Once again the social media giant has activated a new default setting without giving users any prior warning, meaning all users must opt out from within the sites privacy settings.  According to a report from Sophos, the new feature which is currently being rolled out globally, implements a new facial recognition technology allowing users to easily tag friends in pictures.  This means when you are given the option to tag friends in pictures, Facebook will use the new facial recognition technology to group your friends that it identifies together, allowing you to tag them in groups.

This is not the first time that Facebook has implemented a new feature without alerting users and is sure to upset many privacy focused users of the site.

A Facebook spokesperson told CNET

“When we announced this feature last December, we explained that we would test it, listen to feedback, and iterate before rolling it out more broadly. We should have been more clear with people during the rollout process when this became available to them. Tag suggestions are now available in most countries and we’ll post further updates to our blog over time.”

If you don’t want Facebook to suggest you to friends when they are tagging photos from that wild party that you would rather not share , then here is how you can disable the feature in the privacy settings.

• Go to your privacy settings.
• Click “Customize settings.”
• Scroll down to “Things others share.”
• Find “Suggest photos of me to friends.”
• Edit accordingly.

Matthew Marley

360innovate

A basic guide to using WYSIWYG for content managed systems.

Definition

WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get

The purpose of a WYSIWYG editor is to let a content editor update web content without having to know complex code. Sounds pretty straight forward, right? – Well it is… and its isn’t.

At 360innovate we create content managed websites for many of our clients. Often incorporating the use of WYSIWYG Text editors that allow non-skilled users to edit and update website content.

It is very easy to get stuck into using a WYSIWYG editor and create content right away, however it is also easy to create bad content which may be detrimental to the users of your site.

A little bit of understanding of what is happening behind the scenes of a WYSIWYG editor can help to produce results that are easier to achieve and better for website users, search engines and you.

The intention of this post is to enhance a first time user’s understanding and to give a bit of best practice advice along the way.

Why is it important to know these things?

A basic understanding of the different user types that may visit and interact with your website can be helpful in creating content that will add value to your site. If your content is easy to read and engaging it can pay real dividends with you users response.

In addition if you structure your content in a meaningful and semantic manner it can help to improve your search engine rankings.

Hidden Code!

When using a WYSIWYG to create content, the WYSIWYG editor is working hard in the background to translate your intentions into HTML code which will eventually be added to your web page.

HTML uses a tag based system to give plain text meaning. When you write a few lines of text  in a WYSIWYG and hit return the editor will be creating the HTML code(markup) in the background to make your text appear as a paragraph. When you select a word within your paragraph and make it bold, the editor wraps this word with more markup to tell the word how to behave.

A paragraph will look this this in raw format:
<p>This a paragraph with tags at the beginning and the end which indicate opening and closing of the code.</p>

A list of other common tags:

Links

<a href="http:www.google.com">This is a link to google</a>

Bold Emphasis

<strong>Bold Words</strong>

Lists (unordered)

<ul>
<li>List item </li>
<li>List item </li>
<li>List item </li>
</ul>

Which will look like this:

• List item
• List item
• List item

Lists (ordered)

<ol>
<li>List item </li>
<li>List item </li>
<li>List item </li>
</ol>

Which will look like this:

1. List item
2. List item
3. List item

Headers

<h1>Important Header</h1>
<h2>Quite Important Sub-heading</h2>
<h3>Slightly Less Important heading</h3>

Example of these tags in use:

<h2>Welcome to my test page</h2>
<p>This the first paragraph in my test page. I will use the content of this paragraph to explain a little bit about HTML tags</p>
<h3>Sub-headings help to break up blocks of text</h3>
<p>This second paragraph contains <strong>bold text</strong> and a <a href="http://www.google.com">link to google</a> < /p>
<h4>A list of things:</h4>
<ul>
<li>This is a list item </li>
<li>This is also a list item plus a link to <a href="http://www.google.com">google</a></li>
<li>This is just a regular List item</li>
</ul>

Below is how that code looks to the user.

Welcome to my test page

This the first paragraph in my test page. I will use the content of this paragraph to explain a little bit about HTML tags

Sub-headings help to break up blocks of text

This second paragraph contains bold text and a link to google

A list of things:

• This is a list item
• This is also a list item plus a link to google
• This is just a regular List item

Creating Good content

There are a number of different WYSIWYG Editors that are used widely for content management systems and other application on the internet. Functionality can vary from editor to editor, some have a huge array of options for creating content, others have a stripped down set of tools. Here at 360 we certainly favour keeping things simple when it come to updating content for a content managed website.

We often use a WYSIWIG called Tiny MCE, this is a widely used tool and is highly configurable. For most applications we tend to strip away some of the more complicated functionality and strip it down to the bear essentials. The reason we reduce the capability of the editor is to make it easier for the user and also to reduce the any possibility of creating “Bad Code” – more on bad code later.

