It’s not news to those of us with our fingers on the pulse, but it constantly surprises me how often my clients overlook social media and insist that search engine rankings and web site traffic are of more importance.

It often feels as though those of us in digital marketing are suffering the backlash from cowboy SEO companies circa 2003 brandishing mottos such as “more traffic = more sales” or “if you’re not on Google, you’re nobody”. Sure, Google’s important, but funneling thousands of untargeted visitors to your web site won’t increase your sales and will probably do more harm to your brand’s image than good.

Social media is SEO’s all grown up little brother. Social media is the equivalent of a man standing outside your shop with a megaphone giving his opinion on your business to those deciding whether or not they want to come inside. Imagine that the man had just been inside to purchase something and experienced a rude customer service representative; is his opinion going to be biased? If you aren’t at least aware of social media and its power; the good (and hopefully accurate) image of your brand could be sullied irreparably by a few customers’ bad experiences.

Social media is not a fad, it is a paradigm shift in the way that companies are advertised and unless you’re embracing it; you’re suffering.

Recently I was asked by a client to provide some pretty mouseover tooltips using CSS with no JavaScript, I came up with the following solution. It’s by no means perfect but hopefully some of you may find it useful to build something upon.

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a.info{
	position:relative;
	z-index:24;
	background-color:#ccc;
	color:#000;
	text-decoration:none;
	}
 
a.info:hover{
	z-index:25;
	background-color:#ff0
	}
 
a.info span{
	display:none;
	}
 
a.info:hover span{
	display:block;
	position:absolute;
	top:2em;
	left:2em;
	width:15em;
	border:1px solid  #0cf;
	background-color:#cff;
	color:#000;
	text-align:center;
	}

If you do use it at all, do let me know so that I can see it in action.

We’ve all done it; you’ve had a long day at work and you write a quick blog entry when you get home, late at night, forget to spell-check it and release it into the masses blissfully unaware. The next morning you read the drivel you posted and edit it for grammar and spelling mistakes, hoping that nobody noticed.

Only, they did.

It showed up in their feed-readers as soon as you hit publish, archived for all of eternity should they so wish. In this instance, it’s only a few spelling mistakes and typos, it’s not a huge deal and in all honesty, only the particularly finicky would have noticed anyway.

But what about when it’s something a little more controversial?

Picture this if you will, you’ve just had a majorly bad dealing with a supplier/client/colleague and in the heat of the moment you log onto your blog and write a lengthy rant declaring their incompetence. 5 minutes later realisation hits home and you delete the entry immediately. Phew. Or not. What you forget is that a (possibly large) number of people may already have received that post in their feed-readers, and your seemingly final act of deletion is rendered completely useless should they hesitate to refresh their feeds – or worse – save the article on purpose.

That’s not the only scenario of doom and despair. Say for instance, your company has a blog, and you have a hidden category that only employees can post to and view. This category contains some potentially dynamite material in the wrong hands and oops – you just forgot to choose the category and published it to the default, sending it out to all of those lovely feed-readers. There’s no undo, you could take your entire web presence offline and those feed-readers will still have a copy of your private moments.

Then there’s the personal blog, you’ve got a few categories for personal (let’s say, emotional) entries, maybe you’ve got one for ideas for the next big invention/startup, and another for your terrible love poetry. You mark these entries as private and think nothing of writing them once you get into the swing of things, occasionally you’ll forget to mark it as private displaying it on your front page for all of 10 seconds until you realise, but that’s okay, you fixed it.

Wrong.

RSS feeds could potentially ruin your business, livelihood, relationships and reputation if not given the appropriate consideration. Don’t get me wrong, I love them and use them excessively, but let us not for a second consider feeds to be harmless, useful little channels through which we spread our news, let us take them as seriously as we would take committing something to print in a very large publication, because effectively, you are, and the internet has a far bigger reach than any printed publication.

So, what can we do about it?

