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I feel I’ve spent the last 12 years of life, my career, trying to help people do things better.  Helping them make better systems, better experiences, better websites.  And I would expect that there are other people like me doing similar things for similar organisations.

But still I see so many organisations just getting it wrong, and I think I’ve figured out why.  Fundementally these organisations (I’m going to just say ‘people’ from now on) are making flawed business process decisions.  The decisions they are making about what to do on their website are being made with the concept being “how can I make this easier for me”.  Wrong!

It’s not about you – it should never be about you.

So what do I mean by ‘you’ – who is ‘you’?  You is the organisation you work for.  ‘You’ is the one making decisions about your business, your products and services, your communications and strategy.  ‘You’ might be the CEO, it might be the IT department, the marketing department, the membership team, or perhaps the worst offender – the accounting/finance department.

When you make decisions with ‘you’ in mind what you are doing is leaving out the customer altogether.  You are forgetting about their experience with your organisation and forgetting that without ‘them’ there would be a ‘you’ in the first place.

It’s the internet – and it’s instant

Put your hand up if your website has a ‘contact us’ form of some sort, perhaps something like the one used by the Zoom Teeth Whitening Centre right here in Melbourne.  My goal was simple – get an appointment.  If only the process was simple.

Firstly I found this organisation by doing a google search for teeth whitening melbourne, and at the top of the results was an advertisement for these guys.  Now I know a little about advertising on the web (in fact I know alot about it) and I know that anything that has a customer value of $495 is a highly competitive keyword search market.  Suffice to say that this organisation would be paying considerably for each and every click on that advert.  And to be honest it’s being waisted right now.

After taking a few seconds to look around their site I decided to hit the contact us form.  Alot of information requested but hey – if they’re asking for it then it must be important right?  And if you take a second to actually look at the form – it even asks when I’d like to have my appointment, day and time.  Hit the go button and sit back.

And then you wait.

And you wait some more.

And nothing happens.  Days go by and nothing happens.  Weeks go by and still nothing.

I don’t think my expectations are too high here – I think if I take the time to fill in your online form – provide all the appropriate information and follow the rules – then it’s common courtesy that you would take the time to respond to it.  I’d be happy to wait perhaps an hour, perhaps two, and reluctantly wait a day.  Anything more is just wasted time, effort, and dollars.  Not my dollars, yours.

Shouldn’t the response be instant?  Shouldn’t the receptionist be getting an email or an alert that says “someone did something you need to pay attention to?”  If I chose to pick up the phone then they would get an alert – a black box on their desk would ring.  Why is it so different with web forms?

I’d love to hear your experiences, good and bad.

This just has to stop.  At some point organisations operating like this need to realise that the thousands of dollars they spent building their website, optimising it for google and paying for the click through adverts is completely wasted if they aren’t taking the customer experience into account.  It’s not about ‘you’, it’s about ‘me’.

flickr: cliff1066 (CC BY 2.0)

Someone asked me today about building a website, and part of the conversation revolved around why the site needed to exist.  The answer was a few things but part of the answer was “it looks good on a resume”.

This made me think… what is it about building a website that would look good on a resume, which led me to think about what it means to have a successful website.

Success is measured in many ways, but for a website i think it’s critical that you establish what success means, even before you start building and designing.

This is no different to most anything you do in life, you need to have a goal of some sort so you know whether all your hard work is paying off.

It’s really weird how we inherently apply to goals to some things in life, and then completely ignore them for others.  Losing weight is a perfect example.  If  you’ve ever been on a diet or exercise kick then you have no doubt started by saying “i want to lose x kgs, or y pounds”.  This gives you something to work towards.

However i’ve seen so many businesses and websites start with things like the colour scheme, or the logo, or the domain name and give no thought at all to what you are trying to achieve AND HOW YOU’LL KNOW WHEN YOU GET THERE!

So without laboring any further on that, what does success mean for a website?

- Traffic: This is pretty easy to measure and tools like google analytics make it super simple to set up.  Traffic is typically measured in page views or unique visits.  The first is a count of how many web pages people see in a month on your site, the second is an indication of how many people visited your site in a month regardless of how many pages they clicked on or how many times they visited in that month.

