Which browser to choose is always a good debate amongst the web crowd (Currently Chrome is winning in our experience). But which one should we all be using? Certainly the older generation and less ‘techy’ out there be firmly fixed on Internet Explorer (IE) unless Google Chrome‘s drive for supremacy has caught their eye (in which case the choice has been made for them by Google not for any other reason).

Google Chrome (32% worldwide share)

It may or may not come as a surprise (mainly due to the dominance of Google in the online world not to mention Mac’s, which generally won’t be able to install IE, surge in popularity) but Chrome is now, apparently, jointly the most popular browser, worldwide.

Despite those of you out there who hate the way Google seems to be taking over the online world, we still think the browser is great and is our top choice. It offers great speed (page load times), it’s nice and easy to use, keeps up with web standards and it’s fantastic for developers and designers. We don’t seem to be alone in our opinion either…

Chrome now has 32% of all online users ‘signing up’, growing from just 1% back in 2008. Isolate things to Europe and results are still much the same where it’s just behind Firefox, with 29% of the crowd (that’s joint second with IE). But is it always destined to finish second? No chance… Chrome’s rise has, obviously, been significant in recent years and this years figures come as no surprise, suggesting they have taken a big bite out of Firefox and ie user percentages, who are both down by 6% of the share year on year. Hence to say – we think top spot is just around the corner.

Internet Explorer (32% worldwide share)

IE still has top spot worldwide, enjoying 32% of the market (though of course that would be joint). This is probably no surprise; it’s installed on every PC laptop sold on the planet with a Microsft (the most popular worldwide) operating system after all. Having said that – we actually have nothing against the newer versions, which are nice to use and make use of the lastest standards. Of course, how many people have the latest editions? Just go back to IE8 and you’ll see issues starting to creep in, such as designs not being quite as nice in other browsers and experiences on the site not being quite as nice. Go back to IE6 (which still cannot be ignored entirely) and you may even get a ‘please upgrade’ message from the website you’re on. Needless to say, our suggestion would be to make sure you’re using a later edition or opt for either Firefox or Chrome.

Firefox (26% worldwide share)

There’s no denying Firefox is a great choice with personalisation options etc. It’s certainly, in our opinion, improved further in the last few years and that’s evident with it’s top spot hold (if only by 1%) in Europe. It’s was our browser of choice – but things just seemed to get a little sluggish and we took a side step in favour of Chrome. However, as we’ve said, it’s a solid choice and keeps up nicely with web standards so your user experience will, no doubt, be good.

Safari (7% worldwide share)

Another good choice and very similar to Chrome and Firefox, though not often a developers choice. It enjoy’s 7% of the worlds users which is certainly not to be sniffed at, though it’s unlikely to ever challenge the top three.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

Firstly, we thought we should quickly talk about your click through rate, though only briefly.  CTR is, of course, the amount of times you advert is clicked when it is shown on the results page.

CTR can vary hugely from campaign to campaign. You may receive a report saying your CTR is 1% and instantly see it as being poor – it may, in fact be pretty good. On the other hand you may be getting as high as 25% but, depending on your aims, be losing out. To get a clear idea on things you’ll need to see how well things are performing or, are you getting a good Return On Investment?

What is ROI?

The most common form of ROI is making a sale. However, it may also be someone signing up on your site, visiting a certain page… really whatever you see as an achievement on your site via a click on your paid advert and if it is just getting people on to your site – great!

Measuring your ROI

Measuring your ROI is the only way you can be sure that you’re getting what you want from your campaign. There are various way you can do this, guess work amongst them, but probably the best way is to use the code Google offer to track things properly, allowing you to see the results in your Google Analytics. This can be supplied by the company or person managing your account and will need placing in the correct place on your website (i.e. after the sale or conversion has been made).

Improving ROI

Yes, it is possible to improve your ROI! It will require a little work, however, to do this you’ll need to make sure your page is optimised to get the best success. Again, this can be done through guess work or you could utilise something called A/B testing (though this be more costly and take longer to put in place).  It allows you to set variations of your page and see what is working best, for example, a bigger ‘buy now’ button, successfully placed banners for sign up etc.

Managing your campaign costs

As with your ROI, this can be improved. Ways to get things better can be identified by your campaign manager and will probably include things such as making sure identified landing pages are relevant to your adverts, altering text and page headers to include advert keywords etc. This will help to lower the costs incurred when someone clicks through to your site via a paid advert.

