In one sentence, what is Achoo? A professional social network where marketers and other professionals can build their network, share their accomplishments and find new opportunities. What problems does Achoo solve? The traditional résumé and services built around it, including LinkedIn, have stopped being as effective as they used to be. Today more than 20% of US workforce are consultants, contractors and freelancers and this figure is similar in the UK. But how do you show on your résumé that during the last two years you've worked with seven different projects, as a member of four different teams? Even for non-freelancers, what matters in networking is what you have achieved and who you have worked with, not fancy job titles and company names.  Achoo lets you share your bigger and smaller achievements, and show who you've worked with. Each achievement, or 'achoo' as we call them, can be tagged with people, companies, skills and Quora-like discussions. And collectively these add up a really useful profile. When and why did you launch it? I first started to work on social professional profiles in 2010 after I had quit my marketing job at Skype. Our first attempt failed but helped me better understand the market and needs. We regrouped as a team and launched a prototype of Achoo in September 2011. Over the following months we made many improvements, and launched publicly about a month ago. Who is your target audience? We think Achoo works best for freelancers, consultants and creatives in the marketing and communication field, but the concept makes sense for almost all professionals from entrepreneurs to interior designers.  What are your immediate goals? We've gotten lots of positive feedback but we've also identified many areas where we need to improve the product. One key area is integrations with other networks ie. people should be able to post to their Achoo profile via Twitter, and show it on their blog or LinkedIn profile. What were the biggest challenges involved in building Achoo? We've seen our fair share of usual startup challenges, I believe. We've had people telling us that LinkedIn owns professional networking and it's silly to even try to challenge that (which I don't believe should stop anyone, ever), we've had some annoying bugs in the system, communications issues in the team and, like many startups, some days where traffic and user growth seems ridiculously small.  So far, so good, and though I'm sure there are more challenges in store for us, we seem to have gotten quite good at learning and problem solving.  How will the company make money? The site is free to use for all users at the moment. In the future we'll be adding premium services, for example featured listings and advanced customisation for people with skills, and advanced search and contacting capabilities for recruiters.  Where would you like to be in one, three and five years? In a year’s time we will have added all the features and improvements we're envisioning, and hopefully validated that these were indeed the most important things to our users. So using startup terminology, we're currently focused on confirming "product-market fit".  Scaling the idea and business globally is on our three-year horizon and in five years we'd like to be busy carrying out our wider vision for how professional networking can be better. 

Homepage Mobile sites need to be simple to navigate, and Majestic has initially done a good job of stripping out unnecessary options. The search function is prominently positioned at the top of the page, as is a store locator which offers both geo-location or postcode search. These are both useful options for mobile users and it makes sense to make them easy to find.                        Furthermore, while there are quite a few product categories, it doesn’t feel too cluttered, and the options match the desktop site so regular customers will be familiar with the navigation. Navigation Each category on the homepage has a dropdown menu that reveals further product options. The process is very smooth, although in some categories it does feel as if you are given too many choices. Mobile sites need to be simple and Majestic could probably have stripped a few options out. That said, it still feels quite slick and is relatively easy to find the products you are looking for. Product pages The product pages are well laid out with a large product image prominently displayed. It also includes pricing information, access to customer reviews and ratings, and social media buttons in case you are inclined to share your purchase with friends. There is also comprehensive information about the wine, such as its origin, taste, body and even whether it is cork or screw top.                        The one minor issue is that you need to navigate away from the page to access delivery information, which could have been provided in a dropdown menu on the product page. Checkout This is where the site loses points, as you are forced to register before you can order your goods. Typing in all your personal details is a fiddly process on a mobile and is likely to put some customers off completing a purchase. It is fine to offer the option of creating an account, but it shouldn’t be compulsory on mobile sites. Another issue is with the delivery method. If you choose home delivery then it tells you it will deliver it from your local store, which in my case is Clapham. However if you then select ‘Collect in store’ it doesn’t automatically assume I would want to pick it up from Clapham, and instead you have to scroll down a massive list of stores. This is only a minor point, but seems a fairly obvious way of making the process easier.                         Conclusion Majestic Wines has produced a decent mobile site that is easy to navigate, although there are a few points that let it down. There are a few too many options in the drop-down menus on the homepage, but it could be that these will be reduced after Majestic has evaluated user data. Furthermore, the checkout process is too long and may harm the conversion rate. But that said, it still provides a useful tool for Majestic’s customers and keeps them one step ahead of the competition.

