For the last few weeks Channel Five’s Gadget Show have been running a campaign for broadband suppliers to be honest with the public about the broadband speeds we can realistically expect. The point of contention is the term “upto” as in “upto 8MB”. This leaves the broadband suppliers with a massive loophole to take advantage of as “upto” could mean anything from the advertised speed down to Zero!

The Gadget Show web-site features a speed test to gauge what speed your broadband is at the time of the test. There’s also a form you can fill out with the recorded speed to help the Gadget Show collect enough information to take to the broadband suppliers.

So, using the speed test feature, I’ve just tested my broadband speed, which should be close to the 16MB I’m paying for. They recommend that you take the test a few times:

1. Dec 6th 2:30pm: 2.6MB
2. Dec 7th 8:37am: 2.8MB
3. Dec 7th 9:00am: 2.8MB
4. Dec 7th 2:00pm: 2.6MB

I think it’s safe to say that my broadband speed will never come close to the “upto 16MB” I’m currently paying for! Time to downgrade methinks!

Check out your broadband speed here and join the campaign if yours isn’t what you’re paying for.

schoolsout.com is a US website that offers a unique service to parents.

This service offers US schools with a notification infrastructure to inform parents of emergencies, changes in schedule, closure e.g. due to extreme weather conditions, etc.

Offering 2 levels of service, the School’s Out Plus package costs $19.95 per annum and notifies parents by text to their cell phone, and the School’s Out Basic package informs/notifies parents by email for free.

When a school needs to inform parents it enters the notification into the School’s Out portal and this is immediately sent out to the relevant parents either by text or email depending on the level of service the parent subscribes to.

From the web-site’s Services page…

In the case of emergencies, delays, cancellations, or schedule changes for instance, you can spend hours watching TV or listening to the radio waiting to get an updated status of your child’s school. With School’s Out, you will immediately know when your child’s school has posted a notification.

I’ve just landed a job that requires me to know Python, which I don’t! And no, I don’t mean the snake either! Python is a well established programming language and I can’t wait to get to know it better.

To get some idea of what it involves I looked up ‘Python tutorials’ on Google and found a really nice, easy tutorial to get started with here - http://www.sthurlow.com/python/

A UK morning tv show, GMTV,  reported today that 2 churches here in the United Kingdom refused a yoga teacher permission to conduct kids’ yoga classes in their halls.

The reason? One of the interviewed clerics, Reverend Tim Jones, explained that because yoga has it’s roots in Hinduism, it goes against the teachings of the bible and is therefore un-Christian and cannot be allowed to be practiced in a church hall. Firstly, whether yoga has it’s roots in Hinduism or not, the practice of it doesn’t propagate any religion whatsoever. It does however help the person practicing it to become more spiritual - something that in my opinion seems to be largely lacking in most religious practice today.

I was born a Hindu but respect every religion and form of spirituality that exists (funnily enough you’ll find this true of most Hindus as this forms part of the religion: respect for others beliefs) but it’s guys like this cleric who spread fear and make it difficult for everyone to get along. He may want to join us in the 21st century and use his religion to build bridges rather than destroy them.

Steve Jobs of Apple dropped a bomb at the World Wide Developers Conference by announcing that Apple would be releasing a Windows version of the Apple web browser, Safari.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, as faulty and web standards non-compliant as ever, still dominates the market at about 70% with the open source browser Firefox coming it at 15% and Apple’s Safari at 5%. Steve Jobs promised the Windows version of Safari would have twice the performance of Internet Explorer.

As a web developer and designer, this comes as good news as designers worldwide are having to continually design new sites for 2 markets - the smart market that uses browsers like Firefox and Opera and the market that continues to use Internet Explorer. Although Firefox has been making significant gains on market share in the last year or so, and especially after the dismal performance of Internet Explorer 7, any new Windows browser that takes even more market share from Internet Explorer will be welcomed with open arms by the web design community.

A beta version of Safari for Windows can be downloaded from Apple’s website here - http://www.apple.com/safari/

A few days ago I was speaking to friend of mine who is a DJ and makes a fair living playing at parties and other occassions. The topic fell to how he could generate more traffic to his web site, thereby improving business for himself.

What I said to him is nothing original - it’s been done numerous times but it hadn’t been done by him yet. He told me that he was getting some promotional t-shirts printed that would have his company logo emblazoned across the front. The obvious first step to advertise his web site would be to add the web site address under the logo. But what else could be done?

My idea is for him to give as many t-shirts away as possible at gigs and then create a buzz around a competition where people would send in photos of them wearing the t-shirt. These would be displayed on his web site and so traffic would increase as those photographed, and their friends, would visit. Every week or month he would pick the best photos and send them a one of a kind CD or MP3 compilation that he would have created. Even better, he could create a system allowing site visitors to vote for their favourite photos. This would get otherwise passive visitors to the site involved and keep them coming back again and again to check how their favourite was doing. Each visit would be an opportunity to sell his service and/or capture email addresses so he could begin cultivating a relationship with them for future business.

