If you’ve ever worked with SAP, the chances are you have been “amazed” by its GUI more than once.

Besides a usability experience dating back from the first half of the previous century, the default sounds on every interaction with the GUI can be very anoying (at a minimum).

How to disable it:

• Fire up the GUI and sign in.
• On the main toolbar, click the last icon (Adjust local layout – what did you expect).
• In the dropdown menu, select the second option (Configure New Visual Design… – of course).
• Select Sound – Off.

Once again, it proved you should really stay away from the alcohol. Looking for something like “Settings” under de main “System” menu… you s*****.

Want to start your own business and work from home?

Inc.com published a list of 9 examples of people who started a successful business from their home.

One of them is a self employed insurance broker who offers live webcam chat through his website. You do not need to know anything about insurance to imagine this can have a positive effect on customers who do not have time to make an appointment with him.

Enjoy the read!

No, you guessed wrong. This will not be the nth post about W3C standards.

Well, maybe one paragraph: while I know the use of W3C standards is favourable, the usability of your project/application should be your number one priority. Not adherence to a standard which would render your application unusable for (a part of) your audience. Every once in a while people tend to forget this. Of course no one will argue that W3C standards actually are a blessing.

But, this post is mainly about 2 simple standards:

• The ISO 639 standard for representing languages. Please use “en” or “fr” in your database, routing, scripts,… . It is unbelievable how many times people pick something like “FR” or “F”.
  Next time, consult the ISO 639-1 list.
• The ISO 3166 standard for representing countries. Same case: please use “US”, “FR” or “BE” or use the ISO 3166-1 list.

Additionally, use the Unicode CLDR list when working with locale’s (e.g. nl_BE).

Standards in general provide a major productivity benefit: you do not have to lose time discussing, implementing, mapping,… other peoples personal preferences (whether or not their choice can be motivated).

This also applies to coding standards/guidelines. We have probably all had (or will have) discussions about them once in our life because there are no “official” ones as far as I know. Specifically about PHP: please (yes, I am on my knees right now) use one of the major ones that are already available: e.g. Zend Framework (my preference because it is or will become the industry standard), PEAR or … . Do not create your own flavour (I do not have to explain why this does not make sense).

A hot topic at your company, project or team? Have a look at Weble Subversion hosting: you can force a list of predefined guidelines/standards by a mouse click. This will prevent SVN users from committing their code if it does not comply and, in such a case, an overview of the deviations will be displayed.

Popular and widespread in Japan, QR codes (a variant of the well-known bar-codes) certainly provide many opportunities.

The QR code was invented by Denso Wave, Inc of Japan in 1994. They appear on many product packaging in addition to “normal” bar-codes for shipment tracking and other purposes. When scanned, these codes can return numbers and text (e.g. the URL to this blogpost in the example image). The camera on your mobile phone and dedicated scanning software do the rest of the magic.

While their ability to be a link between the “online” and “offline” world can provide many opportunities, it hasn’t really become the hype it could be outside of Japan. Practical implementations are rare. Most likely because of the lack of knowledge by the broad public. Although QR reader software is freely available and a July ‘09 research by the University of Essex stated that 68% of UK phone owners can install such an application, most have not.

The biggest difference between the numerous free QR readers (for about any phone brand/model) may be the image quality needed to recognize a code. I’m happy with the  speed of NeoReader but there are also Kaywa Reader and QuickMark barcode reader (among others).

Besides Wordpress plug-ins and support in the Google Charts API, there is a PHP library but support in the Zend Framework could stimulate its use even more (Zend_Gdata_Chart anyone)?

Some more implementations:

• Facebook Add to Friends.
• Viral advertising campaigns.
• Share contact information.
• TV to website link (Dutch).
• … any other examples? Please share them in the comments.

One useful tip is to shorten URLs through one of the many URL shortening services there are. This generates a smaller, less prominent QR code.

The name or URL strictlyPHP may not immediately reveal I have a second online passion: Web Analytics.

I am more than aware a proper site would help clarify what I do and it’s certainly on the list, but for now, a short description: besides PHP/Web development, I try to invest as much time as possible in Web Analytics. In my case summarized as: website optimization using Google Analytics.

I am extremely fascinated by the information you can derive from analysing data/traffic. I like to pin-point possible usability issues, missing information or missed opportunities to improve site conversion performance. Related to that, targeted AdWords PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns are lots of fun too!

And that is what made me write this post: I just started a new Google PPC campaign for a small Bed and Breakfast in Haspengouw (Belgium) targeted to Belgian and Dutch people.

The conversion action is of course the use of the contact form and as results are coming in, it’s doing well. I did a small site rebuild in advance so not everything can be compared to the past, but the amount of new not-bouncing visitors has almost doubled and conversions (of course!) follow the same path. While traditionally March and April were their best months, July is coming close.

Conversions via phone are currently not measurable but it’s easy to ask the person that handles them if an increase is visible (audible?). You could do this properly by asking those people if they visited the website before. Logging that somewhere would allow you to combine this data without to much hassle.

Now, don’t forget to visit De Pastorie yourself! Even if it is only for a drink on their terrace.

Or even better: if you like to receive an actionable optimization report for your site or launch a PPC campaign together to increase traffic: don’t hesitate and send me a message.

Finding out why your visitors do not buy anything or don’t take any other action you want them to take does not need to be that hard.

This post will be an attempt to show how easy it is to get an insight into how many potential “converters” leave your site before they buy anything (or perform any other goal) and why they do this.