How social logins and sharing affect e-commerce (Monetate via GetElastic) The marketer's guide to Pinterest (via mdg blog)   Page speed and web performance (Strangeloop) The Digital campaign in US (ReTargeter)  The future of mobile payments (SapientNitro)   Screen resolution and browser trends (via infographipedia)

In 2006 the average user would be happy to wait around four seconds for a page to load, but by 2009 this had halved to two seconds. Econsultancy’s Internet Statistics Compendium includes data from Rackspace which shows that 38% of UK online shoppers abandon websites or apps that take more than 10 seconds to load.  Furthermore, Google considers a page to be ‘slow’ if it takes longer than 1.5 seconds to load and will consequently relegate it in the search rankings. As only a quarter (28%) of users bother to go past the first page of Google’s search results this could have a drastic impact on site traffic. Lack of speed also kills conversions on mobile: 74% of users will abandon after waiting five seconds for a mobile site to load.   To quantify the actual impact of slow loading times, QuBit surveyed 60,000 consumers using its Exit Feedback tool where users are asked to comment on their experience at the point of leaving a website. Customer opinions were captured across 80 websites, within a range industries including retail, travel, technology, finance and publishing. Of those surveyed, 8% cited slow loading pages as a key reason for abandoning their purchase. QuBit, which is run by four ex-Googlers, said it is unrealistic to assume all of these users would have completed their purchase.  Therefore it weighted the average conversion rate of web shoppers (4.35%) against the value of global online sales (£496bn). Based on this estimate, internet retailers could be losing out on £1.73bn each year. The report also evaluated loading times for pages across a range of industries. It found that on average homepages took 3.50 seconds to load, although some were as slow as 15 seconds. Product pages were the slowest, taking twice as long to load as homepages across the board. Site loading times vs. the average But all is not lost for slow websites, QuBit suggests several steps that can be taken to improve loading times: Use a content delivery network: this is a network of servers that delivers static content to users from the closest point of presence. It can increase loading speed for all visitors and is relatively inexpensive. Minify HTML, CCS and JavaScript: the white space created by these formats reduces the speed at which the on-screen elements can be delivered, making load times slower. Optimise image content: while high-res images look attractive, their size and prominence can slow down web pages. To optimise images you should remove unnecessary metadata, define image dimensions and use CSS sprites. Use browser caching: this can be used to remember static files from the site that have previously been downloaded. This means that should the user return to that site in the future, large elements can be immediately accessed from the cache rather than downloaded from the server. Minimise HTTP requests: QuBit’s Exit Feedback research also highlighted that one of the key issues faced by users was too much on-screen content, leading to confusion and eventually abandonment. In fact, some of the most effective uplifts in conversion can be delivered via streamlining web-pages, so minimising HTTP requests won’t only boost site-speed but in all likelihood will directly boost sales as well. Image credit: psd via Flickr. 

Black Acre Brewing Click ‘I am under 21’ and brace yourself (use headphones at your discretion). Your Next Seven Go to the footer and find ‘Destroy The Things’. Click it. Wait for the spaceship to arrive, fully armed, and use the arrow keys to start the carnage. Wordpress ToS Randomly inserts the sentence: ‘If you’re actually reading this, here’s a treat’, which links to a picture of some moist brisket.    Google There are a bunch of Easter eggs hidden in Google’s various website, but for now simply visit Google and type in these four search queries (individually) to mine the gold. 1. askew  2. zerg rush 3. do a barrel roll 4. recursion Konami Code Sites A list of websites including Facebook will perform a little trick if you input the Konami code, which is as follows: [arrow keys] up up down down left right left right A B Enter Yahoo Australia Visit! The! Site! And! Click! On! The! Exclamation! Mark! In! the! Logo! And! Noise! Will! Happen! The IMDb page for Spinal Tap You guessed it… the rating goes all the way up to 11 (as does the volume control on the BBC iPlayer). The Oatmeal Click ‘view source’ for a surprise. Mini USA Type ‘reverse’ in the search field and then hold down Shift and click on the gear lever.  EnterComputers.com Visit this website and type 'penguin' on the hompage. Note animated penguin. Then wait for something else to happen. [An aside: I had this tab open in the background while writing this for the past 15 minutes. I've also been listening to a record for the first time, and thought it included a weird backing track featuring some very odd animal noises. I've just put 2+2 together...] Have you seen any others out there? 

