With a strong sense of how he wants to manage his brand communications, Barry has set us a challenge and suggested how the website should deal with visitors from those others markets.

Currently ‘barrysbiscuits.com’ shows the UK-focused website and online shop. Barry wants to give visitors the appropriate site and shop for their region when they go directly to the .com address. He would prefer visitors not to have to choose their country on the first page, or for there to be a default country selection which they then have to change.

From the outset we know that detecting a visitor’s location from their IP address is an option, if a potentially flawed one. We also know that many of the best-known and successful global brands do not operate geolocation-based redirection in the way Barry wants to.

Our approach to this was – as with anything – to gather some useful research to develop our own understanding before making some informed recommendations to Barry.

What are the important and uncontroversial facts?

Each country site needs its own URL and own content in order to be properly indexed by search engines.

Detection of location is done by IP address and is not always reliable. IPs get reassigned and the location result is only as good as how up-to-date the database your subscribing to is.

Most people do not reach your website by typing in barrysbiscuits.com to their address bar. Search engines have secured their place as the key gateway to most websites.

You cannot hide content for one country from those in another. So your prices, product names etc are still available to those who want to see them. The important thing is to make it easier or more obvious for them to see the content which is most relevant to them.

How some global brands do it

1. Apple

http://apple.com gives you the US version of the site. Regardless of where you enter this URL around the world, you always get the US site. You then have to use the flag at the bottom of the screen to choose a different country, be it UK, Ireland or even Cameroon.

1. Ikea

http://ikea.com gives you the global landing page and asks you to select your country. This is a very common approach

1. Dyson (by far the most interesting and seemingly sophisticated)

http://dyson.com from the UK gives you dyson.co.uk automatically. From the US it gives you their US site automatically. From the Netherlands it automatically gives you a page where you can choose your country.

Why might mainland Europe might be different? It could be harder to know with certainty which country someone is in from their IP address and so rather than have lots of Dutch looking at Belgian sites in error – they make the choice more explicit. It would be interesting to know more about this as our conclusions are fairly intuitive.

1. Amazon

http://amazon.com takes you to the US site from wherever you are, but then gives you a message to encourage you to which to the correct site.

It’s about more than what you type in the address bar

What the website shows when you arrive from different places around the world after typing in the main URL.

What results are shown on Google when someone types in your brand name from different places around the world.

We can flag the different versions of the site as being primarily relevant to specific territories using Google Webmaster tools. This means that when someone Googles “barrys biscuits”, in Australia, they will see search results from your Australian site first.

This element of Google Webmaster Tools was created for this specific purpose – when there is content which is only relevant to people in a specific area. So you wouldn’t use it to flag French language content else you’d risk excluding many Canadians from reaching the results easily.

This is exactly what Apple does. This suggests to us that Apple has accepted that the most efficient way to target traffic to the right regional site is through appropriate search listings.

For Barry, who had a very strong sense of how he wanted the site to work, our initial recommendation was to follow the Dyson model. Have re-direction in place, but be ready to keep its results under constant review and accept that the approach may have to change or be varied by territory if necessary.

Geolocation on the basis of IP address is by no means an exact science. Location is an increasingly important digital dynamic, and so there are much better ways to determine where someone is – especially when it comes to mobile devices. This may mean the question of whether to use IP to check where some one is will cease to be relevant.

As Matt reminded us recently, the very notion of manually entering domain names to the address bar is becoming forgotten in favour of searching. So perhaps the key conclusion is the dominance of search. The best method – as ever – may be to do right by people trying to find you in search.

Advertisers clearly have also realised this, occasionally using “Search Honda on Google” rather than giving the URL. Not using the address bar is clearly an advantage in this case, remembering one or two words related to a product or brand is far easier than remembering a long URL. Recently published stats from Google also place Facebook, Yahoo and Google itself amongst the top searches of 2011, confirming that searching rather than using the address bar is widespread.

In most cases it’s quite obvious what the domain could be, such as Facebook.com, but still search is preferred to using the address bar. It’s safe to assume that people want to be sure that they are going to the right address when they are unsure of the full URL of the site (whether the site uses .com .co.uk .net etc). Taking this into consideration, Searching for a site may be faster in some circumstances.

