Myself, Caelen and Jason went to an informal meeting last night of some local online business people, where we all talked through our products and pricing plans and gave each other some advice on how we might change and hopefully improve them. It was great to meet: James from Piehole We’re looking forward to continuing to discuss some of the ideas that cropped up last night, and hopefully we’ll see all of the above and some more of you at the next one. More details soon… |
Jun 25
Jun 23
 Collab.ie Homepage This week’s Tuesday Push is for Collab.ie, a site which aims to enable “collaboration by helping people with ideas meet people with skills”. Collab.ie is brought to us by SmartCube, the people behind SwiftStore. So, how does it work? Say you have a great idea but you don’t have the tech skills to implement it, you could come to Collab.ie and post an general outline of the project and ask for someone with the right skills to collaborate with you on it. Similarly, if you have a product but no idea how to market it, you could find someone here to help you get on track. Now, at first this just sounds like another job / CV site, but (and I’m guessing here) there are other ways to collaborate other than just being paid straightforward salaries. Some people will no doubt offer advice for free. Others may even lend a hand on a small part of a project in their spare time. Others still might want a stake in the final company or product in return. I guess this whole aspect won’t become clear until more people are using the service. Something that does stick out to me though is that a lot of the collaboration seems to take place behind closed doors. This makes sense for privacy reasons obviously, but also discourages people from joining in to collaborate. For instance, I wouldn’t spend my time on a message board giving advice to someone about SEO or SEM if someone else has already given them the same advice earlier in the thread. If the public’s responses to a Collab.ie posting are hidden from each other, they might be less inclined to take part in the first place. This is a little bit catch-22, so I’m not sure what the answer here should be. I decided to try using the site and came up against some behaviour that was a little unexpected. When I hit the “Add a Project” button, rather than being asked to put in the details of my project, I was asked to login, with the usual “forgot password” link. However, I wasn’t given the option to register on the same screen, other than the link in the top right hand corner. Ideally, I’d have liked to see a form where I could post my project and add my login or registration details in at the end. Apart from that though, the site seems pretty clear and functional to me. The latest projects list and the tag cloud give you a couple of quick ways into the content. All the expected links (Twitter, RSS) and pages (How, About, Contact) are easy to find. Overall, Lee Munroe has done a nice job on the design. Any tool that can help move people and their ideas forward is very welcome, especially in current climate. A free tool like Collab.ie even more so. collaboration by helping people with ideas meet people with skills. |
Jun 22
Caelen and James Kennedy of Piehole.ie are getting together to talk about sales, marketing and pricing on Wednesday after work in Oleysa’s Wine Bar on Exchequer Street (between Grafton Street and George’s Street) and would love you to come along too. It’s completely informal, and there will be some drinking, but the main purpose is to talk about how to decide what your price points should be for your products, and how to differentiate them for sales and marketing purposes. If you’re free on Wednesday evening, drop in and say hi and add your 2 cent to the discussion. What: Talking about pricing, drinking beer and wine. |
Jun 22
Following on from my ramble about addresses (see Return To Sender) I’m going to complain in general about some blocks of information on the web. Say you work as a professional, and your professional body sends around a form for you to fill out. They tell you it will be published on the web, say to help people find their nearest qualified aerospace engineer, of which you are one of course. Now, if you fill in an email address on the form and it gets published you will get emails. It is surprising how many people think this will not happen. Which brings me to what my real point is: a whole load of data that gets thrown out there on the web is published without considering either its intention or its purpose. If you make your phone number public, is it decipherable? The bottom line is that I don’t want phone numbers like (0)-555/767.768/9 appearing anywhere. [OK, below is a long post-amble about what I think a well formed number might be. Read it to see how finikity (which may or may not be a word, making it all the more embiggening) I am.] If you write your number like this people will probably still be able to reach you, but you’re making it hard for them, and if you’re inputting the number on the web somewhere, you’re probably caused a few people to scratch their heads and wonder if they should bother coding solutions for numbers of such opacity. (They should not.) In case you’re getting angry at coders at this stage, the flip-side is the dumb entry field that insists you enter your number in some bizarre format chosen by a coder through ignorance/laziness. (Yes Bord Gáis a + is valid in a telephone number, in fact it is the single best starting character for a number to have, but enough about that… ) Where was all this going? Oh yes, why is all this information going on the web in the