They may also help to save you money through the use of the correct keywords (what brings your advert up), setting them to be as broadly used as required or possible setting words or phrases to prevent unnecessary clicks, for instance, you don’t want to pay for someone wanting no more then a definition of a type of flower when you’re actually wanting to sell it to them.

You can also set things such as maximum bids on keywords etc. This will all be done by your campaign manager should you choose to use one.

We’d love to know your thoughts

If you have any opinions on Google Adwords – good or bad – and would like to share them then we’d love to hear about them.

We’ve been asked a few times recently about our javascript framework choice; so we’ve decided to write a quick article about it. As you may have guessed, it’s jQuery. Why? Well we’ll go in to that in a bit more detail now.

A bit of jQuery’s history

jQuery is the brain child of John Resig and was released in 2006. Of course, as with any other framework, it’s designed to simplify things for developers and bring in a dose of consistency. It’s free to use, available under a MIT license, and was at first going to be called jSelect!

Great effects, minimal hassle…

Having started out using Mootools, we worked on a project which already had jQuery in place; it excited us. Now that’s not to say that Mootools is bad; if it weren’t for us already knowing it, jQuery may not have felt so natural to us. Indeed, Mootools, along with Prototype or which ever other framework you choose, is no doubt great, we just found the jQuery syntax clear and easy to use.However, jQuery just gave us a buzz, with the simplicity of getting some great effects (such as fading / scrolling viewing panel (which work on iPhones etc, unlike Flash), enjoyable ‘animation’ effects, AJAX loads – the list goes on) which seemed to, somehow, be more of a hassle with Mootools.

Of course the support is absolutely fantastic – even w3schools has picked it up (no that doesn’t mean it’s a web standard but it does strengthen the case for choosing it), which leads us nicely on to our next section.

Some of the benefits

As we’ve mentioned, jQuery enjoys huge support, which is obviously a huge benefit. Just take a look online and you’ll no doubt find hundreds of examples for the kind of effect you’re after. Of course that doesn’t beat a good understanding of it, which is, luckily enough, easy enough to acquire (take a look at our get going section below) and the syntax sensible with powerful effects with just a few bits of code. The framework has been well tested, with support all the way down to Internet Explore 6 – not to be sniffed at I’m sure you’d agree. What’s more, the main js files, to get things up and running, can be included via Google or downloaded and hosted by your own site. Okay, we’ve been pretty brief there, but this is just a quick overview and you just need to type jQuery in to Google to see how much people like it.

Get going with jQuery yourself

Lessong, unsurprisingly enough are easy to come by. However, if you’re looking for some great lessons then you could do worse than taking a look at the w3school jQuery lessons, taking you through each step in a very clear and concise manner. Then of course there’s jQuery themselves with full descriptions of their framework functions and plenty of YouTube videos. We’re sure you’ll do great.

Let us know about your experiences with jQuery or your preferred choice…

Many people make the mistake of assuming that their logo is their brand. Of course, this is a mistake, your brand goes well beyond this, including your logo, yes, but the colours you use, the literature you attach to it in the form of your ‘strap’ line, images you choose to sell your products and so much more… essentially it is you or your company’s identity and how people portray you on a whole.

So without further ado, we’ll take a look at a few things and Just Do It!

Good Branding

Have you ever watched an advert and known what it’s adverting from the off, even before you’ve seen the logo… that’s good (and exceptionally strong) branding. BP, Guinness, Coca Cola, Nike, World Wildlife Fund; the list goes on (we’re assuming you didn’t need those to recognise the symbols to the right!). It’s not great surprise, of course, that this level of branding takes time, but when your deciding on this it’s worth thinking about it for the future.

Choosing the right colours

Your corporate colours are an essential part of your brand. Choose unwisely and you’ll get people turning off before they’ve even begun. The colours you choose in your logo will no doubt be worked into the emails, direct mail / leaflets, corporate stationery, website and anything else you produce so it’s worth making sure you choose the right ones. When you get your logo produced, ask your designer to produce it in several colour options if you’re not certain – it may cost a little more, but it’s surely worth it?