- Revenue: If you are selling stuff on your site or doing banner advertising then this becomes pretty simple also.

- Speed of build:  Success to you might mean that the site was able to be built from scratch in a specific timeframe.  Maybe it’s a success if you got it done in a week!  Despite having no visitors… it’s still a measure of success.

- Business integration: Succes can also be measured by some specific business process were working with, as an example success might mean that someone can  fill in a form on your site and have the information automatically appear in your
customer management system.

There are other measures also, however importantly you need to have some indication in your head that you can use to say “i’m getting closer to my goal”, without this your just building another website.

What are you building and how are you going to measure the success?

flickr: steve_brace (CC BY 2.0)

- Do you have a real avatar? A real picture, not a logo and definetly not the default Twitter avatar.
- Are more people following you than you are following? This is typically a good indication of interesting posts.
- What’s your tweet to friends ratio? If you are following 600 people but have only tweeted 6 updates then I’m not going to follow you.
- Do you pimp Twitter or engage in conversations? If your last 20 updates or so are exclusively outbound tweets with no retweets or replies then I’m probably not going to follow you.
- Are you here to sell? If every tweet includes a bit.ly link and a vague post like “you have to read this” then I’m not going to follow you.
- Where do you do your tweeting? if every update is from ‘web’ then I’m probably not going to follow you. The Twitter website is not well designed to allow you to engage in conversation, rather it’s built for simple updates.

So… would I follow you?

The problem with twitter (I think anyway) is the twitter website, it’s just not well designed for having conversations with people.  I use twitter without EVER VISITING THE TWITTER WEBSITE! I use it from my phone and from other software that I have installed.

So what’s tweetdeck all about?  Tweetdeck (available from www.tweetdeck.com) presents information in columns on your screen with each column showing different types of tweets (updates).  You can re-arrange the columns to suit, however the default is that:

• The first column shows tweets from all the people you are following, in date and time order.  It normally only shows the last 50 tweets or so.

• The second column shows tweets that are replies to you or contain your twitter username.  This allows you to see who has responded to your tweets and further see if people have re-tweeted your tweets.

• The third column shows direct messages to you, kind of like your email inbox.

Here’s the cool part, from any column you click on small icon to reply or re-tweet messages and also at the top of the screen is a big box to add your own updates to twitter.  To me this made twitter ‘make sense’, I could finally see all that was happening and specifically could see those interested in having a conversation about what I was tweeting about.

Regardless, here are the 5 keyboard shortcuts that save my alot of time:

1. Multi-Line text in a cell – ALT+Enter. This is like hitting enter in a word processor to make a new line, but in the same cell.  It’s good for column headings that are a little long and you want to control the wrapping manually.
2. Autosum – ALT + =. This is great for adding in a SUM function under a bunch of numbers.  If you go to a cell directly under a column of numbers and then hit this short cut key it will type the SUM function for you and make an assumption about the cells to add, you can then select the right cells if it didn’t make the right selection, or just keep what it selected and then hit Enter to accept the formula.
3. Quick Formatting – CTRL + SHIFT + 3/4/5.  I use this most often for formatting dates and dollars.  Having highlighted the cells you want to format you can then hit CTRL + SHIFT + 3 or 4 or 5.
   - CTRL + SHIFT + 3 (or #) is to format dates in dd-mmm-yy format.
   - CTRL + SHIFT + 4 (or $) is to format dollars as currency with two decimal points.
   - CTRL + SHIFT + 5 (or %) is to format as a percentage.
4. Select a Row or Column – CTRL + SPACE or SHIFT + SPACE. This is useful if you need to select a whole row or column, or multiple rows and columns.  Move into any cell in the row or column you need selected and then press CTRL + SPACE to highlight columns or SHIFT + SPACE to highlight rows.   Once selected you can then hold down the shift key and use the arrow keys to extend your selection as required.
5. Autofill – CTRL + d or CTRL + r.  In this case you select a group of cells and then press CTRL + d to fill all cells with what ever is in the top cell down, or CTRL + r to fills cells to the right.

