The website works with Wemf and Google Analytics, but they are giving me very different results; WEMF counts 10 - 30 % more page views than Google Analytics... Why can this be?
Google Analytics works only with JavaScript enabled, yes - but I don't think that's the reason for this difference. The site which should be counted is a famous newspaper in Switzerland.
Any suggestions?
Don't know much about WEMF. Could it be that Google Analytics does a better job at detecting and not counting search engine spider traffic?
Yes!!! I googled a little bit for "Google Analytics search engine spider" and it really seems as Google Analytics doesn't count those...
Thank you very much for that info, helped a lot!
Keep in mind that in addition to the spider traffic, one or the other services might actually lose track based on in page javascript too. There are a hundred different possibilities of why the numbers are off. I've never seen analytics packages match up 100%, usually if they're within 5% of each other you're doing good.
...and btw, I've worked for a few of the big analytics companies, this is a known situation. I say situation because it is also accepted that no one has 100% right on numbers - too many variables to compensate for that level of sigma.
Related
I have a little project I am working on, and would like to know more.
Is it possible to Have 3 google docs (A,B,C), and have them updated into 1 Master Google doc page?
For example, if I were to input data on Document A, I would be able to see the information automatically listed on the Master document? Same with B, and C.
I am willing to learn/work on this, just would like to know if its even possible and hope that you can help me or point me in the right direciton.
Thanks!
Due to this link it seems merging is not possible for now. Copy-Paste is a way to go but that is not what you're looking for.
by the way, Google Document has been renamed to Google Drive lately. And this is a work in progress. has lots of limitations. It's not a solution to everything. The most useful feature of it is real-time editing.
AFAIK LaTeX can do that with if you like a new challenge.
The web site that we're writing needs to be "Accessible". The trouble is, while we understand the general conepts (semantic latout, alt text on images, light on Javascript, etc etc), we don't really have much knowledge of what screen reader products or other accessible browser are actually on the market and/or in general use, nor how to test against them.
So the questions are:
What products do we need to know about?
Would it be sensible (or even useful) to get hold of them to test against?
Are there any QA processes we should be looking at to assist us (we do a lot of automated browser testing [Selenium] to ensure we don't break anything for regular users; can we/should we do the same for screen readers?)
Thanks in advance for any tips.
See this question
As the question implies if you want good screen reading testing you either need to hire someone to do the testing for you that has a lot of screen reader experience or invest the time in having developers and or QA learn a screen reader well. To my knolidge there is nothing like Selenium that can simulate how a screen reader handles a website. FOr general info on accessibility see
http://www.w3.org/WAI/gettingstarted/
This appears to have a lot of good information and covers all kinds of accessibility, not just blindness.
For a list of tools to check html accessibility see
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/complete.html
Although these tools will help they are not a substitute for screen reading testing. For a discussion of some of the problems with relying only on automated tools see
http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/automated-tools.shtml
In addition to Jared's answer: For the non screen reader visual accessibility testing, I've found that a simple and easily available test tool is a gray scale printer. This will let you know (roughly) if you have enough contrast for those who have a form of color blindness or other issues with contrast, etc and whether you've snuck any images in that are relying too much on color for information. It's not the be all and end all, but it's an easy first test.
Since you're already using Selenium to test your site, you can easily integrate something like Continuum, which can scan a page for accessibility concerns that would be noticeable by someone using assistive technologies, into your existing test framework. There's API documentation if you'd like to roll your own solution, or free Java and JavaScript sample projects on webaccessibility.com you can use for inspiration.
As others have noted, automated accessibility testing isn't going to catch everything as nothing compares to manual testing done by experts, but it's a good idea to do some kind of automated testing just to cover your bases, and there are a wealth of technologies out there these days that can help you do that very easily.
Have we finally got to the point where we assume CSS2, and hope for CSS3?
(Not looking for discussion, if the answer is "yes, you idiot", go for it...)
You should always take into consideration users who
A. use screen readers and text-only browsers
B. are on mobile devices
C. are not human (i.e. search engine spiders)
By having a good separation of content and style, you should be able to address each of these with ease. As far as users who have CSS disabled, in this day and age, I don't think a designer should concern themselves over it too much. It's certainly not worth spending a significant amount of time and resources on.
What is your target audience and what is your cost for supporting (or not supporting) certain clients?
In addition to the fine points made by pst and ttreat31, I'll add that using semantic markup will generally let your document be readable with CSS disabled (i.e. using the browser's default CSS).
There may be a few quirks (forms come to mind), but generally I find with my own pages, they are plenty readable.
