'Net Features : web

Web Highlights from Week 16 for 'Net Pros

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:30:00 GMT

It's been quite a week - one that many likely will want to quickly forget (and it's not even over yet). But there were many developments to remember from the World Wide Web this week that may prove important to your enterprises' future 'Net success.

In this week's Weekly Web Roundup, Website Magazine has assembled some the top stories (from here at WebsiteMagazine.com and elsewhere) on digital advertising, software, social media, e-commerce and a whole lot more. Did we miss something you think is important? Let us know by sharing a comment.

Google Brings Google+ Comments to Blogger: - Users of Google's popular Blogger platform will now see direct comments from direct visitors alongside comments from people talking about that content on Google+.

Bing Integrates Pinterest into Image Search: Amid reports that Google Image Search changes in early January are driving less traffic, Bing announced that users of its image search product will featuer the Pinterest "pinit' button on every photo detail page.

IAB Updates "Quality" Guidelines: The Interactive Advertising Bureau released a new version of its Quality Assurance Guidelines or QAG (only for public comment). The self-policing framework aimed at insuring transparentcy the the quality of digital advertising between buyers and sellers.

Twitter Keyword-Based Advertising: Advertisers on the social network are now able to reach consumers based on keywords in recent tweets and the tweets that they have recently engaged with.

The Value of a Facebook Fan 2013: Syncapse released research into the average value of brand fans on Facebook and found that of the top 20 global consumer brands, the "fan value" was $174.17 U.S.

Wordpress Under Attack: Popular blogging and CMS solution Wordpress has been the subject of a recent attack, compromising thousands of site with low-level administrative credentials. Here are a few security tips to consider to protect your Wordpress deployment. Check out some Wordpress security tips here.

Intel Acquires Mashery: API management solution Mashery has reportedly been acquired by Intel. Mashery will service as a buildin gblock for an Intel suite of services - cloud services, digital storefronts, location services, network services and security - according to the announcement.

Google Affiliate Network (GAN) Retired: Google announced that it will be retiring the Google Affiliate Network and focusing on other products in the future. Note that GAN is seperate from both Adsense and DoubleClick for Publishers.

E-Commerce in China: The e-commerce market in China generated 1.3 trillion RMB ($190 billion USD) worth of transactions in 2012, according to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), an increase of 66.5 percent over 2011's total.

Abandonment in Online Retail: Almost three-quarters (72.5%) of shoppers have left an online store or marketplace because they couldn't easily find what they were looking for. Two-thirds (66%) terminated an online purchase because the process took too long, or was overly complicated (60.8%).

Rackspace's Openstack Expanding for Hosts, Telcos: Rackspace announced plans to build OpenStack deployments for other hosting providers and telecommunications companies in a move which many believe will position it to take on rival Amazon.

Amazon S3 Storing 2 Trillion Objects: Amazon announced that it's S3 storage service now holds more than 2 trillion objects, up from 1 trillion in June and 1.3 trillion in November.

LinkedIn Updates Apps: Professional socnet LinkedIn updated versions of its iPhone, Android and web paps to focus on content and personalization. The company also recently gave a make over to its Recruiter product.

Facebook Launches CPA for Advertisers: Facebook will soon offer advertisers the ability to promote listings on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis. The functionality measures conversions within 24 hours of FB users clicking on ads.

Online Content Provides Value to the Internet: 92 percent of 1,000 Americans surveyed agreed that free news, weather, email, blogs and video content was either somewhat or extremely important to the overall value of the Internet according to a poll commissioned by the Digital Advertising Alliance.

Email's Top Performers and Benchmarks: Silverpop relased its 2013 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark study and found that consumer product emails scored highest for open rates with a media 25.4 percent success rate.

Consumer Behavior Driven By Mobile Apps

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:21:00 GMT

The debate regarding mobile apps versus Web consumption is getting hotter and hotter - and clearer and clearer. The rate of adoption, according to Mobile analytics firm Flurry, is outpacing both the PC revolution of the 80's and the Internet boom of the 90's.

Since 2007, in fact, more than 500 million iOS and Android smartphones and tablets have been activates and by the end of 2012, Flurry estimates that the cumulative number of those devices actives will surpass 1 billion.

