fooling people into inadvertently upgrading to Windows 10 for months. This time, it actually changed the behavior of the window that appears so that if you click the “Close” window box, you are actually agreeing to the upgrade. Without you knowing what just happened.

Previously, closing this window would correctly signal that you do not want the upgrade. So Microsoft didn’t change the wording in the window. It didn’t make an “Upgrade now” button bigger, or a non-existent “don’t ever upgrade” button smaller. It pulled a switcheroonie.

Do you have any examples of dark patterns? Tell me!

Do not forget to take a look at the book Web Strategy for Everyone, it talks a great deal about how to design convincing but with usability in mind.

— update May 29th – Verizon Fios

As Twitter user Mixonic exposed, Verizon Fios is using a randomized number to tell how many agents are waiting for your call. Lying is a great start for a long-lasting relationship, right?

The post Dark patterns: Designing with bad intent 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.

These figures is something we encounter on a regular basis on the Web. 404, 410 and numbers like 500-something. They are so-called status codes from the Web’s protocol HTTP, you know that found in the beginning of the addresses on the Web.

On my most recent trip to Stockholm, I got room number 404. Imagine my geeky surprise when I arrive on the fourth floor and the door is actually there, plus there was a room behind the door

Amusing error 404 pages

The book Web Strategy for Everyone show, among others, how Spotify has a cute mascot to divert the attention and relief any visitor’s frustration. In this blog post I will show a bunch of entertaining and well thought-out Error 404 pages.

See these as inspiration and consider what you can do with your own error 404 page. Unfortunately, many still require having Adobe Flash installed to see the 404 pages , there is not really smart when fewer and fewer do not have it, and it definitely does not work for those who get 404 on a cell phone. Another quite common blunder is that you failed to make the 404-page responsive, so sometimes it is both fun and rewarding if you are browsing with a computer browser in full screen. That’s too bad!

Technology

Github

Github is the service where virtually all open source projects are now located. Sometimes the projects are renamed and then we land on this Error 404 page. I’m not sure if there is a Star Wars reference with the craft and the sandy landscape. What do you think? Anyway, it is nicely coded with parallax scrolling when you move the mouse pointer over the image.

Sitespeed.io and their cute mascot

Sitespeed.io is consistently showing their mascot in all kind of roles. Of course the mascot is helping out with the 404, in a Batman-themed setting.

Google Search

Google has a robot that seems to have dismantled itself.

Airbnb drops the ice cream

Airbnb makes the small effort and puts at least an image to lighten their error 404 page up a bit.

CSS-Tricks shows the underlying CSS

A bit like the CSS code punctured the cloth of the HTML code and made the CSS code take a peek at the user.

Dropbox allows an impossible variation of its logo

Guessing I’m not the only one to get headache when looking at that kind of sketches with impossible angles. Creative, though!

Tableau has found sasquatch

Visualization company Tableau has found sasquatch in its visualization engine. Now there ought to be no opposing the evidence that they are in fact real?

Public sector

American space agency NASA

NASA say that the reason why the page has disappeared is because it is behind the event horizon. Certainly a blast for those who are more knowledgable in physics than myself, but at least appropriate to talk about something they themselves are good at.

Delaware jokes about its name – Dela-where?

Certainly a cheap joke, and something those who live there often hear, but it cannot be that common for the public sector to be joking in this way – it could of bores be perceived as frivolous.

Other sites

IMDB brings appropriate movie quotes

Film service IMDB offers quotes from movies on their 404 page. It is hard to stop reloading the page to see what suitable quotes they’ve found.

Hillary Clinton failing

Hillary Clinton’s campaign site for the presidential campaign 2016 shows a GIF when she fails to swipe her card to open a gate. It looks to be at a subway somewhere.

IKEA Sweden excels, but a bore internationally

In the Swedish part of the IKEA website, a person who literally painted himself into a corner. Maybe they could not find something similar figuratively to the international site where they did the bare minimum. Internet seem to suggest that ”paint into a corner” is also and idiom in English, so perhaps they just didn’t dare?

Comedy Central brings out their characters

Comedy Central vary the characters they show up so it is easy to click the refresh button a few times.

The New Yorker and the labyrinth

A rat that got lost in a maze, yeah, why not.

Amazon showcases employees’ dogs

Amazon chooses to showcase a new dog every time you land on their error 404-page. These dogs are “working” on Amazon and they also explains that there are dog treats and fountains in the appropriate height for dogs. Why not tell us what a great offices they have and that employees are welcome to bring their four-legged friend to the office.

