by Martin Dower

Devoted as I am to Safari it’s finally time to say goodbye and move over to the latest shiny toy in the box, Google Chrome. I’m not sure how I am feeling at the moment as I do love Safari for it’s integration into OSX but it’s just losing too much ground to Chrome. So, in a fanfare and a hail of bullets I quit Safari for the last time today.

Google’s Chrome just seems to run so much better on my MacBook and has a fantastic range of add-ins that I use a lot. In fact I would be tempted to say that Chrome has improved my productivity and certainly cuts down on the number of sites I have to visit and tabs I have to have open.

Being a huge 37Signals product user I’m able to slick-away the operation using Autosave, time and graphing, Campfire as well as more commonly used extensions such as Evernote clipper, Dropbox and Wikipedia.

Key headlines

• We are not gathering any more information – we are changing the way we gather and apply this information
• We are synchronising and unifying how we use information across all the data platforms including our core platforms as well as third-party
• The revised policy is being implemented on May the 1st
• We’ll never sell or pass-on your information without your permission

Privacy policies are updated on myBookingWizard.com and on Connected-uk.com

Since the last privacy ruling in 2003 the key change is:

• OLD : You must provide the option for users to opt out of cookies being stored on their device, changes to
• NEW : You must obtain consent for cookies to be stored on a users’ of subscribers device

It is interesting to note that the original ruling has been in place for over 8 years yet almost no site actually complied with this ruling. The ICO and EU have not provided specific processes for companies to follow, nor have they really provided much in the way of solid guidance.

What areas are going to be affected?

Most web assets make extensive use of cookies for a number of key functions.

• Analytics, conversion and performance reporting
• Function of the web-site
• Split testing

Exceptions

Not all cookies will require explicit consent.

• A cookie to remember goods and services for the purposes of “checking out”, ala e-commerce.
• A cookie that is used as part of the 7th Data Protection principle which states “Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data.”
• Cookies that speed the loading of the page up by distributing the workload amongst a number of web-servers.

It should be noted that there is very specific reference to “Cookies used to recognise a user and give them tailored content”. This is NOT a permitted exception.

Timeline

The initial position is that everyone must be 100% compliant by May 25th 2012. This has, however, softened over time with the recent statement “There will not be a wave of knee-jerk formal enforcement action taken against people who are not yet compliant but trying to get there” coming out of the ICO

Misinformation

A whole industry is springing up around this date and most (all?) are using a fear/uncertainty/doubt close that entails a lot of scaremongering. Ignore most of it. With 4 months to go some are scaremongering with headlines like “Websites face £500k fine for breaching ‘cookie’ law“.

It is worth noting that there are larger fines available to the ICO, but this applies to all outbound marketing activities covered by the revised Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations and that definitely effects other activities covered by most organisations in such areas as unwanted emails and text.

Be also aware that some sites who initially (over)reacted to the new privacy rules have now softened their stance, presumably as it was having such an adverse affect on business.

It is also worth noting that hosting and operating outside of the EU won’t get round the problem if you want to supply goods and services into the UK (wow, that sounds like a minefield!). And finally, there are some differences in how this will apply in different EU states but the difference are far less than the similarities.

Effect on third-party systems (reporting and analytics, mostly)

It is also to be noted that the only site (of note) using the explicit system is the ICO site and they have seen a dramatic drop in the number of recorded visitors to the site. This drop has come about as less than 9% of visitors agree to the policy.

This is not to say that the overall traffic has fallen, far from it. Some reports suggest that the traffic to the ICO has tripled since the announcement.

This is, I believe, an issue that the various analytics and reporting providers should be providing a solution to now. We are already starting to see the effects of privacy as Google now scrambles around 30% of search terms, making them invisible to the web-site and therefore analytics and reporting.

The simplest answer is to adopt a cookie free tracking system with some hybrid cookie solution to sample user information. It’s pretty easy to do and provides, in most cases, a lot information. This can be done via Javascript or Apache log analysis.

However, for some, the user journey, mapping and conversion requires a way to recognise visitors and this is mostly provided via a cookie. It doesn’t have to but many folks are seduced by the allure of recording every (?) customer journey. Not really sure why they need to record every person’s journey, a 10% sample should probably do the trick nicely.

Effect on first-party systems

I would suggest the following should not directly be affected:

• Any system that can conclusively show it need cookies to provide data security, this should include login systems and services that store personal information.
• Transaction-based applications that require the use of a cookie to store data in between stages, much like e-commerce or online booking. A system that would be rendered inoperable by the absence of cookies.

