Steven Nash

eCommerce and Digital Marketing

Christmas is over

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On December 30, 2007

In General

Christmas is over, I’m a bit bored and I still have the remaining sniffles of a cold that flared up on Christmas Day (it didn’t put me in a very good mood!). I’ve got a few books to start reading – His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman (haven’t seen the film of the first book yet – I’ve heard some pretty awful reviews by critics and friends alike). I’ve also picked up Britain’s Everyday Heroes by Gordon Brown which is quite an interesting read so far, and as I love horror so much – I picked up The Devil Rides Out and The Exorcist. God only knows when I’ll get through that lot.

My friend Pete told me recently about a friend of his who bought lots of books regularly and had worked out that at the rate that he bought them he wouldn’t read them all in his lifetime. He then decided that it would be perfectly fine as he was planning on living forever. Good plan!

Picked up the Tarantino and Indiana Jones boxsets as well – classic films.

Your e-commerce website – Is it any good?

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On December 30, 2007

In Uncategorized

I’ve just been working out what I need to do for the year ahead and most of my free time will be devoted to my Usability research at Staffordshire University, I’m currently planning which papers to write and setting deadlines.

This should be a good way of obtaining a wider view of e-commerce usability and web 2.0, as on a coding level – whilst you obtain invaluable technical knowledge and proficiency, you can lose focus on the overall picture of what makes a website work.

In day-to-day development work, individual tasks are completed, each design element is implemented but just like a football club filled with star players does not always result in a title winning team; sometimes a website can equal much less than the sum of its parts.

Sites often get the basics wrong! But because they are unattractive, unexciting jobs, which will probably go unnoticed and will not result in whoops of excitement from a Sales and Marketing team or a Director, too often not enough time is spent on things such as:

  • Defining a clear navigational hierarchy and site structure
  • Improving the site search algorithm to return more accurate results,
  • Ensuring that the site is accessible to disabled users.

You might have a customer discussion forum, you might have customer reviews of your products, you may add flashy Web 2.0 widgets that you hope add a ‘coolness’ factor to the site. But I am suddenly reminded of a question that drummer Andy Edwards asks on a fairly regular basis… ‘Is it good?’

It is a simple question and the answer is largely a subjective one. You can produce something very simple, but it can be ‘good.’ An example I can think of off-hand is the song ‘Kashmir’ by Led Zeppelin, great song, but the drum pattern is on the whole very very simple, but when listening to the overall song, it sounds good!

Each individual developer can get so wrapped up in finishing their individual task that nobody is taking that step back and looking at the site and asking: ‘But is it good?’

Unlike music or film, judging whether a site is ‘good’ is much less subjective and you could define your own criteria based upon what you are hoping to achieve with your site. Task-based usability testing with participants representative of your users go a long way towards measuring whether your site is ‘good.’

When is a shopping basket not a shopping basket?

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On September 13, 2007

In Usability

I was reading through Jakob Nielsen’s ‘Prioritizing Web Usability’ recently and there is a brief discussion of a website called watches.co.uk.  Jakob is usually worth reading as a lot of web developers will tell you, but on this ocassion he made a very strange comment about use of the term ‘shopping basket.’

Nielsen prefers that they use ‘Shopping Cart’ instead as apparently most users look for the term ‘Cart’, not ‘Basket’.

Numerically, he may be correct, as I am certain that American users look for the term ‘Cart’ as they are used to that term.  In the UK however we are used to doing our weekly trip to Tesco and putting the products into a ‘shopping basket’, not a ‘cart’. The term ‘cart’ is very un-English and as (I strongly suspect) the target audience of watches.co.uk is English – surely the visitors on that site are looking for the term ‘Basket’, not ‘Cart’.

Of course an argument could be made that the site in question might wish to export goods to America, even if that is the case I would still say that their primary market is the UK, otherwise surely they would be using a .com (global) web address and offering the option to display prices in US Dollars.

I’ve just had a look at their updated site and spotted that they haven’t taken any notice of Nielsen’s advice (I suspect they aren’t even aware of it), and have actually made certain things even worse by removing the textual link entirely and replacing it with just a very small basket icon.

Not often I disagree with Nielsen’s advice, but in this case – I feel he is very wrong!

Neuros OSD

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On September 9, 2007

In Technology

A couple of months back a friend of mine, Pete Oliver mentioned a Linux event called LugRadio Live that he was helping to co-ordinate at the Light House in Wolverhampton. It sounded like it might be interesting for a few hours so I went up on the Sunday.