Dilbert: The pointy-haired boss is fooled

The manager, the pointy-haired boss, is fooled that the Internet is full. Appropriate to have a special series just for error 404 in Dilbert.

As previously mentioned, it is also important that your error 404 page is usable and properly designed. It is one of many topics in the book Web Strategy for Everyone – available for about 10 $ + VAT.

The post Design the error 404 page to be entertaining appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.

You who have read my book Web Strategy for Everyone notes at the end of the web design section that I, a little unexpectedly, am lumping together usability and accessibility with game-based learning, so-called gamification. It is not a coincidence. In addition to the fact that each user’s abilities are highly individual in its mix its fundamental, for all users, to show that it’s worth the effort.

Accessibility is all about empathy

It can sometimes be difficult to find support for working with accessibility even though most people agree that it is important. My most common argument is that accessibility will benefit all of us – at some point.

“What will you send an Iphone 6S with its retina display locked in landscape mode when on a medium fast cellular connection and located outdoors at noon?”
– Web Strategy for Everyone

Anyone using their mobile phones out in bright sunlight will notice that they need a lot of contrast in order to have a chance to orient themselves on a website. All of us have motor impairments sometimes, you’ll notice it when on a touch screen when the finger you’re accustomed to have a patch, or whether using someone else’s computer where the mouse is not as you expect. Such as a gaming mouse with a “high sense”, then the mouse pointer moves far too fast for an inexperienced person.

Accessibility is beneficial for all users – at some point

Also, most of us suffer from cognitive impairment once in a while, at least it must be common having a reduced function at the end of the working day. We get tired and easily distracted, in other words. But we can also be under emotional stress, as Eric Meyer explains in the podcast episode The Web Ahead – Designing for Crisis, all those interfaces not being helpful, when all he wanted was to see his daughter.

Some users of these needs all the time. To convince those being doubtful you can also invite them to a usability test. Or show them some of all videos online where you get to see how these problems affects the user experience for actual users. The web standard organization W3C has compiled a list of examples, videos for us to gain insight on accessibility.

Tips on tools and an accessibility checklist in the book

Don’t miss out on the DIY-section of the book. I suggest tools you can use to check if your website is okay accessibility-wise. Buy Web Strategy for Everyone at introductory price ≈ 25 $ + VAT from Intranatverk ›

The post Global Accessibility Awareness Day today 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.

How to qualify for a review copy

First of all, you have to have somewhere to publish your review, of course. It is not a requirement that you have a lot of visitors or followers. But preferably your publication/blog is tech or web related.

You are expected to have written your review within a month, and please let us know when you have and we’ll post a link to your review on Twitter and our other channels.

Get in touch via Twitter if you want a review copy.

Some facts about the book

All in all, there are 80 pictures and 60 000 words spread over 212 pages. The printed book will be released late this summer. The book is published by Intranätverk, they also offer books about the digital workplace, intranet governance, and more.

The post Want to review Web Strategy for Everyone? appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.

I suspect that they would ideally spend all their focus in their new browser, Edge, but it might give too many angry corporate customers.

Some of us still remember Internet Explorer 6

We, old-timers in the web, is still upset over Internet Explorer 6, even though it is a couple of years since it disappeared from even the most slow organizations in the public sector in Sweden. Internet Explorer 6 was really good when it arrived, but was woefully poor during the last years of its life. The bottom line is that no browser version should live more than a year.

For us working with the web, it really is nothing new.  We should not design anything to work in one or a few browsers that happens to be current right now. If we follow the design principle of progressive enhancement, ensuring a design’s usability in both new and old browser. As icing on the cake we are then not:

• Dependant of Javascript.
• Do not make it complicated for the search engines.
• Set up barriers for those with disabilities.
• Most likely, it has also resolved about half of the challenges of web performance without even focusing on it.

If you’re looking for a longer rant on the advantages of progressive enhancement? This is that concludes the chapter on web design in the book Web Strategy for Everyone.

My web developing friend Filip expresses his feelings for Internet Explorer 8-10 this way:

???
Very nice to once and for all throw out all the old fallbacks. Right now it actually feels like Safari is the elephant in the room, which will be harder to ignore …
– Filip Andersson

More on Internet Explorer <11’s death

• Gizmodo: Internet Explorer 8-10 finally dies >
• The Next Web on that web developers rejoice now that IE 8-10 dies >

The post Hooray! Internet Explorer died 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.

