I just received an email from one of the UK’s main grocery outlets.

The email looked clean, fresh and inviting.

For each of the offers they had a picture of the product, the name, price, saving and original price.

Here’s what I found interesting.

I was more interested in the original price (shown with a line through it) than the saving.

Here’s where it goes wrong.

There are three bottles of wine, with a half price stamp on them. But how much do they cost?

I’d be more interested if a £20 bottle of wine were being sold at half price than a £4 bottle.

Note that this may be deliberate. There’s enough research proving that many people are more interested in the saving than the value of the deal. But it doesn’t work for me.

The other mistake is that I can’t actually read the original prices of the cherries, pizzas or prawns.

Good deals; poor execution.

Amazon are an interesting beast, and in many ways serve as an ideal example of how to do almost everything in just the right way.

Their website’s functionality is excellent, with an obvious leaning towards practicality over beauty.

Their Prime system is sheer genius – and means that I not only spend far more money with them each year, but that they are also my first port of call when looking to buy online.

Yet two of their recent press releases have revealed some interesting trends: That the Kindle format has overtaken the hardcover format, and that the past year has seen an impressive $1 billion of Amazon products ordered through a mobile device. Presumably more than one…

“The leading mobile commerce device today is the smartphone, but we’re excited by the potential of the new category of wireless tablet computers. Over time, tablet computers could become a meaningful additional driver for our business.”

Some believe that we have become slaves to our mobile devices. Personally I consider mine liberating. Yet irrespective of your opinion, the mobile revolution is underway. Isn’t it time your businesses started to tap into it?

You are losing website visitors. Right now, even as you read this, people are coming to your website, not finding what they need and leaving. Most will never return.

Terrifyingly, many were looking for the very solution that you provide. Yet they didn’t stay on your website long enough to realise it.

On Wednesday August 11th, I’ll be holding a 30 minute free webinar on practical steps that you can take to retain more visitors and convert them to customers. Subjects will include 17 different ways to optimize your website for conversions, and 10 of the most common optimization mistakes to avoid.

Join me if you can on Wednesday August 11th at 5:00 PM (BST), 9:00 AM (PDT), 11.00 AM (CDT).

Stop wasting money. Stop wasting customers.

Register for the free webinar today.

As a very regular user of the BBC news website, and someone who works with website optimisation and usability, I was geekishly excited when I heard that the BBC were in the process of a major redesign. Yet what a disappointment!

The preview certainly sounded good:

• a fresh, updated design, with more space for the main stories of the day
• better use of video and images
• clearer and more prominent labelling and signposting of key stories, whether you are on the front page or a story page
• a better indication of which are the most recent headlines
• easier ways to share stories with others, for those who wish to, on social media networks

The reality, however, is a major disappointment.

Take a look at how the top navigation appears in Chrome – note that the size has not been reduced; it really is that unclear:

Then there’s the bewildering mix of fonts, sizes and styles:

I understand that when a regularly used website is updated, users tend to initially dislike the redesign. But this is a major hop, skip and a jump backwards.

The old design allowed me to see all the major stories of the day; barely having to move my mouse.

The new design forces me to click the sidebar four times to get to the bottom of the page – and that’s at my resolution of 1680 x 1050.

The old design had a clear separation of actual news and items of interest.

The new design shows me main news stories, also in the news, sport, uk/world news, more from BBC news, democracy live, BBC world service, multimedia content, features and analysis, most popular, market data, programs and more.

Far, far too much in too little space.

Bad design. Bad usability. Bad.

I just returned from this year’s Software Industry Conference in Dallas, Texas. This year we decided to immortalise the event in photos and a film.

Pictures of the Software Industry Conference 2010.

“All my bags are packed, and I’m ready to go… “; except they’re not packed yet, and I’m far from ready.

Tomorrow morning I leave for the Software Industry Conference in Dallas, Texas. If you’re planning on attending, I’ll be the red-eyed, jet-lagged English guy trying to remember his name at the reception desk. Please take pity on me – say hi and remind me who I am.