Symbols

Symbols will be something, should you choose to use it, that people will only recognise after time. Take, for example, Apple – do we need to say anymore. But do you choose to make it part of your logo or something to be used in conjunction? That’s really up to you, our advice would be to really think about what you’re wanting to achieve. For a differnt  take on it look at the Amazon logo. Is it an arrow or a smile? if you see a smile it’s happiness but if it’s an arrow from a to z it’s suggesting that they have everything from that to that! Take a look above, again, and you’ll see the power a symbol can have!

Your Slogan or Strap Line

The phrases you attach to your logo can be a big part of how people portray you. You just have to say the words ‘just do it’ and you instantly see Nike appear in your head and is used to portray the can do nature you need in sport.

Geek moment – The phrase reportedly came about when a Dan Weiden (a member of Nike’s ad agency), noted of Nike’s can-do attitude: “You Nike guys, you just do it.” 

Of course that suggests that a good idea is just that and doesn’t need over analysing – but that’s for another discussion. What is worth noting, however, is the power that the right choice of words can deliver to your brand.

Imagery

Images can make a real difference to your brand and can instantly deliver a potential clients opinion about you. Would you want to sell your accountants firm with a picture of man posing in a clowns outfit, would you? and likewise, unless you were doing something clever with it, you wouldn’t have a man at an office desk to sell your surfin equipment.

Logos

We all know what a logo is of course so we’ll simply say this – it needs to work with the brand you’re developing, through the font choice, the colours selected… well, the things we’ve mentioned above.

Consistency

This is possibly one of the most important parts of it. When you are building your brand you should bear in mind that consistency is a way of building your brand so that people start to recognise it and should be used across everything, from you letterhead to you website. It may be that you want to put in place guidelines over how your logo should be shown, breakdowns of your corporate colours in to CMYK, RGB Pantone etc. This doesn’t mean be dull, that would be terrible, but it will help you to build a brand that can be trusted and instantly recognisable to your customers.

This is obviously a quick look at what a brand is but we hope it’s helped you to understand things a little better and make it a bit clearer about how we look at your brand and how we’ll look at it should you come to see us about helping to develop yours or suggest us to someone.

When most people hear the phrase ‘WordPress‘ people instantly think, Blog. But is this still the case or has it now gone a bit beyond it? We’re of the mind that it’s not just a bit, but one of the very best CMS platforms available on the market and it’s certainly what WordPress themselves are striving for – though of course it’s still the worlds number one blogging platform too!

Why WordPress?

WordPress have invested a lot (understatement) of time in developing their system in to its current CMS state. It’s even being used as the Ten Downing Street websites framework, albeit in a heavily modified way. Our point is that it’s a very solid basis for your website and is certainly our choice. if you Still don’t believe us then just take a look at WordPresses own CMS showcase.

Easily edit your pages & posts

As we say, WordPress offers a fantastic interface to edit your pages and posts (they’re separated in to two sections for you). There’s no advanced knowledge needed: upload and position your images, embolden text, add links… it’s all there. Okay, as you can see from the images, so the page won’t look exactly the same as the final page, but that’s just because people like us (a web agency) have put code in place to ensure your sites pages remain consistent.

Geek moment, Wiki mentions:
WordPress (started by Mark Mullenweg, 23rd May 2003) is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites and as of August 2011 manages 22% of all new websites. WordPress is currently the most popular CMS in use on the Internet.

WordPress Framework… Your Brand

A WordPress website is only that in it’s framework when you employ someone to develop your site in it. By this we mean that the inner working’s may be the same from site to site but the appearance can vary massively, matching your existing brand or something we’ve developed for you perfectly. It also enables costs to be kept down as huge amounts of time does not need to be spent developing a system which works in much the same way.

Of course, it may be that your system requires something very specific. That’s no problem, ‘plugins‘ can be developed to add these elements to the site for you so that you get the exact system you need and retain full control over content.

Does WordPress use HTML 5?

Whether WordPress use HTML 5 or not would be up to you. The code for the visitors side can be structured to be in HTML 5 should you choose, you would just need to either specify that before development was started. If you’re unsure about HTML 5 then read our recent post on the subject or have a look up online where there is a huge amount of documentation on the matter.

Does using it affect your Google performance?

