In short, the program is designed to enable such agencies to:

• Maximize the value they can add to their projects
• Take on larger, more technical projects
• Offer their clients high-level strategic input from a technology point of view
• Broaden their offering and sales reach

For all those who missed out on the launch, you can get the low down on the program on our website, or get in touch with us directly if you want to see the full presentation with case studies.

A similar event is planned for Johannesburg in the near future. If you are in the Jo’burg area and would like to attend, you can contact us directly.

You could bring focus groups into expensive testing labs and record your subjects actions on the site, asking them questions about the site and their interactions with it, but this takes time and money – time to find the right people that represent your target market and collate and document all the responses,  money to get them interested in helping you test your application, and more money to hire the necessary equipment to perform these tests. Not a particularly attractive concept in the current state of our economy.

But there are other options available which can give you the metrics required to establish what your potential customers are or aren’t doing on your site. There are tools which you can implement to execute the appropriate tests and gain the necessary metrics, some of which we discuss in our previous post “Helpful tools for tracking user behaviour.” But to delve deeper into establishing what works and what doesn’t work on your site, we’ll highlight a few additional tools and methods.

Split A/B Testing

It’s often difficult to decide if a particular design layout has the desired effect. In fact, with so many design options available to us, choosing a single layout can be a stressful process. An image, the placement of a text block, or an action button, can all have a significant impact on how successful your design and layout strategy is. The best option is to let your customers tell you which one works by tracking their actions around your site. Split Testing allows you to show different layout variations of certain elements to different groups of site visitors, and to track which one is the most likely to deliver the desired result.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO provides a substantial amount of data pertaining to the visibility of your site on Google and takes into consideration fundamental elements, namely keywords, links and search impressions. Google’s Webmaster Tools are useful for SEO purposes, and provide important information on various technical aspects of your site, such as broken links, HTML problems and duplicate Meta.

With constant monitoring of your site, these issues can be addressed as and when they happen. You also receive insight into page load time, an important factor of client satisfaction, and will be able to identify which keywords (on various search engines, i.e. Google, Yahoo) bring the most traffic to your site. With this knowledge, you can equip yourself  with the advice you need in order to ensure optimum results are realised.

There are numerous tools and methods available to track the performance and usability of your site and it can be difficult or even overwhelming to decide on a starting point. We recommend that you  get your SEO right first by putting Google Analytics in place, and then supplement that with user feedback surveys and forms. Once you are confident with gathering and understanding this data, you can move on to Split A/B Testing and other more advanced methods such as goal tracking and heat maps.

Metrics is about applying a layer of tracking, understanding it and then implementing the next layer. Each layer helps you refine the previous layer’s metrics and once you’ve got the correct layers carefully in place, you’ll have the tools you require to fine-tune your site and optimize it to align as closely as possible with your business goals, which is, after all, the goal of your website!

Let’s assume that we have attained adequate specifications from the client and feel confident with our understanding thereof.  We then need to make an educated estimation of the amount of work the project requires, and establish the cost. The word “educated” in the above statement must be emphasized, as estimation is, by no means, an exact science when it comes to software development. It does however, become more accurate when one relates the work to similar completed projects, and this is where the ‘educated’ estimation comes in. However, even with a historical precedent, there are factors and variables that could make the estimates inaccurate, but with experience, you learn to identify these variables and take them into account.

So, how do we educate ourselves in order to provide reasonable estimates? How do we reduce the risks to both the client and ourselves, as the service provider? We track what we do with clear metrics.

At White Wall Web, we make use of SCRUM for our project work. Velocity is probably the most important metric in SCRUM, allowing us to track the number of Story Points we can complete in a specified time frame. Without going into too much detail about how SCRUM works, Story Points are a measure of the perceived complexity of a particular User Story (another name for a software feature). A well-known and often implemented story, such as “as a user, I should be able to log into the system in order to gain access to my account”, is given a value that describes how complex it is to implement. This value is then used as the basis on which all the other stories are rated.

When the project begins, the SCRUM Master tracks how long the team takes to complete the stories and calculates the number of complexity points completed in the elapsed time. At the end of the sprint, the team ends up with a single figure called the “Velocity” that indicates how many points were completed in the sprint. After a few sprints, this figure should become more and more accurate, as long as the team continues to estimate according to the agreed baseline.