This intensive two-day course is a great place to start your training. It gives mareters a complete overview of all the essential digital marketing disciplines, how they can work together in your marketing strategy and helps to highlight areas for further in-depth learning.

The task Users had to search for and book a summer holiday for themselves and their family, stopping at the last moment before purchase.  They were then asked what one thing would have prevented them from making a purchase. The tests were carried out using a range of devices. There were five users, two on iPads, three on other tablets.  The first four videos here show users on iPads. It seems that more high priority issues were uncovered on Apple's devices. Since this device dominates the market right now, these are perhaps the most significant tests.  Summary Overall, users managed to complete the holiday purchase task, and many commented positively about the use of photos and choice of holidays. However, several users encountered issues which would lead to abandonment normally. These problems included:  Technical errors, such as the site being slow, images not loading and the system freezing with an error message. Problems with pages not refreshing as expected. Problems with the navigation, including use of the browser back button. Some users could not read the full Ts and Cs as there was no means to scroll through them on their tablet. Interacting with the calendar proved difficult for many users. A number of these problems were categorised as high priority, i.e. they were likely to make customers abandon the website:  The high priority problems in detail Difficulty clicking on links As the video shows, this user is having difficulties selecting the correct link from the drop-down menu:  This becomes more frustrating, as the user's attempts to zoom in to make the links clearer lead to the menu disappearing.  In general, the size of links and the space around them is a problem issue on tablets, and adapting to touch screen devices and the 'fat finger' problem is one area where sites can improve.  Elsewhere on the site, the links to choose from different hotel rooms are too small and too close together, meaning that it is too easy to make a mistake.    Viewing Flash content This user is unable to view photos of the hotel and video content on her iPad. If she cannot view photos of the hotel, then making a decision is much harder.  According to the tester:  The website failed to download photos of the hotel and when I tried to return to the previous screen it crashed altogether which was frustrating and meant that I had to return to the search page and start again. I would have considered dropping out at this point Users cannot scroll T&Cs on iPad In the exact questionnaire, the tester cited this as an issue which would have stopped the purchase, as she would have to check them on a PC later, and may then end up on a different site.  Server identity error message In this video, just as the user is heading towards the payment page, she gets an error message saying the identity of the server cannot be verified. As the tester says, outside of the test environment, she would abandon the process after seeing such a message.  Website errors This may have nothing to do with the fact that a tablet is being used but, whatever the reason, it's a conversion killer.  Form filling This is one area where many sites can improve for tablet users. Input areas are often too small, drop-downs can be awkward to use, and if options are too close together, then users can easily make mistakes.  In fact, this was cited as a reason to abandon the purchase by the tester:  The lack of attention to detail on the forms the inputs were far too small and it didn't bring up shortcuts like the correct keyboard etc. Some of the information could have had an auto population feature also. Conclusion While most e-commerce sites do work reasonably well in iPad, and the relatively high conversion rates are proof of this, there are areas where retailers can improve.   Retailers should be looking at their visitor numbers, as an upward trend in visits from tablets may indicate the need to optimise.  After this, they should be seeing how their website works on an iPad, by trying it themselves, conducting user tests like this one, and looking at abandonment rates for tablet users.  In the case of Thomas Cook, though most of the site works well enough on an iPad, there are enough problems here to cause users to abandon purchases. When this is a holiday for £2,000, then you can see how an investment in testing and optimisation could pay off. 

