Kind of obvious, I know. But today it put things into perspective. I was using lastminute.com – one of the biggest dot com brands in the UK – to find a hotel in London. It’s a brilliant site – they’ve clearly invested time and money into making sure the browsing experience feels natural for any type of user. I added a few hotels to my basket to compare later but when I went to my basket all the hotels I’d added had been replaced by the text “you need to have cookies enabled to use the basket”.

#FAIL! I know for a fact I have cookies enabled on my browser. Others may not be so sure. Either way there was no way I could be bothered to go through the list and find the hotels I had selected earlier. So I left, and now Last Minute won’t be getting my business. Because the site didn’t work as it should at that one stage of my browsing/buying process the whole experience was ruined.

You may not agree, but here’s what you do to ensure your website doesn’t have the same fate as Last Minute:

Test test test! This is where the value of testing can be truly appreciated. Test all browsers, all scenarios. Cover all bases because 1 unhappy user could become many more if their experience is shared.

Check your web stats! You might notice a particular page where site traffic is dropping off, or a particular browser that doesn’t convert. It could be an issue solved by optimising your pages, but it could be a technical issue so test test test!

Use monitoring tools. These can follow a set process like an online shop checkout as if it was a real user and send an alert text/email to you if for some reason it can’t complete the process. They are not the complete solution but can certainly help ensure you are always on top of the game.

Because Google Analytics can directly link to your client’s adwords account, giving greater insight into the actions of people that click on your client’s Google ads. Ok, you can optimise the urls and so on if you wanted to stick with your paid for service, but that is a big pain to manage and keep up-to-date.

The data comes in and your client notices the difference in reporting between Analytics and Webtrends. Then you have to explain the complexities of tracking and cookies and all the other reasons for variance in results.

Or, your client doesn’t want to pay for web stats so you install Google Analytics and when your client decides they want to dig into click path data, you remind them that Google Analytics doesn’t have detailed click path analysis.

The best advice is to get it right first time. Make sure if you are selling web stats software to your client, you are fully aware of what it can and can’t do and what would suit this particular client and why.

If your client has a big, complex site with lots of on and offline campaigns directing traffic to it and a complex e-commerce system, a paid for stats product is the best option. As defined in this article by Darren Guarnaccia, Google Analytics is a basic tool and won’t give those that need a competitive edge through their website stats the data they need.

However, if your client does not require such detailed reporting, Google Analytics is a fine tool that is forever being enhanced and improved. Just recently they added the ability to add various types of page actions as goals. Considering it is free, the money your client would have been paying for a dedicated stats product can now be spent on your agency producing fantastic reports and insight into their website.

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change” - Wayne Dyer

I love this. It’s very true. Perhaps obviously true. But when you think about it, we could all benefit from looking at certain things differently.

A great way to find more bands, well done @asmitter

Good job too, because Avatar cost approximately $280 – $310 million to produce (plus $150 million for marketing) – an unreal sum of money. But when you look into some of the tech behind Avatar you can start to see why it cost so much.

The cameras used to film the production in 3-D were developed specifically for the film by Cameron and his team. Not only could they give depth perception like no other film camera ever, the motion capture technology used augmented reality to map the actors’ performances in real-time to their CGI character. So Cameron could see the performances as if they were being performed in the computer generated world he had created.

60% of Avatar is said to be CGI. Most of the motion capture filming was done in a performance-capture stage called ‘the Volume’, specifically built for Avatar and over 6 times bigger than anything previously used. It housed 120 cameras that recorded all the action at once so Cameron could render whatever angles he wanted from the action and produce insanely accurate 3-D visuals.

Another 1st developed by Cameron for the film were the skull rigs used by the cast. It would point a tiny camera at the actor’s face, tracking 95% of the movement in their expressions and eyes meaning the actor’s performance is truly represented in the final film.

1 petabyte of storage is required to store the final render of the film which is the equivalent of 1,000 1TB hard drives. 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of RAM were required to film, edit and render the film.

(More techy jargon can be found on the Next Web site, Popular Mechanics and Wikipedia).

While most people will test a few different images and the placement of calls-to-action, it is important not to forget that optimising your copy is just as important and nothing has made me realise this more than the book, ‘Nudge‘ by Thaler & Sunstein.

Nudge is about choice and influencing decisions and I recently read a chapter about human behaviour when faced with gains or losses, and ‘framing’. Consider this example as detailed in the book:

It is a far stronger nudge to say “if you do not use energy conservation methods, you could lose £300 a year”, than to say “if you use energy conservation methods, you could save £300 a year”.

Humans are typically loss adverse and will be far more attentive if told they could lose something (shock horror) than if they can gain something (yeah yeah). The framing of the statement also plays an important part in the nudge. Although the information is exactly the same, framing it a particular way is more likely to provoke a response.

With this in mind, review the copy and calls-to-action on your website to see how you can better influence your website’s users. As always, test the variances to find the optimum. Just because a book says it’s true, it doesn’t mean the same principals apply to your users.

I’m looking forward to the pics!

There has been a lot of “hooha” about this. The Times Online article opened with:

“If anybody needed a lesson on what not to do when dad loses his job, Sarah Henderson, daughter of General Motors’ ousted chief executive Fritz Henderson, has the answer.”

and the Telegraph put:

“The rant, although not a major issue for the company, highlights the problems that can occur when companies use social networking sites”

How is this a problem? It doesn’t harm GM, it doesn’t harm Henderson but it has given Sarah an outlet to vent her anguish (in spectacular fashion). If she was my daughter, I would be very proud of how she fought in my corner and basically said what I was thinking but couldn’t say out loud.

Don’t you just love the power of social media?

The download isn’t free, 7Digital’s usual pricing applies, but this does give Spotify another weapon in its arsenal against the side of the music industry that fear Spotify. In the future, users will be able to download complete playlists with the click of a button.

This is a great step forward for Spotify. By bridging the gap between free and paid for music, the music industry can see a valid payment model that benefits the industry and the audience. You may question why you would want to pay to download a track when you can listen to it on Spotify, but Spotify is reliant on the cloud and therefore if you are in the middle of no where with just your mp3 player, you’re going to want this service. Perhaps you want a higher quality version of the track, or simply want to support the artist, now you can do this through Spotify and not have to open up i-tunes to download the track you want.

In my previous post, “Spotify, you’ll never need to own music again“, I talked about using Spotify as your central resource for playing music, being able to play online tracks as well as music downloaded to your hard drive. Enabling users to download music through Spotify is surely the first step towards this. It also shows that Spotify wants to be your core music player, and the sooner it integrates more features like those in Last.fm, myspace, Boxee and Songbird, the better for everyone.