This in a way is what buzz marketing is all about; creating a must-have or must-see situation and allowing your very own potential customers to create the content that attracts them to your site in the first place.  Everyone’s happy!

The graphical internet has been around for almost 15 years now and almost from the beginnng business owners saw the opportunity presented to them to drive product sales higher using this new fantastic graphical environment that so many potential customers were ‘logging’ onto. However, for most small businesses the internet, and how it can help their bottom-line, is still fuzzy.

Many of the SMEs that come to me for a website or consultancy still only envision their product brochures on a web site, what’s known as brochureware. However your web site can be, and should be, so much more than that.

For a start, a product brochure is usually designed within certain limitations like size, number of colours, weight of paper etc. Ask any marketer how difficult it can be to get product benefits across to a reader when fighting for space with company branding and a call-to-action like a phone number.

A web site, on the other hand, has none of these limitations. It can be as big or small as required, sporting as many graphics and colours needed to support the sales message and numerous types of calls-to-action from ‘Buy now’ buttons for the immediate sale to ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ for long-term-relationship building. It can be static or dynamic, i.e. displaying content stored in an on line database, depending on the frequency of new content. It could have advertising thereby creating a new revenue channel for your business. Using smart search-engine-optimisation techniques, thousands of visitors can be driven to your product pages resulting in numerous sales.

This article only scratches the surface of how effective a web site can be to improve earnings for your business. Stay tuned as I look at 2 different web sites and how they could improve.

I recently helped writer, business consulatant and teacher, Sunny Bindra develop a site to host his 200 plus articles he wrote, and writes, for various newspapers and magazines in Kenya. His articles appear in the Sunday Nation, Daily Nation, The East African, Awaaz magazine and Wajibu magazine amongst others.

Based on the very popular Wordpress blog engine, Sunny chose a theme that resonated well with him and I made modifications to sunwords.com to fully customise it.

Live for only 2 months now, sunwords.com is experiencing some serious traffic, almost 2,000 page views per month. This is especially noteworthy as the site is read mainly within Kenya and the Kenyan diaspora worldwide.

Check the site out at www.sunwords.com 

There’s a great book referred to me by a friend called ‘Getting Real’ by that great web development firm 37 Signals, masters of Rails, and creators of some fantastic web 2.0 applications.
A fairly short read, it is nontheless packed with incredible wisdom on how web applications need to be developed. Out goes the conventional system of huge scope documents and endless meetings to decide on the feature set - in’Getting Real’ they very clearly lay out a system that allows you, the developer, to get a application built and live in the shortest possible time.

The current system of developing web applications has come from the offline software development field where a new, updated version any software is released every 2 years or so. The advantage with web applications is that new features can be added/removed/tweaked at any point even when running live.  This makes web applications very flexible and further agility can be achieved by not getting caught up in minor details that push the launch of an app back by months and sometimes years. The philosophy is launch now and tweak later.

You can read the book for free on the 37 Signals web site or buy either the pdf or physical book. Check it all out at http://getreal.37signals.com/ 

We’ve all seen the ‘Email to a friend’ link on different types of sites, be they blogs, news sites or shopping portals. However, just how effective is this marketing technique and how can it be leveraged to improve click-throughs and therefore generate greater traffic to your pages?

The popularity, and ease-of-use, of this technique speaks for itself. Adding just a bit of code under an article or product listing and the ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing takes off with visitors referring it to their friends and family.

What makes a visitor refer or recommend something they see on your site to a friend? By very definition, friends share similar interests and when a visitor sees something that appeals to them they’re more than likely to refer to someone else they know will be similarly interested.

The very decision to refer a product to a friend follows the same formula as that of making a decison to buy something - emotion followed by logic to validate the emotion felt.  The product must meet the visitor’s criteria on buying - price, need, exclusivity, fun. If all these criteria are met for the visitor, more than likely you’ll have a sale on your hands and a greater chance that they’ll refer it to their friends.

However, a good way to improve on the clickthrough rate is to introduce an element of fun and value for the visitor - make them an offer e.g. they get the product at 10% off if they refer it to 5 friends. With the sophisticated, and yet easy to implement, referral scripts out there this kind of offer is easy to track. Or maybe offer them discount vouchers for the next time they shop thereby increasing the probability that they’ll be back to your site for some further shopping. Another good way is to enter them into a draw for some concert tickets if they refer the product to 10 friends.

Now where did my ‘Email to a friend’  link go……?