No, if anything it will makes it better by formatting pages you create, for you, ensuring that pages accepted web standards and search engines such as Google can read the content easily. On top of that XML sitemaps, meta descriptions etc (all great for SEO) can be added, through plugins, so that you benefit fully (something we ensure is in place for all our sites and Google etc are informed of their presence). You can also integrate things such as Facebook and Twitter without any problems, you just need to let your developer (us of course!) know – this is something we actually suggets to our clients.

Let us know your thoughts

While we can build a completely bespoke system (and it does depend on the task at hand), for any site looking for a good CMS, that we feel would benefit from the system, we’ll be advising them to go on it. Of course, we’re open to debate on the matter and would like to hear you thoughts on the matter…

It’s a common enough question; should we still support Internet Explorer 6? After all, released back in August of 2001 and fast approaching it’s 11th birthday, it’s a relative online tombstone.

The simplest answer is of course no, but should it be? After all, Microsoft saw fit to extend support to 2014 and as one of the biggest businesses on the earth should we take note.

Some of the Arguments

Internet Explorer 6 has increasingly limited users, though, according to ie6countdown.com, it’s still boasting 7.1% (down 5% year on year) of the worlds internet users and 1.4% users in the UK (don’t forget your site may be more!).  It’s a piffling amount, in the case of the UK, assuming your site follows the trend. But can it be ignored? to put in simple terms:

Assuming your online store takes £1 million a year online (a lot yes – but not unrealistic in this day and age) and your visitor stats it equates to £14,000 per year… though of course that’s not necessarily all profit!

Yes, okay, the math is unlikely to be so straight forwards, but the point remains. Does that figure seem worth while to you?

Another issue with IE6 is of course the problems it has with modern web standards. Transparent PNG’s have acquired a white background, ruining what could be a lovely design, modern styling standards (CSS) become redundant and more. This can cause problems for developers and designers and increase the code required (text / code ratio’s up) for layouts not to mention increasing the time it takes to develop your site. Of course, as we’ve just indicated, there are ways around these problems, but they take time to put in place. The inclusion of Internet Explorer 6 also adds yet another browser that changes / new layouts need to be checked in (We shan’t lie, it really isn’t fun and IE6 really can behave very oddly at times, really bumping up times).

There are, of course, many more arguments – ask a developer or web designer and there no doubt be outrage that IE6 even exists.

How can you tell if times up for IE6 with you?

The most straight forward way we can suggest is to take a look at your websites visitor stats – at least that will mean an informed decision rather than a snap one. Google Analytics is, in our eye’s at least, is the best for this, giving clear statistics about your visitors, including which browser they’ve come via. If results show that your site’s IE6 stats are below what you feel are worth while, then follow sites such as Google, Amazon & Youtube and ditch it (we didn’t mention before, but even Microsoft are campaigning for people to finally stop using ie6).

As for us, we’re thinking that people, in this double dip recession, are less likely to be upgrading their adequate computers, which will, of course mean that browsers remain the same. As such, we’ll continue to test everything we design and develop in it, unless instructed otherwise. Will there be differences? Probably, though we’ll always do our best if it needs to be included, to ensure things match up as closely as possible with other browsers.

As with all our other post, we’re interested in hearing what you have to say on the matter, so let us know your thoughts below…

HTML 5 is here!… But should we really be worried?

In short… certainly not! HTML 5 is just another step in getting the code that builds your website that bit better, but it doesn’t mean that anyone’s computer which lands on your nicely polished XHTML website is going to explode. Yes, that means that your existing site is still fine for the world wide web.

So what’s it all about?

Well, as we’ve said, HTML 5 is a new version of the current mark-up to improve website standards and make code better able to handle the latest multimedia, while keeping things nice and easy for us human beings to read on your web pages. It just happens to have been a pretty big shake up (hence all the discussions you’ll find about it – it’s even been a factor in Adobe discontinuing the development of the Flash Player for instance). It does get a bit more technical than that, but that’s the main gist of it.

Some new bits

As with any new language there are plenty of new mark up tags for your code. We’re not going to name them all, but there are the proper locations where you can see them… If you are interested in that side of things though here’s a HTML 5 mark-up link to see some of the new tags and some goners too. What we will tell you about the tags though, is that they do make sense, though it is still in development so some we’d suggest certain tags would be unwise to use. Having said that – here are a few:

<header>: as this suggests it’s to identify your main header. Header, though, isn’t just an identifier for the main site header. You can actually mark up headers within the other new sections, such as <article> (an independent, stand alone piece of content) to identify the header of that. (adding a bit more complexity to it but we still think it’s pretty clear).