For the publishing of the English edition of my book I chose a Macallan from 1997 – the year when I met my wife for the very first time.So, when is the book to be published, then? Well, I strived towards the end of last year but the editing is not done yet. Since I am Swedish there is no point in being sloppy with the editing when releasing a book in my second language. We’re one-third through the editing, and when we find time to complete the book it’s probably just a couple of days of work.

I’ll keep you posted.

PS.
Don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter, I got a 20 % discount on all books published by Intranätverk waiting for you
/ ps

The post Still editing the Web Strategy book 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.

Well, the English edition of the web strategy book is published by Intranätverk and I’m inclined to publish all my future books this way since it lets me focus on writing.

Intranätverk’s publisher manifesto

We at Intranätverk publish books that we like, we care about and we think will help you! We are on a mission to deliver valuable and useful knowledge.

As an independent publisher we care about the quality of our books, about our authors and our customer service.

We like to be in touch with everyone who reads the books we publish, because our authors and we care about what you think about the books, so please tell us! It is how we keep improving what we offer.

We love publishing books and we hope you love reading them. If you like our books, we would love you to buy them directly from us. If you do, all the money goes towards investing in new books and authors.

If you buy directly from us you will also get:

• all the updates for the ebook you buy
• an ebook version included with every print version of the book
• free shipping via post

For the sake of transparency: We share profits 50/50 with our authors. 

Kristian Norling, September 2015

Also, read Mark Morrell’s take on the publisher manifesto, he’s also an author on Intranätverk.

The post Publisher manifesto appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.

It’s worth mentioning that my book, Web Strategy for Everyone, also covers backend aspects of intranet performance optimization. Check it out, only cost you ten bucks ›

Speed test for your intranet

For reference when testing your intranet from a mobile device you can use the app Speedtest.net on Android phones and Speedtest for iOS. Some plugins for Firefox requires a plugin called Firebug – you can find Firebug here – which is of great use in other scenarios such as inspecting cookies etcetera.

l.o.r.i (Life-of-Request Info)

Lori is a plugin for Firefox. It shows initial latency (time before first byte), total load-time, page weight and number of connections for every page you visit.

Firefox addons »

Yahoo! YSlow

Analyses a page and give you suggestions on how to better the performance. Install as a plugin in Firefox. Requires the plugin Firebug.

YSlow at Firefox Addons »

Google PageSpeed

Google offers a browser plugin for both Firefox and Chrome to examine pagespeed factors of pages you can access with your browser (logged in, VPN, what-have-you).

Google PageSpeed for Chrome and Firefox »

IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit

If you happen to have a Windows Web Server you can install an extension called “IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit” to do local analysis of factors such as performance and SEO, and get a report of eventual issues.

Get the extension for IIS »

Did I miss any of your favorite tools?

The post Tools to troubleshoot performance issues on your intranet appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.

There are a plethora of different tools for this and we have assembled a list of suggestions here.

Why intranet analytics?

Intranet analytics is the activity to see if a site lives up to its purpose, if it already meets or is on track to meet the goals of the site. In other words, one must know what one wants to achieve with the intranet to know which metrics are relevant, otherwise it is not very worthwhile to work with intranet analytics.
Choose a few, easy to understand measurements to work with, and ensure that these measurements describe the site’s contribution to the operation’s success or challenges.

This means that you have set up one or more goals, breaking them down into something that can be measured and then use the intranet analytics tool to see if the work makes the intranet approach the goal.

It is worth thinking through the goals we want to measure. For an example, to measure the goal of having many views per visitor does not necessarily mean that visitors appreciate the website – visitor might be lost in the navigation. The same dubious value can be the number of visits, unique visitors, time spent on the site and more.

There are two different types of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and you need both kinds :

• Quantitative measurements that provide figures on how the site is performing, for example, all the information about the visitors as a group you can glean in a statistical tool. These measurements provide answers to how, when, and what about the visitors, as what equipment they have, when they visit the site, where they came from and so on.
• Qualitative measurements are more of the visitors experience as they themselves put it. These values ​​are more in the form of text than numbers and it could be issues explained in a site survey, interviews and features on the site which allows the visitor to talk about what they thought of their experience or what they have just read.

Your KPIs need to be both quantitative and qualitative and the metrics that are most valuable are those that relate to the business objectives. Among other things, if one conducts some form of commerce on a public website it is easier to connect the commercial purpose of the statistics. Then you prioritise which measurable economic values ​​that are most important to steer towards , for example , it may be the percentage of visitors converting to customers, or average order value per customer.