Obviously, we can all take a lot more precautions. Read, re-read and re-read. Do an all systems check before launching, and generally exercise a lot more caution, but personally I think that we as web developers can do more.

Let’s look into flagging entries for changes and the ability to disable local caching in feed-readers. Let’s put a delay on the RSS publication say 15 minutes after the article itself is published. Let’s develop the RSS spec to take into account these measures and let’s work together to find more solutions to a problem that we have barely acknowledged even exists yet. Because if we don’t, we may live to regret it, and we all know that prevention is far, far better than the cure.

Skimming through the last 4 years’ of my emails, I noticed a few trends.

First of all, I was shortsighted. I had all of my sights set on one thing, and although I did achieve it relatively quickly (my own design company), I lost sight of everything else. Music, friends, family, life… forgotten about.

Secondly, I was lazy. I had opportunities falling in my lap left, right and center. I wasted them, ignored them, sat on them. Looking back I’m kicking myself, but the truth is, I just wasn’t ready. I was a kid, trying to make waves in an adult world.

I’m old enough now to realise my mistakes and rectify them, and so I will. I’ll finish that album, those web sites, get back in touch with some important people, and hope to God people still see in me what they saw 4 years ago.

As most of those close to me will probably already know, there have been some massive changes in my life of late. Most notably that of starting my own business.

After years of talking about it, planning and for the most part dreaming, it’s finally come to fruition and I’ve joined forces with two good friends, who are also very talented in the world of web design – Alex Stanhope and Chris Wheeler.

It was a scary plunge to take for me, I had a good, steady, salaried job with a very respectable web agency, but I soon got tired of not being the boss. Naturally, I’m a leader sort of person, I’m great at taking direction all the while I agree with it, but I’m much better at steering myself. So, being a Creative Director will suit me perfectly.

The company has already launched and we have been operating very successfully in our lovely new Chichester office for about 3 weeks now, but I will reserve the big ‘launch’ post until we’ve got the web site live (simply too busy with client work at the moment), so, as I always say, watch this space!

Last week’s massive data loss has got me reconsidering whether or not Google Analytics is the right solution for my clients.

I’ve long been aching for a logfile-based stats package as I’m utterly fed up of implementing and changing goals and filters and having to restart the stat-count from the time of implementation. A logfile-based solution will apply your new filter/goal retroactively and instantly give you some stats to work with. I’m tired of waiting a month after implementing the smallest tweak before being able to report anything back to the client.

However, a logfile-based solution with the advanced features and adaptability of Google Anayltics is not cheap. Or pretty. Of all of the systems I’ve been able to test, Urchin (which Google Analytics is actually based on) is the only one that comes even remotely close to the functionality I need – and costs an arm and a leg for it.

I’ve looked past the JavaScript-only counting, I’ve endured the countless downtimes, I’ve put up with the 6-24 hour delay in reporting, and I’ve forgiven the odd data loss, but the (possibly) final straw for me has come in the shape of last week’s massive data loss. For a period of over a week data was lost on at least 9 of my major accounts relating to the e-commerce tracking – the most important feature of Google Analytics for me. This has completely skewed my conversion rates, my goal conversion rates, the average transactions/amounts etc. Bascially, that one week of last data can equate to me writing off the entire month for reporting. The only thing worse than not reporting at all is reporting bad data.

Of course, who am I to complain whilst Google Analytics is a free service? Well, I’m a user. They’ve lured us all in with a gorgeous interface, awesome functionality and the best price tag in the world – having coerced us away from paid solutions for the most part – it’s their responsibility to provide a service that’s equally as reliable in my opinion. Why? Because it was their intention to have us reliant upon them. It’s a completely closed platform with no interoperability or export function to speak of. Once you go Google, you can’t go back. This is another of the reasons for preferring a logfile-based solution – logfiles are controlled by you.

I’m going to do some research this week to find an alternative solution, I’ve been playing with Woopra a lot recently and I love it, but again it’s JavaScript-based and appears to have little conversion rate and marketing tracking built-in at this stage. Great for brochure sites, not quite there yet for the big guns.