For instance, instead of worrying about whether mobile websites will one day overtake mobile apps in popularity, consider the question: is your mobile app better than your main website? That question is raised by an insightful blog post by Stackoverflow founder Jeff Atwood. Using a high-profile example, he points out that eBay's tablet and mobile apps "are just plain simpler, easier, and faster to use than the eBay website itself." His screenshots which pit the eBay website against its tablet and mobile apps show the stark contrast: the apps are simple and uncluttered, while the eBay website is quite the opposite. According to Atwood, the lesson is to "embrace constraints": Having a limited, fixed palette of UI controls and screen space is a strength. A strength we used to have in early Mac and Windows apps, but seem to have lost somewhere along the way as applications got more powerful and complicated. And it's endemic on the web as well, where the eBay website has been slowly accreting more and more functionality since 1999. The nearly unlimited freedom that you get in a modern web browser to build whatever UI you can dream up, and assume as large or as small a page as you like, often ends up being harmful to users. It certainly is in the case of eBay. The solution: "design simple things that scale up; not complicated things you need to scale down." It's an interesting suggestion, and one that Atwood notes is part of the increasingly popular mobile-first design approach. There's an obvious problem here, however, for many organizations: many don't know that their mobile app experience is better than their web experience. Which highlights the importance of analytics in mobile apps. When a company understands how its mobile app users are interacting with its app, and collects the right data, it can compare apples (its mobile app) to oranges (its website) in a meaningful way. If your mobile app has a better conversion rate for certain actions, for instance, it may hint that the more complicated website experience is getting in the way somehow. On the flip side, knowledge of what works well on the website and is popular with users can influence what functionality is a worthwhile candidate for inclusion in a mobile app. The point here is that collecting, analyzing and comparing analytics data in every individual channel is the first step in building better experiences across all channels. Building fantastic user experiences is difficult, but the web and app worlds are giving companies a greater opportunity to pull it off if they're watching and carefully evaluating the right things.

But the favicon may be on the decline. It's already been removed from the address bar in Google Chrome, and now, Firefox will apparently be removing it too. As spotted by TheNextWeb's Harrison Weber, Mozilla software engineer Jared Wein posted on his personal blog that security concerns led the Firefox team to reconsider the favicon's place too. He explained: Since the dawn of time, we have included the site favicon in the address bar as part of the site-identity block. While the favicon can represent a piece of a site’s identity, there are some sites that set their favicon to a padlock. This behavior can trick users in to thinking that a site is using a secure connection when on an unsecured connection. The obvious solution: eliminate the favicon from the address bar, something that is now visible on the Nightly release of Firefox and which should make its way into the official release channel in mid-July. Needless to say, this is not the most earth-shattering browser change ever, but the favicon has been a web staple for some time and some would argue that it add a nice, if still subtle, touch to a website's identity. With Chrome and now Firefox shunning the favicon, however, its days may be numbered. That's sure to be disappointing news to favicon connoisseurs who love nothing more than creativity in a 64x64 pixel or less package. But it's devastating news for the web shops that charge government agencies big bucks for their favicons.