Although I’ve described the process quite simplistically here, achieving an accurate final Velocity figure is not that simple. A number of barriers always present themselves during our projects, but knowing the Velocity of our teams is crucial to the successful execution and completion of our projects. It allows us to give the client a reasonably accurate idea of how much work can be completed in a Sprint, and at the same time allows the team to measure their performance against previous sprints. This has helped us minimize the risk of projects running over budget and over time, and made the software development process much more predictable for us. Ultimately this leads to happy, satisfied clients, and a healthy ongoing relationship.

There are a number of powerful free tools available on the web that will give you more than enough data to accurately gain insight into what users do when they arrive on your site. Even the slightest text tweak of a landing page, or positioning of a button can make a world of difference.

Here are our top 5 tools for getting started:

Analytics

The mainstay of any web marketer, Google Analytics allows you to gather and analyse specific data about your website, such as, where your visitors came from and how long they spent on your site, which links they clicked on and which content they favoured more. It is particularly useful when coupled with online marketing campaigns, as it can show the various sources of traffic, be it third party ads, organic search results, or pay per click campaigns.

KISSmetrics is a customer development platform that provides analytics and insights for blogs, websites & web applications. It is different from Google Analytics in that is focused on the “split screen testing” and tracking “people” as opposed to “visitors” through the journey towards a desired result or “conversion.” It is not a substitute for Google Analytics, but instead a compliment.

Heat Maps

By tracking the mouse clicks of your visitors, you can establish which parts of your site are hot or not. Similar to analytics, but a more graphic display which makes presenting to non-tech people much easier. Heat Maps shows you where your visitors clicked on your site, even if they aren’t links – which perhaps should be. Feng-gui, clickheat, clickdensity, and several WordPress plugins are some of the available free software apps, but for $8 p/month, you’ll get a more well-known and reliable service with CrazyEgg.

Online Surveys

Get your visitors to solve your problems! Send out concise and non-invasive questionnaires to your visitors. By asking well-thought out and open-ended questions to your visitors, you can attain a clearer understanding into what the needs of your visitors. Use their feedback to understand what they’re search for and what you need to do to maintain their focus whilst they’re visiting your site, improve your site, or even make additions to your product offering. SurveyMonkey is a popular online survey software and questionnaire tool that offers both a free and pro service.

Sharing is Caring

Give users the power to tell others about your site. By implementing a “tell-a-friend” system into your site, you allow visitors to easily share some information about something they like, or something they’d think their friends would like. A “share” button is the easiest and quickest way to get your word out there. TellaFriend is a free service to apply to any website, while a Sharing is Sexy bookmark can be added to any WordPress site; and at a click of a button, your visitor can Like your site via Facebook’s Like button.

Search & Alerts

With all the activity on blogs, forums, and social media networks, it’s hard to track what everyone is saying, and more importantly what they are saying about you! Google Alerts coupled with a good Reader is a great way to aggregate where your name is being featured, and who’s saying what about you, leaving you in a comfortable position to respond to any comments. Twitter Search is also useful to keep you up-to-speed with what’s happening in the Twittersphere.

Google Street View is a service linked to Google Maps and Google Earth that provides users with panoramic, photographic detail at street level. Areas in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Pretoria, Johannesburg and Durban were mapped out by stitching together millions of photographs taken by the Google Street View Trikes (vehicles), enabling users to view panoramic images of local streets in vivid detail, as if they were standing on the very street they were viewing. Users visiting www.remax.co.za can now see the ‘Street View’ of specific properties listed on the site.

A huge value-add to property consumers, this opens the doors to many ancillary benefits which are soon to be exploited, but most significantly, buyers are afforded an improved perspective on the properties in question, and sellers are better able to recoup the intrinsic value of appealing neighbourhoods, attractive houses and proximity to amenities such as educational institutions, shopping areas and police stations. Adrian Goslett, CEO of RE/MAX of Southern Africa says, “Each year an increased number of South Africans are searching online for property, so the implementation of Google Street View to our service is the natural progression.”

The benefits of Google Street View to clients are vast as they will no longer need to page through newspapers or drive around on Sundays, painstakingly searching for show houses.

Prior to the launch of Google Street View in South Africa, Google SA approached White Wall Web and RE/MAX as potential integration partners for Street View as a result of their long standing relationship building and innovating web-based technologies for the property industry. Google Street View subsequently became the ‘cherry on top’ for the newly launched www.remax.co.za website, which features address level map data as well.