The most frustrating part of the recent outage is that I had a programmer looking at the checkout processes on the sites that were missing data for hours searching for any inkling of a bug, I briefly toyed with the idea that it could be Google’s fault but thought better of it as normal visits and page view etc. were still being counted – it was only the e-commerce tracking that was missing. I had our lead programmer spend the better part of a day trying to hunt this bug down which equated to at the very least a loss of £750 billable time.

That’s probably enough to warrant an Urchin license (£1500 for 100 sites).

So most people that know me will know that I’ve been working on this version of the site on and off for at least a couple of years. Typical web designer story – too busy with client work to finish my own site. Not that I’m complaining, mind.

3 years after the final Photoshop comp it’s sliced, templated and ported into WordPress as the design you see here today. I would have thought that 3 years down the line this design would look a little dated, but I’m pleased to say I’m still enjoying it. For the moment.

You’ll notice that a few areas are still a little rough around the edges. I can but apologise. The gallery has been through at least 5 incarnations, beginning life as Gallery2, then Flickr, then the awesome NextGEN Gallery plugin, then 2.5’s built-in gallery function, and then back to NextGEN again. The same could be said of the portfolio, and these are areas that I will be improving over the next few weeks for sure. Also – apologies for the few validation errors – unescaped ampersands are the bane of my existence of late.

In other news, there’s loads of other news. Life is going swimmingly and I’ve some big announcements to make soon.

I’ve had some appalling service from BT of late, here’s a love letter I sent them on 7th April, I’ll let you know if/when they reply:

I am absolutely shocked and appalled at the service I have recieved. 3 months ago I moved house, and informed you beforehand in order to transfer the line. The line is still not working, despite the many attempts I have made to report the fault.

Your operatives have hung up on me mid-call (usually while transferring to another of your million departments) no less than 5 times. Once I actually managed to get through to somebody to report the fault, and received a text message the next day indicating that it had been fixed.

It hadn’t. Not only has your phone service upset me, but I have not received one single email or letter telling me my new phone number or account number. Therefore every time I actually manage to get through on a phonecall – we have to jump through hoops in order to find my account. That adds an extra £2 to each phonecall. I should be billing you not vice versa.

I’ve never received such poor service in my life. And this is an absolute shame, because I have been a customer of yours for many years and until 3 months ago had no complaints to speak of.

I’m at the point now where I would like to request a full refund for the 3 months of service I have not received, and a termination of my contract. If only I could actually get hold of an English-speaking operative to explain this. The last customer services representative I spoke to refused to put me through to his supervisor (despite requesting it no less than 4 times) adamant that he could resolve my issues. Of course, he only inflamed them.

I suggest somebody gets back to me ASAP.

They’ve definitely made my Top 10 list of Companies To Avoid Like The Plague™

An update: 7th May 2008

This matter was finally resolved today. After 4 or 5 missed calls from their customer services department (always when I was right in the middle of a meeting typically) I spoke to a very nice Irish chap who got it all fixed for me. The faceplate was apparently replaced on March 11th (though nobody told me) and so, my line has been working since then. I didn’t know this because one of my phone cables had stopped working, but that isn’t their fault. I’ve now been refunded the line rental I paid during the start date and the date of the repair and I also have a working line. I’m happy as pie.

Bottom line with BT is: if you have a problem, kick up as big a fuss as you can. They almost certainly read this blog entry (hell, I’m #4 in Google for BT complaints)  and handled the matter in a better fashion accordingly. But do, I repeat; do double-check your phone and cables, else you’ll be in the same embarrassing situation as I was this evening after complaining about the service for ages, then meekly admitting “oh actually, it works, sorry”.

If like me you’re fed up of using Arial and Verdana as the body typeface on web sites, why not experiment with two very beautiful typefaces present on OS X and Vista.

Calibri

Calibri comes bundled as standard with Windows Vista and Office bundles post-2006 and should therefore be present on a large portion of visitors machines.

