COOL! A Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods

Welcome back! Good to see you. If you haven't seen it, here's the archive of my best writing. Thanks for visiting!

Check out this Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods that details dozens of ways to present and visualise data. What a great resource.
Thanks to Stuart Gordon via Marc Dussault for this link.

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The Democratization of Web Technology

A colleague recently told me about his experiences putting together a quote to build a website for a government department way back in 1996. The department in question had no idea how much it should cost so they set aside a budget of $400,000(!!). Needless to say, my colleague was more than happy to take the project on board, using relatively low-priced contractors to put together the site and rake in 80%+ margins.

Ah, the good old days…

A few years later, in 2000, a medium-sized company of my acquaintance thought it was about time they got on the web. They located a designer who offered to put together the site for $40,000(!). Unfortunately, they chose the wrong developer and the site didn’t even make ONE sale over the next few years. OUCH!

Fast forward to 2003 – the Internet had started to mature and become a viable revenue-generator for most “offline” product and service businesses. A wide range of web design companies and specialist firms had sprung up in addition to clearing houses such as Elance and Guru.com.

But essentially, what companies were paying for was for geeks to manipulate impenetrable technology to achieve a desired result. It’s been compared to the early days of motoring, when well-to-do families who could afford an automobile would also retain a mechanic to make the thing work and deal with frequent breakdowns.

Now in 2007, we’re seeing this trend of “democratizing the web” continue, and the geeks in the middle are getting squeezed out and commoditized. The technologies for building and managing websites are becoming more and more accessible and user-friendly.

The in-demand, “top 20%” skills that companies will pay for are now shifting toward marketing and analytical skills rather than technical skills.

Examples of emerging technologies that are democratizing the web

Web design:

Tools such as Google Pages allow even absolute novice to put together a reasonable looking webpage in under an hour. There are also countless other platforms connected to simple content management systems that allow you to design your own site without touching any code. These tend to lack advanced functionality, but if it’s a simple brochure site you want they can certainly do the job.

Web analytics:

Web analytics tools have become much more accessible in recent years. 5 years ago you needed a propellerhead to generate meaningful, useable statistics from your website (i.e. beyond page views and hits). Now there are a number of free or very cheap tools available to provide you with most of the analytics you’ll ever need. Some recommended tools are:

Google Analytics – an outstanding free service
Crazy Egg – slick clickpath heatmap tool (earlier post here)
Google Adwords conversion tracking (for calculating ROI)
Email list stats such as those generated by Aweber

Website conversion optimisation:

Multivariate analysis of landing page content is another area that has come a long way. Testing different landing page versions is one of the core techniques of website conversion optimisation. Traditionally it has involved setting up software to serve and track different content.

As a provider of this type of consulting service myself, my impression is that many companies feel they are paying more for the technical component of the sevice as much as the marketing component (i.e. results).

Testing functionality which would have been considered cutting edge not too long ago is in the process of becoming freely available via new services such as Google Website Optimizer (still in Beta). While Google’s new service doesn’t provide particularly advanced functionality, it’s adequate for most uses and is certainly easy to use.

Providers of conversion optimisation services are thus going to have to ensure they add sufficient value in terms of marketing smarts as the technical side becomes more accessible and transparent.

My take on what this means

At the lower end especially, technical smarts are getting squeezed out and commoditized in favour of the marketing and analytical skills required to make sense of data and turn it into improved outcomes (i.e. Return On Investment).

There will always be a place for highly competent technical people, but I expect to see more mid to low-level tasks done inhouse or outsourced offshore.

The real growth in demand will be for people who can show companies how to profit from the web. This is the trend that I’ve built my new business model around.

Instead of building new sites from scratch, I now specialise in working with companies and/or their inhouse or external teams to optimise the results of their existing site. This includes a combination of SEO / SEM / Conversion Improvement / Web Analytics / List building and management.

I believe that many companies can often tap into greater leverage opportunities by understanding and optimising their online marketing rather than investing in “capital works” projects.

It’s important to start with the right structure, but it’s what happens after your site goes live that separates mediocre from stellar results.

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Miscellania: Beating Comment Spam, Trackbacks, Blog Maintentance et cetera

As you may have already discerned, the technical side of blogging is not my forte.  I’m sure it’s relatively straightforward but I just haven’t got around to learning how it all works.

However, I do believe that blogging for business is very worthwhile and will continue to be so, especially in non-Internet and non-technology related niches.