You, and your business, will probably survive if you require CSS. But you'll probably do better if you DON'T require it.
By catering for non-CSS cases, you'll write better markup, with better-structured content. You'll mitigate cross-browser problems, and develop a more robust API. Search engines will be able to parse and 'understand' your content that much better.
Allowing for 'no CSS' is much more about the philosophies relating to web standards and good coding practises than it is actually about the common final rendering.
I don't take any effort to help users who disable CSS or javascript. If I worked on a site which counted on attracting new customers and had lots of first time hits, then I would probably try and give non-javascript users a scaled down set of features. But I would never bother with users who disable CSS. I think that is probably a very small minority.
I often surf in the terminal using links or lynx when my computer is overloaded and I just can't have Firefox, Java, and some Flash applications taking half of my RAM. Text-only browsers don't have advanced CSS or Javascript support.
Many server administrators might do similar thing as most servers are headless, and some administrator might be too lazy to open their other laptop just for a quick browse. People using screenreaders usually have similar view as text-only browser, except it's now read aurally instead of text-only.
When using text browsers, I wouldn't expect any fancies colors or tables, usually I just need to have some quick information. So, IMO, you should at least make all the page's essential information available as plain HTML.
I personally loathe background music on a website. My client has opposite feelings on the subject. I added music because the customer is always right, though I'd like to revisit the subject with them.
Almost everyone would agree that it is annoying and wastes precious bandwidth but are there any usability studies or a recommendation for someone esteemed in the profession that can provide a valid argument against background music?
Usability is not the only concern. Consider the following scenarios:
1 - Someone browses to the site while at work in a shared office, and now all of their co-workers think "Gee, he's wasting time".
2 - Someone browses to the site while in a room with a sleeping baby, and now they have to spend an hour getting him/her back to sleep.
3 - Someone browses to the site while they are listening to their own music, and now they hear a cacaphony of shrieks until one source is muted.
Also, consider that any benefit gained from the music on your website will be totally lost on anyone who has their speakers muted. So your audience can be divided between:
A - People who cannot hear the music
B - People who can hear it, but do not like it
C - People who can hear it, and do like it
I would not care to estimate the percentages associated with each of these groups, but keep in mind that category "B" is actively offended by your website. To take a line from the hippocratic oath, one rule of web design should be "do no harm".
Metrics. You'll never be able to convince a business person with an emotional answer.
If you investigate the situation empirically you'll be able to give them something irrefutable.
I would would try an experiment: (get google analytics)
have one site with the music as-is, measure the bounce rate,etc
have an identical site without music, measure the bounce rate,etc
Have the server randomly serve up the different pages for a couple weeks (until you get a significant data) and see what happens.
Maybe we're wrong (I hate music too). I hope your customer is wrong, but who knows.
You could also add a survey link and try to get people to answer that as well (but without an incentive that might not work)
Stats can be your friend here :)
I would also:
(calculate the size of the audio file(s)*the number of hits*months)/cost of GB per month
Then tell them how much money they are wasting.
Basically, it boils down to this:
Audio on websites is a bad idea. No one likes it.
Try to educate your client that it is a bad idea. (It's annoying, different levels of sound can cause problems, yadda yadda) Mention that most users don't take sites seriously if they use sound. It's a very '99 thing to do.
If you client does not budge, (politely) remind him/her that they are paying you for your expertise as an internet professional. You are the expert on the web, and they have hired you to give your expertise.
If they still won't budge, keep the sound and make sure they are happy. The bottom line is keeping the client happy.
Music also interferes with screen reader users. I'm a blind computer user and nothing annoys me more then having music start playing and drowned out my speech program that's trying to read the site. Nothing will make me close a website quicker then unwanted audio.
It took a bit but I found a site that talks about usability on web sites.
They have a video on the right hand side of this page:
http://www.ciaromano.com/evaluating/testing.php
It shows why audio ads are not a good idea on websites.
Hope this helps.
G-Man
Just make sure that there is a way to turn it off. It really depends on the type of Website, because multimedia-heavy sites (i.e. sites for Movies or Games) can benefit from it, but if I'm listening to some of my own music, I definitely want a way to turn it off.
Oh and please, no crappy MIDI-Files that people already hated in 1993 when they were novel.
This is a tough one -- and what's amazing is that at the moment, I have a client who's demanding the exact same thing.
Personally I don't know of any usability studies addressing this topic specifically, but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence out there from users complaining about the intrusiveness or outright corniness of unrequested background music. * That said, clients still ask for it. Best you can do is try to explain the situation to them, try to gather a few good examples of people complaining about it from the Web at large, build a case, and hope the client goes for it.