There’ll be no further blog posts this week – they’ll be back by Wednesday the 14th.

The BBC News website are showing edited highlights of a video conference between David Cameron (British Prime Minister) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), discussing the Governments plans to use Facebook for seeking ideas on spending cuts.

I’m not yet certain whether the whole thing is a clever piece of PR, an act of desperation, or a government who finally understand what the web is and how it can be used.

Irrespective of motives, my favourite line in the dialog comes from our Prime Minister:

“… next time you’re in town, come and look us up…”

How’s that for a one-sided non-commital invitation? Cameron may be getting on board with social networking, but he’s still a politician!

David Cameron chats to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

Average position is a reasonably useful indicator within your AdWords account. So how is average position calculated for ads on Google’s Display (content) Network?

Ads aren’t always displayed vertically, so what do the numbers actually mean?

We contacted Google’s support for clarification, and their answer was a little surprising:

“Thank you for your patience in awaiting this email.  I understand you have a question regarding the metric average position on the Display Network. Average position is not used for the Display Network.  When looking at campaigns or statistics for the Display Network, you do not even need to look at that column.  If you want to measure performance or see how you are doing on the Display Network, you should focus on other metrics such as CTR, conversions, average cost, ROI, etc.”

Read that again:

“Average position is not used for the Display Network.  When looking at campaigns or statistics for the Display Network, you do not even need to look at that column.”

“You do not even need to look at that column“?

If there no average position for the display network, why is the figure displayed?

Surely Google have the technical know-how to turn off a column according to its context.

If I was cynical, I might wonder whether the figures were there to encourage raising bids. Luckily for Google, I’m not cynical.

In case you haven’t noticed, Google have recently opened up a somewhat old feature to all AdWords account holders: Ad SiteLinks. In short, it can potentially make your ad stand out from those of your competition.

To use it is rather easy. Go to your campaign settings, and under the ad extensions section you will find an item offering to “Show additional links to my site within my ad“. When you choose to edit, it will display a section for entering link text and a destination URL. This allows you to add additional links to be displayed right under your ad’s text.

Be aware, however, that just because you’ve setup this feature doesn’t mean that it will always show for all your ads. Your ads need to be displayed above the organic results, have very high quality scores, and the URLs need to send traffic to pages which are a part of your main website. Don’t bother setting this up on a campaign which only targets the display network (content network). SiteLinks will only work on Google.com and Google Search partners.

If you have set them up, you might be in for a surprise when it comes to reporting, as Google do not provide any detail or depth to this new feature. Conversion data and a breakdown for which SiteLink people clicked on is absent. You will need to figure that out on your own through log analysis. The stats which they do supply are all grouped together with clicks on your ad’s headline. For example, if you have an ad which the headline was clicked 4 times and 4 SiteLinks which were each clicked once, Google’s reporting for the SiteLinks would show a total of 8 clicks.

More information on ad sitelinks can be found here.

Research by Dan Zarrella suggests that certain words have a greater impact in social media than others.

The Most Facebook-Shareable Words vs. The Least Shareable Words on Facebook.

Not exactly a great surprise, but the research also found that “techie and social-media dork favorite topics like Twitter, Google, and the iPhone aren’t very popular with the mainstream Facebook audience“.

So who are the typical Facebook users?

If you’re thinking about advertising on Facebook (and who isn’t?), then you can take advantage of their advanced demographic and psychographic filters, including location, keywords, relationship status, age, education, gender, languages and more.

On a superficial level, this makes Facebook appear far more enticing for advertisers than Google. Google’s demographic tools are almost non-existent by comparison.

Yet the key issue is that people go to Google to find what they’re looking for. People go to Facebook to see what their friends are doing and engage with them.

For now I’ll continue thinking about advertising on Facebook, while spending actual money on Google AdWords.