Executive Director at White Wall Web, Noel Ross-Gillespie, states, “The incorporation of Google Street View into the RE/MAX of Southern Africa website is a big step in the right technological direction. While South Africa might be behind the rest of the developed world in some aspects, we’re also in a unique position in which we can take the best-of-breed technologies and fast-track our growth. We are pleased to have been able to assist RE/MAX in bringing the very latest technology to the forefront of the Real Estate industry.”

See it to believe it – visit the RE/MAX site and experience it first hand, or take a look at some of these randomly selected samples below:

http://remax.co.za/300148190/

http://remax.co.za/300176836/

http://remax.co.za/300207313/

http://remax.co.za/300229443/

http://remax.co.za/300267310/

HTML was initially designed to be a language for semantically describing a scientific document, but its general design and adaptation has enabled it to be used to describe a number of other types of documents. HTML5 is a specification for how the web’s core language, HTML, should be formatted and utilised to deliver text, images, multimedia, Web apps, search forms, everything else you see in your browser, and addresses many issues of the previous versions’ specs. The aim is to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in-based rich internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Apache Pivot and Sun JavaFX.

A foremost difference between HTML5 and HTML4 is error handling. New browser vendors have experienced problems when they enter the market, as they must test malformed documents in various browsers (and as with most new tech, IE is always the biggest problem-child), and reverse-engineer their error handling. If this is not done, then many pages will not display correctly. HTML5 is aimed to codify this error handling, with the result being that browser developers can standardize, and reduce the time and money required to display things consistently.

Another difference – or more appropriately phrased as “another goal” – is for HTML5 to develop the ability of the browser to be an application platform via HTML, CSS and Javascript. Useful new features include: local storage (JS-accessible browser, built in SQL database, for storing information beyond cookies’ capabilities), new input types (for the browser to expose easier user interface), and browser-supported form validation, which will make things simpler for developers, and faster for users. A more in-depth look into all the differences between HTML5 and HTML4 can be found here.

So what are the disadvantages of HTML5?

This would be the lack of acceptance of micro-formats across multiple browsers. HTML5 uses new tags that add new ‘semantic richness’ to a web document, but doesn’t fully utilise micro-formats (class attributes, etc) which results in backwards compatibility being non-existent.

As with most new technology in its integration stage, HTML5 is not supported by a number of browsers. But with that said, different developers have different needs. We found a very useful site which gives you interactive compatibility tables for features in HTML5 and other upcoming Web technologies.

We think HTML5 is a great new technology, and could replace the need for Flash. Realistically speaking, the number of people who browse on mobile devices far exceeds the number of people who browse on desktop PCs. As mobile devices cannot support Flash, one should look at the development of technology in adaptation of those who use the technology. Steve Jobs’ recent attack on Adobe is an indication that industry experts are leaning more towards technology such as HTML5, rather than Flash. “New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

Some useful links for HTML5:

• HTML5 Gallery
• HTML5 Showcase & Resources
• HTML5 – A vocabulary & associated APIs for HTML and XHTML
• HTML5 Validator
• HTML5 Specification tracker
• HTML5 FAQs
• Click here for some very cool HTML5 experiments
• W3C official specifications for HTML5
• HTML5 & CSS3 Readiness chart

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.

Entrepreneurs and their success stories, innovative companies, universities and their research projects, and venture capital landscape is the name of the game at the exhibition. A dedicated section on Agile development in the Cape and case studies of successful Agile implementations will also be on display.

The exhibition is free for all and is aimed towards people in the Cape technology industry, university students, and school learners. Various industry experts will be attending the exhibition – including our very own Peter Flynn (Managing Director), Noel Ross-Gillespie (Operations Director) and Zayne Upton (Head of Operations).

Times:

• Exhibition opens: 09h00 on Wednesday, 5 May 2010

• Industry: 09h00 – 17h00: The exhibition is open to anyone who works in the Cape technology industry or its supporting industries, from 09h00 – 17h00 on Wednesday 5th and Thursday 6th May and from 09h00 – 16h00 on Friday 7th May.

• University Students: 11h00 – 12h00 & 14h00 – 15h00: Students are invited to attend between 11h00 – 12h00 and   14h00 – 15h00 on Wednesday 5th, Thursday 6th and Friday 7th May.