Cookies are typically bad:

• in profiles to recognise different users
• in testing different content to different users
• to pre-popolute fields on the site based on previously entered information
• in remembering logins into secure systems (including forums)
• in taster-type applications that show user-journey specific content
• in sales stages display applications
• country selectors

So what now?

So there is not a threat of legal action if you are following the advice to achieve compliance. Interpreting the guidance, this suggests that by May you should have:

• Audited your current use of cookies.
• Updated privacy messages on your site to reference use of cookies.
• Implemented or be working on implementing a method of offering opt-in to cookies.

The first two items are pretty straightforward but the last one is more troublesome.

This also gives you the opportunity to test some of the solutions in a conventional A/B test environment, whilst you can. This is different to normal testing where we are looking for a (confidence probable) winner but a test to explicitly measure the drop in conversion rates.

However, if the press reaction to the EU Policy is good then there is an argument that overt cookie compliance or overly public displays of privacy (sound odd, I know) could actually increase the effectiveness of the web-site – but that a subject for another day.

• Avoid opinion, professional or otherwise, let testing give you the answer
• Have a clearly defined and measurable target for the page, immediate conversion may hamper conversion down the track so keep your eye on the big picture
• If your brand is unknown then one of your challenges is credibility, otherwise the challenge is product/service communication
• Long pages need cues to help people scroll down, this can make or break a long page
• Consider infinite scrolling as a solution, harder to implement but it effectively “right-sizes” the pages to visitor needs
• Don’t sweat what is long and what is short

This post was prompted by a discussion on eConsultancy.

• 57% of visitors will abandon a website if the waiting time reaches 3 seconds
• Between 1995 and 2010, the average web page grew from 14k with 2.3 objects to 484k with 75 objects
• In 2009, Shopzilla became the poster child for web performance when it shaved almost 5 seconds from its page load times and increased revenue by 7-12%
• Amazon reported that 100ms improvement in speed gave a 1% increase in performance
• In 2008, Yahoo! reported that making pages just 400 milliseconds slower resulted in a traffic drop of up to 9%.

That’s pretty staggering and, in most cases, is an easy fix by cutting down files sizes, optimising code and reducing the amount or superfluous imagery. There are competing pressures coming from our “better connected” web. For example the Google +1 button and the Facebook Like button add over one second of load time to your page, according to a recent research study by TagMan, a tag management and acceleration company.

To complicate things further, Google for years has been telling anyone who will listen that website speed is as an important factor in determining rankings. “One of the 10 things we hold to be true here at Google is that fast is better than slow. We keep speed in mind in all things that we do, and the +1 button is no exception,” according to a post published this week on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.

It is widely preached that page load speed should be under the magic 2-second mark and Google will normally reward this speed with a better ranking. It is then a little surprising that almost half of the top 500 online retailers exceed THREE seconds. Mad.

Almost all of the approaches to speeding the site up will involve a technical understanding of what’s going on to deliver your web-site so it’s a subject to raise with your web development agency.

Nope. In July this year he publicly announced the end of search and the death of Microsoft. The video is superbly exciting, well-informed and offers an all too rare perspective on the role of emerging technology.

A self-confessed Apple lover, Flash hater (Ed:ace!) and believer that HTML5 is the greatest thing since Google started to own the web 10 years ago. He’s evangelical about the iPad and iPhone as devices because of their massive adoption rate and where Microsoft once had 96% control of internet connected devices, it now has just 50% because the growth of mobile is replacing the old PC era. That’s a scary number for Microsoft, losing nearly half of your influence in just 3 years.

Google, meanwhile, has captured 80% of the index search business from which it then went onto top controlling the web advertising market. But at a price as ”Google’s success eventually filled the web with crap, so consumers began using other products to search: Wikipedia for facts, Facebook for matters of taste, time or money, Twitter for news, Yelp for restaurants, Realtor.com for places to live, LinkedIn for jobs. Over the past three years, these alternatives have gone from 10% of search volume to about half,” said McNamee.

As the “crap” built up other companies stepped into the space to provide a better, more focussed, search experience which also had the advantage of external branding. Until the birth of Facebook, Wikipedia et al your search results were, in essence, Google branded so big brands struggled to appear over the flotsam and jetsam of spammers and the product of bent SEO companies.

As Roger goes on to say ”As if all this competition wasn’t bad enough for Google, then along came Apple with the iPhone and App Store… Apple has branded, trustworthy apps for everything. If they want news, Apple customers use apps from the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. If they want to know which camera to buy, they ask friends on Facebook. If they want to go to dinner, they use the Yelp app. These searches have economic value and it’s not going to Google, even on Android…When Apple and the app model win, Google’s search business loses.”