It might be also be that some users find searching for websites easier or may do it through habit. The majority of browsers these days include bookmark, history and web searching within the address bar, so you only have to type a word or two into your address bar to either search the web, your bookmarks or view sites you’ve been to previously. It’s easy to see how this would influence how people use the web as a whole, as searching for your favourite sites in this way would get you into a habit of searching for all of your websites. A Mac application called Alfred and Linux-based operating system Ubuntu also work in a similar way to these all in one address bars, allowing the user of the computer to type a couple of words into a text box to open application, search for files and complete many other functions.

Searching for sites rather than navigating to them directly is fine most of the time, however it can be an issue when a site needs to be hidden from search results but you still need a number of people to have access to it.

Users of the internet will always navigate the web the way that they find easiest. It’s not up to web designers or developers to tell them how they should use the internet, we should understand how they work and make it easy for them to find what they need to find. After all, if you make something difficult for someone to do, the likelihood is they won’t do it.

The ID usually comes directly from the database. Each time a product is added, the ID column is incremented by 1 and creates a new number.

This works well in most situations, but consider a multi-level application. Recently I’ve been involved with working on an issue tracker. The system includes areas called projects, and within each project you then have issues.

So the urls for the application might look something like /project/12/issue/246 which if we stuck to the incremental method above would mean we were viewing the 246th issue added to the system.

But wouldn’t it be nice if the number was actually the 246th issue added to that project? It would give a much clearer idea of what we were looking at just from the url.

And that is the point of this article. Sometimes, although it’s easier to stick to database IDs, we should push the boat out and make our urls and items specific to the area we are in.

As far as the database schema, it adds a small amount more complexity because we then have another column (number) to keep track of, but the benefits far outweigh this.

A few examples of where it might be useful are players in a team, pupils in a class or year, photos in a gallery or cars in a race.

So now each time I start work on a new app, I look to see if I can make the items relevant to their container rather than to the system as a whole, and it adds just a little more clarity to a users experience of the product.

I suggest that there are three factors to personal productivity.

1. Attitude

Some people might call this motivation. I suggest our attitude can have a massive impact on our overall productivity in two different ways. The first is concerned with ensuring we have a greater number of productive moments and the second is about our overall attitude towards work.

To get into the right frame of mind, some people like to listen to music whilst they work, and some prefer things a little quieter. Some are bothered by their surroundings more, having particular places they associate with good work; whilst others find that a change of scene can be as good as a rest. The length of time for which we can focus as well as the times in the day when we work best can also play their part. If you’re lucky enough to be able to identify some of these patterns then you might find that you’re more productive when you’re able to work with them rather than against them. For instance, a while ago I realised that my attention span has an absolute limit somewhere around the 2 hour mark. So I now divide may days up into 2 hour segments. I set myself a rule that I will only work on one project during the segment unless I finish the whole project. I don’t look at email, take phone calls or do anything other than work on that single project. The boost to my personal productivity through this slightly forced method of getting some focus has ben phenomenal.

The time of day can have an interesting impact on our ability to get in the zone and focus on quality work. Ever wondered why many programmers prefer to work at night? Swizec’s article raises the idea that good focus is often achieved at an optimal level of tiredness: awake enough to do justice to the task, whilst not enough to worry about all of the other things which are not being completed.

On the second point – overall attitude – there is absolutely no substitute for knowing that you are either working on something you love or towards something you love. Plenty of people work at jobs with little sense of purpose and end up unhappy and unmotivated as a result. Not rocket science, I can hear you cry. Given the apparent obviousness of this observation it is astonishing how many talented people allow themselves to end up doing things that they do not want to. It must stand to reason that if in your first waking moment of the day you feel good about the purpose of everything that follows, then you can have a much easier job of being motivated and productive.

2. Tools

You can either make your tools more effective in themselves or you can make them more attractive to you.