What is good content?

Good content should be meaningful and easy to to read (This post is the only exception to the rule!).

Meaningful content can be considered primarily as being contextually relevant and readable for the end user. It can also concern how you set up your content so that it can be understood by search engines.

There are techniques and best practices that can be used that will ensure your content can be digested easily by your users and also help to search engines index your page so that it can be found by people searching for your topics.

Headings should be descriptive but concise – summing up the content to follow.

Paragraphs should be created in bite sizes chunks, that users can choose to dip in and out of.

Meaningful sub-headings throughout content will allow for easy scanning of pages.

For lists of items where the order is unimportant use the Unordered list (bulleted) button.

Unordered List Example – Things on my desk:

• Phone
• Newspaper
• Laptop
• Screwdriver (no sure why!)

For lists where the order is important you should use the Ordered list (numbered) button

Ordered List Example – Make tea:

1. Fill kettle with water
2. Set to boil
3. Fetch mug
4. Place teabag in mug
5. Pour boiled water into mug
6. Stir teabag then remove
7. Add milk and sugar (optional)

If a section of content is overworked with a WYSIWYG editor  the results can be

Bad Content – What not to do:

Many WYSIWYG systems allow for the addition of extra added features for decorating text. The ability to chage fonts and add different colours to text is common. It may be tempting to try and spruce up your content by playing the various effects available through the WYSIWYG.

DONT DO IT!!!!

IT WILL LOOK TERRIBLE!!!!

Why the dramatic statements?  Well thats years of eperience talking – I have seen the same mistakes repeated on many occasions by many different people. So what are these mistake and how can you avoid them?

“Jazzing” content up with different fonts.

Changing the font to make a bit of text stand out from the rest may seen like a decent idea but if your website has been built well it should already have a least a little bit if typographic styling which should more than suffice for 99.9% of the time.

Having more than one font for the body text of you web page will result in a mish-mash of styles that will rarely make the text any more readable or look any better. In addition the code generated by the WYSIWYG is likeley to mean nothing from a semantic point of view so any emphasis will be missed by search engines and people using screen readers.

Change the font size

This one catches a lot of people out – they start to play with font resizing options and before they know it a whle page of content is set to several different sizes and it is sometimes hard to tell whether a block of text has been resized or not. The truth is that a well designed website should make enough provision for the styling of text without the need for resizing. No content editor should have to use font resizing to format their site content – the default typography styles should suffice for all your content.

This is important to remember because changing the font size will create inconsistencies in how you are presenting your content to the end user, an unprofessional look and feel can affect a user’s perception of your business or organisationas a whole.

Adding a splash of colour.

Again it may be easy and tempting brighten up your page with a splash of colour. In reality you should not have to bother  – a good website design with pre-planned and well though out typography should provide all the typographic tools to deliver your content without the need for ‘crazy’ and ‘fun’ additional colours.

Adding colour to convey meaning is also bad practice as no semantic meaning is implied when you re-colour a font.

If you want your content to mean something to all users and search engines place your “Summer Sale Now On!” text in a heading and follow it with some descriptive content.

Why have all these tools and not put them to use?

WYSIWYG text editors are designed to plugged in or bolted on to other applications – they are designed to cater for a broad spectrum of users and often this means non-technical users can end up working with systems that are unnecessarily complicated. Often additional features are available that users will never need for their day-to-day content management purposes.

Conclusions

Make your content easy to read. Keep it simple. Dont go crazy with the typography options on the content editor. Maintain consistency across your content.

Googles webmaster  guidelines:

“Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.”

Provided you have a web design you are happy with you should not have to get involved in the visual appearance of your website – it should look after it’s self – leaving you to look after the cration of valuable and meaningful content.

Further reading

As mentioned at the top this post this article is intended as a very basic guide to getting started with WYSIWYG. If you are a content editor who should or would like to find out a bit more about the stuff I have talked about here  please click on some te links below.

Tips for good web content

Jacob Nielsen article Write for the web

More on Jacob Nielsen

List of WYSIWYG editors

Another list of WYSIWYG editors

I have noticed there seems to be a lot more interest from people regarding their privacy on Facebook these days, maybe this is due to the media attention that it’s had recently. Personally I keep my account private and I think everyone should as this gives me full control of the information that I chose to share with people. The privacy features which come with Facebook is something not a lot of people use, or aware of which is mainly due to how complicated and confusing these features can be for the none technical people who use the social network. In the past 12 month we have seen Facebook role out a whole new set of privacy features to help users stay safe while using the site, so I thought I would create this blog to highlight some of the main privacy features that everyone should use and at least be aware of!

