Think bigger

I’ve been around this web stuff long enough now to have seen a few changes; over 11 years now in the field.

I remember when the web was something that a designer, who had some basic hack code skills, could weave into a commercial offering. What I mean of course is turning graphics into ‘brochure-ware’. By 1999 I was excited by contact forms and dhtml. Patrick and I even won an international award from Macromedia for our DHTML work. But that stuff sort of faded away as content management systems (CMS) came to the fore and the priority moved to content rather than graphics.

By 2000 we had custom written our own CMS and over the next few years things changed massively in that space. Open source offerings, a vast myriad of commercial proprietary products, and even half-arsed things from players like Macromedia (Adobe now) made the space very confusing for the market. Microsoft made some god awful stuff too. Bless their little hearts.

There were a few players back then like Spike that were really serious. Only a few years ago someone showed me some specification plans from early last decade. Gosh. It shakes you up a bit when you see how far ahead of the curve people like that were. I mean, we love our planning and take massive pride in our specification work but people like that could have written a book about it. I digress.

Usability and user planning and proper use case identification has been core to our work for over 5 years and we keep tuning our methods. But the touchpoints and the use of the web is changing and we need to create new methodologies to have more open thoughts about what our users want. Closed thinking about traditional web uses worries me. Think of mobile, think of non html web use like the IPAD.. hmmm.

Anyway, so by mid last decade CMS was a commodity, web 2.0 starts to hit, and people start to realise (conceptually of course) that the web is a business tool, a massive communication device, and indeed a cornerstone for pretty much anyone who needs to be in touch with anyone else.

We as a business hid from search engine optimisation SEO for a while and tried to work with partners to build capacity BUT sure enough it’s something that now needs to be an integral part of our offering. But the game changes with that everyday too. And despite the fact that the majority of our clients don’t properly market their websites they tend to universally acknowledge the buzz around SEO and rank it high in their top 10 issues right now. It’s so important that it affects their buying decisions. The problem with SEO is people think that’s it, ‘do’ and you’re done. But it’s not! Digital marketing as we now affectionately know it is a vast issue. SEO is a key part of our offering now and we’ve signed a partnership deal (exclusive) with one of the worlds largest SEO firms out of the UK. More on that later….

Integration across all media and proper integration between digital campaigns and your digital assets is the real problem now.

Don’t worry. We’re onto that too and building campaigns and strategies for our key clients. Feel free to drop us a line to see what we’re up to.

A bit of a ramble this month but it has been a while.

How many of you access the web on your mobile phone?

Use of the web ‘on the go’ is increasing.  The launch of the iPhone certainly had a lot to do with this and amounts to almost 2/3rds of mobile browsing.  Viewing typical websites on screens a few inches tall became much easier but still not quite right.

But not everyone on a mobile device is seeing the same thing.  Clever people behind the web can make different users see different things depending on the device in use.  And I don’t just mean pretty colours or fewer graphic.

A mobile version of a website can be an entirely different site in its own right with tuned functionality and special design.

Take yellow pages as an example for a moment (and let’s pretend that we’re not all using Google instead). Yellow’s website had a fairly complicated set of input boxes that relied heavily on type to drive it.

Well that’s too hard in a mobile environment – even with the iPhone it was clunky.

A mobile version of Yellow’s website is available instead and it’s got just two input boxes – that’s all – and the design is as simple and clean as possible.

This stuff has been happening quietly without most of you realising.

We built a mobile version of Petrusma Property years ago.  If you’re on a compatible device it will automatically show you a different website.

But why have a different mobile site?

Well, how many intricate search panels are customary in real estate websites?  Heaps!  When you’ve got a full keyboard in front of you and a big screen you’re relatively happy to be very descriptive about what you want.  But on a mobile device, forget it, it’s too hard!

Creating the Petrusma Property mobile site wasn’t just about simpler functionality either.  The audience is different on a mobile device.  The user has different needs and exhibits different behaviour.

