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Design Inspiration - Where can I get some please?

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:52:25 +0000

So, you’ve gone through your briefing and discovery stage, created mood-boards and wire-frames, and now you’re at the stage where you actually need to knuckle down and design something. If you’re like me, you’re probably familiar with the feeling of looking at that blank ‘page’ and thinking “where on earth do I start?”

Hopefully, you’ve already got a reasonably good idea of the overall style that you’re going to be creating (if not, then you’re probably not ready to start designing), but you just need a little nudge in the right direction.

Well never fear, help is at hand. I’m definitely an advocate for taking inspiration from all around you - books, magazines, billboards, music videos and so on - but there are also a wealth of online resources available to you and I want to share some of my favourites.

Dribbble: www.dribbble.com

Dribbble is a ‘show-and-tell’ site for designers to share small snapshots of what they’re working on and ask for feedback. As an invite-only site (you can browse as a guest) the standard is very high. The snapshots are small, so you won’t see whole sites featured here, but you will find a multitude of fantastic user-interface elements.

If you’re a fan of sexy app icons this is the site for you - prepare to be wowed!

Designpiration: www.designspiration.net

For pure design-related gorgeousness look no further than designspiration. designspiration features a huge and diverse selection of high quality, user-submitted images, featuring branding, typography, prints, brochures, photography... It simply oozes coolness.

Siteinspire: www.siteinspire.com/showcase/all

siteinspire is a great website design showcase. You can browse through the sites in the directory by ‘style’, ‘type’ and ‘theme’, so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for.

Design Blogs:

A lot of design blogs have an inspiration section, much of it grouped into themed round-ups, such as “Beautiful Ecommerce Websites”, “Outstanding Minimalist Website Designs” and so on. This can really help speed up your research process - these sites have already done a lot of the hard work for you. Some of my favourites that consistently feature fantastic content are:

Vandelay Design

Smashing Magazine

On these sites you can usually subscribe to email updates, keeping you informed when new articles have been posted.

Twitter

Last, but by no means least, is Twitter.

I’ve found it one of the best resources for inspiration by following other designers and web agencies - we designers seem to like sharing cool stuff we’ve found, so I always make a point of checking my time-line on a regular basis, and if I come across a fantastic piece of design I’ll tweet about it.

It’s also worth noting that many of the sites mentioned above have Twitter accounts, so they’re worth following to keep up-to-date with what’s popular on their particular network.

As a great start why not follow GPMD - twitter.com/gpmd

I hope you enjoyed my inspiration round-up and have got something out of it. Look out for more design related articles in the near future.

Backing up your NAS with Dropbox - Non Native

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:57:25 +0000

So, we had a problem in the office the other day... We bought a new Synology DS1511+ (x86 - Intel Atom) to replace our old *nix NAS, which had dropboxd running on it. I thought I would have a crack at getting dropboxd compiled on the DS1511+, after all it was an x86 architecture and it had ipkg to install make utils... But to no avail.

The problem is that the version of GLIBC that comes with DSM 3.2 is 2.3.6 and the version of GLIBC that dropboxd wants is 2.4.*... Damn. I also tried a precompiled binary, but that was a whole other can of worms, again it boiled down to features that are present in GLIBC 2.4 but not 2.3. Unfortunately, I don't possess the skills for cross-compiling nor have I the time, if anyone else fancies the challenge go ahead and let me know how you get on!

So the alternatives were to send back the shiny new NAS OR find another way. We chose the latter. In this blog post I will document an alternative to native dropboxd for NAS backup... Yes we could use S3 backup, but that's already baked into DSM and no fun ;) plus we wanted dropbox specifically.

Goal:

Have the NAS and dropbox synced together. We will use the spare computer to mount shares from the NAS and use its architecture to run the dropbox client.

Requirements:

NAS
Spare computer (*nix/Mac)... We will use Mac OS X 10.6+ for the rest of this tutorial (with hints for *nix).
Native Dropbox client for OS of spare computer
Dropbox account
Network connection between the NAS and spare machine

Step 1 - Pre Setup

If you haven't done so already, enable network shares for the relevant folders on your NAS that you want sync'd and add a user than can read/write them. If your using a Mac enable AFP shares or SMB (samba) and if your using *nix go for NFS or SMB. In the case of Synology it is as simple as using the web interface.

Step 2 - Setup

Setup a folder on your spare computer that will hold the dropbox folder. You can use the default location but in our case we didn't want users using the mounted locations.

$ sudo mkdir /share

// Change owner ship of /share folder so we can write to it
$ sudo chown -R <local username>:wheel /share

Step 3 - Install Dropbox

Now it's time to install your dropbox and point it towards / share (Advanced setup). It will create a folder called 'Dropbox' inside share and will probably try and start syncing... At this point pause the sync.

Step 4 - Mounting

Now we are going to use automount to mount our folders from the NAS. If you're using *nix you can use your fstab for this part (google for 'mounting smb/nfs shares with fstab').

$ sudo vi /etc/auto_master

You'll see something along the lines of this:

#
# Automounter master map
#
+auto_master	# Use directory service
/net			-hosts		-nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid
/home		auto_home	-nobrowse,hidefromfinder
/Network/Servers	-fstab
/-			-static

Add the following line to the bottom:

/share/Dropbox          auto_dropbox

This tells the automount service that you want to use a sub-mount map to define your mounts, and that sub-mount map is relative to '/share/Dropbox'. Your full 'auto_master' file should look like this:

#
# Automounter master map
#
+auto_master	# Use directory service
/net			-hosts		-nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid
/home		auto_home	-nobrowse,hidefromfinder
/Network/Servers	-fstab
/-			-static
/share/Dropbox     auto_dropbox

Now save and exit. Run the next command to create the 'auto_dropbox' sub-map and edit it

$ sudo vi /etc/auto_dropbox

Now you will want to fill this file with the directories you want from your NAS, here is an example based from our own

[foldername]    -fstype=[sharefstype]    [sharetype]://[username]:[password]@[NAS hostname / IP]/[foldername shared on NAS]
clients             -fstype=afp    afp://auser:arealpassword@green.local/clients

If you wanted to use SMB you can replace '-fstype=afp' with '-fstype=smbfs' and use 'smb://' instead of 'afp://'. Also note that [foldername] is relative to '/share/Dropbox'.

Now just run the following commands to re-mount:

$ sudo automount -vc

Step 5 - Finishing Up

That's about it. Now your shares are mounted you can resume the dropbox sync and it will happily plod along backing up your NAS.

Conclusion

While not as graceful / efficient as having dropboxd running directly on the NAS, this is definitely a viable solution and it works. This will be especially helpful for anyone with an ARM based NAS as dropbox I believe said they won't be supporting it anytime soon.

If you're having problems with this, please leave your comments below and we will do our best to help you.

Getting and scaling Magento in the cloud

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:11:38 +0000

I was recently asked to research getting Magento into the cloud and making it scalable for one of our clients. This decision came about as we believe performance is a large factor in conversion, coupled with server reliability and server uptime. You may ask "Why don't you host your own servers?" well we do... But they don't scale on demand and they are certainly prone to hardware faults where the response time is probably a couple of hours, not minutes. It has become obvious that the cloud has many advantages over a rack full of servers in one data centre. I'm not writing this post to convert you to the cloud so lets get on...

Overview

What's to follow is a set of instructions on how I went about getting Magento on the cloud in a scalable configuration, that's not to say it's the 'correct' way, but it works. The following are the tools I used:

Magento 1.6.1.0 Community Edition (should work with 1.5.0.0+)
Amazon AWS (EC2, ELB, RDS, S3/Cloudfront)
OnePica Image CDN plugin
Scalr (Open source cloud management platform)
NFSv3 (you can use v4)
s3cmd

Scalr isn't required, but it does provide some handy features like managing a DNS record for each server instance or allowing you to execute scripts across multiple servers. I'm also certain you could translate these instructions to other cloud systems as none of them depend on any particular AWS feature. Here is what we are trying to achieve (pardon the icons, they were the best I could find):

The image above depicts:

(ELB) Load balancer, balancing our web servers
(S3) CDN which will host our cached media files and skin (skin/) files (you could use cloudfront)
(EC2)x2 Public facing web servers which will contain our Magento code base (I put 2x so you can see how the load balancer and web server scaling will work)
(EC2) Admin web server which will be a seperated administration-only server
(EBS) Persistant storage mounted on the admin server containing our media filesÂ (media/) shared out via NFS
(RDS) Database server which speaks for itself

Admin Server (EC2)

Overview

Our admin box will serve as the central code base that all web servers will sync from, and also where our media files will be served from. You may be thinking "Well that's the central point of failure" and to an extent you're correct, but what we can do is ensure regular backups as well as using scalr to mange the box (server goes down, new server goes up).

Scalr Setup

Create yourself a new farm, call it whatever you like. Go to the roles and create yourself a new application server with apache (I used Ubuntu 10.04 app-apache64-ubuntu-ebs), add any scaling options you would like but make sure minimum instances is 1 (as it's a required server). No need for load balancing on this server, but I would suggest you add an elastic IP if you use a payment gateway like SagePay (as they only allow communications from certain IP's). When using scalr images they are all bundled with EBS volumes, if you're using your own AMI make sure you add a persistent volume now.