Lists

The friend’s lists in Facebook are a great feature, which not a lot of people know about. Facebook describes them as a feature which will allow you to create private groups of friends based on your personal preferences. For example, you can create a Friend List for your close friends that you see on a regular basis, you can create a list for work colleagues and people that you may have attended school with.  You can create Friend Lists for all of your needs, allowing you to quickly view your friends by type and also send messages to your lists.

A typical setup for a friends list and something I use personally would be “Friends”, “Family”, and “Professional”. These three groups can then be used to apply different privacy policies. For example, you may only want you closest friends to see photos from the party you were at last night, but you don’t want your family or professional contacts to see.

To create a list all you have to do is go to the friends section on Facebook

How To Use The Custom Settings

Facebook has made a lot of improvements in this area recently, to access this part of the site just go to the custom settings , once you are there you can select who has access to all of your information that you have shared on your Facebook account including pictures and your location which can be shared using Facebook Places. You can customize these setting and set this to friends only, friends of friends or everyone which will allow everyone on Facebook to have access to all your information. One of the great features is that you can customize your sharing settings so only certain people get to see what you want them to see. To do this just click on the drop down box and select the people you want to have access to this information.

These are just a few of the main privacy settings that I would recommend that everyone should use, I have also included a video below that was released by Facebook which will give you an overview of all the new changes to the privacy feature which they have rolled out to all users recently.

Matthew Marley – 360innovate

It’s very common for us to show and hide vertical menus when developing sites. This idiom is particularly common on sites with a lot of submenus, such as e-commerce shopping carts.

Since it’s a technique we use so frequently, we decided to write a little jQuery plugin to make life easier for ourselves. This plugin takes nested unordered lists and turns them into expandable and contractable menus.

The plugin has the following features:

• Dual licenced under GPL / MIT licences – do what you want with this code (as long as you leave the licence intact!)
• Lightweight (~2Kb packed)
• Keyboard accessible, basic WAI-ARIA support. Usable with JavaScript switched off.
• Easy to use and deploy
• Configurable through CSS, callback functions and numerous options

Please note that this plugin optionally uses of Klaus Hartl‘s excellent jquery.cookie.js plugin.

You can download the plugin here, and view the docs, and an example here.

Following on from ‘would your website stand up in a court of law’ I thought another area of e-business worthy of discussion is email marketing and the law.

As with any type of direct mailing, email marketing is strictly regulated to prevent the abuse or misappropriation of consumer data.

The transmission of Electronic Mail is regulated by the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, which states that;

1. You cannot transmit, or instigate the transmission of, unsolicited marketing material by electronic mail to an individual subscriber unless they have previously notified you, the sender, that they consent, for the time being, to receiving such communications. There is an exception to this rule which has been widely referred to as the ‘soft opt in‘ (Regulation 22(2) refers).
2. You cannot transmit, or instigate the transmission of, any marketing by electronic mail (whether solicited or unsolicited) to any subscriber (whether corporate or individual) where:

• the identity of the sender has been disguised or concealed; or
• a valid address to which the recipient can send an opt-out request has not been provided. (Regulation 23 refers)

In summary the 2003 Regulation states that you can only carry out unsolicited electronic marketing if the person you’re targeting has given you their permission (opts in) or if there is a customer relationship in existence. An individual subscriber is defined as a living individual which includes sole traders and unincorporated partnerships, and are given much greater protection than the corporate subscriber.  Corporate subscribers are companies or individuals within companies; sending unsolicited emails to corporate subscribers is allowed.  The rationale for this being that the same safeguards imposed for a business to consumer relationship would impede a business to business relationship. No matter the recipient, corporate or individual, ecommerce regulations require that if your email is a commercial one it must be clearly identifiable as such.

Email marketing and individual subscriber

As the previous paragraphs states you cannot simply direct mail individual subscribers, you must obtain their prior consent to do so. The only exception to this rule is if there is an existing customer relationship between the business and the individual. Even still there are certain rules about how you contact them, firstly their email address must have been acquired through the course of a sale, secondly any further emails must relate to your business products or services, and at the time of the email being acquired the individual was given the opportunity to refuse their email address being used for direct mail purposes. As with all direct mail, including sending to corporate subscribers, the email must contain clear address details for the sender and must be given an option or means of removing themselves from the subscription list. Further to this, e-commerce regulations require you to make all commercial emails clearly identifiable as such, either in the header or the text of the email.

