More than 83 percent of Internet users are likely to leave a website if they feel they have to make too many clicks to find what they’re looking for.

One of the most important aspects of any website or web application is the end-user experience. However, website usability is often neglected during the development process, and rarely considered after the development project has been completed. This could have negative consequences for your business, such as driving away visitors, or potential bad publicity. With this in mind, usability of your site becomes an important factor, not only for generating web traffic, but also ensuring user satisfaction and return visits.

In order to improve your site and maximise the user experience, it is vital that you understand how your visitors are using your site, where changes can be made to your site to increase visitor numbers, and how to retain visitors for as long as possible. There is no greater waste than visitors abandoning your site because they are unable to clearly see your value proposition or understand your products and services; therefore, implementing various metrics is a vital component to successfully track the usability of your site.

As part of our drive to constantly find new ways to create value for our clients, we have created an offering to specifically improve our client’s business success with their website strategy.

1. Through working closely with our clients, we  establish what their highest priority goals and business objectives are, and start with those which present the most business value.
2. Thereafter, we install and configure various tools to monitor their site for key usability elements, including design aesthetics, screen layout, ease of use and target audience. These metrics will be monitored and collated at various “check points” over an agreed period.
3. After analysing the metrics, we will present a plan to align the website with the client’s business objectives.
4. This plan will then be implemented, and the monitoring process will track the results of the implemented changes.

Following an iterative process like this, we are able to make incremental changes to the website, identify the business impact of these changes, and effectively remove the guesswork often associated with website development projects.

For more information, check out our latest inclusion into the White Wall Web basket – WebSense – and contact us if you need help to improve your business success with your website.

Then fast foward to today…

400 delegates arrived and queued to get access to the Old Mutual Business School (amazing venue). Some nice touches faciliated an incredibly interactive vibe – a Twitter fountain on the big screen was one, a decent number of breaks was another, a one hour lunch was another and QA sessions when time allowed was another.

A great mix of speakers, some well known, others less known, but all “experts” (or at least passionate and researched) about particular subjects. See the full agenda and speakers on the NetProphet site. Marlon Parker wrote a succint personal account of the days procedings, naming it a “wake up call.”

All the Twitter activity got us top 10 trended on Twitter for about 5-6 hours (we hit 2nd at one point and were 4th overall for the day on #NetProphet).

As a sponsor and organizer, this was incredibly satisfying, especially since the community expressed so much appreciation for our efforts (I trust that we won’t have to lobby so hard next time to get the sponsorship required to run this event).

At RAMP HQ tomorrow I’m sure there will be loads of discussion and post event analysis and we’ll be deciding how to take this event (and brand) from strength to strength. I hope to convince Tim Price (who heads up RAMP Marketing) to blog the story of how NetProphet came about, and how we managed to make it succeed as it did, as a kind of marketing case study.

Mike Stopforth blogged a great endorsement for NetProphet which seems to sum up the sentiment (which is also immensely satisfying).

Right now, I’m about to hit the sack feeling very pleased with our first NetProphet and proud of the amazing team of people I get to spend my working days with.

All presentations, videos, post talk interviews (video) and pics will be up on www.netprophet.org.za shortly.

NetProphet brings together a host of industry experts who will help delegates get a handle on where they see the industry being headed, the technologies and companies investors are interested in, new trends to follow and practical ways to extract maximum business value from the Internet.

NetProphets speaking at the event include Herman Heunis, CEO of Mixit, Arthur Goldstuck, owner of World Wide Worx, social media specialist, Mike Stopforth, Hannes van Rensburg, founding member of Fundamo, Dave Duarte of Huddlemind and Peter Flynn, MD of White Wall Web to name but a few.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Why the Digital Going is Good in Bad Times
• Harnessing the Social Web for Brands
• Successfully Integrating Web and Mobile into Your Media Mix
• Software as a Service
• The Entrepreneur’s Perspective on Vulture Capital
• The Art of Making the Transition to Transacting Online
• Opportunities for Entrepreneurs Looking to the Mobile Web

The conference is hosted by the non-profit RAMP Foundation and is FREE to attend (delegates must register at www.netprophet.org.za in order to attend). To find out more, or register for this event, visit www.netprophet.org.za.