Save the farm and get it started, within a minute or two scalr should register that there isn't a server running and will pop us our admin box. Once it's up and running, ssh yourself in (click the icon next to the server), you should now be root.

Please go through the magento requirements, as there are a few things you are going to need... Ones that I can remember are:

php5
php5-cli
php5-mysql
php5-mcrypt
php5-gd
php5-curl

Make sure you restart apache after installing new modules.

Apache

The first thing we need to do if you're using one of the scalr application server images is to make sure AllowOverride is set to all on /var/www by doing the following:

$ vi /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
# Change line[11] "AllowOverride None" to "AllowOverride All"

This will allow .htaccess files to work (required for magento). Next make sure to clear out your /var/www folder:

$ rm -rf /var/www/*

From here you can use your own method to pull in your code base (or a fresh version of Magento 1.6.1.0) to /var/www... For example:

# This method would require you to download your private key
# for the farm you have created. Tools > SSH Keys...
$ rsync -av -i /path/to/private/key.pem /path/to/local/magento-source/ \
root@<external admin ip>:/var/www/

Next we will need to create an RDS / database instance to use for magento.

Now you will need to modify your Magento local.xml settings to reflect the new database location and settings:

$ vi /var/www/app/etc/local.xml

If you're installing from fresh, go ahead and run the installer and come back once you're done. Don't forget to:

$ chmod -R a+rw /var/www/media/ /var/www/var/

You should now have a working Magento install running from the RDS / Database instance, good work.

OnePica Image CDN

This plugin is great, it will cache your product media files to S3 / Cloudfront and various other sources. We are going to use S3 in this post, so go ahead and install the plugin from magento connect... You may need to chown your /var/www so that the user www-data (apache2) can write to /var/www:

$ chown -R www-data: /var/www

Create yourself a new S3 bucket and get your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key at the ready. Now log back into the admin server and go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Image CDN. if it's not there, you've done something wrong (try logging out of the admin and back in again and clearing the cache). Use the following settings:

-- General Settings
Current Adapter: Amazon S3/Cloudfront
File Result Cahce: In Database
Defaults for everything else

--Amazon S3/Cloudfront
Access Key ID: [access key]
Secret Access Key: [secret key]
Bucket: [bucket you just created]
Base URL: http://s3-[zone].amazonaws.com/[bucket]
Secure Base URL: https://s3-[zone].amazonaws.com/[bucket]

Save the settings and clear the cache, now try out a category page... Right click one of the product images and inspect the url, it should be from amazon s3. Congratulations, you have completed the first part of the CDN.

Skin CDN

Now we are going to place the skin files onto s3 and point Magento that way. I used the s3cmd sync tool to get the skin files up on s3, you can install it like this:

# Import S3tools signing key
$ wget -O- -q http://s3tools.org/repo/deb-all/stable/s3tools.key | sudo apt-key add -

# Add the repo to sources.list
$ sudo wget -O/etc/apt/sources.list.d/s3tools.list http://s3tools.org/repo/deb-all/stable/s3tools.list

# Refresh package cache and install the newest s3cmd
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install s3cmd

# You'll want to configure it
$ s3cmd --configure

Now lets get our skin into s3 using the bucket you used before:

# -P = Make public
$ s3cmd sync -P /var/www/skin s3://[bucket]/

Great, now we should have a folder called skin/ in the root of our bucket with all our skin files.

Go back to the magento admin System > Configuration > Web now this bit is important, make sure you switch to 'Default Store View' as there is a slight gotcha with CDN'ing your skin files, if you try and upload images via Magento admin it won't work because the image uploader is flash and it would require a cross-domain policy file, which we don't want to do, so you circumvent it by only setting the default store configuration to use skin CDN:

-- Unsecure
Base Skin URL: http://s3-[zone].amazonaws.com/[bucket]/skin/
-- Secure
Base Skin URL: https://s3-[zone].amazonaws.com/[bucket]/skin/

Save the settings, clear the cache and go check where the css files are coming from, it should be s3. Done!

NFS Server

Next you will want to install NFS:

# Install nfs
$ sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server

# Lets add our network share in
$ vi /etc/exports

# /etc/exports: the access control list for filesystems which may be exported
#               to NFS clients.  See exports(5).
#
# Example for NFSv2 and NFSv3:
# /srv/homes       hostname1(rw,sync,no_subtree_check) hostname2(ro,sync,no_subtree_check)
#
# Example for NFSv4:
# /srv/nfs4        gss/krb5i(rw,sync,fsid=0,crossmnt,no_subtree_check)
# /srv/nfs4/homes  gss/krb5i(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

/var/www/media         *(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

$ /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

You may be thinking "* WTF?!", but with amazon all EC2 instances are locked down, conveniently scalr will modify the default security group to allow any connection between servers in this group (all servers will be added to default), so it looks wide open but it's not. Any of your servers that do connect over NFS will be communicating in plain text (granted it will be internal ip's) if this is an issue for you, feel free to setup kerberos.

Up until this point we have been doing everything on the Admin box.

Its now time to create and configure our web servers. I'd suggest creating an image of the admin box now and giving it some sane name like "Admin" so we have nice dns entries in scalr.

Admin URL

So you should now have a fully working web server and admin server. There are a few configuration settings we will need to change to allow for seperate admin domains and web page domains (note this is for 1.6.1.0, there is a fix for < 1.6.1.0... ask me in the comments). This configuration assumes your load balancer is up and running.

Navigate over to the admin external hostname or ip and log into the admin area. Go to System > Configuration > General > Web and set the following settings:

-- Url Options
Auto-redirect to Base URL: Yes
-- Unsecure
Base URL: http://[load balancer]
-- Secure
Base URL: https://[load balancer]

Save settings, now head over to System > Configuration > Advanced > Admin:

-- Admin Base URL
Use Custom Admin URL: 
Custom Admin URL: http://[external admin hostname]

Save settings. Now clear the cache on both web server and admin server via ssh. You should now find you can only get to the admin area of the admin box and the whole site on the load balancer.

This is the end of the tutorial and I apologise for making you jump around.

One more time for the conclusion.

RDS / Database

This step is fairly straight forward, pop a new MySQL RDS instance (default engine is fine). You could use one of scalr's MySQL ami's and have it auto scale them but thats not within the scope of this post.

If you are using a pre-existing database you can use some of these commands to get you going:

# Export your DB from a box running MySQLd
$ mysqldump -u [username] -p [magento db name] -h [host / ip] > [magento db name].sql

# Connect to RDS / Database instance and create a database to import into
$ echo "create database [database name];" | mysql -h [database host / ip] -u [database instance username] -p

# Import database dump into RDS / Database instance
$ cat [magento db name].sql | \
mysql -h [database instance hostname] -u [database instance uname] -p [database name]

Once your done you can continue with your admin server configuration.

Web Server (EC2)

Overview

Our web servers will be our public facing servers that will be load balanced and fairly minimal, the guts to these servers will be coming from the admin box with a little help of a start up script.

Scalr Setup

Edit the farm you created for the admin role and add a new role, use the same image as you used before (I used Ubuntu 10.04 app-apache64-ubuntu-ebs).

Scaling Options

Mine are 1 - 5 instances, 5min waits, 15minute load average over: 5 and under: 1.5. Make sure to add yourself a load balancer, your health check target can be 'HTTP:80/' and for the most reliability check all 'Availability Zones'.

Now add your listeners, mine are (note if your going to add SSL, upload your certificate to Tools > AWS > IAM > Certificates > Add New):

Protocol	Load Balancer Port	Instance Port	SSL Certificate
HTTP	80	80
HTTPS	443	80	arn:aws:iam:xxxx

Placement and Type

I set my 'Availability Zone' to distribute equally.

I left all the other settings as default. No need for elastic ips or extra EBS.

Now make sure you install all the same modules as before for PHP otherwise you'll have an unhappy Magento.

Apache

This process is the same as the admin role apache setup here. You won't need to grab your code base though.

NFS Client

Now we are going to install the client ready for use but not configure it as we will have our startup script do all the hard work. Note that if you try and use fstab it may get nuked by scalr when it creates images of the server. Go ahead and install nfs-common:

$ sudo apt-get install nfs-common

Now lets try mounting the admin media share before we go on:

# Create folder to mount to
$ mkdir /var/www/media

# Mount
$ mount -t nfs -o proto=tcp,port=2049 [admin internal ip or hostname]:/var/www/media

# Provided that worked
$ umount /var/www/media

Great we have a working media share!

Startup Script

This is the fun part of the web servers, auto mounting and auto loading the code base. The script below is a modified version of the one I wrote, it won't work without modifications. Things to note are:

I created a ssh key on the admin box for a user called ubuntu which I then copied to the web server instance.
I also created a user on the web server box who chowns /var/www/* called replicant.
I setup postfix and installed mail-utils to allow email alerts

This script will try to ping the admin box and if successful mount the nfs share and copy the Magento code base across. You can run it multiple times.