One of the best productivity tools I’ve discovered is Alfred; though it’s difficult to explain to those who have not experienced it. It’s a set of keystrokes and shortcuts which allow you to manipulate files, open applications and to search for information and resources on your computer with much more ease and speed than comes built-in with Mac OS. It’s the first new piece of software I’ve installed since I switched to Mac in 2002, which has genuinely improved the way I use my computer.

We all use lots of tools everyday – be they physical aids or pieces of software – so we are aware of the difference that improving or upgrading those tools can make.

I suggested that either the effectiveness or attractiveness of a tools could be altered. This is – of course – a nonsense dichotomy.  The more enlightened among you already know that, in most situations, making a tool more attractive also makes it more effective.  Rubbermaid and Method are brands which solve highly practical problems using design attractiveness to make their products more effective. It’s a point Stephen Fry reinforced in an recent  interview for the BBC about the success of Steve Jobs’ Apple. The essence of the point is simple. When we enjoy using something, we use it more often, and we often use it in a more considered and thorough way. I have never vacuumed so much since I bought my Dyson. I don’t mind telling you that it is insanely satisfying to use a piece of British engineering which so obviously improves my world with great ease and efficiency. Objects of functional and aesthetic beauty invite us to develop a relationship with them and to use them properly. So go on; invest in that lovely new Moleskine notebook or at least download Alfred – you wont regret it!

3. Techniques

For the avoidance of any doubt in the difference between tools and techniques, it might be useful to recall that phrase so often used in relation to newbie middle-aged cyclists. Indeed, no one wants to be thought of as having “all the gear and no idea”.

Technique is about how you do things as well as knowing what works best for you. Unfortunately, productivity is an area which provides rich soil for a forest of (largely unhelpful) self-help books. Despite this, there must still be value in appraising those skills which are as fundamental to a productive life as are reading and numeracy. To ask ourselves the question: how do I work best, is to appraise and make possible the fine tuning of our own personal operating system.

We have long been fans of a certain methodology when it comes to productivity technique. Though I’m loath to call it a self help book, you may disagree. Getting Things Done by David Allen is a both an entire system and a set of useful principles for personal productivity technique.

I first discovered it during the first year of my career. I recall being stressed beyond my wit at a small PR firm whose MD had (perhaps foolishly) loaded me with a rather  uncharitable number of projects and responsibilities. Getting Things Done (GTD) assisted with both the practical task of coping with the massive and disorganised workload, as well as the higher-order task of deciding that the world of PR was not for me!

GTD has yielded many helpful principles including: reviewing active projects on a weekly basis; storing each action only once; capturing thoughts and tasks for later processing and; having a list of tasks appropriate to contexts such as “flight”, “desk” or “home”.

In addition to whole systems or approaches to technique, everyone has their own good habits. Creating and sustaining good habits can be as much as most of us ever want or need.

Asking you to accept that all improvements to productivity can slot neatly into one of my three categories might be a little audacious. Let’s now extend that audacity by suggesting that really great productivity actually comes from combining all three. The three factors of attitude, tools and technique form a highly virtuous trio.

GTD delivers real benefits, but it demands a certain commitment to keep to the system, to follow its rules. So there’s no point taking it on unless you have the right attitude and are prepared to focus – at least for example – on your Weekly Review. But it’s also a two-way process. Some of the higher principles of GTD allow you to assess the bigger decisions and responsibilities you have, which can help you to solve problems of background attitude. I quit my last job and setup my own business on the strength of these processes. That was 5 years ago now, and it was one of the most important and beneficial things I ever did for myself.

Some of the ways of getting the right attitude could definitely require good technique. For you it might mean scheduling the right kind of work for the time of day or having a decent playlist of vocal-free music on standby in your iTunes for those times when you need to get back in the zone.

What have I learned in my somewhat obsessive quest for better personal productivity over the years so far? For one thing there’s no ideal method or even combination of methods. It is however, absolutely worth continuing to experiment and revise. We all need to keep working on and upgrading our personal operating system – so why not enjoy the process and do a good job of it?

Here is a little about how we went from just the idea to a fully fledged features on the live system…

New features always start with a discussion between myself and Chris to see if we’re both thinking along the same lines. He usually sees it from the user’s point of view, and me from the complexity of development point of view. We thrash out what the user actually needs in the first version of a feature. I usually try and keep it to the bare minimum of functionality, while Chris likes to really wow with our new releases.

