It reaffirms a lot of what we do here at PaperStreet  (i.e. hire in different time zones, be agile, have 35 hour work weeks, be flexible, get stuff done and minimize meetings).

Some cool tips you can take away from the book:

1. Work time – Have uninterrupted periods where IM, Phone and Email are off.
2. Judo Solutions – Make “good enough” a viable solution.  Although you may not show off mad skillz or get accolades, it will get the job done.
3. Meetings – Should have a timer.  Should have a specific goal.
4. Pick a fight, but be able to back it up.
5. Be simple rather than complex.  If needed, cut clients to keep the product simple.
6. Be a drug dealer – give something away for free.
7. Marketing is for EVERYONE – phone, email, web site, software, errors, invoices, greetings, and anything is marketing.
8. Hire when it hurts.  Don’t hire to replace, see how long you can go without that person.
9. Fire delegators.  Hire Managers.  Managers get stuff done and don’t need hand holding.
10. Test drive employees.
11. Don’t hide bad news.  Let clients know immediately.
12. Getting back to people quickly is the most important thing. I REALLY AGREE WITH THIS, in fact we make it mandatory to contact all clients back same day, if not within same hour.
    
13. Allow employee control and not to have to ask permission on small things or even big things.
14. Don’t create a policy on the first issue or problem.  Just say politely, don’t do it again.

Cool stuff and really a quick read.  I think I pounded through all 250+ pages in less than an hour.

“How would I create a text version of these documents so that they can be crawled by search engines?”

Easy.  Google already indexes PDFs.  In fact, Google can index just about anything these days.  See a chart here.

• Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf)
• Adobe PostScript (.ps)
• Atom and RSS feeds (.atom, .rss)
• Autodesk Design Web Format (.dwf)
• Google Earth (.kml, .kmz)
• Lotus 1-2-3 (.wk1, .wk2, .wk3, .wk4, .wk5, .wki, .wks, .wku)
• Lotus WordPro (.lwp)
• MacWrite (.mw)
• Microsoft Excel (.xls)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt)
• Microsoft Word (.doc)
• Microsoft Works (.wks, .wps, .wdb)
• Microsoft Write (.wri)
• Open Document Format (.odt)
• Rich Text Format (.rtf)
• Shockwave Flash (.swf)
• Text (.ans, .txt)
• Wireless Markup Language (.wml, .wap)

Now from an SEO perspective, we have found the following to be helpful.  In order to give them a boost, you may want to do one of the following:

1. Create a new page summarizing the PDF’s contents and then link to the PDF itself.  The theory is that the summary will add additional keyword phrases to index and by linking to the article, you will increase the documents authority.
2. Rename the PDFs to be keyword phrases you want to rank high for (i.e. instead of article1.pdf it becomes “real estate how to guide.pdf.”)  The theory is that the file name gives Google another indicator about what the article is about AND all links to the file will contain keyword phrases.
3. Alternatively, you could cut/paste the entire PDF as HTML text.  The theory is that HTML documents tend to rank higher than PDF documents.  You would create links to the PDF internally on the site and from other web sites.  This will give the document more authority and rank it higher in the search engines.  Make sure that you do not copy and paste the entire PDF document AND have the PDF indexed.  That is technically duplicate content.  You may want to indicate to Google to not index the PDF.   You can do this by disallowing the PDF folder of all files.

But IE 6 Sucks!

Yes, it does.  But losing business sucks more.  Spending a few more hours on a site can help the client.  For each client, I think we need to check their server logs and determine their traffic.  It takes about 3 minutes of work to determine their audience and will help our clients. 

• If a client has a HUGE population of IE 6 users (like 10% or more), then we have to still code for them.  I could easily see this happening if our clients have older customers, lower socio-economic customers, or customers in developing countries.  Why?  Because they probably have older computers.
• If they have a 5% or less share we can just drop features and make small work arounds.
• If they have a 1% market share we can just ignore completely – just like we do for poor Opera.

My Gut Feeling

I have a sneaky feeling that it will be not a dramatic drop as we want.  I would love to see our server stats go from 4.6% to 0% in the next few months.  I just don’t think it will happen. I think it will continue trending down, but by next year we will only be a few percentage points lower.

Big Question – Our Web Site and Our Clients Sites

The big question is should we cater to 4.6% of our audience.  I ran our numbers and that is the number of visitors that came back – see attached chart.  I say yes, we should still provide a solid experience in IE6.  However, we can kill any fancy features and just do basic things.

In the last month we had 700 visitors in IE 6.  That is quite a few people (20 to 30 a day).  We had an inquiry just today from an IE 6 user.  Yes, I know a mere coincidence, but still there are people who don’t use it.   Would you design your store or restaurant to exclude 5% of your traffic?  No.

I did run a report and since August we have had 40 inquiries with IE6 as the browser (about 8% of our overall inquiries via the web form).  So, would we want to lose 8% of our business?  At this time, I don’t think we would want to do that.

So, says the Zen Master….we’ll see.

