Posts from — March 2009

The following javascript code will allow you to add keyboard shortcuts to any webpage.

The code

(put this on any page where you want keyboard shortcuts)

(put this in a file called shortcut.js and upload to the same directory as the webpage with the above code). This example will display an alert message when the escape key is pressed.

The following are some more keyboard codes that can be used within the above script (in the if code == X, where X is one of the codes below).

Other Methods

HTML has built-in methods that allow you to add keyboard shortcuts to certain elements on a page. These are also supported by firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera.

accesskey = Character

The accesskey attribute is used to assign a shortcut key to an HTML element of the following types A, AREA, BUTTON, INPUT, LABEL, LEGEND, and TEXTAREA 1.
When the user performs the appropriate keystroke focus is moved to the element.

If the element is a link the link is followed to the referenced document.
If the element is an input or label the cursor is moved to that element.
Depending on the browser, the keystroke to use the accesskey will differ (CHARACTER is any character in the containing documents charset).

• Internet Explorer use: ALT-CHARACTER
• Mozilla Firefox use: ALT-SHIFT-CHARACTER
• Opera use: SHIFT-ESC then CHARACTER

1) Google Trends

You can use this tool to compare daily unique visitors to your site compared to multiple competitors. When you’re signed in with a google account, it will display volume numbers. You can segment by region or time period and also see what sites or search terms visitors used. As an example, I searched twitter.com.

Here are the results:

link: Here

2) Google Insights for Search

You can view trending of interest in your company versus that of your competitor’s company versus that of keywords of products or services in your category. It also allows you to filter by region. As an example, you could track the interest for pepsi in Brazil in the last 12 months and compare it to the interest in Canada.

Link Here

3) Google ad planner

This service is still in beta, but it can give you some valuable demographic information. You can: search for websites relevant to your audience, access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise and store them in a media plan, and generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan.

Link Here

4) Google alternative view for search results

This is an experimental service from google. You need to go to the link below and click on: “join this experiment”. You can search for keywords and specify a month/year filter.

Link Here

5) twist.flaptor.com

This site will allow you to search for daily trends on twitter. This includes a graph of the search term and individual tweets that contained it.

Link Here

I found a case study today about how a popular e-commerce site made a few simple design changes and increased its annual revenue by $300 million.

Introduction

The website was a simple design: two fields, two buttons, and a link. The fields were “Email Address” and “Password”. The buttons were “Login” and “Register”. The link was “Forgot Password”. It’s a form most users on the Internet have encountered at one time or another and seems like it should be pretty straight-forward and easy to design.

The problem wasn’t with actual layout or design of the form, but where it appeared in the checkout process. If a customer wanted to checkout, they were presented with a screen to enter in their username/password (previous customers) or register for a new account (a new customer). Customers were forced to create an account.

Assumptions

The original developers of this site thought that repeat customers would be able checkout faster and that first-time purchasers wouldn’t mind the extra steps involved in the payment process.

A usability test was performed and there were many complaints. First-time users didn’t like the idea of being forced to register. Many people also didn’t want to give out details such as a personal email address for fear of getting spam/unwanted messages. Repeat customers were also frustrated. Some couldn’t remember which email address or password they used to complete their order.

The fix

The registration button was completely removed and in it’s place is now a continue button with the following text: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”.

The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

Original article here

What is robots.txt?

A robots.txt file on your website tells a search engine to ignore specified files or directories. You might want to create one to exclude certain content because it is private (such as an administrative interface) or that it is misleading or irrelevant to the categorization to your website as a whole.

You can create the robots.txt file manually, using any text editor. It should be an ascii-encoded text file and the filename should all be in lowercase. Once you’ve created your robots.txt file, save it to the root of your domain with the name robots.txt. This is where robots will check for your file. If it’s saved anywhere else, they will not find it.

Setting it up

• User-agent: the search engine robot
• Disallow: the URL that will be blocked

You can include as many entries as you want.

Blocking search engine bots

A comprehensive list of search engine bots can be found here

Blocking a page:
Disallow: /my_page.html

Blocking an entire directory (which includes all pages in it):
Disallow: /blocked_dir/

Block a site:
Disallow: /

To block files of a specific file type (.exe) from the google bot:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.exe$

More advanced settings (only works with the goolgebot)

Block access to all URLs that include a question mark:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*?

If you have created a robots.txt file for your site and would like to check the validity of it, there is a free service that will do this for you here

The following are the 25 oldest domain names registered on the internet: