Latest Web Project Management content from Econsultancy

The Four Seasons site is beautiful, but not for disabled users

2012-02-08T14:20:00+00:00

Presumably the target audience ('every user' according to Four Seasons) should include those with disabilities who may have to adjust the presentation (such as increasing the font size) or use assistive technology such as screen readers or switches.

Indeed, as outlined recently in another area of the travel sector, sites that fail to do this can not only lose revenues and suffer PR damage but also be at the wrong end of a legal action.

Although not a comprehensive accessibility check alone, simple audit tools such as WAVE 3.0 and the Accessibility Toolbar can quickly reveal some of the main problems, and we have included some images to show this.

The main accessibility issues uncovered can be summarised as follows:-

Inaccessible functions for keyboard users.
Poor colour contrast.
New windows opening without warning.
Missing/inappropriate alt text.
Inaccessible forms/poor error reporting.

We take a look at a few of these below.

Alternative text on images

Assistive technologies such as screen readers are very clever, but they cannot interpret images on their own.

The most basic accessibility requirement is to provide alternative text (ALT text) on all images and similar content to allow them to be interpreted by the screen reader.

The site makes three main mistakes in this area:

1. Alt text is missing entirely on many images especially on pages describing the hotels.

Many images that should have descriptive alternative text have only a null Alt text which will not describe the image.

For instance, the screen reader user could benefit from knowing that this is a picture of two golfers walking (and there are many other similar examples).

For some images where they have provided a descriptive Alt text, it is inappropriate.

On a page about meetings, an image shows catering for a meeting and has the unhelpful Alt text of “Accommodation image”.

Furthermore this same Alt text was used repeatedly on pages within the site, potentially causing more confusion for screen reader users who may think they are seeing the same image in multiple locations across the site.

On a more serious note, this suggests that the underlying coding is being lazily copied and pasted without due care and attention.

Giving warning of opening new pages

As shown in the image below from an accessibility checking tool, many links opening new windows do not provide any indication of this.

It also shows another missing Alt text:

For visually disabled users with screen readers the unannounced opening up of new browsers or tabs can be very confusing.

They may be unable to see that a new browser has opened, and may wish to return to the previous page. However, the back button will not work since there is no browser history to return to.

Most accessible sites either avoid opening new browser windows unless absolutely necessary, or they indicate appropriately that a new window will open.

Inaccessible navigation from assumed use of mouse interaction

No doubt the designers of the site use a mouse but they should not assume that all users of the site can. Keyboard navigation is difficult or impossible in many places, blocking these users from the main site content.

Currently these issues make the site unusable by both keyboard and users of screen readers or other assistive technologies which mimic keyboards.

This begins on the homepage, where maps indicating world regions are not accessible by keyboard users, but are only if they are clicked on.

When using keyboard navigation many of the link destinations are unclear (for example - http://www.fourseasons.com/# ) making it hard for users to choose which links to follow.

When tabbing through a page, there is no visual change of style to indicate which link has keyboard focus. Therefore such users have poor indication of their location on the page, removing important feedback.

Also there is no “skip to content” link near the start of the page navigation which is very helpful to allow non-mouse users to move immediately to the page content. Instead they need to tab through (or listen to) the standard set of navigation at the top of each page.

Perhaps most importantly for the business and conversions, the booking engine is not accessible to keyboard users.

The booking engine often appears as a pop-up window, and the keyboard tab sequence takes the user back to the underlying page, or worse they trap the user within the booking engine, neither allowing them to complete a booking nor navigate back to the underlying page.

Screen reader users would have no awareness of this making this feature unusable to them.

There are several other accessibility barriers in the site including colour contrast issues and the presentation of error messages and mandatory fields on the booking forms.

Conclusion

Surprisingly for such a large brand aiming to serve the needs of every customer with their new site, Four Seasons does not seem to have considered web accessibility during the design.