#!/bin/bash
ADMIN=[internal admin hostname]
LOGFILE=/var/log/webserver.log
MEDIA=/var/www/media
DEVEMAIL=admin@email.com
ROOT_UID=0
# File to check the existance of
MEDIA_TEST=`mount|grep $MEDIA|awk '{print $3'}`

if [ "$UID" -ne "$ROOT_UID" ]; then
	echo "`date`: Not running as Root" | mail -s "Not Root!" $DEVEMAIL
	echo "`date`: Not running as Root" >> $LOGFILE
	exit
fi

echo "`date`: Web server started" >> $LOGFILE

# Check if admin box is alive
ping -c 1 $ADMIN &> /dev/null

if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
	# Try again just incase
	sleep 60
	ping -c 1 $ADMIN &> /dev/null

	if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
		echo "`date`: ping failed, $ADMIN host is down!" | mail -s "$ADMIN host is down!" $DEVEMAIL
		echo "`date`: Ping failed $ADMIN is down, exitting." >> $LOGFILE
		exit
	fi
fi

if [ ! -e  "$MEDIA"]; then
	echo "`date`: No media folder to mount too" | mail -s "Missing media folder!" $DEVEMAIL
	echo "`date`: No media folder to mount too" >> $LOGFILE
	exit
fi

# Mount media over NFS
if [ "X$MEDIA_TEST" = "X" ]; then # Check if already mounted
	mount -t nfs -o proto=tcp,port=2049 $ADMIN:$MEDIA $MEDIA &> /tmp/mount-media

	if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
		echo "`date`: Error mounting media from $ADMIN check /tmp/mount-media" | mail -s "Media failed to mount!" $DEVEMAIL
		echo "`date`: Error mounting media from $ADMIN check /tmp/mount-media" >> $LOGFILE
		exit
	fi
fi

# Remove known hosts so no rsync/ssh error about DNS spoofing
sudo -u replicant rm /home/replicant/.ssh/known_hosts
sudo -u replicant touch /home/replicant/.ssh/known_hosts

# Get code up to date
sudo -u replicant rsync -av -e "ssh -o 'StrictHostKeyChecking no' -i /home/replicant/.ssh/id_rsa" --exclude 'media/' --exclude 'var/' --exclude '.svn' root@$ADMIN:/var/www/ /var/www/ &> /tmp/rsync

if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
	echo "`date`: Error rsync'ing code base from $ADMIN check /tmp/rsync" | mail -s "Rsync error!" $DEVEMAIL
	echo "`date`: Error rsync'ing code base from $ADMIN check /tmp/rsync" >> $LOGFILE
	echo "root@$ADMIN:/var/www /var/www" >> $LOGFILE
	exit
fi

rm -rf /var/www/var/cache/*
rm -rf /var/www/var/session/*

chmod -R a+rw /var/www/shop/var/

echo "`date`: Startup script successful!" >> $LOGFILE

With your startup script in place, you should be almost ready with your web server. Execute your script and try browsing to the ip address, you should find a working version of Magento (or it may redirect you to the admin box). Your now ready to make an image of the server and modify the scalr farm to execute your script on HostUp.

ELB / Load Balancer

This is fairly simple with ELB, unless you start using SSL in which case it gets a little more complicated (but remains doable). I will assume you do want SSL and the solution I am going to explain will use it up until the load balancer. You could use backend authentication but that is not within the scope of this post. If you're not using ELB find out what http header is set for SSL, this will be important.

You'll want to set the load balancers stickiness to Application Based on both HTTP and HTTPS and use the cookie name of: PHPSESSID.

SSL

SSL was the last hurdle I had to tackle and it was painful, but lucky enough for you I have the answers here... Hopefully you have followed all the steps above and configured everything with SSL in mind, now it's time to get your hands dirty.

Scalr Setup

Your going to need to add in your virtual host that will accomodate for SSL, if your using scalr its pretty simple... Websites > Apache Virtual Hosts create yourself a new host and tick the 'SSL' check box. Upload your certificates and point this VH at your admin server. Your certificate locations will be as follows:

Certificate = /etc/aws/keys/ssl/https.crt
Private Key = /etc/aws/keys/ssl/https.key
Certificate Chain = /etc/aws/keys/ssl/https-ca.crt

When you hit save, the VH will be uploaded to your running web server instances and enabled... Whoop! If you're thinking "Why the admin box?", that's because we are having the load balancer forward HTTPS to HTTP on the web servers so we only need the certificates on the LB and Admin Box.

Magento

Thanks to Magento's yoyo feature set, we can't just use the Offloader Header setting as that would be too easy... Instead you're going to have to create a rewrite rule and this is where you need to know the http header that your load balancer uses to signify HTTPS being on.

Add this to your .htaccess on the admin box:

$ vi /var/www/.htaccess

############################################
## you can put here your magento root folder
## path relative to web root

    #RewriteBase /magento/
    RewriteBase /

    RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} https
    RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTPS:on]

This condition takes the forwarded header from the load balancer (in this case ELB's X-Forwarded-Proto which is either 'http' or 'https') and sets HTTPS 'on' if it equates to 'https'. This is due to how magento decides whether a url should be secure or not, in some places it supports the 'Offleader Header' and in some places (I'm looking at you Zend framework) it checks the HTTPS environment header... Great... But atleast we have a fix!

Now head into the admin backend and set System > Configuration > General > Web > Offloader Header to 'HTTPS'. Done!

You can now set your urls and you should be all finished

Conclusion

If you're still with me, well done! That was a lot of information. You should end up with a scaleable Magento system, what I will end this post with is a few points you can research yourself:

SSL is only up to the ELB Load balancer in this tutorial, if you require encryption from the ELB to the web servers you will have to look into backend authentication.
The NFS share is also unencrypted unless you use something like Kerberos. I personally don't think it's necessary as the only things being shared are the public media files anyway.
The Admin box is your single point of failure. While the web servers will manage for a while on cache (about 2 minutes) you have to consider the possiblity of the admin box going down and having something in place to handle it like scalr.
Persistence on the admin box whilst using scalr isn't TRUE persistence. Scalr treats EBS volumes as disposable. While not a huge issue if you backup your admin box (s3sync can help there), it does become a problem if it goes down... see point above.
This is a big undertaking and isn't cheap. Serving ~100,000 uniques / ~500,000 page views per month this will rack up a bill of around $700 - 900

I am sure there are 100 other ways of doing some of the stuff here so let me know if you have any better solutions :).

If you would like to find out more about the Magento services we offer, visit our Magento development page or call us on 020 7183 1072.

CMS Review - Strengths and weakness of Wordpress, SilverStripe and Joomla

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:02:05 +0000

A few days before New Years Eve, I came up with a number of resolutions that I would be adopting, with the majority of them related to my sugar intake and exercise levels. However, I also decided upon a few work-related resolutions, one of which was to write about topics outside of my comfort area of SEO, in particular link building - so I decided to do a two-part review of a few popular content management systems.

There are countless content management systems (CMS) out there today, some free, some paid, some open-source, some built for bespoke projects, I could go on but I’d be here all day.

Part one of this blog post will be focused on three different CMS platforms, outlining the strengths and weaknesses of using each – the systems are:

Part two of this article will be focused on Magento, osCommerce and Shopify.

SilverStripe CMS:

SilverStripe are headquartered in Wellington, New Zealand and they released version one of their content management system, which is built on the sapphire framework, in September 2006.

SilverStripe is an open-source platform that is often used due to its development versatility and user-friendly back-end admin interface.

Key Advantages of using SilverStripe:

The software is free
Open-source code base
Active developer community
There are additional themes available (free and paid)
Extensive support available
Ajax site tree
Easy to customise and integrate with software and other platforms
Good for SEO
Quick to install
Version control

Key disadvantages of using SilverStripe:

Fairly small following, meaning less information is available online
Not as many modules available as similar platforms like Wordpress or Joomla
Lack of documentation (because it’s still pretty new)
Shortage of stock themes

Examples of SilverStripe websites:

SilverStripe Conclusion:

SilverStripe is a really nice, easy to use content management system with a really big future ahead of it. SilverStripe is getting more popular by the day and they’re due to release version 3 in the next couple of months, which is promising a number of great new features and an updated user interface.

German-based company, PixelTricks are also actively working on a new ecommerce module, which showed a lot of promise when it was released in Beta form last year.

For me, there are a lot more strengths than weaknesses – I would recommend SilverStripe.

Best for:

More advanced non-ecommerce sites
Aesthetics-focused sites
Highly customised websites
Advanced developers

Wordpress:

Wordpress is most famous for being the world’s biggest blogging platform, but in reality, it’s so much more than that! First released in 2003 as a piece of code designed to aid typography, Wordpress has enjoyed unbelievable levels of popularity – as of August 2011 it is believed that Wordpress powers well over 20% of all new websites globally!

The undeniable appeal of Wordpress owes greatly to the astonishing amount of themes and plugins that are available to download, currently over 1,450 and just under 18,000 respectively.

I personally am a huge fan of Wordpress, with the ease of access to the code and the simplicity behind what would usually be complex programming changes representing my reasoning – however I have also witnessed one of the main disadvantages first-hand.