People are using it nicely! We introduced an “invite a friend” function and a number of users have already invited more than one friend. Over 300 logs have been created.
Have a great Easter weekend all…

I think that this oversimplifies – the devil is in the detail. From experience it is about far more than just “the wrong scope” (I’m referring to the project requirements as the “scope”) – it is also about “scope creep,” “scope change” and underlying business change which inevitably results in “scope change.”

If you want to scope a big development at the start of the development, you are going to have a tough choice when the inevitable scope change requests come. Either, enforce the “letter of the law” by referring to the brilliant/bullet-proof requirements documentation you created upfront OR allow the changes and “donate” the work required to the paying client.

Neither option is reasonable. Someone is going to lose out in either case.

There is an answer. It’s called Agile Development. At WWW, we use a particular methodology called “SCRUM.”

The Agile Manifesto puts the issues squarely on the table.

In simple terms: Work in smaller chunks. Deliver business value often. Collaborate with the software owner/sponsor very closely throughout the process. Accept that change is inevitable in software development – accommodate and encourage it. Ensure that everyone on the development team trained and mandated to maximize business value on behalf of the software sponsor/owner. Everyone on the team is both developer and analyst.

Available through www.travellogger.co.za, the online travel log enables users to track their mileage online throughout the year and easily export this data to a CSV file, for use in Excel, when it becomes time to submit their annual returns.
The web-based nature of the app affords users the convenience of logging their travel any time and any place where they have internet access. The app is also compatible with the majority of popular cellphone web browsers – making ‘on the road’ logging a breeze.

Users can feel assured in using this application as their information is backed up on a web server in a secure data centre environment. Users also have the extra option of exporting the information, and backing it up for convenience on their own PC or laptop.

Employees that are required by their employers to log their travel will also find this app particularly useful.

1 March 2009 to 28 February 2010 will be the last year where the “deeming provision” may be used to calculate a business travel deduction. Before, taxpayers were only asked to provide their total business and personal mileage for the year. However, according to the SARS web site, this provision was open to abuse and resulted in excessive deductions, which did not match actual business expenses.

So, from 1 March 2010, taxpayers seeking to claim a deduction for business travel will be required to keep a logbook and www.travellogger.co.za will assist taxpayers in doing so.

White Wall Web recently worked with RE/MAX of Southern Africa to deliver a new digital initiative which “allows sales associates with profiles or accounts on major social networking sites (such as Facebook or MySpace) to add, manage and organise property listings through social bookmarking.” (Read more about this here)

This sounds exceptional from a business value perspective and has generated notable press coverage, but technically, this is one of the simplest implementations we have completed on behalf of RE/MAX of Southern Africa in the entire 5 years of working with them. This got me seriously thinking about maximizing business value when consulting…

Business Value, Complexity and Effort

When doing project work at WWW, we follow the SCRUM process. Three important metrics considered in the planning process are “business value,” “complexity” and “effort.”

Business Value is all about the value a piece of functionality will create in positioning a business to meet it’s organizational objectives.

Complexity is about how complex a piece of functionality is to produce.

Effort is about how long a piece of functionality will take to produce.

Complexity and Effort differ in that two tasks may take the same amount of time (effort) but require a far more skilled person to do the one than the other (complexity). Consider the difference between watching a 2 hour movie vs. conducting a 2 hour heart surgery.

Clients are happy when…

…they maximise business value while minimizing costs. Since both effort (time = money) and complexity (high skill = money) add cost.

Consultant’s Gold

As a consultant/solution provider you have struck gold when you find ways to maximize business value while keeping effort and complexity at a necessary low.

Fight the urge to use all your super powers all the time

As consultants/solutions providers (in any field) we have a great toolset of awesome super-powers. The urge is to use them all, all the time. We are conditioned to think “It’s not good enough to add some simple social-media-bookmarking-tool-bar to a website as a professional and respectable solution.” Surely that can’t be of great value? What will my peers say? How could I possibly do that and claim I have done something noteworthy/worthwhile?