The site has issues with all of the four POUR principles of the WCAG 2.0 guidelines (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust). Indeed, Four Seasons does not even include an accessibility statement on the site to describe measures they have taken to address web accessibility and how to use the relevant accessibility features.

Some of the issues such as missing Alt text are relatively easy to fix post-launch, but many others that are integrated with the navigation and interaction design will be more difficult.

Hopefully, Four Seasons will be prioritising these shortcomings for future revisions to the site and genuinely make its online services accessible to every user.

Special thanks to my colleague Jamie Sands who led the accessibility review of the site.

Websites crucial to CPG brands: report

2012-01-31T09:47:40+00:00

But according to a new study conducted by Accenture, comScore and dunnhumbyUSA, which looked at ten food and household brands with $40m to $3bn in annual sales, CPG brand marketers shouldn't underestimate the importance of brand websites. That's because the study found that visitors to a CPG brand website were seen to spend 37% more than non-visitors. They also spent substantially more (53%) within the product category as well.

In looking at CPG brand websites, the study's authors identified three key factors that correlated with higher in-store sales:

Strong and convincing brand messaging.
Fresh content.
Engaging content.

Brands excelling in the above reaped the biggest rewards. According to Jerry Lohse, senior director at Accenture Interactive, "Analysis shows that consumers visiting the best of the ten CPG brand websites evaluated in the research study, spent over 200 percent more on the brand than non-visitors. Moreover, the research shows that the price paid per unit of the brand at the best of the ten CPG brand websites in the study was two percent more than for non-visitors in brand."

Impressive figures to say the least, raising the question: should CPG marketers be spending more on their websites?

Up to now, connecting the dots between what happens online and the supermarket has been difficult for CPG brands. Building a compelling brand website and making sure it has fresh content (eg. blog posts and polls) and engaging content (eg. games and promotions) isn't always cheap. And it didn't always make sense. After all, in some cases, it seemed somewhat improbable that having these things on a CPG website would heavily influence a consumer's purchasing decision.

But as we learn more about consumers and how they interact with brands across multiple channels, brands should be paying attention, as the opportunities to build meaningful multichannel campaigns could grow significantly in number.

Of course, there are plenty of questions most brands don't yet have the answers to. How big of a role does traditional (and often costly) advertising have in supporting online initiatives? Should they be promoting their own websites, or Facebook Pages? What offerings and techniques are consumers most receptive to?

It will take time for brands to figure this all out, but the study by Accenture, comScore and dunnhumbyUSA suggests that answering these questions could be quite rewarding.

Fast Track Digital Marketing - Singapore

2012-01-27T16:50:12+00:00

UK's most popular Digital Marketing course - Singapore

A 2 day digital university that will introduce marketers to 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.

This intensive 2-day course is a great place to start your digital marketing training. The course gives you a complete overview of the exciting areas of digital marketing, knowledge on how to effectively leverage the new media and integrate them into your overall marketing strategy.

When it comes to collaboration software, should companies avoid the IT department?

2012-01-26T18:29:11+00:00

An interesting blog post by Gartner VP of Communication, Collaboration, and Content Craig Roth hints that the answer might be 'no.' As he notes, "purchasing and licensing have little to do with whether a technology will be used", and most importantly, whether that technology will actually create value for the organization.

The problem in general with many IT departments is that they're sadly out of touch with the employees they serve. When evaluating a technology, established vendor relationships and preferences may trump the quality of the product. For instance, if your IT department loves Oracle or Microsoft and is hesitant to support any technology not built on their products and platforms, a not-uncommon thing to see at large enterprises, the number of options considered in an RFP may be limited by factors that are irrelevant to end users.

So what's the answer?