Key advantages of using Wordpress:

Nearly 1,500 themes available + more premium options
Nearly 20,000 plugins/modules available + more premium options
It’s free
Used by millions of people and websites world-wide
World’s biggest blogging platform
Quick and simple to integrate with other software packages
Search engines love Wordpress
Easy to integrate with social networking profiles
Manage multiple websites in one dashboard
Open-source platform
Built-in code editor within the admin area
Quick and easy to install
Simple PHP framework
Huge development following
Very easy to customise
E-commerce modules available and constantly being developed

Key disadvantages of using Wordpress:

Hackers love Wordpress (If you don’t know what you’re doing and don’t keep up to date with updates, you could be leaving your website susceptible to hackers)
Lots of updates
Some plugins and themes are unsecure (I’ve heard lots of stories about unsecure plugins that have lead to websites being hacked)
Could be outgrown (there are more suitable platforms for larger projects and ecommerce sites)

Wordpress Conclusion:

To be honest, there are very few disadvantages of using Wordpress, it felt a bit like I was clutching at straws. Wordpress is an immensely powerful CMS that really is ideal for users of any experience level. The one thing that I would recommend watching out for though is the Wordpress security – I failed to update an installation on Wordpress last year and was hit by a pretty fatal hack.

All in all, great platform – I love it and I use it!

Best for:

Blogging
Any non-ecommerce project
Users of any level

Joomla:

I thought I would throw a CMS that I haven'y had much experience with into the mix here, as although I’ve played around with it, I’m not overly familiar with Joomla as a CMS.

Joomla is a PHP-based content management system that, much like Wordpress, has a huge selection of extensions and themes readily available for users. Following their launch in 2005, Joomla won the Packt open-source CMS award in 2006, 2007 and 2011, previous winners include Wordpress and Drupal.

Key advantages of using Joomla:

Open-source CMS
It’s free (although there’s also a paid version)
Simplistic user-friendly admin interface
Multiple users can edit a site at the same time
Support for multi-language sites
Huge development following
Lots of templates available
Huge range of extensions/modules
Joomla release regular upgrades
Highly customisable
Can be good for SEO (if developed correctly)
Lots of support available
Lots of readily-integrated features (such as polls and user control)
Appropriate for larger, more complex websites

Key disadvantages of using Joomla:

Harder to learn than Wordpress
Changes can often require development support
Requires work to make it SEO-friendly
Slower-loading and more expensive hosting (due to excess javascript and CSS)
Wordpress has more plugins (and more free plugins)
Wordpress is better for blogging

Joomla Conclusion:

Joomla is a very powerful system with lots of great extensions and a really easy to use admin system.

These advantages and disadvantages are based on my limited experience and the views of a few of my colleagues, but I would say that whilst it may be more appropriate for larger websites, Wordpress is a better option for beginners and small sites.

Best for:

Larger websites
Multi-language websites
Experienced developers

Overall conclusion:

To conclude, I think that all three of these content management systems are different and have their own benefits. SilverStripe has the fluency and intuitive admin system, Wordpress has the range of modules and simplicity and Joomla’s versatility and out of the box quality is a big plus.

I also think that SilverStripe is more suited to larger non-ecommerce websites, due to its versatility, user-friendly back-end and added customisability. Joomla is also suited to larger websites because of it’s multi-user editing functionality, but it’s slower to load and will cost more to host with bigger sites.

I still think Wordpress is the best option for blogging, beginners and small websites. It is also the easiest to get used to and the most time-efficient for small websites.

----------------------

This is part one of two posts, the second one will be focused on Ecommerce platforms and will look at Magento, Shopify and osCommerce.

There are many other content management systems that I could have talked about (such as Drupal), if there are any that you think should have been included or any additional points that you think I've missed, please feel free to add them in the comments. You can also visit our CMS design or Ecommerce development pages to find out more about the services we offer in these areas.

Book Review: Convert by Ben Hunt

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:04:28 +0000

I've just finished reading my latest book on conversion rate optimisation, which was Convert, by Ben Hunt of ScratchMedia. I chose the book because it had a number of good reviews on Amazon and the subject matter was just what I was looking for - I wasn't dissappointed with my choice and have since been convincing everyone I can to read it!

The book is written to be of interest to novices and professionals alike and is spilt into two parts 'Designing for Traffic' and 'Designing for Conversion'. The first three chapters covered some basic ground first, putting forward the notion that designing websites based on what you or your boss think is important is not going to produce results - this is your best guess and it will more than likely not deliver results. Instead we should take some lessons from direct marketers who ran test after test to discover what worked and what didn't - the web makes it easier to do this and there are lots of tools available to help you test what actually works. The main point is to understand your market and make sure you give people what they want.

The next chapter focused on the fundamentals of search engine optimisation and using keyword research to find the right keyphrases for your market, whilst also covering the basics of on-page and off-page optimisation. This followed with a chatper about how to use your website to build multiple entry points for visitors, a concept that Ben calls multiplicity - a strategy that we have seen work time and time again.

The next chapter was focused on what really interested me, a concept that can help anyone make their website perform better - Ben calls it The Awareness Ladder. The theory is that there are six steps of awareness that people will go through to buy a product or service:

Step 0: Not aware of the need - people are not aware of the need for the product or service, so you have to educate them.
Step 1: Aware of a need (but not aware solutions exist)
Step 2: Aware of some solutuions (but not your specific one)
Step 3: Aware of the specific solution (but not of its benefits)
Step 4: Aware of the benefits (but not convinced)
Step 5: Convinced and ready to buy

You have to lead people through each step of the ladder in order to make the sale, presenting the right messages at the right time to propel them to the next step. This is one of the fundamental principles of making any website convert better, creating pages for each step and leading people through to the next level will improve your conversion.

The second part of the book was focused on how to design your site to sell better and how to research, test and implement changes to your site that will significantly improve conversion and how to lead people down the steps of the awareness ladder. There were lots of examples given throughout the book to illustrate each point and how seamingly small changes can make a big difference.

The other major lesson is to test your ideas using a multivarient testing tool and let your customers tell you which ideas work the best. This book contains lots of useful information and is a worthwhile read for site owners and professionals a like, it now has 31 one reviews on Amazon with an avergage 5 star rating - clearly I'm not the only one who things its a good read!

New domain names suffixes available .yourcompany

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:17:34 +0000

On Thursday 12 January 2012 a new service will be available for businesses to apply for practically any web address suffix. For example we could see http://shop.pepsi or http://dell.computers as opposed to the traditional top level domain endings (.com .org .net).

Not cheap

Before you get excited about having your own TLD you mght want to know that it could cost £120,000 just to apply for the new suffix. It is potentially one of the biggest updates to the internet that we have seen in 25 years.

You can find out more about this by reading the BBC news piece and the ICCAN website.

Image credit

Why you should be thinking about a mobile website in 2012

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:00:00 +0000

With the amount of people using their mobile phone to browse the internet increasing every single day, now represents the perfect time to start thinking about the benefits of a mobile website for your business.

Last year, it was reported that there were over 48,500,000 active mobile internet users (source), yet only 21% of online advertisers currently have a mobile optimised website (data from a previous mobile blog post) - leaving a huge opportunity for the remaining 79% of online businesses. If you think about how often you check your emails on your mobile phone, wouldn't you be more likely to act if you clicked through to a quick, user-friendly mobile page rather than a desktop page that is barely readible?

You don't necessarily need a full-on mobile website to start converting more mobile users, you could just have your existing website optimised for mobile devices. Responsive design enables the pages of your site to respond to different browsers/devices, providing an optimised user experience that is much more likely to generate conversions. Responsive design has become really popular over the last 12 months and is a great alternative to a full mobile website.

Obviously the value of a mobile website differs depending on your business, with some sectors seeing up to 50% of their orders coming from mobile phones. According to a Google employee speaking at a recent Google Engage event, one third of flowers purchased on Mother's Day 2011 were ordered from mobile devices. This is just one example, but it's well worth looking through your Google Analytics data to see how much of your traffic is coming from mobile users.

Ecommerce websites in particular will be in a much better position to convert more users if their website makes it easier to find information and buy products. We're going to be releasing a series of ecommerce-related blog posts in 2012 and one of the highlights that we'll be focusing on is the ease of buying from mobile devices. I've found myself trying to order products on my phone on several occasions, only to stop due to a lengthy and annoying checkout process.

Depending on your design and functionality requirements, you could look into making a mobile website yourself, there are a number of guides and templates available that can help you along the way. However, if you're looking for more advanced features, a more specific design or ecommerce capabilities, I would strongly recommend using a good, experienced agency.

Here is a short video about responsive design.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;For more information about mobile websites and the related services that we provide &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="/solutions/design/mobile-web-design/" mce_href="/solutions/design/mobile-web-design/"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;click here&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

If you would like to find out more about mobile websites or responsive design visit our mobile design page or call us on 020 7183 1072.

High Street and Online Retail - The Portas Review 2012

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:18:23 +0000

Mary Portas is a retail and marketing consultant who was asked my the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister to create an independant report on the state of our High Streets. Mary recently published a 28 point report recommending various initiatives to improve High Street retail and encourage shoppers to return to their local shops. You can download the pdf report here (1.9mb).