<footer>: As above, it’s pretty clear: used to identify the main footer and other footer elements.

<nav>: Again, straight forward: the navigational elements on a page.

Incidentally – and yes, this is a Geek moment – if you’re thinking these look like your current ‘id’ or ‘class’ tags, that’s because that exactly how they were decided upon. Back in the early days of HTML 5 development, Ian Hickson (editor of the HTML 5 spec) took a look at 1 billion web pages and the identification of more popular class and id names was one outcome… cue new tag names.

Of course there’s tons more tags: <video>, great form ones, <aside>… the list goes on. If you really want to see them we suggest taking a look at the link we suggested above or one of the fantastic books out there – we got ‘Introducing HTML 5 by Bruce Lawson and Remy Clark’ which is pretty good, though we got it quite a while ago.

So how do you get your site to HTML 5 and should you bother?

You could ‘fool’ browsers into believing that your mak-up is HTML 5 by making some DOCTYPE amends – but what’s the point? After all, the real benefit is in the new tags, so if you’re going to do it, make sure you use them.

As we mentioned before, there are tags which just aren’t going to work. Make sure you identify these before you get started and you’ll be fine. Other than that, there are things you can put in place to make browsers as old as Internet Explorer 6 understand the new code.

So should you bother? We are (we’re currently in the process of making the change, so the sites not there yet), though we understand those who are holding off for now. Our advice would be to start taking a look in to it, you don’t want to be left behind!

Let us know what you think to the new mark up and if you’re bothering with it just yet…

Ian has just taken his professional Google individual qualification in Advanced Search Advertising as our Bradford, Yorkshire, based agency takes our first steps towards a company qualification & even better customer service, and guess what… he’s only gone and passed!

What he has to say on the Google Adwords Professional exams:

They’re really not easy (can’t stress this enough) and all I can say is really hammer the revision.

There’s some fantastic mock exams (though they tend to be about 10 questions per block on the trials) and revision notes others have put up to help you along your way to the qualification. Mostly though, I’d suggest really taking note of Google Professional Adwords own revision section and videos (don’t forget to follow all the links that are in there – though it probably triples the amount you have to get through).

The Fundamentals (don’t be fooled by the title) requires you to achieve a minimum of 85% in the exam and it’s 80% for the advanced search so it’s pretty high expectations from Google, though I suppose it’s fair enough when you’ll be managing others campaigns. Throw in to the mix the $50 (what ever that equates to in pound coins!) per exam it costs and you realise that this is something that will take time to learn and you don’t want to be failing. All I can say is revise, revise, revise!

PS… You can now contact Feel Created about running your Google Adwords campaigns!

Find Ians Google Adwords qualification here.

Javascript Vs Dart

Okay, so what are the differences? Well realistically they are two separate languages with Dart being phrased as a ‘structured, object-oriented language that is designed to improve on and ultimately replace JavaScript’. However, Google are doing their best to keep the new language similar to javascript to keep thing easier for developers making the transition to the new syntax. Beyond this, Dart promises to do much the same as javascript but with the greater performance in the areas mentioned in the first paragraph. If that’s true then it’s certainly going to be a good thing for online industry, but should we be jumping ship from javascript and our chosen frameworks?

Time to choose Dart?

Well that’s up to you, as we’ve said Google would certainly like that… however, we’re certainly not going to be leaving Jquery just yet (we think it’s pretty darn fantastic). We have read people stating that they’re going to ignore it because it’s Google which we’re not so sure that’s a particularly good reason – Google are after all the biggest search engine in the world and your websites performance does matter to it. Having said that, while there’s no denying that the online community generally thinks Javascript needs some real looking at to generally improve things, but a full replacement?… we’re not so sure. Our advice keep a close eye Dart and maybe even do a bit of programming in it in your spare time. We certainly will be… it’s our job and passion after all and of course, who really likes being left behind?

Find out more

As the article suggests, we’re along way from knowing everything there is to know about Dart… though we are getting better and more informed every day, but if you’re looking to find out more about Dart then where better to look than on their own site.