For the first version of ‘image in paragraph’ we decided on a choice of existing or new image and the ability to remove it. That means no choice about which side of the page it shows (we default to right) which is currently decided as part of your sites design and no choices about whether its a link (it opens the content size in a lightbox on click).

Next, Chris usually comes up with some sketches, and there was no difference here…

This is the new paragraph edit overview. It shows the new photo button which optionally allows adding of a photo to a paragraph.

This sketch was the original plan for how to select where to get the image from. It changed during development and then agreed in it’s final form which takes up less space.

If you upload a new photo then you need to give the photo a title and alternative.

This sketch shows the idea for select existing. Again it’s slightly changed. We didn’t need confirm after all and we kept the position and text for the cancel button from previous stages.

When you edit a paragraph with an image attached your only option is to remove it. That then allows you to add a new one!

Once we have a working version of the feature, I test it locally on my own computer to make sure it works as expected. I then upload it to a development server we use to allow internal testing and bug reporting.

Once everyone in the team is happy the new feature works how we agreed and it’s been tested across various internet browsers we then upload it to the live server so it’s available to all our PagePlay users.

At this point we then let the world know by emailing our users and announcing it on Facebook and Twitter.

I’ve often thought that it would be great if CSS could include some of the functionality found in programming languages to lessen the amount of code required and speed up development. A couple of weeks ago i came across LESS, which does everything i had wished for and more.

LESS gives us variables, mixins, operations and functions, which i will go into a bit more detail about below.

PagePlay

We have loads of great designs available for use with PagePlay sites. When a customer signs up to PagePlay on either a Bronze or Silver setup package, we take one of these existing designs chosen by the customer and amend it to fit their needs. Using LESS we can make this process as simple as changing a few variables at the top of the stylesheet.

CSS3 browser specific properties

Until recently the proper CSS property for border-radius hasn’t been available (in Firefox at least), meaning if we wanted to do something like add rounded corners to an element we had to add both the webkit and mozilla browser specific alternatives (-moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius) instead of one simple property. Even now that this property is available, we still have to add three properties to ensure rounded corners are shown in older versions of the browser (where border-radius) doesn’t feature. Multiply this multiple times over a CSS file and we’ve got many many lines that we shouldn’t really need to write.

Using LESS we can use a Mixin to limit the amount of code we write. By setting up the following mixin…
and using in our LESS like the following…

Our CSS will appear like this…

Lessphp

Once you have created your LESS file, it needs to be compiled into regular old CSS. There’s a number of LESS compilers around that can do this job for you, but one that caught my eye was a PHP implementation. This allows us to upload .less files directly to the server and they will be automatically compiled into CSS when they are first used. A handy function is also provided that compiles LESS files and saves them as CSS files only when needs (when a change has been made to the LESS files).

So in our PHP implementation we just need a bit of LESS as a style.less file…

Two lines of PHP…

And the following style.css file is ready for us to use in the same directory…

Take a look at http://lesscss.org for more details of all the wonderful things that LESS can do.

Over December 2011, we’ll provide a mixture of ‘Full’ and ‘Emergency’ service. Here’s the detailed breakdown…

Thursday 15th December (we’re moving to new offices)

AM – full
PM – emergency

Friday 16th December (Christmas Party)
AM – full
PM – emergency

26 & 27 December
emergency

28 – 30 December (inclusive)
full

Fri 31 December
AM – full
PM – emergency

2 January
emergency

3 January
Back to normal full service

If you need assistance – call 0161 850 0561 or email help@pageplay.com and we’ll be pleased to help. We hope you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The market for web design is very competitive. There are thousands of web designers and hosting companies out there.

Why do we believe PagePlay still offers the best value for small business and charity websites? Here’s five reasons:

1. It’s always good to have a helping hand.

PagePlay’s entire approach is about looking after you so that you can look after your content. You can email or call us and we’ll help you with your website. Behind the scenes we’ll take care of anything boring or complicated so you can stay focused on what’s what’s import: the pages, words, images and videos which make up your site. PagePlay is a subscription service, and because customers aren’t locked into a contract, we have to make sure our service is really up to scratch. If our customers were not happy with our service, then we would soon go out of business, so it’s something we take very seriously indeed.