It might just be giving employees a greater say in the adoption process. Or at least looking to them for cues. The rise of the iPhone and iPad in the enterprise, for instance, is being driven in large part by companies wise enough to implement a BYOD (bring your own device) model. If fewer companies were letting their employees decide which devices they use, we'd probably see greater usage of Blackberries. That might have kept the IT department happy, as deploying a fleet of Blackberries was fairly simple given RIM's enterprise focus, but when given a choice, consumers have spoken and most favor other devices.

The good news in the enterprise collaboration and social software space is that, increasingly, software vendors are looking at the consumer market for inspiration. Why are 750m-plus consumers using Facebook, they're asking, and how can we incorporate some of that engagement-driving functionality while also making a product useful to the business?

Even so, companies shouldn't assume that the 'consumerification' of enterprise software is complete, and that therefore the IT department can't go wrong. It can. So any adoption of this software that doesn't include a reality check based on what employees are using personally outside of work risks failure.

Acquiring talent is the biggest challenge for 2012: report

2012-01-26T17:14:00+00:00

When it comes to internal challenges, the Media Growth Trends report, which was produced in conjunction with The Jordan, Edmiston Group, found that the biggest internal challenge to growth faced by companies today is talent acquisition. To thrive in highly-competitive markets, companies need to recruit the best and the brightest, but it's not easy.

Some of the hurdles companies most often cited:

Creating offering attractive compensation packages. Money isn't everything here, but whether it's money or intangibles, it's not always easy to meet the expectations of the top recruits.
Structural limitations which reduce the ability of new hires to effect change early on. For obvious reasons, it's nice to empower new employees to make a difference, but organisations aren't always structured for that.
Skepticism around flexible work arrangements. Demands for telecommuting, for instance, are increasing, particularly amongst younger members of the workforce, but changing management attitudes about how the workplace operates can be difficult.

So how are companies dealing with these challenges? Some are wisely focusing on internal development. Sometimes it's an outright necessity. As one CEO surveyed noted, "there aren't enough" experts to recruit in some markets. Other companies are willing to make exceptions for certain kinds of recruits. One publisher reported making a greater effort to accommodate developers: "without the tech talent to put ideas into action, all the learning we’re getting from customers can’t help us."

Another way of recruiting talent that may become quite popular in 2012 is the acquihire. Many of the mid-to-large size companies were bullish on acquisitions prospects this year. Some, flush with cash thanks to recession-induced saving, are more than capable of making deals happen. With a growing number of startups formed in the past several years reaching a make-or-break point, we could start to see a flurry of young companies seeking an exit on realistic terms.

Acquihires, of course, aren't a perfect solution. Retaining the talent that comes through M&A can be tough (just ask AOL). So whether a company is recruiting via more traditional means or looking to acquire a company primarily for its talent, making sure that there's a satisfying environment for them is crucial to making such an acquisition successful.

This highlights perhaps one of key takeaway from the Media Growth Report: companies will have to be increasingly resourceful and willing to think outside the box to attract and retain the best of the best. From compensation packages to structural organisation to acquihires, finding and recruiting the right people will likely require a broader view of the market and far more thoughtfulness in 2012.

Top five KPIs for SEO campaigns

2012-01-20T10:38:00+00:00

1. Keyword ranks

This is one of the most commonly reported KPIs of SEO projects. It shows how much your target keywords have improved or dropped in the search engines throughout the SEO project, and higher ranks is what you're doing SEO for, right?

The only problem with using search engine rankings as your main KPI is that you could be reporting on keywords that are not the best for the website.

Who wants to know that you got them to rank in position one for 'best ever widgets' when it has no search volume? Don't get me wrong, ranks are important, but you have to make sure you're tracking the most beneficial keywords and search engines for the project.

To improve this KPI, consider showing a graph for each of your top keywords with its individual rank, traffic and revenue data to show how much impact a change has had and to help you get a better understanding of your keywords.

2. Traffic volume

SEO is there to bring you loads of traffic isn't it? Well if that's all you're looking for you may have missed a step.

Traffic is important, but think about quality not quantity. Is the traffic coming from the target keywords? Is your traffic likely to convert?