First of all: make sure you set goals in Google Analytics. In this post, I assume you only have one goal, but be sure to mark everything that is of interest to you (as the site owner) as a goal. If you didn’t do this upfront, you’ll have to wait for some time so you have enough data to work with (let’s say at least 150 – 200 conversions).

Secondly: have a look at the people that convert. Because it is a predefined segment, select it like this:

• Open up the advanced segments selection on the top right of your Google Analytics overview.
• In the “Default Segments” list, select “Visits with Conversions” and click “Apply”.

As you would expect, you now see information for visitors that completed your goal. One important note: if you have multiple goals, be sure to monitor them separately.

Have a look at the “Visitors” – “Overview” report, you will see some useful averages for visitors that converted. E.g.: you’ll notice people that convert visit at average X number of pages or stay X minutes on your site. Write them down or something (yes, with a good old pencil).

With this information: advanced segmentation to the rescue (again)! It is as easy as this:

• Open up the advanced segments selection again.
• Click “Create a new advanced segment”.
• Add one or more of the averages you have in front of you to the new segment. E.g. Page Depth greater than or equal to 15. As long as you have enough results, segmenting more precise can have advantages (as long as you don’t generalize the outcome).
• Save the segment and apply it to the reports.

You now basically look over the shoulder of people that leave your site before they convert. You can for instance notice:

• where they left your site (“Content” – “Top Exit Pages”).
• whether many of them return more than once (“Visitors” – “New vs. Returning”).
• if specific countries/languages pop out (“Visitors” – “Map Overlay”/”Languages”).
• if any OS or browser pops out (“Visitors” – “Browser Capabilities”).
• whether specific content is notably more popular (“Content” – “Top Content”).

Comparing this to the people that convert can be useful. Did not-converters

• reach you from a different source (“Traffic Sources” – “All Traffic Sources”)
• land on another page (“Content” – “Top Landing Pages”)

than converters?

Remember: there really is no end to this – segment and analyze as much as you can. One segment at a time. People in one segment could be leaving for different reasons than people in another.

Don’t hesitate to contact me if you get stuck somewhere!

Gather valuable feedback on your designs, artwork, photos,… by simply waiting. Just waiting. For free.

A nice new web 2.0 application, fivesecondtest, provides a platform for images to be “reviewed” by the public (stored at Amazon S3 of course). It’s dead simple: you upload the image and wait. After some time people will have reviewed your image and marked what drew their attention in the first five seconds they saw your image.

Whether it is a screenshot of your site, a fresh mock-up, a (stock) photograph,… you name it and it gets reviewed. All without creating an account or leaving any personal information.

Be sure to review some too!

Edit: use of Calibri font makes it look nice on Windows.

Once in a while (not that much actually, but enough to write something about it) I get a question from friends or family, newly graduated or experienced, about what their next career move should be.

Not that I know that much about it, but let’s assume you want to find the appropriate job/hobby related to IT for yourself.

When I was at school we basically had to choose between development (programming) or networking. A fairly easy choice that, as we realised later, would define the rest of our life. Luckily our school provided good guidance (just kidding).

With the Internet and everything around it evolving at warp-speed, the options you have are far less obvious.

Of course you should still look at yourself and think about whether or not you like to do development. But let’s say you do. In that case and in my opinion, the language you pick is not that important. Although at school they probably still divide classes that way, it is good to realize you will have to switch between languages someday (possibly multiple times, who knows). And as Dave Thomas (The Pragmatic Programmer) says: it’s almost a requirement to keep an eye on multiple languages/technologies.

While you should not be guided by the salaries mentioned, the IT Jobs Watch provides multiple views on the current job market. One basic fact that you could derive from this list is what sector/language/tool is becoming increasingly popular (in the UK, but probably everywhere). While that may not be the optimal choice (and I’m not even saying you should base your choice on this!), it may as well play a role in your decision process.

Note: if you are interested in the salaries mentioned, there are far better opportunities for you!

Apparently price settings for telecom (broadband/mobile/land line) plans in Belgium are significantly higher than its neighbouring countries and our Belgian government has decided to do something about it.

I try to avoid posts about Belgian/Dutch subjects but this one is too big of a disgrace:

To increase competition between operators, our government has launched a site to compare different telecom offers (Dutch). I can only assume someone naively decided this is the cheapest way to get prices to drop without extra legislation and while one can doubt its effectiveness in case of (forbidden) price setting agreements between operators, it must have cost (or still costs) huge amounts of time to get up-to-date data in their application.

If you now doubt this is something a government should occupy itself with, you’re not alone.

But it gets even worse. As you may have guessed looking at the site, the underlying code is terrible. This is even more sad because, while very basic and a bit outdated, there are guidelines for creating sites from the government (Dutch).

With less work and more talented people, they could have built an application that could at least be user friendly (as an example: if you submit without some required field, everything you entered is reset) and it could have been an attempt to justify the budget spent.

Maybe it is best they just fire the one responsible for this decision. No motivation needed.

No one doubts that learning something new is a good way to increase job security, productivity and overall happiness.

But in these tough economic times, it’s one of the mayor things people tend to spend time and money on. At least online:

The graph above shows the traffic boosts some online universities have been getting over the last months (although you may not be able to see it, ashford.edu has also doubled their traffic in the last months with an estimate of about 200.000 visitors).

If an online degree doesn’t sound appealing to you, simply reading a book can bring the same benefits.

Some suggestions:

I hope to order and read these this year. (Although I don’t know about the last one yet: it’s not the book I would usually read, but Andy pointed me to its site and the user story is just so funny.)