But it does’t stop there. Roger goes onto say that HTML5 offers a better experience than Apple’s App model and it far cheaper to develop and deploy so could spell the end of the App Store.

The video is 10 minutes long, the presentation slides are so-so,  I suggest you listen to it when you are doing your expenses, or making a brew.

Google Plus could almost be Facebook Version 2 – which you have to think must be heading our way at some point. You can add me on Google Plus here.

Anyhoo, on with Robert’s useful post.

My tips for newer users of Google+:

1. Learn what circles are and how to put people into them. When I first started out I went crazy with circles, opening up something like 20 of them. That wasn’t very smart, it turned out. Now I’m back to seven. Simple ones like “friends, family, coworkers, geeks, VCs, tech press.” Etc.

2. Learn how to distribute content to circles, or public, or certain people. When you post here you don’t need to send it to everyone. You can send it just to people you’ve put in a specific circle, like “friends” or you can send it to a specific person, like me.

2b: Learn not to use your home feed as your main place to visit. Start a circle called “my home circle.” Now when you add people you can add them to multiple circles, but if you don’t want to see someone everyday you can keep them out of your home circle (unfortunately if you follow people they will always be on your actual main feed).

3. Find a few “seed followers” that you like to follow. Then look at who they are following. You’ll find lots more people to follow that way. For instance, I’m following 3,200 geeks, including most of the execs, tech press, VCs, etc. If those kinds of people float your boat, look through my list and pick and choose who you also want to follow.

4. Remember, posts with photos or video do better than just text posts, so see if you can figure out how to get other media in here.

5. If someone gets too noisy, let’s cover how to handle that.

A. Too many posts. Sometimes you’ll follow someone like +Chris Pirillo who posts a lot. What I’ve done with those folks, is put them into a “Noisy buttheads” circle. That way they don’t pollute all your other circles, although they still will show up on your home feed. Feel free to put me in that circle for now.

B. Too many comments on some posts. Some posts will go viral here. It won’t just happen to me. For instance, it might happen to you now that I’ve pushed you into 33,000 people’s view by resharing your post (more on that in a second). If this happens to just one post, you can click the drop-down-menu over to the right of a post and choose “mute.” You’ll never see that post again. This is a good way to get rid of some things that are cluttering up your feed.

C. Consistently high engagement noise (there are already about 50 people who are consistently getting high engagement, folks like me, Trey Ratcliff, Leo Laporte, etc etc) and for us you just need to segregate us into our own circle. Or just put up with that kind of noise (I enjoy engaging in a lot of rapid-fire comments).

6. Turn off email notifications, or learn to filter them with Gmail’s filters. I have turned them off. Too much email, too fast, especially if you get hit by one of the whales here (sorry for hitting you on the first day).

7. Setup your profile and make sure it’s hyper complete. Look at mine and then go set yours up here (I’ve spent a lot of time on mine).

8. Try to talk about something other than Google+. Try to say what you’ll be doing with this. Post something original. Or, start a good debate about something that you care about. Etc. I’m really trying to do this because I’m getting bored with talking about Google+, but I see a lot of new people coming in here, so wanted to write down my thoughts based on my first 13 days.

9. Try using keyboard. J moves down. K moves up. I’m sure there’s others coming.

10. If you use Google Chrome as your browser, there are a bunch of extensions you should try.

11. Learn how resharing works. For instance, I took your original post and reshared it with my audience. Right now that causes some duplication noise (folks following both of us will see your post twice, once from you, once reshared from me) and there will be separate comments under both. Fragmentation is gonna be a problem until Google fixes that here. But resharing is how things are getting very viral. For instance, I just reshared your item with 33,000 people. Now, what if 10% of those reshared it with THEIR audiences? This is why things get crazy very quickly.

Again, huge thanks to Robert for this post – it made my starting out with G+ much simpler. I’m not sure I’m ready to give up Safari and install Chrome but, hey, time will tell.

But I almost never directly use Facebook. I’ve also been aggressively culling my friend list so it’s down from over 300 to almost 50. By this time next year I will probably have less than 20 friends and not be using it. Twitter, on the other hand, has grown for me but primarily I use it as a link sharer so when I find something I like I tend to re-tweet to the small list of followers I have.

I am a heavy user of LinkedIn. This is, I suppose, the business version of Facebook and it’s highly useful me to stay in touch with my business circles.

Enter Google Plus. It easily fills the sharing role of Twitter. It covers off following tech geeks that I want to stay abreast of. It integrates (obviously) with our Google Apps accounts nicely. It’s still early adopter. It’s much better than Google Wave.