• School Learners: 16h00 – 17h00:  School learners, their parents and teachers are invited from 16h00 – 17h00 on Wednesday 5th and Thursday 6th May.

• Exhibition closes: 17h00 on Friday, 7 May

We are proud to be associated with this event, and look forward to meeting you there!

Net Prophet, a non-profit conference hosted by the RAMP Foundation, is all about inspiring, equipping and empowering entrepreneurs operating in the local technology space – something which is close to our heart (with our roots as a tech start-up) and forms a large part of CSI mandate.

Leveraging off the enormous success of last year’s event, which saw #NetProphet trending (in the twitter top 10 world trends) on twitter for 6 hours and an over-capacity turnout, Net Prophet 2010 is shaping out to be something truly spectacular. We’re particularly excited about the Net Prophet Super Panel on international trends and opportunities that local entrepreneurs can tap into. The panel features acclaimed Silicon Valley author and editor-at-large for www.techcrunch.com, Sarah Lacy, who is accompanied by Stephen Newton (head of Google SA) and Stephan Ekbergh (travelstart.com). To top it off, Richard Hardiman (Cape Town’s local Partyman) from KFM will play the role of host.

The speaker line-up features some of Africa’s tech hero’s and esteemed prophets, such as Erik Hersman (AfriGadget, Ushahdidi), Arthur Goldstuck (World Wide Worx), Vinny Lingham (yola), Adriaan Pienaar (Woo themes) to name a few. It seems that a strong thread for this years Net Prophet will be innovation and opportunities in Africa.

The event is not just for industry experts, but for anyone wanting to learn how they can make better business sense of the ever-changing web-technology landscape. We are told that there are still a few seats available for those who haven’t joined the party yet. You can register for the conference at www.netrophet.org.za.

Garth Watson (Grant Gunston Attorneys) & Noel Ross-Gillespie (White Wall Web) at Net Prophet 2009.

It’s such a simple concept that we’re usually blissfully unaware of it, but it represents – albeit by a technical term – the common sense of learning and adjusting from experience. Having watched my two children grow up, there is certainly no doubt that our brains are immensely good at learning, improving and optimising automatically. We’re all (mostly) good at gathering feedback from our peers, our critics, our environments and our endeavours, and we manage these various cues by influencing our actions and behaviours. Many experiences can be observed with our five senses and perhaps some intuition, but when our natural detection abilities start to break down, the age-old adage should come to mind: “if you can’t measure, you can’t manage”.

Let’s consider the 3 parts of a feedback loop

1. The actual process
2. The measurement at the outputs (against expectations)
3. The implementation of measurements, and consequent changes to the inputs

The actual process can take any shape, size or form. If we were to return to the kids, eating porridge with a spoon represents a fairly substantial process. The outcomes (aka outputs) could, for fun, be quantified as the ratio of porridge consumed to porridge smeared, or time taken to empty the bowl, accuracy of the hand-to-mouth process, or even nutrition over time. The inputs could then too be thought of as the speed-of-spoon, consistency of the goop or size of spoon. While most inputs can be subtly adjusted, occasionally changes may need more radical forms – for arguments sake, the introduction of handcuffs and syringes!

This is the exception however – one seldom chooses to introduce step changes, preferring rather to see incremental improvements resulting from incremental changes, tweaked in the right direction based on reliable measurements.

Fortunately, running the operations at a software development house like White Wall Web doesn’t often involve porridge, but there is an almost infinite array of processes which need to be improved in order to extract efficiencies, deliver value and maintain our competitive advantages. Over the last few years the truth of measurement being the key to management has been obvious – from understanding the real costs of smoke breaks through to recognising the trade-offs of implementing Scrum and its associated stand-ups, planning meetings and necessary overheads. Our sales side is now obsessing about lead times and conversion ratios, while our product support team is focused on creating capacity reports and utilisation statistics.

Have we arrived? No. Has it been easy? Like pulling teeth. Worth it? Of course! The journey of identifying, establishing and implementing the measurements is of almost equal value to the actual metrics, because their origins and impacts on the larger processes are understood. By watching the changes in measurements, we’re now able to make changes to the inputs – people, approaches, discussions, meetings, paradigms and even cost rates – aware all the time of how these many small and individual factors influence the bigger picture. And just as the impressionists demonstrated – the beauty of the big picture lies in many correctly placed, correctly coloured little details.

Follow our Series on Business Metrics as we introduce to you the key factors to successful measuring.