I'd recommend you look at your traffic volume regularly, but don't just look at the one number. Instead, segment your data to see where it's coming from, find trends and look at other statistics such as interaction and revenue from each traffic source to understand the visitor quality and true value of your marketing methods.

3. Non-brand organic traffic volume

Leading on from looking at your total traffic, segmenting this down to measure your non brand related organic traffic will give you a good understanding of how well the SEO keywords are performing.

As important as it is to look at the big picture, the nitty-gritty details like this will often give you a much better understanding of how successful your SEO project is and where you still need to improve.

One way to report on the previous two KPIs is a table that includes rows for the totals (visits, transactions, revenue, conversion rate) and then breaks the information down by traffic source and splits up brand and non brand traffic.

Reporting monthly data and year on year data with percentage changes shows very clearly whether things are up or down on the previous month and whether you've seen an increase despite seasonal trends.

4. ROI (return on investment)

This is the KPI that can be seen as the most important, as without a good return a business is unlikely to succeed.

However, as a search marketer you cannot change the business model, which could mean that regardless of how well your campaign is performing, some businesses just aren't going to be profitable and this shouldn't then impact the view of the SEO campaign.

Before implementing an SEO project I would recommend ensuring your business can make money, then through using search and other marketing methods you can invest to gain a better return and successfully track the ROI of the project.

5. Brand exposure

Brand is an important part of SEO that also needs to be included.

If you do everything you can to get your target non brand keywords ranking but forget about the brand, you hve two problems:

You're going to have a harder struggle with your non brand keywords without a brand behind them.
Secondly, once someone has found your site through your target keywords and decided to come back to you because of who you are, you need to have a good presence in the SERPs for your brand.

It's not just a company name any more; however big your company is, it should be a brand and ideally dominate the first page of results for the brand name.

Keeping an eye on this as a KPI can help you know how your brand reputation is as well as completing the SEO picture.

Try combining this with non brand organic keyword reporting by using multichannel funnels with custom segments to show keyword types. This can show you great insights to how people come and go from your site:

Can you rely on any one of these KPIs alone? No.

Lesser spotted KPI's and why not to use them

Everything requires context and you need to look at the big picture as well as the pieces of the jigsaw that make it.

There may be other areas that you would like to use in your SEO reporting jigsaw, but I've decided to throw the following pieces away on this occasion:

Number of links

I've said it before and I'll say it again, what is a number without context?

Link building is about quality rather than quantity so any reporting on links should always take other considerations into account. This could include link diversity, link density or quality links gained and lost.

This makes it a rather large section to report on, rather a singular KPI so don't discount its importance, but don't rely on the number alone.

PageRank

We've all had clients focus on this little number more than the other much more important factors, does it really matter? In reality, no.

It's good to have a look at your site's PageRank to gauge its strength, but in actuality, it doesn't gain you anything. What is a strong PageRank without traffic or conversions?

Your KPIs versus client KPIs

When you're working on behalf of someone to get better results for them you're going to need to discuss what KPIs they would like to track too.

One of the fundamental ways of having a successful project is to all know what you want to get out of it. Working out your key goals from the start and reassessing these regularly avoids the unforseen occasion when someone decides the project is not successful having looked at different metrics to the ones you've been working to improve.

What are your KPIs?

I hope that this post has inspired you to think about what really matters to your website. If you have any KPIs you'd like to share please leave a comment.

Digital Cream Sydney

2012-01-20T10:10:39+00:00

Econsultancy’s Digital Cream is our invitation-only event for senior client-side digital marketers to help you meet your peers and learn from each other about the latest best practice, what's working and what's not. The event is part of a global series of Digital Cream events running in London, Dubai, Shanghai, Singapore, New York, Chicago and San Jose.

It's a 'hands-on' participatory event to enable you to network with your peers and learn through discussion, roundtables and debate.