2. Web technology constantly evolves.

Digital technologies and the standards for how they are used constantly evolve. Rather than building everything from scratch each time we create a site, then moving on to the next, all PagePlay sites share our common core architecture.  You can’t tell as a visitor – the sites look just like individually created ones. The difference is under the hood. We constantly update the system not only to improve site performance for speed and search, but also to add new features for you to add and edit your content. Because the web constantly evolves, you need a system that constantly evolves too – and to know that someone will be there to help you through the changes when they come.

3. We make it easy to connect all the dots.

Domain names, name servers, email accounts, hosting, FTP, forwarding and re-directs. Who really wants to get involved with all of this when setting up their new website? Everyone’s setup is a little bit different so the one-size-fits-all approach from most DIY website providers is usually inadequate. The PagePlay team takes the strain by dealing with anything boring or complicated about your site setup and ongoing hosting needs. Whether you’re a one man band or a large corporate company with an IT department, we have a personal setup approach which means everything will be taken care of, without you having to read any manuals or submit any support tickets.

4. You don’t need to learn anything.

PagePlay sites are pretty impressive and their owners have full control over all of their content. But that’s not what we’re most proud of. We have never met a customer who takes any longer than 3 minutes to learn everything they need in order to manage their own website. The whole system has passed the Mum-test and ongoing improvements only serve to make things even easier. Why spend time learning how to be a web designer unless it is your job?

Put that time to better use by creating some great content and building your business or charity to achieve its aims.

5. PagePlay is extremely good value.

It isn’t ‘cheap’ because there are more affordable ways to simply throw a website online – DIY website tools for instance. But PagePlay is amazingly good value for what it really is.

A fully content-content managed website; with no limits to the amount of pages, text and images you can add; which requires no training for people to update; which performs very well in search engines; which plays so well with your social media channels; whose technology is constantly being improved; with email accounts included and personal service as standard.

These kind of web projects and systems are usually quoted in the tens of thousands of pounds whereas PagePlay subscriptions start from a very affordable £24 per month.

At the time it was massive for us. Just by getting that far we knew we’d won some – much needed – funding and would receive publicity across the manchester business community.

The award ceremony took place in the amazing Gorton Monastery where myself, Chris, Matt, family and friends were wined, dined and interviewed for a likely very embarrassing official awards video.

It turns out we didn’t win the competition, a very worthy Wigs Up North did, but the experience was invaluable and the money we did win was used to stabilise and push PagePlay forward to what we knew it capable of.

In the last 2 years the company has changed beyond recognition. We now employ Matt full time as our first employee, our second product Cluster – which you will hear a lot more about in the next few months – is live on its first few projects, and we have a third product in the works which is currently under wraps, but has the potential to be much larger than either of its siblings.

Although still based on producing easy to use web tools, Modlia is far more organised and stable now, with operations manuals and procedures. PagePlay has become the strong oak tree we always hoped it would and the number of people who end their subscriptions is still astonishingly low thanks to the A1 customer service Matt often provides and the ease-of-use we bake in to our products from day one.

So here is to the next 2 years and the exciting developments in Modlia and the products we so carefully cultivate for our fantastic and supportive users.

I can assure you that we love what we do at Modlia and will try our best to keep you enjoying the products we build and continually develop for you.

Harry

Imagine Pageplay with no Photobanner, PayPal, SubPages, Feeds, Hidden Pages, Statistics or Gallery! Your can see all our bolt-ons.

Some of the things we’ve helped people to sell include cakes, crafts, rosettes, educational artistry, lighting design, consultancy, graphic design and door stripping.

Some of the things we’ve helped gain awareness of include a double olympic gold medalist, a gay choir, Manchester Airport’s Enterprise Zone and The Young Advisors Movement.

We also have our first full time employee, the wonderful Matt. If you’ve given us a call in the last 12 months then you’ve more than likely spoken to him.

Here’s to the next 3 years!