It’s the first week of school back at Wofford.  Wow, what a busy week but it’s almost over and I’m so glad because a fun weekend is planned.  Atlanta Braves game tonight and Six Flags tomorrow.  I really need a break.  Kind of sad because the school year has just started, but with planning for three conference presentations this fall, already three weeks into my MBA class of the semester and all the other projects I’m working on just seems like I’m working way to much lately!

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The other week Shelby Thayer wrote an excellent post titled, Instantly Actionable – The 404 Page.  Reading through her post got me thinking this is definitely a Web Standard that every site needs to implement properly, but very few take the time to do it.  Nobody likes to see an ugly “The page cannot be found” error page.  This has to be one of the quickest ways for a visitor to leave a site and has to have a high exit rate on this page, but most people don’t even track this page so they have no way of knowing even this little bit of information.  Just for the record since I started tracking this two weeks ago the exit rate is only 29%.  Not as bad as I would have thought, but definitely higher than the site as a whole.

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The web design world let out a collective cry yesterday.  To some, it was a squeal of delight.  To others, it was a groan of despair.  At issue was Google’s new brainchild (and latest step towards WORLD DOMINATION), Chrome.  If you have been hiding in a hole since Labor Day, Chrome is Google’s attempt to enter the web browser market by dropping a “lightweight,” WebKit based browser designed to function more efficiently in an increasingly modern web environment (while at the same time trying to drag us kicking and screaming back into the browser wars that defined the late 90s).  They made a bit of a goof in their release cycle, and let the cat out of the bag a bit early the other day (it could have just as easily been planned to stir the pot for the couple days leading up to the Beta release on the 2nd).  Like many things Google related, the idea is quite idealistic, and has a ton of potential.  But just the same, new browsers always pose a number of issues.

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So many many months ago in what was the third post of this blog I asked the question, Which search engines really matter?  In that post I pulled data from Compete’s monthly post about web search market share that showed Google dominating with almost 69% of the US market.  So fast forward eight months later (can you believe this blog is eight months old!?) and Google is now a dominating 70.4% of the US web search market.  At the time I wanted to see how this national trend held up for Wofford and at the time did some tweaking to Wofford’s search submissions to the other two main search market players, Yahoo and MSN.  Since making these changes I thought they might have an impact on Google’s dominance of searches that return traffic to Wofford’s site (over 80% then). I think to be totally fair before moving forward I need to analyzes what percentage of Wofford’s search traffic is domestic.  Keep in mind this data is only for wofford.edu as pulled from Google Analytics over the last month. Read the rest of this entry »

So last week nineteen of you voted on keeping the weekly links around and 84% cared enough to give me the thumbs up to keep hitting you up with these things.  As a lot of schools have already started back and Wofford starts back next week, although I’ve already been in my MBA class for two weeks now, some of these links kind of have the “back to school” feel and I think that’s appropriate.  Time for another year and I’ll admit I’m kind of excited because we have much more in place than ever before to track the success of our online campaigns.  More on this to come through the year.

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This week I attended a demo of Harris Connect’s email marketing tool.  Harris is a popular tool for maintaining alumni communities and the email tool they offer is fairly sophisticated in regards to segmentation your audience to target a message to the audience.  But where it lacks is reporting, leading to what could be statistics that could be characterized as deceiving at best.  Other tools that I’ve demoes in the past are not dissimilar to Harris in this respect.

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Those of you who have kept up with some of Microsoft’s new toys (or who read my Twitter), have undoubtedly heard of a new little Seadragon based photo interface they have been working on in conjunction with the University of Washington called Photosynth.  This new spatial photo organization system sent the tech word abuzz when news, video, and a tech demo began passing back and forth across sites like Digg and Slashdot.

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A recent article in InformationWeek drew my attention as being worth a second look, Think Beyond Basic Apps For Smartphones.  The juice of the article discussing developers spending more time designing applications for smartphones beyond the basic email, calendar, and other basic applications.  The article did a good job of presenting the facts and building a case, but I want to champion the cause for web applications for mobile devices.  Of course I’m biased toward the web although I’m a converted web guy who spent years specifically in Information Technology and focusing on that end of the spectrum.

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Can you believe it’s been over a month since the last normal link of the weeks post?  This blog has seen a lot of change in the last week and I have to say as the amazing posts of the last week can attest it’s been change for the good.  So back to this links of the week.  I’ve talked with a few of you who seem to like that traditional staple feature of this blog and you seem to really like ended your week with some of my reads, but let’s try and take a poll and see what you really think.

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This is the first part in a series of solid web standards that I plan on writing.  There is a lot of simple web standards, or things that I think should be standards, that people either do the hard way or don’t make their site as user friendly as possible.  So either you know exactly what I’m talking about here or you’re like, Kyle what the heck is canonicalization?  Well according to Wikipedia Canonicalization is: Read the rest of this entry »