Mary's goal is pretty clear:

"My goal is to breathe economic and community life back into our High Streets and town centres. I want to see all our High Streets bustling with people, services, and jobs. They should be vibrant places that people choose to visit. They should be destinations. Anything less is a wasted opportunity."

Here are the summaries of her 28 points of recommendation if you don't want to read the full report.

I agree that the sense of community and convienence of High Street shopping is a good thing but I for one am in favour of better online shopping. There is a need for local shops and ammenities but without punishing the owners of the large, out of town shopping centers I cannot see how the High Street can be turned around. With the arrival of m-commerce (mobile shopping) I believe the High Street will suffer far more than anyone has anticipated so far.

What are your thoughts on this? Please comment on this post or Tweet @iamtotallyrich

London Green Hackathon 2012

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:39:29 +0000

If you are a kickass developer and are passionate about climate change, sustainability, energy and carbon emissions you should get involved in the London Green Hackathon on 28-29 January 2012.

AMEE have organised a fantastic event at University College London where they'll have thought leaders presenting some short talks, 24 hours of coding and prizes for the winners. More details will be announced in December so keep an eye on the LGH site and follow @AMEEdev and @greenhackathon for updates as they happen.

The 2011 Social Buzz Awards

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:13:41 +0000

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to the first ever Social Buzz Awards at Wembley Stadium.

The event has been organised to recognise the most creative and engaging use of social media in the UK.

Here's a video overview of the event:

Awards and Winners

Grand Prix

AWARD

Company: Revolver Entertainment
Client: Revolver Entertainment
Title: ANUVAHOOD - THE SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN THAT TURNED A LOW BUDGET FEATURE FILM INTO A BOX OFFICE HIT

Chairman’s Award

AWARD

Company: Illegal Jack's South West Grill
Client: Illegal Jack's South West Grill
Title: Customer-Driven Music Videos!

Social Media Team/Individual of the Year

AWARD

Seventy Seven PR

Best use of Twitter

AWARD

Company: Opta
Client: Opta
Title: Opta Joe & Family

Best use of Facebook

AWARD

Company: TBG Digital
Client: Heineken
Title: Music matcher

Best use of Group/Community

AWARD

Company: Anomaly
Client: Sony Music
Title: Vaccines Video

Best Use of Check in/Location Based Services

AWARD

Company: Shelter Scotland
Client: Shelter Scotland
Title: Social Media for Social Good: Shelter Scotland and Foursquare

Best use of Photosharing

AWARD

Company: Crayon
Client: Sony UK
Title: Sony World Photography Awards

Best use of Video

AWARD

Company: 1000heads
Client: Nokia
Title: N8Producers

AWARD

Company: Seventy Seven Social
Client: Nintendo
Title: Flipping Out With Aardman

Best Blog

AWARD

Company: Which?
Client: Which? Conversation
Title: A blog where your comments have an impact

Best Innovation

AWARD

Company: Geronimo
Client: Guinness (Diageo)
Title: Sharing a pint on the ‘Friendliest Day of the Year’

Best App

AWARD

Company: Gondola Group
Client: Pizza Express
Title: Payment App

Best Copywriting

AWARD

Company: Evidently
Client: David Cornfield Melanoma Fund
Title: Dear 16-year-old-Me

Best Meme

AWARD

Company: Evidently
Client: David Cornfield Melanoma Fund
Title: Dear 16-year-old-Me

Breakthrough Website

AWARD

Company: Naked Wines
Client: Naked Wines
Title: Don't Debate. Prototype

Best Social Media Customer Service Strategy

AWARD

Company: Fishburn Hedges
Client: BBC TV Licensing
Title: ‘Customer relations support in a new world’

Best Stunt

AWARD

Company: 1000heads
Client: F-Secure
Title: Be Smarter Than John

Best Socially Responsible Initiative

AWARD

Company: Delib
Client: Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)
Title: My2050

AWARD

Company: TBWA\Manchester
Client: The Co-operative Group
Title: Join the Revolution launch

Best FMCG Social Media Strategy

AWARD

Company: TBG Digital
Client: Heineken
Title: Music matcher

Best Travel / Leisure / Sports Media Strategy

AWARD

Company: SapientNitro
Client: Foot Locker Europe
Title: Sneakerpedia

Best Retail / E-Commerce Social Media Strategy

AWARD

Company: FreshNetworks/ TM Lewin
Client: TM Lewin
Title: "Off the Cuff" - TM Lewin's social media hub

Best Charity / Not for Profit Social Media Strategy

AWARD

Company: Which?
Client: Which?
Title: Consumer champion Which? Uses social tools to fix company cock-ups

Best Professional Sector Social Media Strategy

AWARD

Company: Prodo Digital Marketing Ltd
Client: Walker Smith Way Solicitors
Title: Approachable and Social Law: Social Media for a firm of Solicitors

Best B2B Sector Social Media Strategy

AWARD

Company: Prodo Digital Marketing Ltd
Client: Salons Direct Lts
Title: It's a Snip: Social Media for a Salon Supplier

Best Integrated Campaign

AWARD

Company: Revolver Entertainment
Client: Revolver Entertainment
Title: ANUVAHOOD - THE SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN THAT TURNED A LOW BUDGET FEATURE FILM INTO A BOX OFFICE HIT

Special thanks to Diane are the Recommended Agency Register for the invite. Source for award info: The Drum

If you are looking for some help with your companies social strategy and online marketing please get in touch.

Mobile & Real Time Optimisation - Amy Africa at Conversion Conference 2011

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:13:43 +0000

Amy is a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold a number of businesses, she is also a well known blogger, check out her Web Marketing blog. Her fast paced talk was packed with information on how to get the best from your mobile website. She outlined 38 tips for optimising your website in 45 mins:

Tip 1 - Optimise your Speed

For mobile, speed is the only thing the matters, mobile users will not wait 15s. Your goal, whether or not you choose to accept it, is a low page weight. The best pages have a page weight of 50kb (eg. The Dell UK page).

Tip 2 - Navigation is Really Important – Be Clear About Your Goals

In mobile, navigation accounts for about 70-80% of your success, for desktop 40 -60%. For mobile websites your goals have to be really simple and clear. In the mobile world you can't do multiple goals so sticking to 1 or 2 is best.

Tip 3 - Focus on One Thing

Be it getting the lead, getting the order or getting an e-mail address. The companies who are successful with mobile live and die by their goal funnels, and keep in mind that if your average desktop user session is 7 minutes. Our best case user session on mobile will be 3-4 minutes.

Tip 4 – Work on Your Diversions

Have different pages depending on the source of the traffic i.e. PPC versus search. In mobile you might have 50 different landing pages in a diversion. What are mobile diversions?

Tip 5 – Sell Where Your User Wants to be Sold

From a user perspecitive we are not going to convert on a mobile device – so work out where the best place a person is going to convert. So different sources will convert in different ways i.e. Twitter converts well on the phone.

Tip 6 - Situational Context Can Be Key

Consider the use of GPS etc

Tip 7 - Brand Match

We have one view to make it happen and that's ONE view - No Scolling, this applies to everything, including products. In the mobile world there are 15 times more distractions to contend with as users are usually out and about so make sure users know where they can and can't get the info they want quickly.

Tip 8 - Detection

Implement user-agent detection, if you know the device a user is on give them the best experience for that device. Period. End of story.If you have an app and you think its better than a mobile website then direct users to it, if you don't have an app drive them to your mobile website.

Tip 9 – Know Where the User is Coming From

If the user is coming from a shopping site they are only interested in price and your USPs (if it's not price) give them the information upfront. Email has the highest conversion rate, so optimise for it and remember that 50% of UK users read their email on a mobile device.

Tip 10 – User Linking is Key

How is the user using the entire process?

Tip 11 – An App is not a Mobile Site, It's an App

If you don't have something really interesting - invest in a mobile website

Tip 12 – The iPad is not a Mobile Device

An iPad should convert at twice your normal website. A mobile website will covert a third less than a normal website. Look at what works best for you (every company is different) and provide the right experience for those devices.

Tip 13 – You Will Get More Mobile Info From Non-Mobile Channels

Collect mobile numbers everywhere you can (i.e. on every channel).

Tip 14 – Navigation Makes up the Majority of Your Success

Users expect to browse and / or buy the same products that are on your regular website so make sure your inventory is the same and is easy to find.

Tip 15 - Top vs Bottom Navigation

There is a very big difference – top is better than bottom – you have limited chances to convert so streamline you navigation. On desktop, 80% of people will scroll, on a mobile device users do scroll but 92% of the time is spent on the first view (the page without scrolling), i.e. they scroll but they spend most of their time and attention on the top of the page.

Tip 16 - Ease of User-Agent

Make it easy - use breadcrumbs, sorts, jump links.

Tip 17 - Do Not Depend on the Scroll

Tip 18 - Size Matters

Use BIG buttons - Bigger Bolder Better.

Tip 19 - Mobilise Not Minaturise

Make your forms shorter and simpler – only collect what you really need. Desktop forms do not work on mobile, on desktop sites on average, abandonment rates in the checkout are 65% for mobile its 95% - so use short forms and streamline the process.

Tip 20 - The Size of the Fields Will Make a Difference

Vertical fields will work better.

