Business: June 2007 Archives

Just a reminder to people that BarCamp Belfast is on this weekend. I'd love to be going, but I am meant to be down in Cork for another (non-technical) event We'll be there in spirit anyway :)

If you want to do something dodgy online there are ways to do it without getting caught. Of course some people obviously think that they won't get caught and try some really dumb things. Damien got crap service from an Irish company recently and blogged about it. There are several ways that the company in question could react to this kind of situation, but obviously someone in there decided to take matters into their own hands. They seem to have signed Damien up for a load of gay dating sites - from their office IP which is clearly assigned to the company! Talk about dumb! Tip: If you have a fixed IP properly assigned to you or your employer acting the maggot online is a bad idea! The other little "gem" is the email I got this morning from yet another one of those companies that works really hard to get business. You know the type - they're in the same category as the vendors of herbal viagra and all those other gems. The email is a classic:

To whom it may concern, Have your WebSite Designed or Renovated.

Brilliant! So you don't know who you are addressing and you don't know how to punctuate either! But it gets better.. skip past all the badly worded marketing crap to the footer:

This email was sent according to the guidelines of the Data Protection Commissioner All recipients of this mail were compiled from online directories therefore given permission to be contacted by email.

That's brilliant! So not only are you spamming me, now you're trying to say that your spam is "ok", since our website is listed in online directories. Maybe aadwebdesign.com can hook up with whoever submitted Damien's email to the gay dating sites. I'm sure they'd have a lot in common!

I don't like buzzwords. In fact I'd almost go so far as to say that I loathe them. Of course I do use them - it's really hard not to. For the last 7 years or so I've been subscribed to Jakob Nielsen's newsletter. I missed a few issues over the years due to moving emails around (I have a tendency of doing that!), but I've always found his reports to be thought provoking. We're currently working on a couple of things to improve the company website and other public interfaces ie. control panels, order forms etc., As a result of this work one of the things that I have been thinking a lot about is usability. While it maybe a nice idea to have an accessible and usable website my motivations are much simpler. If we can make things more usable, then it will be easier for people to buy stuff, so we should, hopefully, get an increase in sales. Even if we don't get a direct increase in sales our costs should be lower. Why? The following example illustrates what I mean. Up until about 2 months ago we used to get a lot of phonecalls from people who wanted to pay for their hosting / domain renewals online. We've been offering the facility to do this for ages, so I was a bit confused as to the volume of phonecalls. Eventually the proverbial penny dropped: The link for credit card and Laser payments was simply too subtle for people to notice it. We knew where it was, but our poor clients didn't. Solving the problem was very easy - I just got our designer to do up a couple of obvious buttons and we integrated them into the billing system. The number of calls dropped dramatically! The addition of a simple graphic made it all that much easier for people to do things. So I'm currently thinking about how we can combine usability with gorgeous design while also focussing on our site's key purpose - sales. If anyone has experience of usability testing and reports I'd love to hear from them. PS: I blame IQ Content's post about AIB's interface for this. It really got me thinking!

According to an article published on Out-law.com, online shoppers are willing to pay more if they feel their privacy is being respected. I wonder has anyone mentioned this to Irish website owners? While editing search.ie and armchair.ie I've had to visit thousands of Irish websites. The number of them that either don't have privacy policies or have incredibly vague and incomplete ones is worrying. Of course, if you take into account the number of them that still haven't got any tangible contact details this probably isn't too surprising.