Why I’m deleting Adobe from my PC

Monday, February 6th, 2012

Rather than buy a new laptop, I recently decided to recondition a four-year-old Acer to see whether it was up to the relatively light duties intended of it. This laptop had been my workhorse during a period when I was regularly flitting between my home office and business headquarters, and had almost no available space on its 140GB hard disk. The first job, then, was to do some weeding.

Microsoft Office was the first package to go, now that I use Google Docs almost exclusively. I found plenty of dross in the Downloads folder of course, but the real shock came when I looked through the list of Adobe programs installed on this machine and realised that I use almost none of them regularly any more.

When I bought this laptop, I reckon I spent around two thirds of my working day using Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Flex Builder – with the last of these accounting for the lion’s share. And yet, over the past year, Flash based development has dropped away almost entirely.

The rot began with Dreamweaver, which I’d been using since it was first launched in the mid 1990s. Since I began creating websites using PHP, and especially when WordPress became the basis of most of my web development, Dreamweaver became irrelevant and I’ve not used it for over five years now. (more…)

Website owners can’t afford to ignore mobile

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

Making a success of an online business is often about noticing trends and acting on them early. Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) has just released figures that show the startling growth of mobile traffic in the past couple of years. If you run an online shop, this is now a bandwagon you need to jump on.

IMRG has been running a quarterly index since the first quarter of 2010. The index tracks a range of critical performance indicators across some of the biggest names in online retail including John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and Matalan. In its first index, covering Feb-April 2010, mobile visits stood at 1.4% of the total, but by the Aug-Oct 2011 quarter they’d quintupled to 7%, with some retailers seeing figures as high as 12%. Whilst mobile users, on average, don’t spend as much (making up less than 4% of total sales) the trend in both traffic and contribution to turnover is heavily upwards.

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Google’s new AdWords algorithm

Friday, October 14th, 2011

The peak shopping period is upon us and, for most online shops, the effectiveness of their Google AdWords campaigns can make the difference between a fruitful festive season and a bleak new year.

It’s at just such a critical moment that Google is rolling out changes to its AdWords algorithms having successfully tested them on its users in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. The algorithms are used to determine where in the sponsored rankings your ad will appear so a change can mean a dip in your position and consequent loss of traffic which, as business hots up, can cost a lot of money. The knee-jerk reaction is then to increase the bid price which, of course, reduces profitability – again costing money.

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Five ways to boost online profits – courtesy of Amazon and friends

Monday, September 12th, 2011

No feedback is more valuable than customer feedback, but mystery shopping comes a close second. Whilst “spot the stooge” was a popular game amongst store staff when I worked for Dixons (rendering the process pretty pointless), ecommerce sites can’t tell the difference so they need to be on best behaviour at all times.

Research firm eDigitalResearch has been mystery shopping leading ecommerce sites for over 10 years now and its latest findings make interesting reading for even the smallest online retailer. For the purposes of this research, they visited 51 of UK’s biggest retail websites — including Amazon, the main supermarkets, online clothing retailers and department stores.

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What businesses can learn from the TouchPad fiasco

Friday, September 9th, 2011

I wonder what Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard would have made of the TouchPad fiasco? One of the fundamental tenets of successful business is to start with a good product – the problem with HP’s defunct tablet is that this was also where it ended.

I was lucky. Using a barrage of open browser windows I managed to order one of the £89 bargains via Best Buy. I didn’t fully believe I’d succeeded until it turned up on my doorstep two days later.

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How a spell checker can boost your web profits

Monday, July 18th, 2011

It must be summer because the stories about how moronic our offspring are and how much better things were in the age of steam are surfacing. Indeed spelling mistakes could apparently cost companies “millions of pounds”.

Whilst you might imagine such hyperbole coming from one of the beleaguered red tops, in fact this is a claim made by an online entrepreneur. With a keen eye for a marketing opportunity, the Confederation of British Industry has swooped in to link these spelling mistakes to the lack of skills of school leavers.

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The time’s right to start your online business

Sunday, April 24th, 2011

The Retail Sales Figures for March have been published by the Office for National Statistics, showing a tiny rise in sales over the past year. Some industries were up (mainly non-food) and some down – perhaps surprisingly including DIY sales. All very ordinary, very boring and slightly depressing. Except that hidden within the numbers is a very surprising statistic.

You see, I’ve got only a passing interest in the overall figures. It matters not a jot to me whether B&Q is doing better or worse than last year. I mainly focus on my own companies’ turnover, but I’m also interested in the overall trends in online sales. Fortunately, the ONS presents these figures at the end of its Statistical Bulletin.

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Designing for the iPad – or any other tablet

Friday, April 1st, 2011

It’s rare that a book comes along that profoundly changes the way I see the world. I shan’t bore you with a list here but my latest revelatory experience came from an unexpected source.

I fully acknowledge that the iPad, in either guise, is a superb piece of design and the £399 price tag for the base version of iPad 2 is extremely competitive compared to the prices of other tablets, or even the launch price of the original iPad. For me, however, I simply cannot justify the cost and don’t fancy the prospect of being locked into the Apple/iTunes dimension (knock another £100 off, on the other hand, and I’d grin and bear it!)

My interest lies in developing Android smartphone applications and apps for credible Android tablets (should any emerge), so you might imagine that a book called Designing for the iPad would hold little appeal for me. Indeed, it’s a sign of my desperation for any guide to Android tablet development that I was prepared to give it a go. I’m glad I did – it is without doubt the best tech book I’ve read in the past couple of years.

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StartUp Britain – business advice or marketing machine?

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

One week after the Government focused on big business with a 2% cut in the main rate of corporation tax (which doesn’t apply to small businesses) it’s seeking to make up for this by supporting StartUp Britain.org. This website, which features a picture of David Cameron levitating and a very red-faced Richard Branson, purports to “make it easier for new companies to flourish” and, perhaps, is the planned replacement for BusinessLink.

The essential difference with StartUp Britain is that it’s been developed and run by private companies rather than the Government. This gets around BusinessLink’s obsessive focus on regulation rather than the development of business. However, the Government’s much vaunted idea – that private individuals and companies will philanthropically fill the gap left by their withdrawal from public services – is immediately exposed as pie in the sky by StartUp Britain.

The site is little more than a series of links to other sites (how original) along with “up to £1,500 of great offers”. Sadly what these offers amount to is a set of promotional vouchers, many offered by the founders of StartUp Britain. For example, Glasses Direct (whose founder Jamie Murray Wells is one of the backers of StartUp Britain) offers a £15 discount voucher.

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WordPress 3.1 review: first look

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

WordPress 3.1 has just been unveiled, with the usual mix of immediately useful changes to the interface and structural improvements that give more options to theme builders.

The first thing you’ll notice on upgrading your site is the Admin Bar at the top, bringing standalone WordPress installations in line with those hosted on WordPress.org. The Admin Bar provides quick access to regularly used functions to any logged-in user with appropriate permissions. Initial reactions to this have been mixed but I like it.

I create sites for clients, many of whom want to update their site themselves and the bar provides a much more obvious and easy to use method to create new posts and pages. The feature can be disabled in your profile if you really don’t like it, but I suspect the next minor update will include an option to disable it globally.

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