The Roundtable Format

The topic-focused and independently moderated roundtable format allows you to discuss a number of subjects that are most relevant to you and find out from your peers how they are addressing the challenges and opportunities you are also facing. These typically include questions around best practice, measurement, ROI, resourcing, supplier selection, recruitment, business processes, budgeting, trends etc.

There are three roundtable sessions of an hour and fifteen minutes each. Each roundtable is moderated and focuses on a particular topic with the roundtable attendees proposing specific questions or challenges they wish to discuss on that topic in the time available.

About Econsultancy's peer-to-peer roundtable events

US Government agencies upped digital communication in 2011

2012-01-19T20:56:13+00:00

When it comes to government activity online, where is all the action? A new report from GovDelivery, a digital communications solutions provider focused on government, three subjects accounted for over half of all online requests from citizens in 2011: health, business and jobs.

Interaction with citizens is often related to information requests. So it's no surprise that the IRS, USA.gov, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration saw individual email and social media updates being shared the most by recipients. The agencies producing the greatest amount of email and social media-based sharing overall were the Department of Defense, IRS and FoodSafety.gov.

According to GovDelivery, its clients saw an average increase in the number of digital subscribers of 20%. The greatest third of performers saw subscriber numbers increase by an average of 85%.

It seems likely that such growth will continue. The demand for information is seemingly unlimited. As GovDelivery CEO Scott Burns notes, "Federal agencies are seeing unprecedented demand from the public for direct communications on everything from national emergencies to targeted programs." What is limited is money. Significantly reduced budgets should motivate government agencies to increase their use of the internet and digital communications tools to disseminate information and serve constituents.

To be successful, however, agencies can't exactly skimp on effort. Increasingly, those they serve will expect enjoyable, efficient experiences, meaning government agencies will be expected to employ digital tools just as well as the private sector.

Apple wants to reinvent the textbook, but is it destined to fail?

2012-01-19T16:23:00+00:00

But putting looks aside, there is one big question everybody will be asking in the coming hours and days: does iBooks 2 really have the potential to revolutionise the textbook, making Apple the future of education in the process? The answer: probably not.

There are several key problems with iBooks 2:

Not every student can afford an iPad, and schools are broke. The iPad is an incredible device for students, and 1.5m iPads are currently used in education. But not every parent can shell out hundreds of dollars or pounds for an iPad, and not every school has the funds to equip their students with them. Dead trees aren't dead, and cheaper tablet devices (likely based on Android) will have a big role in this market.
iBooks 2 harks back to the CD-ROM era. Make no mistake about it, Apple is not "reinventing" the textbook. Rather, it is trying to take us back to the future, specifically the 1990s when interactive CD-ROMs were the next big thing in education. iBooks Author, which is used to compose iBooks 2 titles, is little more than HyperCard for the e-book/mobile app generation.
iBooks 2 won't really make textbooks less expensive. This isn't about greed. Apple taking a double-digit percentage cut of gross revenue increases pressure on margins, and authoring interactive content is not cheap. The output from the iBooks 2 authoring process isn't reusable anywhere else (as in, you can't sell an iBooks 2 title through non-Apple channels), producing a less-than-optimal investment scenario for publishers.
Publishers already offer app-like versions of textbooks. Initial textbook publishers on board for launch are Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This is for good reason: being seen as jumping on the Apple bandwagon is usually a good thing. But it's worth noting that most of these publishers already offer app-like interactive versions of their textbooks directly to schools. In some cases, their licenses for schools cost less than the texbooks in the new section of the iBookstore, which are $14.99. Selling app-like versions, whether through Apple or other channels, is only possible of course because of the revenue from physical textbooks. So if iBooks 2 (or any other digital format) killed off the hardcover textbook, producing these apps and selling them on the cheap at a profit would be impossible.
Apple doesn't seem to understand publishing. During its announcement, Apple kept referring to the fact that authors themselves can create interactive titles using iBooks Author, which is available for free download. But the authors of textbooks published by the big publishers don't compose their textbooks - the publishers do. Pointing this out may seem like nit-picking, but it hints at a fundamental naivety about the textbook publishing process on Apple's part.
Apple is but one channel. iBooks 2 is specific to one channel/device - the iPad. An important channel to be sure, but publishing is a multichannel world. It's hard to see the education industry standardising in any meaningful way around Apple hardware and software, meaning that publishers will be certainly be investing in making sure their content is available through all emerging channels, such as Android-based tablets.