(For example, Jeff Veale from All Suburbs Catering in Sydney publishes his Sydney Catering Blog to keep clients and prospects up to date with what’s happening in the catering world that may be of interest.  Although I don’t have any hard stats, I know that this is one of the many successful marketing strategies that Jeff uses to market his business.)

But back to the subject of this post…

I’ve found that it’s incredibly easy to set up a wordpress blog, but a little harder to manage and customise a blog to your specifications.  Here are a couple of things I’ve learnt along the way.

Beating comment spam

Most blogs allow users to add comments to posts.  Unfortunately, bots take advantage of this to post sometimes hundreds of spammy comments (mostly about niche adult-oriented content you’ve probably never heard about).

Recently I installed the Spam Karma plugin to gobble up spam comments, but it unfortunately gobbled up legitimate comments as well.

So I got rid of that and replaced it with what I’m hoping will be a formidable Akismet / Math Comment tag team (thanks to Yaro for that tip).

Allowing trackbacks

Trackbacks are links between posts on different blogs.  In theory, when someone links to this blog, a “trackback” link should be added to this blog linking back to their blog.  However, this isn’t happening right now – I think this is because I need to supply a special “trackback URL” at the end of each post.   I’m in the process of working out how to do this.

Blog Maintenance

While a blog doesn’t have to be fancy, to make them really work well I believe that they have to be equipped with a good smattering of the latest doohickies that make your blog easy to use, interesting and sticky.   I’ll see what I can add over the next couple of weeks and report back on how it went.

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Welcome to 2007 – Review of goals set in 2006

Sheesh, it’s already half way through January already. I’ve just taken a few weeks off, including a visit to NZ for Christmas (and seeing Jimmy Barnes live at the Coroglen Tavern!)

At the start of each year I like to take stock of the previous year and set some new goals for the year ahead. Last year around this time I set out in this post how I planned to double my income while working 30% less.

Here’s a followup on that post about how it went…

The good news: in 2006 I did in fact manage to double my income (from a faily modest base, I’ll admit).

The bad news: The while working 30% less part didn’t really work out that way. I probably worked about the same number of hours in 2006 as 2005 (around 50-60 per week).

Drilling a little deeper…

Here are some of the specific strategies I laid out to achieve my goal, plus how things actually turned out…

Redesign my workspace

Nope, it’s still just as cluttered as ever, although my online data management systems (e.g. CRM systems, email management, Google desktop, online storage etc.) are much improved.

Move to a home office

Yep, I did this, and cut 1.5 to 2 hours off my daily commute.

Check email and blog comments no more than 3 times a day

Compulsive email checking is a massive productivity sink. I’ve been pretty good with blog comments, but my email checking got pretty out of control over the last couple of months of 2006 – but now I’m much better!

Reorganise project management systems

We did achieve some good results in this area, but eventually decided to ditch the project model in favour of an ongoing consulting model… more about that in future posts!

Training, systems and procedures

A lot of time was put into this one too, and I’m sure some productivity gains were achieved as a result… but I have to admit that I found it a challenge to get tight systems in place because (a) how do you systematise copywriting? and (b) our systems are constantly changing and evolving, making procedures out of date faster than we can patch them up.

Delegate project management

Phil started early last year as my project manager and has done a stirling job – thanks Phil! Nick Schoonens has also been a great help over the past 8 months or so. Gavin was also with us for about 6 months and made some valuable contributions to the team.

Keep a desktop “to do” list

This has worked pretty well – I either use the simple and functional Google Desktop list tool or plain ol’ pen and paper.

Less multi-tasking – structuring work in longer blocks

This is still something I need to work on. Just as important as strucuring work in blocks is being able to get into the zone “on demand”. This is a skill I’d like to have more control over.

The Scorecard

On balance, I’d struggle to give myself much more than 5 out of 10 in the areas I committed to focus on, but the results were OK, which is the most important thing.

I could have been much more structured in my approach as well. One way to assist this would have been simply to print out a copy of my previous post and place it somewhere visible to remind me of what I committed to do.

Conceptually, goal setting is pretty straightforward. i.e.

1. Have written goals

2. Look at them every day

3. Keep track of your progress

…yet it’s amazing how few people are able to do in practice. Funny thing, the human mind.

Goals for 2007

My goal in 2007 is to double my income again while working 40-45 hrs per week and taking 4 weeks vacation.
Wishing you success in everything you set out to achieve in 2007,

Will

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