Tip 21 - Simplify the Sign-In on Checkout or Lead Forms

Rule of thumb - no registration

Tip 22 - If There are Mulitple Steps...

You need to be clear about the length of the process.

Tip 23 - You Can't Count on the Pinch

Tip 24 - Click to Call is Where It's At

The best way to get mobile conversion is to get the user to call you.

Tip 25 - Graphical Icons Can Help

... but you have to test them.

Tip 26 Limit the Number of Menu Options

Tip 27 Put your Search Box Front and Centre

... and make it big.

Tip 28 Work your Search Function

Auto suggestion is really useful for mobile.

Tip 29 Work on Filters

Filters will make a big difference.

Tip 30 Alternative Choices

Consider the many different ways there are to find things.

Tip 31 Size your Images & Pages Appropriately

Tip 32 Be Wise

Tip 33 Work Your MT'S

Tip 34 Always Have an Email Option

Users will send emails to themselves so make sure it's easy.

Tip 35 Abandoned Programs Are Key

Series of emails. Works for lead forms and shopping carts

Tip 36 Sharing Works

But be careful – if they share they will not come back to your website.

Tip 37 View Full Website Should Always Be There

Tip 38 Measure What Matters

Amy suggested using Bango to measure mobile traffic as it's better than Google is at doing this (at the time of writing).

Final tip was to use mobilemoxie.com to see what your site looks like on mobile devices.

Next Talk: The Science of Split And Multivariant Testing By Dr Karl Blanks

The Science of Split And Multivariant Testing - Karl Blanks at Conversion Conference 2011

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:13:44 +0000

Dr Karl Blanks is Chairman of Conversion Rate Experts (CRE) and began by outlining how he and Ben Jesson first started in conversion rate optimisation and how they tripled the sales of Modal, a telecoms company in less than 12 months. They apply this same process to all their client projects.

They find that split testing gives you surprise results and things that you weren't expecting to see and these unexpected results can have a big effect on conversion.

Before and after tests stink! Because external variables will change this is where A/B and Multivarient testing come in to their own because they allow you to implement continuous improvements.

If you pick an early goal (e.g. CTR or Bounce Rate) these are not good as the main goals for split or multivarient testing – you need tangible goals (e.g. Orders) - you can't take Click Through Rates to the bank.

Writing good copy is important and a lot can be learnt form direct marketing, were a lot of research has been done. For example, Martin Conroy wrote an advert for the Wall Street Journal which is the most successful advert ever.

Multi-variant allows you to run lots of split tests at once. Useful if you have several split tests that could be carried out simultaneously.

They tend to run A/B testing to start with – i.e. to test completely different routes, use multi-variant test to test the finer elements of the design.

CRE have published a website that compares all the multi-variant testing tools on the market - look at www.whichmvt.com – find which testing platform is best for you.

The main point here is that tools will only get you so far! If you put garbage in you get garbage out! It's not about the tool, it's about what you do with it.

How long will will your A/B split test take – if you test the small things it will take a long time, big bold tests will get results much more quickly.

Here is how you should approach testing:

Know the Rules of the Game – know your business KPIs, USPs and can you afford to outbid your competitors on PPC?
Understanding and tuning your existing traffic sources
Understand your visitors – particularly your non-converting ones – know why they are not ordering.
Advanced Marketing Intelligentence – know your market
Spot the hidden wealth in your company
Create your experimental strategy
Design your webpages
Carry out your experiments
Transfer your results to other media

KISSmetrics have had made a great infographic of the conversion optimisation process

First know why your visitors aren't converting

Where do you start? Look at Google's visitor flow and unblock the blocked arteries – work on your high traffic pages first. Segment by visits with conversions.

How do you know what's blocked? Look at exits and look at the page – does it make sense? If not, you have a blockage. A lot of what CRE do is taken from process engineering.

Secondly create the missing links

Create M&M trails (in ET Elliot uses a trail of M&M's to get ET into the house), lead your users down the path to conversion don't expect people to do what you want straight away.

Three column approach – create a good sales funnel

Thirdly create an ideas list in Excel

Use three columns:

The idea
How likely is it to double the business
How much effort is needed?

Then create a score based on likelness to double the business and how easy is it to implement and start with the top ideas.

Karl talked about persuasive marketing and, in particular, underhand ways to get people to buy (wiki.darkpatterns.org) and recommended against these method as it doesn't build an honest long term business.

Method Marketing

This was my favourite part of the talk, something CRE do is method marketing, like method acting – when Robert De Niro get the part for Taxi Driver he went to New York and got a job as a taxi driver.

So do the same when working on improving a website's conversion rate.

Order the product
Use Vira Screen flow and video yourself researching and ordering the product
Karl spent 2.5 hours buying an iphone
Go into store and experience the offline process
Use the product (Karl joined weight watchers)
Ben ordered a shed, had to get it through his house it didn't fit and the company realised this was a common problem so re-designed their shed so it was easier to carry through a house

Other Tips

Use objection / counter objection
SEO Moz example – placing a video of the sales person selling SEO moz pro increased conversion by 53%
Sunshine – explaining why there was no phone number helped grow sales by $14million
Ask your converted customers what the main motivation for ordering today was. Then integrate the findings into landing pages.
Have a look at the million dollar homepage

Next Talk: Where's My Conversion by Craig Sullivan

Where is My Conversion? Craig Sullivan & Jeff Greenfield at Conversion Conference 2011

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 18:13:44 +0000

Craig Sullivan is the Group Customer Experience Manager at Belron (who own Autoglass). Craig started by outlining what conversion rate optimisation is - any idea must have the goal of improving one of these 5:

Profit
Net Promoter Score
Lower Costs
Productivity
Simply Delight the Customer

At Belron, Craig's department has delivered a 5000% return on investment, for every £1 they put in they get £50 back.

My key take aways:

Usability & customers are the glue for conversion rate optimisation
Make lots mistakes and learn from them
Do both A/B split testing and MVT
Interesting point about stock images - they convert worse – always use your own images
The most benefits are derived from combining usability test with MVT
By doing website, mobile and other channels together you get a lot of cross benefits
Body language is important in pictures
They use an x-factor style comp to test actors and create videos of them, which are then tested MVT to see which actor performs best online
Interesting point from both Karl and Craig - base your ideas on what you think first i.e if you really hate something or don't understand it don't do it
Belron tested live chat and found they saved 17 calls, but had 329 chats at about 8.25 minutes each - not a great result
Call tracking with infinity tracking – allows you to track conversions across multi-channels
Overall they have achieved a 32% measured increase in conversions

Jeff Greenfield is COO and Co-Founder of C3 Metrics. Jeff's talk was all about attribution - online tracking attributed conversions to the last action and ignored the fact that most users will touch multiple marketing activities before they convert.

My key take aways:

37% of conversions end with a brand related search
44% of conversions start with display advertsing
C3 metrics allows you to track all touch points along the funnel and attribute a value to each
They have had incredible results by allowing companies to identify which marketing activites are really driving sales

Next Talk: Confessions of a Conversion Rate Optimiser by Bryan Eisenberg

Confessions of a Conversion Rate Optimiser by Bryan Eisenberg at Conversion Conference 2011

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:13:44 +0000

Bryan Eisenburg is a professional speaker, best selling author and consultant. His Marketing Blog is also worth reading.

Bryan started optimising a bulliten board on Atari 800, started Future Now in 1998, which took a long time to get going as nobody was interested in conversion then.

Currently the average conversion rate is 2-3% and $56.8 Billion will be spent on generating web traffic. Most websites don't have a traffic problem... but every site has a conversion problem!

If this was a real world store and 98% people left without buying you'd be out of business. The problem is that most companies don't take the time to work out how to optimise the flow. Companies typically spend $92 driving traffic and $1 working on conversion.

“I know that half my ad dollars are wasted, I just don't know which half” John Wannamaker

Bryan showed a shortened clip of Sell or Else by David Ogilvy. This is a video from 1950 and this is still a problem today, testing Direct Marketing takes a long time, but we now have a way to run quick and easy tests online and the learning can be used across all marketing activities.

The current state of optimisation is that we want a Ferrari but we have a Mazda, it's the next big thing because as advertising gets more expensive, companies will have to optimise their wesbites to survive.