first place? A lot of official data now seems to find a place on the web in PDF format. The motivations behind this may be laudable; the original may be a Microsoft Word document and PDF is a more open format. However, PDFs tend to be designed for human rather that machine legibility and lack the semantic structures that are increasingly available (if underused) in html/xml formats. If the official Canadian list of area dialling codes is in a PDF that lacks a readable table structure then someone (or worse still, more than one person) will create unofficial lists using wikis or web pages. These will only maintain some level of compatibility with each other and the original source, so any further sources of information that verify themselves against these pages become less and less reliable. This is all a long way from Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for a semantic web. If governments are responsible for making data they hold accessible, and this is good in any number of ways, then they also have a responsibility for the level of accessibility. A locked filing cabinet in a basement that is accessible by asking the staff member responsible, available the first Monday of the month, between 9:00 and 9:30am, is a level of accessibility… This is not a purely esoteric complaint. Somebody pays for that list of dialling codes, and those emergency service numbers and a whole host of data that has been decreed web worthy, but very little thought seems to go into how much of that information appears to the web or how its value could be maximized. ISO, the International Organisation for Standards publish a lot of information on the web. Take their currency pages for example, which have nice tables of data. Well, their HTML is invalid; the doctype does not match the data contained. Their entity names are arbitrarily chosen forms of country names, even though they themselves define unique identifiers for countries, so the table must be interpreted for it to have value. I guess if ISO can’t get this right there is little hope for other folks. Is there a point to all this? Well the ISO pages are better than a PDF, and PDFs are better than MS Word documents, and all are better than no information at all. There is at least a chance that something like linked data will be widely used and provide a more useful web, but, in the meantime, just a little thought about the quality of information and reasons for it to be placed on the web will make me a lot happier… What does a dash (-) in a phone number mean, why was it put there? Probably it was just put in to separate the number into human digestible chunks 555-767-768. Whitespace would have been as good but no problems so far. What does a slash (/, virgule) mean in a phone number? In a sentence it might have a dash type meaning but I would usually use it to designate a substitution or a logical OR type statement. I would avoid using a – for OR and also avoid using a / for a join. The number 555-767-768/9 then means that either 555-767-768 or 555-767-769 will get you through. The number 555/767/768-9 would be ambiguous to me: it could mean the same as above but I might try 555767768 wait then press 9, or some such. The use of a full-stop as a visual separator seems dubious; it has other meanings both in number sequences and in textual contexts. |
Jun 19
One of the exciting things about working in a web startup company is the rapid growth that happens at the start as your ideas turn into actual traffic to your site. May 2009 was another month of continued growth for us here in RevaHealth.com. As you can see below, our traffic was up by 23.38% on the previous month, and the number of enquiries for clinics on our site grew by 20.98%.  RevaHealth.com Monthly Growth - May 2009 Average monthly growth rates have been around the 20% mark since the start of the year, and we’re hoping to push these up to 30% per month as the year goes on. Obviously this gets hard the more traffic we generate, but we have our ideas and we’re making our plans so we’ll keep you posted! As usual, the majority of our traffic came from the UK (37.21%), Ireland (26.10%) and the US (10.60%). According to our Google analytics, the remaining 26.09% came from 182 different countries or territories! This got us interested, and since the start of the year, we count only 13 countries on the map that haven’t visited our site since the start of the year. I wonder if we can get this number down by year’s end? The split between people using our site to contact clinics at home or clinics abroad remained roughly the same this month for both the UK and Ireland. As our SEO efforts for our local listings take hold we should see the proportion of enquiries for clinics at home increase, but only time will tell.  Home vs Abroad (UK) - May 2009  Home vs Abroad (IRL) - May 2009 Of interest here, we know that the number of people looking at clinics (as opposed to contacting them) is far higher than the contact figures above reflect, so from next month we’re going to look at providing figures for visitors and figures for users i.e. people who just come to the site versus people who use the site to contact clinics. The differences in their behaviours should be interesting. Interest in travelling to Northern Ireland from the Republic is strong as ever, with the raw number of enquiries up another 12% month on month, and the percentage of enquiries slipping just slightly from 19.73% to 19.11%. Poland leapfrogs Hungary and Turkey this month to claim the most popular foreign destination title, with Bulgaria taking Spain’s place at the end of the top 5.  