We cut huge amounts of content and tuned the site down to the critical items that were relevant.  We had to think like someone standing outside a property with a mobile device in their hand prepared to invest maybe 20-30 seconds of time.

So do you need a mobile version of your site?

That’s a tricky question as it depends on what sort of content you’re delivering and whether or not it’s hard to interact with ‘on the go’.

With the rise of iPhone-like devices it’s becoming increasingly easier to view normal websites with relative effectiveness so you may be just fine with one site.

But if your business depends on ease of use in terms of delivering content that is critical to your users you’re going to have to build tuned websites for each platform your customers use.

This is a bigger problem than you may realise.  With the Internet becoming more of a fabric between the community it’s not just PC’s anymore.  It is fridges, TV sets, phones, games consoles, cars and trains.

I’d place bets that even a toilet will be connected one day!  Hooray I could flush remotely… or use the web with one hand.

My point is that whilst the range of devices accessing the web increases we need to consider the different environments in which our customers and users will interact with each other.

Users will have different needs and perhaps even different ways of physically interacting with devices – take touch screen technology as an example.

It stands to reason that any organisation on the web needs to think more broadly than just showing one web design on one device.

Recently I had the privilege of attending a Gov2.0 taskforce round table.  ‘Gov 2.0’ sounds all iphone’ish doesn’t it?

Take the visionary steam power of what America is doing by opening up as many government services as possible via the web ( for the greater benefit of the community) and combine that with Australia’s National Broadband Network buzz and ‘Gov 2.0’ is our national problem.  Oops… I mean opportunity.

Please excuse my optimism slurs.  I’m from the private sector.

Vision. That’s what Barack Obama seems to have.  Issues.  That’s what we Aussies see, and particularly Tasmanians, if the recent Hobart chapter of the round tables was anything to go by.

In front of us right now is a massive opportunity to be a smarter, kinder, more connected community from government down.  Words and promises I’ve heard from many politicians in the last 2 years.

According to the gov2.net.au website its taskforce work falls into two streams.

The first relates to:

“increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information.”

The second stream:

“is concerned with encouraging online engagement with the aim of drawing in the information, knowledge, perspectives, resources and even, where possible, the active collaboration of anyone wishing to contribute to public life.”

Great! This is the stuff of dreams and is music to the ears of every web professional in the country.  But why are Tasmanians struggling with this?  Why did the round table focus so much on the issues and dangers of opening up data rather than looking for value creation?

I’ve been spruiking the benefits of opening up data systems in previous editorials and hopefully you remember views I’ve shared from visionary web leaders about the value that can be realised from mashing up data from various sources and extracting value for the community.

Let’s solve health problems, predict trends in viral movements, gain intelligence in financial decision making, improve access to services… don’t laugh, but the classic example is the issue of Google not knowing where our public toilets are in our country!

Why can’t we get this data out?

Commercial concerns about owning data sets and ‘they’re mine – you can’t have them unless you pay me’ stack up against internal issues resulting in organisations being too politically hamstrung to work out how to even open the door.  Add to these two hurdles what I’m calling a ‘cultural cringe to an open and connected world’.

Where is this cringe the worst?  At the risk of invoking a covert operation to assassinate yours truly I’ll put my hand up and say ‘at the heart of state government’.  It’s often all too hard and not within mandate or budget to have such a vision.

Thankfully the national taskforce has been led by visionary people and their function is not just to provide a report but to ‘fund initiatives and incentives which may achieve or demonstrate how to accomplish government 2.0 objectives.’

Unfortunately I guess our pessimistic Tasmanian stance in front of the taskforce means there won’t be many good pitches for concept projects and Tasmania may miss out on showing off our shiny new NBN roll out before the rest of the country stands up and capitalises on it.

Where are our Tasmanian internet thought leaders?

Who will drive the culture shift needed to embrace open data sets and create value in our new web future?

Anybody want to join me in a gov2.0 project pitch?