Some interesting points:

Magmall and he increased conversion from 1.11% to 4.43%, magmall's major competitor at the time was enews but they didn't optimise and went bust whilst magmall went from strength to strength.
Total Gym - one simple change, removal of the splash page increased conversion by 39%.
CafePress.com - they created what Brian said was checkout ever with a completion rate of over 80%.
If nobody wants to buy your product no one will buy it - conversion is pointless.
Tweaked landing page resulted in 4.5% conversion rate – 1800% increase in revenue.
Dell – learned from them you have to prioritise the recommendations, one change - link text from 'Learn More' to 'Help me choose' was biggest win out of hundreds of recommendations
One client had over 500,000 landing pages and did well – but major time and maintence was a big problem - Conversion is a journey NOT a landing page
Persuasion Architecture (Bryans orginial approach) is time consuming so for an approach that was fast they asked how much time clients had to implement changes and made recommendations that could be done in that time
Presented some interesting highlights from the Econsultancy Conversion Rate Optimization Report
Recommended not to do Slice & Dice optimization – too much resource required, instead focus on achieable improvements
The tag line is a really import on a page
Have a clear hypothesis for every test
Have a team responsible for CRO, test fast test often
Have a look at WebsiteTestingTools.com
Use bo.lt – read the launch story of bolt
Look at btbuckets – use advanced segmentation with google website optimiser
Look atruna.com – instant personal deals
Look at Monetate – see the demos

Bryan then listed most impactful things to look at:

Badging (eg. on products)
Message consistency (across all channels)
Email acquisition
The Conversion Trinity
Relevance
Value proposition
Call to action

His last and biggest confession:

Take one bite at a time

Next Talk: Ecommerce Best Practice by Paul Rouke & Stephen Pavlovich

Ecommerce Best Practice by Paul Rouke & Stephen Pavlovich at Conversion Conference 2011

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:14:00 +0000

The second presentation came from Paul Rouke, Head of Usability, Trainer and Consultant at PRWD

Paul highlighted the main conversion principles for e-commerce:

Provide Transparency
Build Trust and Confidence
Remove Barriers to Entry

In addition to these, make sure you know your value proposition and deliver it clearly - have a key messages bar.

Best practice tips & techniques

Product pages - How to add the product to your shopping bag

Transparency around the delivery options and returns
Understand what your users are looking for and provide the detail
Social proof – customer ratings place in a prominent position
Use tab navigation to feature important information

Shopping Bag - How to encourage people to checkout

Provide transparency around delivery cost
Make the call to action clear (q. cta low down lakeland versus john lewis)
ASOS allow you to change product specification in the cart
Make payment options prominent in the shopping bag
Put security high up on the page
Feature the word securely on the checkout button

New Customer Checkout

Put password in at the end – make account creation optional
Read Paul's article 'Presuasive checkout best practice from ASOS' on Econsultancy

Persuasive design

Look at naked wines - very good example
Read Paul's article 'Booking.com: improving conversion with best practice persuasive design' on Econsultancy

Paul has a very useful resources page http://bit.ly/CROresources

Stephen Pavlovich is a Director at the Conversion Factory

Five key take aways for ecommerce optimisation

1. Look at analytics

Look at the shopping funnel
Look at top landing pages
Look at browser conversion rate (Browsershots / ClickTale) Safari will inclide iOS (low conversion)
Look at site search – higher conversion from visits with site search (ask for PDF)

2. Don't guess objections

Talk to both visitors and customers
Customers – what is the one thing that nearly stopped you buying from us (free text)
Can you then make some business decisions to make it better

3. Use benefit bars

Use light box to show quick view of benefits

4. Pimp Your Shopping Basket

Show saving RRP on shopping cart
Show stock availability to increase persuation

5. Get reviews for PPC

One of dooyou / TrustPilot / review center (recommend Trust Pilot)

Other tips

Use site search to check that you are using the right labelling in your navigation
Ticketing websites - work out time between purchase date and event date for each source of traffic and use this for marketing

Next Talk: Why won't you buy? Finding and Eliminating Conversion Blockers by Dr Karl Blanks & Rob Jackson

Why won't you buy? Finding and Eliminating Conversion Blockers by Dr Karl Blanks & Rob Jackson at Conversion Conference 2011

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:14:11 +0000

The first speaker was Dr Karl Blanks, Chairman of Conversion Rate Experts.

Every website has objections, the key is to find them and eliminate them. Here are 16 Conversion Killers – keep in mind that it's most likely that one of these killers is affecting your conversion rate, not all:

Not split testing
Meek tweaking
Customer isn't in shopping mode (book store example – make browsers happy)
Unclear value proposition
Lack of trust (see mercola.com)
Lack of interest (4Q use as an exit survey, trading platform)
Confusion (visitor just doesn't understand what you do, Read Strunk & White, Plain English Campaign. TIP: read out all website copy)
Usability (UserTesting.com, or find a real user, ethn.io)
Product-specific objections (draw up a shopping list of questions real users ask and make sure they are answered)
Fatal distraction (doorbell rings – try to get their contact details as soon as possible)
Don't believe your company or products are any good (prove they are)
Your competitor gets the sale (everyone assumes this is the big one, niching, shampoo)
Too much perceived risk
Prospect defers decision (Urgency)
The merchant's site is terrible (affiliates, persuade before they leave, qualify the user)
Bad prior experience

The second speaker was Rob Jackson, Founder of Conversion Thursday UK.

Three main areas to work on in order to get users to convert:

Persuasion architecture
User-centric design
Relevancy

Main reasons why users don't convert:

1. Not having a massive green call to action... or blue

2. Not having a measurement strategy

Evaluation is key
Framework of KPI's
Core business segments
Targets & alerts
Dashboards & reporting matrix

3. Ignoring the mobile internet user (what is fast access mode)

Look at conversion rate for mobile devices
Create a table showing current revenue and then apply standard site conversion and show what the revenue is not enough
If that is not enough show a projection over 12 months
Happy HIPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion)
A full m-commerce website is not always needed
Focus on the what you're trying to achieve
Simple mobile contact form gave a 13% uplift in conversion
Look at reagge ready

4. Ignoring high value segment

Look at channels
Look at the position in the purchase funnel
Analyse KPI's by segment look at segments that differ greatly from the average (e.g Site Ave, Social, +3 visits)

Next Talk: Decision Triggers - Brian Science & Conversions by Andre Morys

Decision Triggers – Brain Science & Conversions - Andre Morys at Conversion Conference 2011

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:14:19 +0000

Andrew Morys, CEO at Web Arts, talked about the psychology of what makes people buy, which I found fascinating and it was one of my favourites of the event.

Andre started by looking at the web and what it is at it's core - the web is people, so to improve conversion we need to understand people and how they behave.

The current cycle that most marketers think about is, generate traffic to the website then analyise with web analytics. They are missing the person in the process, their perception, limibic system, prefrontal portex, motor control and their hand - all the things that give stimulus to someone to buy from the website - as marketers, we think we are getting the stimulus right, however most customers see things as clearly as we do.

Alot of the time people don't know why they do things themsleves, so how can we as online marketers know what will make them buy? Understanding your customers decision making process (social and unconscious) is vital to conversion rate optimisation.

Andre has built up a toolbox of rules or heurstics in order to understand how the decision process works; Contrast, Commitment, Consistency, Sympathy, Resonance, Reciprocity, Scarcity, Social Proof and Authority.

Social proof is that people do what other people do. Gave an example of a restaurant, he asked the room a question: given a choice of two restaurants in restaurant A there is a 30 min wait, in restaurant B you are served instantly - which one would you choose? Most people said B. Andre then showed a picture of the restaurants - A was packed, B was empty - which one would you choose now?

An example of social proof as a factor in conversion is the test they did on the FireFox download page - putting the number of downloads so far (79,337,067) resulted in people downloading the software (1,700,000 more).

In another experiment, one group of people were given 10 cookies, the second group were given 2 cookies, both groups were asked to rate the taste, whether they would buy them and what price would they suggest. Group 2 rated the taste better, were more likely to buy and would pay a higher price, showing that scarcity makes people want something more - in this case 21.6% more.

The second stage of the test was to run the same test with two more groups, this time, group one got 10 cookies as before, group two also got 10 but then 8 were taken away saying they needed them for other groups. The result was group two rated the taste much better were more likely to buy and at an even higher price - overall 53.8% higher that group one.

An example of scarcity as a factor in conversion is a test they ran for a photo copier company, one landing page focused on the features as a benefit, the other offered a deal only available for 48 hours, the latter landing page had converted 138% better than the former.

When looking at contrast, Andre gave the following example, giving a choice of two bottles of lager - one priced at 1.60 euros the other at 2.60 euros, 57% chose the cheaper bottle. When a third bottle was added, priced at 3 euros 63% of people choose the 2.80 euro bottle - an uplift of 12%.

Andre went on to show a number of examples where adding a third, more expensive option increased the conversion of the middle option, he also gave an example where listing the options in descending order rather than ascending order resulted in a 35% increase.

Resonance is about triggering an emotional response, in order to measure the emotional response to a design Web Arts used an MRI scan to test the emotional response to two shoe retailer websites - the first Zappos and the second Shoe Guru, Zappos has a more cluttered design where as Shoe Guru has one hero photo of a shoe and a much more simple design, the part are of the brain responsible for emotion is the Nucleus accumbens, the emotional response to Shoe Guru was much stronger than Zappos.

They ran a test for a shoe retailer in Germany where they first surveyed people to ask them what factors influenced their decision to buy, the designs tested were the orignal content but layout optimised for emotional response, content changed to focus on quailty, content changed to focus on style, content changed to focus on dominance (i.e. status, how cool the shoe is and howit makes you feel). The dominance version won the test with an uplift of 79%.

This approach doesn't only work for shoes, they tested the same approach for a product I had never heard of - armpit sweat pads - where they tested three landing pages with the same design with different copy:

One focused on feeling good
One focused on how the product will make you more attactive
One focsed on controlling the situation

The landing page focused on controlling the problem (of sweaty armpits) gave a 93% increase in conversion.