Top 5 destinations (IRL) - May 2009 Our methods of calculating which treatments people are interested in have changed slightly this month, so we can’t compare them directly to previous months, but there are no real surprises in the top 5 treatments in dentistry for Irish patients. Cosmetic surgery though has seen a slight shift towards weight related treatments, as expected as the summer approaches.  Top 5 dental treatments (IRL) - May 2009  Top 5 cosmetic treatments (IRL) - May 2009 One of the fastest rising treatments we found in our incoming keywords was “Endermologie”, which was a new one on me. This was closely followed by “Mesotherapy”. It turns out these are both treatments aimed at reducing cellulite, so I guess bikiniphobia was particularly strong in May! The countries outside of the UK that British people were interested in visiting stayed much the same, with only Spain replacing Bulgaria in the top 5. Poland remained the most popular destination for people from the UK.  Top 5 Destinations (UK) - May 2009 While the UK interest in dental treatments pretty much mirrored that in Ireland, the cosmetic surgery treatments being requested differed in that acne / scar removal and tattoo removal weere 2nd and 3rd after Botox in the UK.  Top 5 dental treatments (UK) - May 2009  Top 5 cosmetic treatments (UK) - May 2009 |
Jun 18
We’ve talked before about the advantages of using a long tail strategy to bring traffic to our site, but in digging into what’s been happening in the last month, some of the disadvantages of the strategy became apparent too. The pros far outweigh the cons, but it’s worth taking a little time to discuss them nonetheless. With just short of 80,000 pages from RevaHealth.com in Google’s active index there are an awful lot of ways that visitors can find pages on our site. Looking at the keywords they searched for before arriving on the site should be an easy way to gain an insight into what our visitors want, but the sheer volume of unique keywords arising from a long tail strategy makes this much harder. For example, in May 2009 there were 83,153 unique keywords that brought people to RevaHealth.com, and the average number of words (fragments) in each keyword was 3.88. Compare this to the 2008 global average of 2.2 words per query and you start to see how different our traffic is. The graph below helps illustrate the problem – there were 13,097 fragments that were searched for just once in May, while there was one word that was searched for 17,130 times!  Keyword fragment usage rates May 2009 So what was this most searched for fragment? Not surprisingly for a site organised by locations, it was “in”. Also unsurprisingly for RevaHealth.com, numbers 2 and 3 were “dentist” (12,837 times) and “dental” (10,041 times) respectively. The difficulty however comes with how quickly these numbers drop off. For instance, our hundredth most popular keyword fragment was “leicester”, with just 379 searches in May. In fact, you may have noticed that the above graph’s vertical axis uses a logarithmic scale just so you can see any detail! The point of all this is that using a long tail strategy to attract traffic does make it harder to spot the underlying trends by mining your keywords. Some tips I would suggest are:
I’d also be interested in hearing how you go about analysing your keywords to identify important SEO terms, visitor trends and sales opportunities, so leave a comment and let us know. |
Jun 09
 Finetuna.com Homepage It’s Tuesday Push time again and this week we’re talking about another nice product from Spoiltchild Design. Anyone who works with a designer will be familiar with the constant stream of back and forward emails and attachments to get the final draft of an image or layout approved. Finetuna.com helps speed up this problem by allowing you to make notes directly on an image either taken from an URL or uploaded from your computer and add simple hand drawn instructions, such as arrows to show where to move things to, or boxes around elements of the image. For a simple demonstration of how it works, I decided to “finetuna” the Finetuna.com homepage.  Using Finetuna.com to make comments about Finetuna.com As you can see I’ve been able to add some text notes and some very simple hand drawn instructions. It was quick and easy to do, but not without its own problems. I was going to share the URL for my notes with you, but just after I finished I decided I wanted to look at the homepage again in another tab, so I CTRL-clicked the Finetuna logo, but instead of loading the homepage in a new tab it loaded it in the same one. When I clicked the back button my notes and drawings were gone but the image was still there. (See http://www.finetuna.com/hx86vv) I haven’t seen a way to change the shape (width) of a note speech bubble, meaning long notes become very tall. I also think it would make sense to be able to change whether the speech bubble pointer was on the left or the right. Finally, when I write a new note (in Chrome at least) and click outside the input bubble by mistake, when I click inside it again I can’t actually input any text. It’s not a big problem, but the numbering of your notes increments, meaning it looks like a note is missing. Overall, I think this tool is incredibly useful. It would definitely have saved us some time on new designs for pages on RevaHealth.com. There are some bugs to fix, which I’m sure the Spoiltchild Design team are already working away on, and I would share the privacy concerns voiced by Dave Concannon, but I will certainly be recommending it to other people in our office when it comes to our next design mock-ups. P.S. As with almost everything Spoiltchild do, it looks great and has some really nice little touches. I particularly liked the “fold” dotted line image on the homepage. P.P.S. To the guys at Spoiltchild, if you can’t read my notes about the homepage in the screenshot above, I’d be happy to email them to you. |