At the end of the day, Apple's success with iBooks 2 will not be based on how "gorgeous" the texbooks on the iPad can be. It will be based on the ROI it delivers to publishers.

The iPad is an attractive channel for textbook publishers (as it is to all publishers) but you aren't going to see major textbook publishers putting their eggs in one basket.

From a pure product standpoint, iBooks 2 may be impressive, but from a commercial perspective, in a few years it will probably still be remembered as one of Steve Jobs' last pet projects.

Project or flow?

2012-01-17T13:00:56+00:00

Somewhere along the line we’ve reasoned that dividing the stuff we have to do into discrete, tightly-bounded chunks called projects will make it easier for us to coordinate related activities, communicate with people affected by our actions, and so on.

In other words, a project is a model. It’s a mental abstraction we use to help ourselves make sense of the world. And, as the saying goes, “All models are wrong, but some are useful”.

So the concept of a project is a simplification,life sometimes doesn’t split cleanly into projects. Thus I often see problems such as the following:

Projects create artificial boundaries between activities.

For example, they create a split between building and operating websites and other systems.

One day we’re building out elements of the site as part of a project; the next day we’re making similar changes as part of day-to-day operations. And the mechanisms we use to prioritise work, allocate resources, etc, all change completely overnight.

This creates conflict, confusion and overheads: arguments about what constitutes a “bug” versus an “enhancement”; change management boards to classify work between the two; dispute resolution mechanisms, and so on.

Some activities don’t fit neatly into projects.

People have to do a lot of stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with a specific project, product and customer administration, system maintenance, staff training, etc.

Because this work isn't part of a project, we don't allocate time for it, don't set up mechanisms to resolve conflicting priorities, and otherwise fail to manage it.

This then flows over into our projects. How often have you seen a project fail to make the expected progress because people’s time is being frittered away on other activities?

Or conversely, how often has necessary work been overlooked because people were too busy on their project tasks?

We set up projects that are ragbags of loosely related activities.

To avoid the above problem, we try to put everything into a project, so we end up with projects that aggregate an incoherent suite of activities into one bundle purely for the convenience of our mental model.

And again this creates overheads, people spend time listening to status reports on activities that have absolutely no bearing on their own work, for example.

These are all signs that our model is breaking down.

It’s interesting to look at some of the trends going on in software development in this light. For example, agile development teams are going into progressively tighter iterations.

30 day sprints were the norm when Scrum first came into vogue, but seven days is much more common now. And kanban teams are moving completely away from the idea of defined projects and iterations in order to try to deliver a continuous flow of new features into production.

This aligns with the pressure on most organisations to deliver change more rapidly, and at the same time creates big questions for the idea of a project as the defining model for organising our work.

I think this “flow” model is going to get a lot more mileage in the coming year.

That doesn’t mean that the idea of a project is irrelevant. Some work does fall neatly into projects. And the idea of a project has served many organisations well.

I can certainly think of several organisations where lack of a well-defined project portfolio and project management structures has created an unholy mess. Interdependent activities are run independently, with consequent problems at the interfaces.

People with common goals act at cross-purposes with each other. And no-one has any clear idea of what is going on overall, nor of how people’s time and attention are being prioritised.

But projects are no longer the only game in town. Be prepared to adjust the model to fit the realities of your situation, rather than vice versa.