Recommendations

1. Design your site for your audience. Take a look at your web site statistics and see exactly what your monitor resolutions are.  If you don’t have statistics, then use some default assumptions – see below.
2. Design for the largest percentage. In the stats below, you will see that 800 x 600 is only 1%.  Will those people viewing your site have a bad experience?  Probably. But I want to cater our site to the 97% of other people who have modern monitors.
3. Design for at least 1024 x 768. When in doubt, set up your web site so that it positions nicely in a 1024 monitor.  You can increase this setup in the coming years as a large percentage of people will have 1280 or higher resolution settings.
4. Design to fit. For a 1024 x 768 monitor, setup the site so that it its no wider than 960 pixels.  Every browser window has scroll bars and other little edge elements.  If you design to exactly 1024, then your design will not fit and the right side parts will be missing, causing the user to scroll left/right to see everything.  To avoid this setup the design so that it fits within a 960 pixel wide framework
5. Design for above the fold. For a 1024 monitor, setup the site so that your key info is not below 575 pixels in height. Same idea as the width.  Most users will various menus and tabs that take up the first 200+ pixels on the screen.  Put your key ideas, benefits above the fold. In our screen shots below, with minimal extra navigation bars the elements must fit above 575 pixels.  For every additional navigation bar in Firefox or IE, you need to reduce your information to get above the fold.

Browser Statistics from W3 Schools – January 2010

• 76% – Higher than 1024 x 768
• 20% – 1024 x 768 pixels
• 1% – 800 x 600 pixels
• 3% – Unknown

Cool Examples – Click Each to See the Browser Screen
The thumbnails are not accurate as Wordpress is zooming to the center of the image.

A web site can double its conversion rate with simple usability tricks.

• Home Page Scroll – Make your home page show everything important above the fold.   Only 23% of users scroll on the home page.  Of those that scroll, they only see 1.8 screens.
• Home Page Tips – Tell the user where they have arrived, offer benefits, offer info about the company and give users relevant, easy to understand choices to find their information.
• Content – Don’t be dense.  Make it scannable.  Create a narrow focus to perform well in search.  Offer analysis and “See Also” links.
• Menus - Don’t flood the user with info.  Create breadcrumbs.
• Design for Search – 88% of people use search to find what they need.  Make sure your web site has relevant content and is properly architected to obtain rankings.

 Our new 6 minute demo is comprised of 11 chapters covering the following topics…

1. Basic Content Updating
2. Adding New Content
3. Adding Photos
4. Adding Links
5. Adding Attorneys
6. Attorneys: Assigning Practice Areas, Offices, and More
7. Adding Practice Areas
8. Adding Offices
9. Adding Seminars, Languages, and Articles

Total control puts you in complete control of your website.  Our clients have the ability to update their website anytime, anywhere, instantly… 365 days of the year.  This quick demo is a great addition to our Total Control help resources.

Click here to watch the demo!

We spend hundreds of hours on our web design, usability testing, ideas, imagery, and copy.  Then someone takes our design and in a few hours creates their knock-off.

I guess it is flattery, but at the same time really, really annoying.  This time the infringer is MangoTree Interactive at www.mangotreeonline.com (not linked on purpose).

The proof is below.  Bottom line, the design layouts and themes are identical.  They use the same:

• Logo placement
• Contact Form Text / Placement / Design
• Menu Bar Height / Fonts / Labels (only changed to grey background)
• Text in the header block – in fact that was our original text that we since changed to improve usability and conversions.
• Layout of the header area (i.e. text / calls to action / portfolio snapshots)
• Same tabbed navigation idea on the home page
• Same three case studies – of course with different text
• Same promises or in our case benefits
• Same footer map and grey footer area

So while some of the details are minimally changed, the overall layout, theme and tone is exactly identical.

You can view a comparison of their site here…

and our beautiful site…

The Issue
The issue was that with each section we added, our bounce rate crept up slightly.  Here is a nice screenshot of our bounce rate over the past month.

Bounce Rate Stats
As you can see we were around 45% to begin October.  Not bad, not great, just an average bounce rate.  Ideally, we would be below 20% and we get worried if we were above 50%.

The Trend
We kept adding more and more content to the page over the course of the month.  The bounce rate go to a ridiculous high of nearly 75% on some days.

Our Analysis
Low and behold, we started to analyze the size of the site and decided to kill some graphics.  We saved about 200KB by removing some 25 non-essential graphics.

The Drop
On October 30 we made a change.  When we did that the bounce rate dropped immediately from 69% to 35% in one day!  That is a 34% drop just from removing some images.

Conclusion
While the images were nice and pretty, they did make the page load slower.  So ultimately, you have to view whether aesthetics are more important than speed.  In this case, I think its clear that speed is better.  Keep your site loading fast and profit.

I am back with some new useful links this week. They range from all categories and will come in handy for all web users and developers. Browse around, check them out and find something new that works for you.

Crazyegg - Lets you figure out what people are doing when they visit your website.

http://crazyegg.com/

Fileshuttle - Makes sharing files on the web easier for Mac users.

http://getfileshuttle.com/

Echo - Is considered the next generation commenting system.

http://js-kit.com/

Cool Ads with nice Photoshop - Interesting visuals can go a long way.

http://media.outlawdesignblog.com/orginals/2008/10/braun.jpg

http://media.outlawdesignblog.com/orginals/2008/10/pepsi-twist.jpg

http://media.outlawdesignblog.com/orginals/2008/10/dunkin-donut.jpg

Screenr - Allows you to record ready-to-tweet screencasts.

http://screenr.com/

Sunday Morning - Is a jQuery plugin which allows site-owners to offer their visitors some easy and fancy ways to translate their content in more than 30 languages.

http://sundaymorning.jaysalvat.com/