Jun 03
At RevaHealth.com we help patients from all over the world to contact health clinics. These enquiries are then used by the clinics to generate business. In sales speak, every enquiry is a new lead. In our experience, some clinics are very good at turning enquiries into paying patients, while others let good business slip away by making simple mistakes. This guide was originally written by Owen Cooney (ocooney@revahealth.com) specifically for health clinics, but it is relevant to any booking business that receives customer enquiries through email or form capture on the web. – Do you feel that the enquiries you receive through the internet do not produce actual customers? Do you feel that the customer is just shopping around and that dealing with these enquiries is just an extra burden that produces no results? If the answer is yes, this guide is for you. I will share a proven process for successfully converting online enquiries into paying customers. Innovative sales professionals who are successful in converting online enquiries into actual paying customers do this on a daily basis. The reward for learning this process is immense. More and more customers are beginning their relationships with their service providers online, and the sales process has definitely entered the internet age. Online is different The difference with online enquiries is that now the initial conversation begins by email instead of face to face or via the phone. Because the customer has contacted you online and has not talked or interacted with you, they have no real relationship with you yet. This carries a very real risk. If they break an appointment with you or stop answering your calls, this is no big deal for them because they don’t know you. The Secret Successful sales professionals tend to follow a similar process for building a relationship with the customer from that first enquiry through to the paid appointment. The Process
Remember: It takes time and persistence for enquiries to turn into sales. For clinics, if you follow the process above, a good rule of thumb is that for every successful conversion from enquiry to booking that you get within 2 months of the enquiry, you will get a further conversion from enquiry to appointment within 2-6 months. |
May 27
I was recently asked about our experiences in taking online payments, and in particular in taking regular subscription payments. The company we chose to handle our payments is called Realex, and we’re very happy with them. However, thinking back over everything that we’ve done since we started, there were plenty of things that we did that made our lives difficult after the fact, especially when it came to reconciling accounts and processing refunds. Hopefully sharing our missteps and mistakes might help save you a bit of time if you plan on taking payments yourself. The first mistake we made was to be too worried about what would happen if our payment processor’s API took a long time to respond. We coded a lot of safety nets around this, recording all the details of the transaction in case something went wrong so we could redo it at a later time if necessary. As it turns out, we’ve never experienced a timeout or overly long delay, so all that safety net coding was a waste of time. I wouldn’t bother with it now if I was starting again. You could just log timeouts or send an email alert and deal with them by hand should it ever happen to you. The next thing we did that made our life difficult was to store the credit transactions in one DB table, and the calls and responses to the payment processor in another. This meant that when we came to reconcile the credit transactions without bank statements, we were missing some vital information. Our payment processor batches payments together and we couldn’t easily work out which payment belonged to which batch without a lot of complicated work after the fact. Now we store the payment processor’s transaction and batch IDs with our own record of payment and it makes it very easy to reconcile our accounts whenever we need to. I really wish we’d done this from the start! Another thing to bear in mind is that inevitably people make mistakes, and at some point you are going to have to process refunds of one sort or another. Doing the refunds themselves isn’t difficult. In our case Realex has simple online tools to handle them. However, you will want to design your system to handle refunds in such a way that you can reconcile your accounts afterwards. Just deleting or altering your own record of the payment will make this very difficult. You’d be surprised at how quickly you forget what the heck went on. By way of example, if you take a payment and then have to refund it two weeks later, you could just delete the original transaction from your system and the books will balance, but you will be out of sync with your payment processor in two places – the original transaction and the refund. If each of these happened in different accounting months it can lead to real headaches. Ultimately, even if you don’t handle refunds directly through your transaction system, you will need to setup your code to handle refunds transactions that you enter by hand. New credit card details can also cause problems. People get issued new cards for all sorts of reasons, so the details you have today