What's even more impressive is that roughly 40 billion applications have already been downloaded from the App Store and Android Market. In the summer of of 2011, Flurry's published a report on how the average smartphone user began spending more time in their mobile apps than they do browsing the Web. Flurry just updated its data and found that the usage gap just keeps getting bigger.

Interactive consumption has continued to change over the last 18 months between the Web and mobile native apps according to Flurry. The chart from Flurry above indicates that smartphone and tablet users now spend over 90 minutes each day using applications while time spend on the Web has shrunk. What this means is that users are replacing their website usage with applications. The growth is slowing however. The time spend in mobile apps rose 23 percent from December 2010 to June 2011 but just over 15% from June 2011 to December 2011.

More on Flurry Analytics from Website Magazine:

- Flurry's Web Analytics Tool Gets Update
- A Flurry of Analytics Data for Mobile Apps

The Sad State of the Small Biz Web

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:27:00 GMT

UK Web hosting provider Streamline.net's latest "Small Business Bytes Survey" has revealed some discouraging information.

Despite two thirds of those surveyed having had a business website for 2 years or more, only 1 in 10 firms made updates on a daily basis.

That is a pretty sad statistics for the small business Web workers and signifies that many companies continue to struggle in maintaining their web presence. Some other alarming results from the survey:

- 1 in 4 companies admit to updating their websites on a monthly basis,

- over half (54 per cent) admitted to making technical tweaks only 'infrequently,'

- one third of companies surveyed use only a single domain name, and three quarters own less than 6 domains

- nearly half of firms (48 per cent) are not currently advertising on search engines

- 1 in 3 (34 per cent) are unable to quantify the popularity of their website as they do not look at their visitor numbers

Are you a small business website owner, manager or marketer? How often do you update your website with new content? When is the last time you made a technical tweak and how often do you do so? How many domains do you own? Are you advertising on search engines? Are you able to quantify the popularity of your website? Share your comments with Website Magazine readers and editors below.

Firms at Risk; Web Professionals Take Note

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:46:00 GMT

A new Fasthosts Internet Ltd survey released earlier this month found that many firms do not have arrangements in place to retain basic control or in some cases even legal ownership of their website and domains because of over-reliance on the IT or web consultants who look after their website.

Ever broadening consumer expectations for the web has led more firms than ever (43%) to opt for using the services of skilled web professionals to help create and maintain their website. 92% of these companies rate their external web consultants positively, with 38% reporting a 'good' return on investment. However, the Fasthosts 'SME & the Web' study found that many UK companies may be risking revenue and reputation as a result of weaknesses in their workflows with such third parties.

Additional insights from the study include:

- During the past 2 years, 1 in 4 firms paying for an external web professional have had their website off-line as a result of a problem related to the other party.

- 1 in 5 businesses incurred delays to projects caused by their external partner, and 17% reported losses of both staff time and sales revenue over £1000 as a result. For 14% of respondents, an external advisor or agency had gone out of business.

- In the event of an issue with their external partner, 56% of firms have no way of making any changes or additions to their website themselves and 80% have no facility for switching their website on/off independently. For these businesses, the link to their external web professional is a single point of failure in their online presence.

- Whilst UK firms invest millions in professional web design each year, 70% of those using a web designer do not retain a back-up copy of their website themselves.

"For many firms, using external web professionals is a very sensible and rewarding option. However, as external parties can come and go, it is vital that businesses protect themselves from the potential disruption, losses and reputation damage that an off-line or out-of-date website can cause,” said Steve Holford, Marketing Director, Fasthosts Internet Ltd.

Xignite Grows the Cloud with Six New Exchanges

Administrator — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 04:00:00 GMT

Financial market web service and data provider Xignite made available some new market data from six additional global securities exchanges.

The new exchanges include the SIX Swiss Exchange, the Irish Stock Exchange, Wiener Börse AG, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), the New Zealand Exchange (NZX) and the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX).

“We continue to see strong growth in demand for global market data delivered via the cloud,” said Stephane Dubois, CEO of Xignite. “Increasingly, large organizations are coming to us because they have a global presence and need global access to market data from any location, at any time and without heavy data management costs. Many regional firms around the world are also driving demand for market data generated by their local securities exchanges. These customers find on-demand delivery of market data an ideal way to meet their requirements.”

Google's New Caffeine Index Goes Live

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 14:55:00 GMT

Google today made the formal announcement that its new Web indexing system called Caffeine is now complete.