What measurable business value do your intranet have? When you have such a list of business goals, or measurable use cases, to measure your intranet you are ready to begin doing intranet analytics.

The post What is intranet analytics? appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.

Intranet analytics

It’s worth mentioning that my book, Web Strategy for Everyone, covers a lot of aspects of intranets and the digital workplace, such as the information architecture, performance optimization and design principles like design with data. Check it out, it only cost you ten bucks ›

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the industry-standard on the public web and is also used by many organizations on their intranets.

Go to Google Analytics »

Piwik

Piwik is a open source alternative for those who don’t want to share data on their users behaviour. Piwik offers a demo you can check out here. Piwik is also capable of crunching server-logs, so there is not really necessary to use client-based techniques for tracking visitors.

Visit piwik.org »

IBM Unica NetInsight

Unica is designed to be used on-premise instead of cloud-based solutions like Google Analytics that leak visitor data to third parties.

Read more about Unica NetInsight »

IBM Digital Analytics (formerly Coremetrics Web Analytics)

Offers, among other features, comparative benchmarks and knowledge of how the best performers reach their successes.

View screenshots of Digital Analytics etc at IBM.com »

Angelfish Web Analytics for Intranets

Web analytics software which can be installed on-premise (ie. within your network) to control collected data. Sometimes intranet/extranet analytics need to store customer data and other sensitive information most prefer to keep close.

analytics.angelfishstats.com

Woopra

How do the users engage with the intranet?

Woopra.com »

NextSTAT Web Analytics & Traffic Statistics

Hosts the solution for you and all you do is put a tracking-code on your pages.

Go to nextstat.com »

GoStats

Got hit counters as well as website analytics.

Go to Gostats.com »

Chartbeat

Lists some major publishing firms as their customers.

Go to chartbeat.com »

Webtrends Reinvigorate

Works with realtime data and heatmaps.

Check out reinvigorate.net »

GoSquared

Claims to be the simplest analytics in the world.

Go to GoSquared.com »

Clicky Real Time Web Analytics

You can inspect an individual visitors journey on your intranet. Live demo here.

Go to Clicky.com »

gauges

Provides an overview to see all websites on a single page.

Go to get.gaug.es »

HitsLink Web Analytics

Visual presentation of a website’s performance. Public demo can be found here.

Read more on HitsLink »

VisiStat

Offers proactive tools on where to make improvement of your pages. Public demo here.

Check out VisiStat here »

Webtrends

Founded 1993 and support multi-channel measurement.

Read more about Webtrends at webtrends.com »

Adobe Analytics (formerly Omniture)

More on Adobe Analytics at adobe.com »

AWStats Log Analyzer

Open source tool that analyzes the web server logs and display the data on a web page. Used at lots of web hosting firms.

Check out AWStats at Sourceforge.com »

OneStat

Services starting at 125 USD per year.

See packages of OneStats »

Crazy Egg

Tracking user behaviour made simple with Crazy Egg.

Go to Crazy Egg »

ClickTale

Records users sessions on the intranet for you to analyze.

See more at clicktale.com »

Optimizely

Perform A/B-testing or multivariate testing on your intranet.

Go to optimizely.com »

Heap

Instant and also retroactive analytics on your data.

Go to heapanalytics.com »

Snowplow Analytics

Snowplow Analytics main feature is as an event data pipeline, which makes it ideal to track users on multiple channels – perfect for digital workplace analytics!

Go to snowplowanalytics.com »

Cardio Analytics for Sharepoint and Office 365

Designed specifically for Microsoft SharePoint, Cardio Analytics stands by the belief that a business can only manage what it measures. These measurements aims to play a huge role in savings, productivity and overall success. Analytic reports are shown in a simple and easily understood fashion. Available in on-prem as well as cloud-based solutions.

Go to intlock.com »

Sitespeed.io

Sitespeed.io is one of the tools to check the intranet’s performance, as in how fast its perceived to be, but also some guidance for the intranet content. Pretty much qualitative analytics, if not performed on a quantitative scale.

Did we leave out your favourite analytics tool? Please post a comment.

The post Tools for intranet analytics appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.

At the top of this post you find a word cloud of the manuscript. Regard it as a small insight on what the book is trying to cover and what wordings you can expect

Sign up to the newsletter to not miss out on when the book is released, and if you like to get discounted offers on related books you can tick that box. At time of writing I got an offer of 20% of all books from my publisher Intranätverk.

The post Last round of proof-reading appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.