are not necessarily the details you will have tomorrow. If you ignore this and just let people overwrite their current credit card details, it can make looking back at old transactions next to impossible. You should code for multiple cards, so a new card is added rather than overwriting the current card’s details. Finally, if and when a customer complains about a transaction to you, stop and listen. As soon as they go to their bank and ask for the transaction to be reversed, you will be punished with higher fees and a permanent flag against your account. The banks have made this very easy to do in recent times, so it is in your best interest to avoid any dispute as quickly as you can. If in any doubt, refund the transaction. Even if you are proved to be right in the long run, your account will still be flagged because you haven’t done enough quickly enough to avoid the dispute. Hopefully the advice above is of some use to you. We’d love to hear your stories of setting up to receive online transactions too, so leave a comment. |
May 26
Time matters, and when it comes to the online world nowhere does it matter as much as with page render times. We have found a direct correlation between render times and bounce rates, so there is a real commercial need to get our page load times down. One of the problems that we face is the physical distance some of our users are, Australians say, from our server, and the time it takes for our page to be downloaded by their browser. Now packets travelling down fibre and copper are fast. The problem is that while they’re fast they aren’t instantaneous. Even with infinite bandwidth it takes a measurable amount of time to request a file and get it back to your browser. The problem only gets worse the further your server is from the user. If, say, the majority of your users are in London then you can potentially minimise the issue by putting your server somewhere physically nearby, in the UK at least. This will give you a round trip delay (latency) of about 30 milliseconds. However, if your server is a continent away the delay is more likely to be 200ms, and if it’s on the other side of the world it going to be about 350ms. Now 200ms or even 300ms does seem like a lot of be worrying about in the context of a 4 second page load time, and it wouldn’t be if the browser only had to suffer this delay once. The problem is that browsers can typically only download a certain number of files simultaneously. For example, if a web page has 30 files to download, then the browser could be forced to wait 200ms more than once and maybe as many as six times. This can add nearly a second and a half onto the page load time. In reality it is even worse that than that as each packet must be acknowledged. So not only is there latency with each file, the time to actually transfer the file is also increased as well. As is the case of most web business, RevaHealth.com was global from day one. No matter where we place our servers, they are going to be physically remote from a large number of our users. We have historically addressed this problem by reducing the number of files on our page. However, there is only so far this can go and we have now run into hard limits. If we want to reduce our page render time further we just have to face this latency problem head on. So what’s the answer? Content Delivery Networks are the answer. Let me explain why they are so useful and what impact they have had on our own build process. There are three distinct advantages to using a CDN for your static content:
A CDN is a network of servers throughout the world that puts your content physically closer to your users, thus enabling the lowest latency possible. In order to use one you need to change your build process so that your static files are uploaded to and called from the CDN rather than from your own server. Here’s what you need to do:
Unfortunately it does get a little bit more complicated than that. The problem is that the servers at the edge of the CDN are designed to deliver files as quickly as possible so they don’t check with the central server to see if the file has changed. This means that if you change any of your static files, in your next build the user will still be downloading the old version of the file. Here’s Why The benefits come when subsequent users in the same geography visit your site. Exactly the same process is repeated, except that now the edge server does not need to ask the central server for the files, as they have them locally. The problem with this system is that when you change the files on the central server, the edge servers don’t know about them and they keep serving up the old files, typically breaking your site.  How a Content Delivery Network works What to do about it To get around this problem you need to implement a build process that iteratively changes all the static file names and the references to them. Now when a user downloads a new version of your page it will reference files that the edge server does not have locally, forcing it to get the new files from the central CDN. So What about the Results? We had already put in a lot of effort in optimizing our page render time and it was down to 4 seconds for our average user (4,000 KM from server). Implimenting the CDN dropped this down to 3.5 seconds. While a half second improvement hardly seems worth it when you get to these kind of time even a small improvement can significantly improve the user experience and we are seeing a probable 2-3% decrease in bounce rate as a result. The saving is made because of two reasons:
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