What can you expect from Caffeine's injection directly in the SERPs? Fresher results says Google. In fact, 50 percent fresher for Web searches than its last index (and from the largest collection of Web content it has offered to date).

This puts your content development and social media marketing efforts on center-stage.

The reason for Google's introduction of a more caffeinated search is simple - content on the Web has evolved. The introduction and importance today of video, image, audio, real-time updates and reviews makes the Web a far more complex environment and one that Web users have grown accustom.

Instead of refreshing its index every few weeks, Caffeined enables Google to analyze the web in small portions and update its search index on a continuous basis and on an enormous scale. Google shared an excellent statistic about just how much information is being shared - Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in paralell which, if it were a pile of paper, would grow three miles taller every second.

RIAs: Managing the Center of the Interactive Website Universe

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:30:00 GMT

Website visitors are doing much more than just visiting site pages today. On every successful website, users are interacting with content and coming away with a more satisfying experience. Using interactive selectors to choose products that best fit their needs, watching and commenting on videos and browsing dynamic photo albums, site visitors are being propelled into user-centric experiences. These experiences are the hallmark of today’s successful websites and it is rapidly becoming clear that this is what users want and expect.

These expectations are that websites function and behave like applications, rather than static repositories of information. Rich internet applications (RIAs) are at the center of supplying this experience, providing intuitive and engaging access between site users and the website’s information. RIAs let users input and manipulate data directly, changing their choices without losing other important information. With instantaneous response, change is visible immediately and the fields in forms can be validated before submission, resulting in faster processing. RIAs can contain whole processes, rather than spreading a process over several different pages, adding a level of immersion and interaction that static sites cannot provide. Beyond the benefits to site visitors, companies that leverage RIAs have seen substantial increases in revenue (upwards of 25% in some cases). Conversion rate increases of more than 60% are not uncommon.

Product selectors, photo galleries, video and audio players and other RIAs are all built on flexible frameworks such as Adobe Flex, Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and HTML5. Utilizing these technologies, websites are able to deliver the information and experience that site users are looking for quickly and efficiently.

But RIAs are only as good as the content they are delivering. And unmanaged content will doom an RIA to failure.

RIAs are extremely content dependent and, in order to stay relevant, the data they consume needs to be kept up to date and flexible. Structured data, such as XML, is preferable over HTML entered content. It can be consumed free of formatting conflicts and is reusable across the website. Like other content on the website, structured data needs to be managed easily and efficiently.

Web content management (WCM) platforms that are able to manage structured content as easily as they handle standard HTML content are the solution to managing RIAs and their content. To do this, a WCM platform must be able to produce XML data without requiring the direct involvement of developers. This will enable non-technical website contributors to manage the RIA’s data. Subject matter experts and marketing professionals, by managing the structured content, are also able to manage the RIAs themselves. These are the people who are making the decisions about what should be in the RIAs and when that information should be changed; the RIA content should be dependent on them, not on developers.

With a WCM capable of managing RIAs, content can be entered as structured data via a form, streamlining the process by which data is added, edited or updated in the RIA. Using a form for input ensures that all of the correct data is entered for the RIA to use and content contributors do not need to be familiar with XML. Subject matter experts and marketing professionals can update content on the fly (just as they do content for the other parts of the website) as messaging changes, new products are introduced, new videos are available or other content updates are necessary. The messaging and structure that is used by the RIA can also be applied across the rest of the site. Updates are more efficient; rather than adding content to the site’s static pages and then to the RIAs, content is updated only once and all changes are applied to every instance that the content is presented.

WCM platforms that allow a true separation of content from presentation are ideal for managing RIAs. While developers create new, more immersive and more interactive functionality for RIAs, they should not have to be concerned with entering content or even how the content is being inputted by subject matter experts. The editing environment of the WCM platform can offer a familiar environment for content authors and contributors to add, edit and manage the data that is consumed by RIAs on the site.

The era of static websites is over and user-centric experiences are becoming the norm. Leveraging RIAs and WCM platforms will produce the immersive, interactive websites that site visitors prefer and expect, and make maintaining and updating these rich experiences more efficient and effective.

About the Author: Bill Rogers is the CEO and founder of Ektron Inc., a Web Solutions company that provides a platform for web content management, marketing optimization and social software. Ektron’s helps customers realize operational efficiency, increased revenue and improved customer loyalty through a combination of software and services.