I’d been meaning to try out Ubuntu on my HP laptop for a while as XP Professional and the crap that HP bundled with it, had slowed it down to a crawl and all I needed it for was web browsing and IM (more on that in another blog). Point being while I hadn’t actually done much with Linux I was interested in seeing some demonstrations etc.

I sat through one presentation called the $100 embedded media device given by Joe Born of Neuros Technologies promoting an Open Source Multimedia Device – the Neuros OSD. The first half of the presentation was very much focused on the technical side of things whereas I was more interested in the – ‘but what does it do…?’ aspect.

The basic idea of the OSD is that you can ‘free your media’. It has a lot of different inputs on it, including a USB port, and two digital camera card slots which will support MMC, SD, MS, CF Card and Microdrive.

There are a lot of possibilities, but here is what I have done with it – right now I have all of videos, all of my music away from the PC, and stored onto a LaCie 500 gigabyte Ethernet Hard Drive. The Neuros OSD is connected to my router and can access the drive and play most of the media on it (more and more file types are being supported with each new firmware update).

So right now I can use the OSD as a kind of… multimedia jukebox. I now no longer have to bog down my PC with a massive winamp playlist while I surf the web (and incidentally stutter every time Yahoo Mail loads up – I suspect thats a combination of Ad-Block in Firefox with Yahoo Mail). Plus I can rip a DVD which I own but would like to access quickly without having to wait and sit through an endless amount of trailers of films that I don’t want to see when all I want is to see one episode of the Adam and Joe Show or Family Guy or Clerks Animated etc as I’m getting ready to go out.

The OSD can record from virtually any source and one of the things I have done is gather up my last remaining VHS tapes that I wanted to digitise, connected a VHS player to the Neuros OSD with a Scart to composite lead (Neuros OSD uses composite leads for input and output) and recorded the tape to an external hard drive as an MP4 file.

Tapes have included:

  • The Wonder Stuff – Finally Live – Phoenix Festival 1994
  • Mark Kermode – Scream and Scream Again (History of the slasher film)
  • Mark Kermode – Interview with John Carpenter
  • Wolves vs Newcastle Utd – FA Cup 2003

So yes, not stuff you are likely to find released on DVD any time soon 🙁

Recording was incredibly easy, theres a record option on the main menu, select the quality, the device you intend to play it back on, choose a filename, press record. Playback showed that it gives very good quality recording.

As the Neuros is open source, anybody is allowed to look at how the device works and alter it, program for it etc. So there are quite a few programmers out there, looking at porting a few Linux programs to it, and adding extra functionality. For example when I bought the OSD, the music player was pretty poor, but now some clever peeps have ported XMMS2 (a winamp style player for Linux) and added a Youtube browser – yes thats right – you too can view all the pointless shit you watch when you think your boss isn’t looking on your TV set at home. At the time of writing Windows Media Audio is not quite supported yet, although I have a development version of the firmware where it seems the support is almost ready.

But other ideas that I personally would like to see implemented in the OSD:

  • Support for subscribing to podcasts – I love listening to Mark Kermode’s Five Live film reviews and it would be super excellent if the OSD would allow you to subscribe to different podcasts and download them when they are ready (in fact at the moment this particular podcast just won’t play at all and I have no idea why, I am sure they’ll fix that though).
  • Streaming Internet Radio – I’m a big fan of BBC 6Music, and it would be excellent if I could stream that on the OSD.
  • Emulation – This one is pure wishful thinking, but it would be bloody cool if you could play MAME on the Neuros OSD as there is a USB port allowing a joypad to be plugged into it.

Its certainly come very far in a short space of time so its a very encouraging device which doesn’t cost much at all. I bought mine for £130 (that included postage and customs charges) and the LaCie ethernet Mini Disk cost £133.

I took these very poor photos with my mobile phone but it gives you a quick overview of what the OSD looks like, the interface design and the size of it.

XMMS2 Running on the Neuros OSDNeuros OSDNeuros OSD in my current setup

Another Nashie.net redesign…

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On August 13, 2007

In General, Web Marketing

Word up etc… this is my latest version of Nashie.net. This time round its built using PHP instead of ASP and the focus is a little more oriented towards my general day-to-day work in XHTML, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and anything interesting I have to say about my Masters that I start next month at Staffordshire University.

As a quick introduction, if you haven’t been on this site before, I’m a web developer in Birmingham working for Attraction World and I’ve worked on the development of several sites, most recently – FloridaTix, AttractionTix.

I’ve been working there since January 2005 and I’ve learnt a hell of a lot in a relatively short space of time and I’ve been fortunate to watch the company grow very quickly and help them produce better and better sites (always room for more improvement though!).

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