I’ve noticed a lot of people searching for “Calibri OS X” and the like, more than likely sharing the same problem as me – just how do you get Calibri on a Mac? Well, for testing purposes I copied the TTF file from one of my Windows machines over to my Mac and hey presto – it worked.

I’m offering the TTF file as a download here strictly for those wishing to test how Calibri renders on a Mac, who also legally own the right to ‘posess’ the typeface by owning a legitimate copy of Windows Vista or Office post-2006

Download Calibri: calibri.zip

Read more about Calibri on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibri

Lucida Grande

Lucida Grande is another humanist sans-serif typeface and has been included with Apple’s OS since X. It is especially popular among web designers who have seen the light and use Macs, and incredibly envied by those on Windows machines. Fortunately, Apple have caught on and have now begun bundling Lucida Grande with the Windows version of Safari, which you can download here: http://www.apple.com/safari/

I’ve also noticed a lot of people searching for “Lucida Grande Windows” and the like, more than likely sharing another problem with me – just how do you get Lucida Grande on Windows machine? Well, luckily for us some clever chap cloned the typeface as a TTF file a few years back and I had it saved on my hard drive. Unfortunately his site is down now so I can’t provide a link, but I’m very grateful, as I’m sure you will be too.

I’m offering the TTF file as a download here strictly for those wishing to test how Lucida Grande renders on Windows, who also legally own the right to ‘posess’ the typeface by owning a legitimate copy of OS X or Safari

Download Lucida Grande: lucida-grande.zip

Read more about Lucida Grande on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucida_Grande

Although Lucida Grande produces absolutely gorgeous body text (especially with Apple’s lovely text rendering engine), Calibri edges it slightly as my favourite of the two because it works just as well as header type, check out this logo I recently designed using Calibri as an example:

Implementation

So, how do we take advantage of these two gorgeous-but-underused typefaces? It’s simple, just add the following to your stylesheet:

body{
	font-family: Calibri, 'Lucida Grande', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;
	}

By specifying Arial and Verdana we are also allowing those users that don’t have Calibri or Lucida Grande on their system to see the text rendered in Arial or Verdana, instead of their default typeface (more than likely Times New Roman, which just isn’t pretty at small sizes).

Problems with this method

I’ll be the first to admit that this solution is far from trouble-free. The most difficult thing to account for is the different sizes, ratios and kerning of the two typefaces. They don’t just differ slightly, they differ a lot. This can lead to problems such as orphans appearing in navigation menus, overlapping elements, all sorts basically. Always test your designs on both Windows and Mac with each of the typefaces turned on and off at different points to test each possible outcome, and try and tweak the font-sizes to cater for all.

Disclaimer

I have searched high and low for legitimate ways to purchase both the Lucida Grande and Calibri typefaces but was unable to find any. I have offered the files here for download as a temporary measure in the hopes that somebody may one day point me to a site where I, and my visitors are able to purchase the above typefaces. I will then replace the download links with the purchase links.

It’s actually surprisingly easy to make work with non-hAtom-based themes (i.e. the Default theme).

How do I do it then?

First things first, ensure your posts are wrapped in a block element that has a class, for instance the Default theme wraps each post in a

<div class="post">

Open wp-imagefit.php and on line 20, change:

jQuery('.hentry').imagefit();\n

to

jQuery('.post').imagefit();\n

Obviously replace .post with the class you used in your HTML. I’ve only tested this on a custom theme and the Default theme but it seems to work fine for me.

Hope it helps other people.

Alternatively, if you’d rather edit your theme than the plugin, simply edit your theme templates to wrap each post in a

<div class="hentry">

Sidenote to plugin author

Excellent plugin, thank you for making it. At some point you could rewrite this so that the plugin automatically injects a

<div class="imagefit">

around each entry in the loop, then call that class in the jQuery instead. Limiting this to hAtom only themes seems unneccesary to me.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-imagefit/