What was the thinking behind the EU e-Privacy Directive? It’s important to remember that the cookies rule is just part of a law aimed at safeguarding privacy online and protected web users from unwanted marketing. There have been growing concerns over the past few years, and the directive sought to address those.  Organisations providing content are obtaining information about users and people have started to become more aware of the sophisticated techniques being used for internet marketing. The 2003 directive wasn’t doing enough to deal with this.  Organisations that collect information need to obtain people’s agreement, and you have to tell them what you want to do with it. So the aim is to protect user privacy, and ensure that they are giving informed consent for using their information. Once this directive had been passed, we wrote to the UK government and pointed out that, the way it was worded, consent for cookies is not so straightforward. Legislators left it broad, and there was no steering on cookie issues. Exemptions for strictly necessary cookies were not drawn widely enough. Have you attempted to find a balance between business needs and the law?  This was one of the first things we thought about. We’re here to educate and to promote good practice. If all we did was to slap fines on people, we wouldn’t be doing our job properly. We will enforce the law proportionately. We’ll look at the risks if and when customers complain to us. If a websites’ cookie and privacy is a risk to many people, we may then take action. There is a balance to be struck though, as not all cookies are equal, and our enforcement approach will bear this in mind. For example, someone may complain about a cookie placed without their consent, but if it was just used to remember essential details rather than to gather information to be used for marketing purposes, then it may not be appropriate to act. The first question we will ask is: have you tried to sort this out yourself? If they don’t want a particular cookie, then they could use browser settings or security software to get rid of it. It’s highly unlikely that organisations will get into trouble because of one cookie or just a few complaints, but we would seek to address any potential issues with the company concerned. In these situations we would be more likely to provide advice to the organisation. It is unlikely (though not impossible) that we would take action just for analytics cookies. Will 'implied consent' solutions be enough in some cases? The law does allow us some leeway, and if a company’s revenue would drop if it went for a strict opt-in, then we could look at different ways of educating users and gaining consent. Just because analytics cookies are caught by this law doesn’t mean a strict opt-in is necessary. It could, in some cases, be seen as an essential part of the relationship.   Organisations can help themselves by informing people and providing decent information about cookies. For the last eight years or more, this has been hidden away in privacy policies which only a minority of internet users ever read. Therefore, can you be confident that your users know about cookies? In the medium to long-term, if lots of websites are more transparent about cookies and privacy, then users will become more informed and it will be easier to assume knowledge.  If we can operate on the basis that, since a website has made efforts to inform customers, and through this collective education process, people understand how and why online businesses are using their data, a website could claim with some justification that since we made it clear, and they are still using our website, opt-on consent may not be necessary.  It will take time to get to the point where most web users are aware of this, but this clarity of information may fill that gap for some websites. It may eventually become an implicit part of the relationship that websites gather and use analytics data. For example, they could say, well we have given this information, and we’re in the process of looking at consent models.  We’re not there yet, and much will depend on the collective efforts of websites. Some will go down a stronger route than implied consent. If a website says ‘we’d like you to use cookies, but click here if you don’t want us to, and click anywhere else to continue'. If customers have seen this message, then this may be enough in most cases. However, if companies aren’t making this information visible, then they are taking a risk. On the other hand, it we received a complaint, then go to the website, and it’s difficult for us to say that the user hasn’t seen this, then have to judge such a complaint on the balance of probabilities.  If it looks like an organisation has put enough information there, and it is clearly visible, such that it wouldn’t be likely that users would miss it, then it’s unlikely we would take that further. What about examples like BT's slider tool for opting out of cookies? Would this be enough to comply?  It looks perfectly fine, though I’ll hold back on passing judgement as it has only just been rolled out. We know how much time and effort BT has put in though, and we also appreciate that this is beyond the capabilities and resources of some companies. Will you actively enforce the regulations after May, or wait for complaints? We have a team of investigators, but we won’t necessarily be trawling the internet looking for abuse of the directive. In time, we may choose to look at particular sectors to see how they are informing users, based on the information we have received. Enforcement won’t be driven by individual complaints though, and how we deal with this may well depend on the response from business. For example, if someone says, 'we’re not doing anything about this', then we may pay them more attention. All of our enforcement actions are likely to be in the form of negotiations. If people listen to our advice and are prepared to take steps towards compliance there shouldn’t be a problem, However, if businesses deliberately stop short of total compliance, then there is a risk. For us, the issue may be that, if an online business has taken some steps towards compliance, and they don’t 'bother us', then that’s OK. However, if we receive a number of complaints it may be a different story. How likely it is that complaints will flood in, we don’t know. It may be that the great British public simply isn’t that concerned about cookies. If users are happy and we receive no complaints about a website then we have other things to be doing anyway. If we had an enforcement team dedicated to looking out for abuse of cookie laws, then people would rightly ask questions about the ICO’s priorities. Will you come up with a definitive answer on what compliance is?  We don’t know what compliance will look like in a year’s time. There are lots of gaps here, and we want people to fill them with good practice. We can then point to examples of this and everyone will have a greater understanding of what is required.  We hope that this will pick up over the next month or so. Will you make allowances for the cost in time and resources required to make the changes to websites in order to comply?  We know that not every website can just switch its website off on May 25 and implement changes. We will bear redesign schedules in mind. There’s no point in rushing through a solution if a revamp is coming soon anyway.