So this will be the end of Facebook contribution for me, I suspect – it’s a good place to see what the world is up to, magazine style but no real use for me at all. Twitter will take a beating as a result of the sharing function so I’ll end up transferring my Twitter effort to our corporate account, which is really rather overdue (I don’t really believe in the hype around personal brand).

So that’s my social world now re-organised. Ta Google, oh…and two fingers up to Zuckerberg for making it impossible to get my data out of Facebook easily.

If you have any questions about supporting older browsers in the future then please contact Andy Holland.

All the major software players have been cutting down on old browser support and we are joining them in an attempt to rid the world of crappy old and insecure browsers.

Many people mistakenly believe that contracts are only useful in the event of a dispute, but this is not true. A good contract can save you time, money, stress, and even improve your sales opportunities and your brand image.

Oftentimes, employers are branded as “unreasonable” because the employee felt obliged to spend unplanned time on the job that they could not bill for.

Some common reasons for this extra unscoped work are:

• The client changed her mind about the project requirements
• The client extended the scope of the project beyond the brief
• The client asked for a “tweak” without understanding the ramifications
• The client expected services that the freelancer had not originally intended to provide
• The client has not provided the required information needed to complete something
• The client has been slow in approving drafts despite impending deadlines
• The client asked for something to be finished earlier than the original deadline
• Disputes and spending unplanned (and, thus, unbillable) time working for “unreasonable clients” result in lost profit, having less time to spend on getting new work (e.g., opportunity costs), and stress.

Amazingly, even when you have bent over backwards to avoid a dispute — and despite all that extra effort — your business and reputation can also be damaged because, in the minds of the client, you’re the one being unreasonable!

In these circumstances — from a commercial perspective, at least — it makes sense to view both disputes and unreasonable clients in the same way: do our best to avoid them.

So, how do we do that?

Managing the expectations of our clients up-front and giving the client clear options to extend the scope of the work — by agreement and subject to appropriate changes in the price and agreed timelines — are the keys to avoiding disputes and doing unpaid work.

This can be done most easily with a bespoke and well-written set of contract documents. Accordingly, a contract is not something which is only useful in the event of a dispute. Rather, it is an invaluable weapon in your fight to eliminate (or at least minimize) time-and-profit-stealers such as unscoped work.

To reduce the risk of misunderstandings and to reduce the opportunity for the client to develop unrealistic expectations, your contact must clearly state:

• What you will do for a client
• What they must do for you
• What is included and excluded from the project
• How much additional work outside of the scope will cost
• Many web designers already produce detailed price quotes and yet still spend a great deal of time doing large amounts of unpaid work for unreasonable clients.

Why?

Firstly, because they know their company inside out and upside down, it sometimes simply doesn’t occur to them that a client might have a different viewpoint.

Indeed, our view of what it is reasonable for us to be expected to provide and what falls outside the scope of the original agreement may be significantly different from that of the client’s.

For example, a web designer may be expecting to produce a couple of design mockups for his client to choose from. The designer may expect the client to register the domain name, provide a suitable logo for the web design, and submit all copy and photos to be used for the final product.

However, the client’s expectations may be far removed from that, and may think the project will include copywriting, marketing, SEO, and so forth.

This conflict of expectations between both parties is what leads to problematic projects.

Many employers have no comprehension of the time it takes to create a good website. A simple “tweak” in their mind might seriously put the project’s budget and timelines in jeopardy.

Secondly, whilst many price quotes state what is included in the project’s fees, they often fail to indicate how changes to the original brief will be dealt with, or how delays caused by the client (e.g., failing to approve drafts or provide information) will impact timelines and costs.

And thirdly, documentation is often written in a technical, convoluted and confusing style which may not be understood by the client. The contract may sometimes even be “borrowed” from another organization, and, as a result, may not even reflect the actual working practices of the business using it.

When the expectations of both parties have not been properly managed, they begin to drift apart. And when the client demands more of the designer than she expected to give, there are only two likely outcomes: Either the designer accommodates the client — and makes much less profit than originally planned — or the parties fall out and the client tells everyone he knows how “difficult” his web designer was.

Wouldn’t it be better, therefore, for the web designer to be in a position where he could say to his client, “Of course, I’m more than happy to do that additional work for you, and the charge for that will be [insert fee here], as set out in our contract”?

We all want to provide a good service to our clients, and there are times when we will be happy to do additional work without charge. However, clients and web designers benefit from thoroughly understanding the process they are embarking on, and setting clear ground rules for situations requiring a deviation from the original plan.

As well as pro