In my case, she completely agrees that it's potentially annoying, understands it cuts against the grain of user expectations and politeness, but wants it anyway. So I'm building it. Whaddyagonnado.
* Indeed, you could probably use this thread as evidence! Good luck.
Consider taking a different path with the client.
Ask them what the purpose for the music is...
If it is to install a particular feeling or mood with the visitor of the site, consider taking them through all the points mentioned in answers here and discuss how that may violate the intended for the music.
Then you will be able to talk to the client about different ways to instill the same "ambience" to the website without resorting to music. This is really a design issue and not usability.
If the background music/sound was to convey some information, then it is a usability issue as people who for technological or biological reasons cannot hear the sound at the correct volume will miss out on that. Therefore the site is not as usable as it should be.
Unfortunately, as a service provider of sorts, all we can do is cringe and give the customer what they want - after documenting your disapproval both commented in the code and in writing to the client, of course.
Pardon me, but i have a different opinion about loading music in the website. With all due respect I have for the answer posters of this thread.
I see visits to e-commerce websites like going to a shopping complex. Where you have a cart, varieties of products, checkout counters and background music to make your stay as comfortable and interesting as possible.
There's a whole psychological reason as to what certain slow paced music can do to certain parts of the brain. Some studies even suggested that certain music play a role in motivating customers to purchase more items. Check this site
This can definitely be a plus point in a website. Of course it depends on what kind of website it is. However, a slow and non-vocal music shouldn't necessarily disrupt one's attention; rather it might have the opposite effect.
My justification is that when a potential customer visits a site, he is only using one of his senses while browsing through the pages. His eyes! I'm saying why not allow him (if he wants) to use his sense of hearing that would encourage him (not only through the means of displaying fancy texts, design and animations that looks nice to the eyes) but also to capture his attention through music (allowing him to be more in touch with the site).
Its obviously not possible to trigger his sense of smell and taste. But why limit it to only the eyes. Why not use the ears too!
Whether you choose to put music into your site or not, MichaelStum's post about having an option to turn off the music is highly essential.
Of course in the end its all about the amount of traffic that comes to your website. For this matter, #Cbrulak's idea of using Google Analytics would be a realistic approach for different individuals.
I had the idea of a search engine that would index web items like other search engines do now but would only store the file's title, url and a hash of the contents.
This way it would be easy to find items on the web if you already had them and didn't know where they came from or wanted to know all the places that something appeared.
More useful for non textual items like images, executables and archives.
I was wondering if there is already something similar?
Check out the wikipedia page on locality sensitive hashing. There's also a good page hosted by a research on MIT.
In general, there are several flavors available: hashes for strings (such as simhash), sets or 0/1 features (such as min-wise hashes), and for real vectors.
The main trick for numerical hashes is basically dimension reduction, so far. For strings, the idea is to come up with a representation that's robust in the face of minor edits.
I'm also doing a little research in this field, although I guess stackoverflow might not be the right place for nascent work.
The question seems to focus on exact match hashes, which we understand better than nearest-neighbor approaches, and are indeed worthwhile, especially if people can share tags and other metadata that way.
As #rjmunro notes, hash-based searching is a popular idea in the P2P world, and Bitzi did pretty much this, though they have shut down and their Bitpedia (Digital Media Encyclopedia) isn't hosted there any more, though some of it at least is still available at Archive.org.
Bitzi also produced software like Bitcollider (SourceForge.net),
and the Magnet URI scheme, which allows for specifying a file by hash and is thus a content-based identifier. Various applications support searching at various databases via Magnet URIs as described at that Wikipedia page.
The same idea is popular in the password-cracking scene - see e.g. findmyhash - Python script to crack hashes using online services etc.
Going a step further, I think it would be great if there were databases and online repositories identifying content by hash and providing tags and other metadata about the content from various perspectives. Then I could leave my music collection in its pristine state (no wasted backup space and time), but still tag them myself and add other metadata, via external tag databases. If my applications knew how to grab the tags, it would seem much better than the current system where we modify and copy around big files just to move tags from e.g. my desktop to my phone.
See a related idea at Metadata Independent Hashing for Media Identification & P2P Transfer Optimisation (pdf).
Well, for images, there's http://tineye.com, which will one-up that, and find you similar images too.
It's not a bad idea. Sometimes I find myself stumbled upon some file trying to figure out where it comes from :) But how are you going to track item's sources? Content can be obtained by various means - web browser, download manager, simply by copying from network share.
If I understand your proposal right, http://bitzi.com/ has done this for a while.