It’s all about what you value

What we value most dictates what we will consider to be most commendable. For example, if you value a healthy family life, you will think that an 80 hour work week is excessive and stupid, but if you value hard work and maximum wealth creation, you will think that a 40 hour work week is lazy and stupid.

This issue is actually rooted in the same. As a consultant/solutions provider, if you value creating maximum business success for the clients you serve, your focus will be on business value creation at the lowest possible cost. If you value the technical implementation of a solution, that will be what you consider most commendable.

It’s also about professional maturity

A mature professional appreciates and celebrates the creation of business value.

It is immature to elevate technical implementation above business value creation because in reality, technical implementation is a means to an end and not an end in and of itself.

The Web Dev Community

As an international and local community, I think we are getting better at this, but we still have a way to go. What I mean is, I recall 3-4 years ago, techie forums (for example) being very heavy on the actual tech used in producing solutions. Some loud-mouths “out there” would lambaste others in the community for their technical implementations (even often when the resultant business value created was high, despite not-too-amazing tech)

As a community of practitioners, we need to continue create a new peer pressure: maximize business value, keep complexity and effort at a necessary minimum.

A developer/technician/consultant who gets this right is a true professional in my view.

Net Prophet is a new initiative that was created to assist individuals in making business sense of the internet, striving to provide intelligent forecasting, industry insights, trend monitoring and advice on how to turn all of this knowledge into profits.

Net Prophet aims to inspire creativity and the flow of ideas among entrepreneurs and stake-holders that are operating in the internet-tech space in Africa & South Africa. The conference has a number of renowned speakers lined up to share their insights on a variety of different internet related topics. The “Net Prophets” include Arthur Goldstuck of World Wide Worx, Hannes Van Rensburg of Fundamo, Mike Stopforth of Cerebra and Dave Duarte.

Net Prophet is free for anyone to attend and is hosted by the RAMP Foundation, a Section 21 company setup to stimulate entrepreneurship thinking and the formation of startup businesses. For more information go to www.netprophet.org.za

In order to address challenges facing companies in the human resource and recruitment management field, we have developed several online based information and personnel management systems that are both cost effective and will maximise ultimate business objectives.

One such example – PersonL (www.personlplace.com a web-based recruiter assignment management software suite), affords recruiters the ability to fully control the recruitment process from start to finish using purely web-based tools, saving both time and money.

PersonL incorporates the entire recruitment and placement management process from the creation of job specifications, advert management, registering of applicants in terms of CVs and personal profiles, intelligent matching algorithms, interview stages with automated regret, as well as final approval and pre-appointment reference checking correspondence.

Other online user-friendly interfaces implemented by White Wall Web to enhance business performance include Knowledge Management and Enterprise Wiki’s. In this day-and-age, with employee turnover figures on the increase due to the trend of job-hopping and the current job market situation in terms of job losses, information is easily lost. Using Knowledge Management and Enterprise Wiki’s, a virtual pool for all employees to dive into, deposit and source information, this precious commodity is literally at your finger tips. Tools such as these save companies not only time and money but also relieve some of the stress surrounding employee retirement, retrenchment and resignation.

We believe technology will continue to offer opportunities to increase efficiency and effectiveness for industries that work with high volumes of information and data storage. With the increase in candidate sourcing from foreign nations, this new technology will mean it is easier to recruit candidates from disparate geographical locations.

Read this article and post your thoughts. My take is that Google must decide: “work with channels”, or “don’t work with channels,” but don’t try to have your cake and eat it.

I sincerely hope Google isn’t becoming too big and arrogant to remember how important loyalty and trust are…

Some more “evil” considerations:

• http://www.theopensourcery.com/wordp1/index.php?p=409
• http://ablog.apress.com/?p=1019
• http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2005/08/is_google_evil.html
• http://www.itwire.com/content/view/19061/53/