Got more that I should know about?  Let me know in the comments.

1. Backups and double checking backups all round
2. I took a backup of the database and then restored it into a new database
3. I took a complete copy of the site on the file system of the server and pointed it at my new database in the web.config
4. Created a new site in IIS to point to this new folder with a subdomain of staging.newagestore.com

   At this time I now had basically a working replica of the site ready for upgrade.  This enabled me to work on the upgrade (which I had done locally first anyway just to check everything) without disrupting the live site.

5. Upgrade the database using the upgrade script provided

   Initially when I tried this on my local system I found a few problems.  Primarily these problems related to custom indexes I had added to a couple of tables in an attempt to increase performance.  On my test system I removed these custom indexes and was able to upgrade smoothly, so on the production server I dropped these custom indexes prior to the script being run.  It ran without errors, and at this stage I haven’t put the custom indexes back onto the tables… all seems ok for the moment.

6. Copy the new files into the new folder structure as per the instructions.

   This was actually a little messy.  The instructions say to do things like “delete the web parts directory”  the problem of course with this approach is that any custom web parts that you might have built will be wiped out if that is where you happened to store them.  I found that I had custom code in the app_code directory, cmsdesk/modules directory and cmswebparts directory.  So I of course copied this code out first, then deleted folders as per the instructions.

7. Loaded the site to let the upgrade to the database occur.  All smooth.

   When I did this step on my local system it appeared to get through OK however none of the new web parts etc were available in the CMS after the upgrade.  This did not happen on the production system, it all went fine.  So on the test system/local I went into the admin area and ran the import for the 3.1a to 4.0 as per the instructions and everything then came together ok.

8. Added back in my custom code.
9. Turned off the old site in IIS and turned on the new one and then changed the host header to www in the new site (instead of staging) and then changed the license key in the new site also.

So the result is an upgraded CMS website.  The average visitor is not going to notice the difference… yet!

The key reason for our upgrade was to take advantage of the new social networking functions, we were licensed for the enterprise version of Kentico and so are granted a license for the new social networking version of Kentico.  We haven’t turned on these tool on the site yet, we are just playing with a few different ways to bring them into the fold.

A few things to be aware for the upgrade:

• I had a couple of pieces of code that called the ‘executenonquery’ method of the data connection object.  This appears to be gone in 4.0, so in my case I simply converted these to ‘executequery’ with no real impact.
• Make sure you have all your license keys before hand.  I have a license for the main domain, plus subdomains of local, test and staging.  So I have few options for working things out before getting too stuck.
• The menu web part and the breadcrumb web parts appear to have a new property called ‘encode name’.  Maybe it was there in previous version and I just never saw it.  Anyway it doesn’t appear to have been updated correctly during the upgrade as some instances of this part have this ticked and other do not.  I had to go and manually chance the config of that part on those templates, no big deal but didn’t discover it until today.  The problem was that some of my breadcrumbs were being rendered as <span>divination</span> – blah – blah and of course I didn’t want the <span> tags visible.
• The standard blogpostpreview transformation seems to be missing one of the function calls that counts the number of comments for each post.  I have temporarily removed that element from the transformation just to get the blog posts working.
• One of the big changes in version 4.0 is module separation.  Kentico have moved around the structure of modules in the folder structure so that they are isolated from other parts of the site structure.  This is a better design but a little difficult to adapt the 3 custom modules I have built into this new architecture.  At the moment I still have my custom code in the old places and will need to move it all around when I can.

So in all a fairly smooth upgrade. Oh.. one more thing.  The sample community site that has all the social networking functionality is pretty cool, however there doesn’t appear to be a simple way of reproducing this functionality in a new site.  Unlike creating a blog which is a pretty quick process where Kentico does all the hard work of creating pages and webparts and configuring those, creating a social networking site appears to be something you have to do by hand from scratch.  I have a support call into them to see if there is a better way.

I don’t think it’s firefox either, i think this is the actual page.  I loaded in IE with the same result!  I think this goes in the “if you’re not going to do it right then don’t do it all” basket.