Web work

The end of Bloglines

Via this post to Google Reader blog I’ve learned the Bloglines news. The service will be closed on October 1st.

Today, Ask.com let our users know that we will shut down Bloglines on October 1. Not an easy decision, especially considering our loyal and supportive (not to mention patient) user base, but, ultimately, the right one given business reasons simply too hard to ignore.

While I myself switched four years ago, I know that some people are still using the service (hi mom!). Everyone is encouraged to migrate to some other news reader. My recommendation is, of course, Google Reader. And the migration process should be simple and straight forward: export subscriptions as a single OPML file from Bloglines and import them into Google Reader.

While Google Reader is a superior service these days, it came later and from a bigger company than the original Bloglines. Back, when people were just figuring out how to use RSS en masse, Bloglines offered a simple and very convenient way. It was so simple in fact, that you didn’t need to know much about RSS at all. It was so simple, that even my mother, who avoids web services as much as possible, was able to use and enjoy it.

And even though I haven’t used Bloglines at all in the last four years, it’s sad to see it go. For me it was one of those milestones in the Web history.

Keep you blog posts dated. Always! Please.

I came across this article in Weblog Tools Collection, which asks the question of whether you should remove dates from your blog posts.

If the content on your blog is timeless and you could increase the amount of traffic coming to your blog from search engines, would you remove the post and comment dates?

While I appreciate a good habit of questioning best practices, I have a very strong feeling on this one. Never ever ever remove dates from the articles and comments. There is no such thing as “timeless content”. Dates are always relevant. Content easily outlives the author, the source, and anything that was considered “timeless” at the moment of writing. Time is a very important dimension. It is a crucial bit of metadata. Don’t lose it.

And on top of that, don’t try to make that kind of decisions for your visitor. It might appear rude and offensive. Let the visitor decide for himself if he wants to click through to your article from the search engine or not. Be transparent. Always let the visitor know when the article was written, which times it refers to, and when it was commented. Publish the date nearby. Also use it in the URLs whenever possible.

Even structure your text to refer to specific time periods (“March 2010”, “July 4th, 1985”, “Stone Age”, etc). Don’t use vague constructs like “yesterday”, “last year”, “when I was a child”. You never know how your content will reach its audience. Some people will find your article in full and on your site. Some will see an excerpt in their RSS feeder. Some will get just a quote emailed to them by a friend. The context might change, and the “timeless”-ness can disappear.

If you are still not convinced, try a practical example. Find some “timeless content” from before (last year, last decade, last century) and see how well it stands the test of times. Now break it in pieces and look again. Still there? Still timeless? Share your findings (both positive and negative) in the comments.

And in the meantime, keep your articles dated.

Front page design is overrated

I was looking through my website statistics yesterday and I arrived to this decision – front page design is overrated. There are, of course, different circumstances and such, but overall, I think this should be true for pretty much every content-based website, except the monsters like CNN. If you are CNN, then, I guess, people just come to your front page to check up on things. But if you are not CNN, or some other huge news outlet, chances are, you’ll get most of your visitors from the search engines. And if that’s true, then I bet your front-page won’t be the landing page for all those visitors. They will come directly to content pages, like articles, products, and so on.

Consider an example. Yesterday, this blog saw 593 unique visitors. The front page was seen by only 46. That’s less than 8%! Of course, days are different, and each website is different in its own way. But I think that in general the correlation between the numbers will be somewhere there. Around 10% of visitors will check your front page. Most of them will check the landing page and leave (what’s your bounce rate? 70-80%?). Some will continue to “Contact Us”, “Related Posts”, “Similar Products”, or search. And then more of them will leave. A few of those, who are still there, will probably check the front page by now. By which time they probably already got what they wanted out of your website or lost all hopes. No matter how beautiful your front page is, they are likely to leave now. Dont’ think so? What’s the average pages per visit metric for your website? 1.5-2? There you go.

So, don’t bother too much about the front page. Yes, it is nice to have a cool one. Yes, it might be important for those direct visitors. But if you are on a tight schedule or budget, concentrate on improving your content pages.

Sideshow – Cyprus web design company

For years I’ve been complaining about the web design situation in Cyprus. Most web design companies here suck. And most of the websites that they do suck even more. Once in a while, though, I’d mention this or that website that was standing out. Finally, I can mention a web design company that stands out and that makes websites that stand out too – Sideshow.

Yes, like every other company, they have their problems (front page of their website doesn’t validate clean) and they don’t do everything the way I would have done it (they are using Vimeo for videos, not YouTube), but I am still impressed with their work. They use Drupal CMS extensively. They truly know what social media is about, with Facebook and Twitter integrations and team tweets, their own blog, RSS feeds, and more. Their design work is fresh and modern. And their portfolio is shining. Remember, when I was praising the new Cyprus Mail website? That’s the company who did it. They even print their business cards with Moo, what more can I say?

I’m so glad I found them. I have people left and right asking me where to go for a new website, and until now I have been very reluctant to refer them to any of the webdesign companies I know. But now I have a proper reference. And even though I haven’t worked with them personally, I think I am in the position to judge their work. And as I said, I am impressed. Respect!

P.S.: no, this is not a paid ad. I truly am glad and impressed.

P.P.S.: if you are a web designer or web developer in Cyprus, they are hiring. If there is one web company to work for in Cyprus, that’s this one.

Ad CTR ratio by browser

Download Squad attempts to analyze a recent report about advertising click-through rate (CTR) ratio based on different browsers. Apparently, more than 40 million impressions were used as the data for this report, and Opera and MSIE users came on top – they click the most ads. Firefox and Chrome users are further down the list, and Safari users are at the bottom.

I think this chart makes a lot of sense. While there are ad-blocking solutions for both Opera and MSIE, neither one of this browsers has a healthy plugin ecosystem. In other words, even if there are ways to filter ads in these browsers, most users don’t know how to do it or simply don’t care enough. Both Firefox and Chrome browsers are blossoming with addons and extensions which filter all ads, known ads, annoying ads, flash ads, ads on specific websites, ads of specific sizes, and so on and so forth. In fact, I don’t know any Firefox or Chrome user who doesn’t have some sort of ad-filtering extension installed.

That leaves us with Safari. Why Safari users are clicking the least ads? I don’t know. I’m thinking that might be a statistical inaccuracy or something along those lines. Or maybe they all are just broke from buying all those Apple products and have no interest in ads no more. Who knows?