Andre finished with 5 tips for CRO:

1. Look outside your web analytics system, watch user behaviour live!
2. Learn about behavioural economics, consumer psychology and neuromaketing. Lindstorm
3. Find out, what motivates your clients.
4. Don't test things on the surface, test social effects and motives.
5. Don't wait for tips from somebody else, learn from you customers.

All in all a really interesting talk and one that really reasonated with me.

View the slides.

Praxeology - Lessons from a lost science - Rory Sutherland at Conversion Conference 2011

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:12:25 +0000

Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman at Ogilvy Group UK, delivered a strong presentation, which I found very entertaining and interesting.

Rory started out with an example - when working on a BT project that was aiming to sell additional features to consumers, they tested the response rate based on which channels they promoted in the copy, then tested three variations:

Just phone as a channel had a response rate of 1.5%
Just post as a channel had a response rate of3%
Phone & post had a response rate of 4.5%

Time and time again the key to selling a product is not the features or price but the channel you allow them to buy through.

Never look at the purchasers of your product and assume that the age has anything to do with the demographic, it's likely to be the channel through which you sell your product that determines this. The more important question to consumers is how easy is the purchase of the product, for economists this is hard to grasp.

Rory gave an example of the choice between two pensions where one provides 15% more return. Logically you should choose this one, however in reality you are more likely to choose the one with the easyiest application form.

In website design, small changes can have huge effects in conversions, Rory suggested that we should spend more time looking for these small changes than bigger things.

Rory then went on to talk about hyperbolic discounting – we have a tendency to view near field expenditure to long field expenditure. For example if you offer someone £1 today or £2 tomorrow, most would take £1 today. However if you offer them £1 in 7 days or £2 in 8 days most would take £2.

Richard Thaler invented a new approach to pensions called Save More Tomorrow, where you sign up to allocate a portion of future salary increases to a pension scheme, you pay nothing now, then when you get a pay raise, 20% of the increase goes in to the pension – so there was no loss on income. This approach resulted in double the uptake and double the savings.

A few problems with Marketing:

Marketing is lacking in influence
No first principles
The dirty little secret – we don't have a model (have procedures but no model)
Obsession with attitude, not behaviour

Accountants do have a model, which means that unless marketers also have a model they will always be subservient to them. The problem with the accountants is that most of them are a little thick (Rory's words!) – they are failed mathematicians who know the model but don't understand the reasons behind why it exists. All models start off as an aid to thinking and end up as a substitute for thinking.

So finally and happily we have the opportunity to create something in developing a model based on behaviourial economics. If you can't sit in the boardroom and challenge the accountant's model you don't deserve to be there – but you need a model to be able to do it.

Rory used the development of Eurostar as an example, he said that the important thing about the Eurostart journey is the start and the end - but we spent £6billion shortening the journey and very little on the start and end of the journey.

Creativity is policed by logic but the logic is not policed by creativity. This is dangerous bias in business. Einstien said "Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts".

Marketers start with the human and work outwards, the best investment Transport For London ever made was putting dot matrix panels on the platforms – the problem people had with waiting for the next train was the uncertainty. The screens on each platform solved this and massively improved people's experiences of the tube.

Koreans have traffic lights that count down the redlight - so drivers know when it's about to change, this makes the wait less frustrating, incidentally the Chinese have a green countdown, this is a terribly bad idea as people speed up to make the light.

The sweet spot is the cross section of Technology Psychology and Economics – great ideas based on all three disciplines.

An example of this that had to be dealt with was the problem that people were not showing up to their GP appointments. Several ideas were tested:

Firstly, a notice in the waiting room, this is a bad idea because the people in the waiting room are not missing their appointments - but putting up a notice tells them that lots are - making it more acceptable to do so
Second idea was to send a text message the day before the appointment which worked well
Third text message requiring a reply, "Are you planning to come to your appointment tomorrow?" this is the sweet spot idea

Rory suggested a solution for making people complete their course of antibiotics - instead of 24 white pills give 18 white ones and 6 blue ones – chunking means people are more likely to complete the course.

Ludwig von Mises is Rory's hero – he was an economist at the time of freud – he believed that psychology is more important than econonmics and first applied the term Praxeology.

In the Art world, if a £4,000 painting doesn't sell in two weeks most galleries will double the price, and the picture is more liekly to sell. Rory followed this point with the questiion "Are there any brand leaders in any category that are also the cheapest? (prehaps Ryan Air and Wallmart but mostly not)

Ludwig von Mises pointed out that, in a restaurtant, you cannot distinguish between creating the food and cleaning the floor, because both are equally important. It's no good serving michelin star food if the restaurant is dirty - you will not succeed.

Royal Mail spent a huge amount of time and effort trying to get the percentage of first class post the was delivered within one day from 98% to 99%, this was a huge waste of effort because the perception in the public was that the rate was more like 50% - 60%, so the problem was the perception not the reality and there would have been more value in improving the public perception rather than the reality.

Our perception is that a clean car drives better.

Peacocks need to show genetical fitness, they do this with bong song and tail feathers which gives the perception of genetical prowess.

Rory suggested that women dress to impress women because dressing to impress men is too easy - men don't care about bags or shoes, women focus on this to impress other women not men.

Women look for signs of long term commitment from men because women can have one or two kids a year – men could have thousands. The traditional way of showing this is for men to make big signs of committment - i.e buying an engagement ring.

Country pub not tourist restaurant form of capitalisum – country pubs rely on their reputation to ensure that people come back, every experience is important. Whereas a tourist restaurant does not need to - chances are that their customers will not come back anyway. Branding is the upfront investment that proves long term commitment

Women like men to buy them flowers and jewellery because it shows a sacrifice – men don't like jewellery or flowers.

Rory made the same point as Andre about the rule of three, Steve jobs was a great believer in this as well and this is the reason that Apple products always came in three options.

It's all about perception, Rolls Royce cars are marketed at air shows not car shows - when you've spent the day looking at jets, £300k on a car doesn't seem as expensive.

Rory recommended reading Nudge By Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

My write-up really doesn't do this talk justice, Rory is a great public speaker and the talk was excellent.

Next Talk: Campaign Management and its Effect on Conversion Rate by Alan Coleman.

Campaign management and it's impact on the conversion rate - Alan Coleman at Conversion Conference 2011

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:12:26 +0000

Alan Coleman is CEO of OnlineAdvertising.ie and has also been awarded a gold medal award for Irish digital agency of the year.

Alan covered 6 Questions:

1. What are you optimising for, Clicks or Conversions?

There tends to be an inverse relationship – more clicks equals lower conversion rate and less click means a higher conversion rate. For example, if you include the product price in an advert you are pre-qualifying, so you should get less clicks but a higher conversion rate.

2. When does lower avg position = more conversion?

This backed up Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google. The quality of your traffic doesn't vary based on your ad position - what this means is that your conversion rate should stay the same whatever position your ad is shown in.

Impression share gets left out, it's a very useful stat that allows you to work out your budget. This is the number of times your ad has been shown versus the number of times it could have been shown if it wasn't limited by budget, shown as a percentage

3. What is the critical stat not in your adwords interface?

This is impression to conversion rate and CTR to conversion rate.

4. How do people interact with various ad formats?

Alan tested how the various ad formats performed:

Text Adverts – got the most conversions - 455 (great from direct response)
Banner Adverts - 130 conversions – but more impressions - view through conversions 180 (great for touch points)
Videos Adverts – CTR very high, conversion rate highest

5. Are you re-marketing / retargetting?

Remarketing campaigns have higher CTR and conversion rates
Recommend that you cap the frequency to 3 or 4 times
Image ads convert better
Remarket by topic

6. Most important development of 2011:

Understanding the paths to purchase or attribution (the assisted conversions report in Google Analytics)

Next Talk: Engaging Content... that Converts - Richard Falconer

Engaging content... that converts - Richard Falconer at Conversion Conference 2011

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:12:26 +0000

Richard Falconer is Head of Technical Services at Big Mouth Media.

Understanding your content is vital to conversion rate optimisation. Content represents your company across the web – not just on your website. When we talk about content we mean everything, lists, emails, articles etc.

Richard outlined four different types of content; Authority Content, User-Generated Content, Content Curation, Confidence Content.

Authority Content

White papers
News
FAQ's
Survey Data
Infographics
Guest Blogging
Articles

A lot of this content is created and people are missing the point – more time needs to be spent on creating this content. Social proof is happening for this type of content and being used in ranking (look up authorship markup).

User Generated Content

Reviews
Q&A's
Comments
Message Boards
Reviews are a fantastic way to increase conversions (Nielsen Wire)

airbnb are a great example of a website with good social interaction.

Content Curation

Custom RSS feeds
Republish, share, retweet
Curate externally
Curate internally
Curate tweets

Look at content curation sites:

Polyvore
Pearltree
Scoop.it
Pinterest
Magnify

Conversion Content

Pricing Pages
Lead Generation Pages
Product Pages

They ran a test with The Harley Medical Group and found that USP-based copy converted higher than the price based copy.

Reccomended reading: blog.eloqua.com

Next Talk: How and Why Domino's Pizza Adopted CRO Techniques - Paul Francis