Obtaining mailing lists and contact details

The Data Protection Act 1998 is designed to regulate the capture and storage of personal data, and provide the individuals whose personal data is being capture with certain rights. If a business chooses to capture, purchase or store data, in this instance for the purpose of email marketing, then they must abide by the regulations outlined in the 1998 Act.
The key principles of the Data Protection Act 1998, relevant to email marketing, are:

• Data must only be used for the purpose of which it was collated
• The data must not be disclosed to other parties without the prior consent of the individual, this also includes reveals recipient details in emails.
• Individuals have a right of access to the information held about them
• Personal information must not be kept for longer than is necessary
• Adequate security, technical and organisational measures must be in place to protect personal information

Any business capturing visitor data on their website must provide appropriate warnings to the data provider and are legally bound to inform individuals of what the data will be used for.

In conclusion

You cannot send unsolicited marketing messages by email to individual subscribers unless you have their prior consent unless their information was collected in the course of a sale or if the recipient has expressed an interest in ‘similar’ items and chose not to opt out when the address was originally collected.

When sending a commercial email ensure:

• that your company title and contact details are clearly displayed
• the email is identifiable as being a commercial email
• recipients have the option to unsubscribe or opt out of future correspondence
• individual recipient details are not disclosed within the mailing list

Get all this right then you’re halfway to creating an effective email marketing campaign, check out our guide to getting email marketing right or view our case studies on how we’ve helped clients get excellent results with email marketing.

Just a quick tip today – the solution to a bit of a ‘gotcha’!

While writing the jCaps plugin, we came up against an issue where .ogv videos were refusing to load, but bizarrely, only in Firefox. In its place was a grey box where the video should be, with a question mark in the middle.

After a little bit of head-scratching, we found the solution – Apache wasn’t sending the right MIME type with the video, resulting in a Firefox fail. The solution is to put the following AddType directive in your .htaccess or httpd.conf file (mod_mime is required):

AddType video/ogg .ogv

Make sure that you restart Apache if you put it in httpd.conf.

On another note, jCaps is nearing another release – hopefully this week. It will take into account some of Bruce Lawson’s wishlist, and includes a big refactoring of many elements of the plugin, including the API. It should be leaner, meaner, and easier to use! In the meantime, you can fork or download the project at Github.

Back in 2008 we published a blog post on making your company recession proof with SEO and for 2010 we are going to keep the momentum going. Last year saw the demise of some big brands including Woolworths, FlyGlobeSpan, Zavvi and Borders; the B2B and SME’s were no different with many closures and struggles endured throughout the year of 2009.

Going forward in 2010 we at 360innovate are looking forward to working with new and existing clients helping them to create economies, increase sales and beat the recession using the opportunities available on the Internet.

In the past year we have helped a variety of businesses streamline their sales process and increase customer satisfaction helping them to save and make money. In one instance we developed an event booking and management system for a large organisation who had previously managed the booking of events offline through a form submission process. The new online booking system has saved our client money by allowing them to direct resources previously wasted on event administration to other areas of the organisation and its simple application process has resulted in an increase in the number of attendees at events.

This simple yet efficient addition to an existing website has helped to make life easier for our client and by making things easier for the customer it has paid for itself. Small changes can go a long way and in many cases a lack of time or knowledge will prevent people from seeking out a solution instead settling to carry on with a website which is not working to its full capacity and in these difficult times, when everyone is penny watching, we need to ensure that every aspect of your business is operating at it’s best.

So for 2010 take a look at your website and ask yourself whether you are getting the most you possibly can from it. Do you feel you should be; getting better sales, spending less time managing it, updating it on a more regular basis or integrating it more into the overall marketing mix? As well as this consider asking a friend, colleague or customer what their thoughts of the website are. Don’t be scared of any negative feedback; modifying or enhancing your website doesn’t have to be expensive. From enhancing the usability of your website, integrating mobile technology, refreshing the graphics to a one off email campaign… these are all small things which can pack a big punch and can be tailored to suit every budget helping you to make 2010 the year we beat the recession.

Last year we talked about getting more Christmas shoppers to your website and getting them to spend, but this year we will turn our attention to B2B, an industry which can be incredibly quiet over the Christmas period we have put together some handy tips and advice on how to get visitors to your website and how to use online marketing techniques to keep your business busy this festive period.

Social media has been big news this year and Christmas 2009 is no different; B2B websites should be using the micro blogging platform Twitter as a way to continue relationships with prospective clients; don’t stop talking about products and services online just because work/enquiries seem to have slowed down.

Most people send a Christmas card every year so why not send an e-Christmas card this year, use it as way to not only wish your stakeholders season’s greetings but to offer them seasonal offers as a means of encouraging a decision (in your favour of course) over the festive period. This method of wishing them well is not only greener but allows you to add a more personal touch, although throw in a donation to a local charity to show your not being cheap!

Get into the festive spirit, do some charitable activities such as helping out at the local soup kitchen or even throw an office pantomime inviting clients to watch. Take it online by blogging and posting photos on Flickr, yes it’s something that can be done all year round but at Christmas time there is a lot more fun things going on and it is much easier to get clients involved in Christmas parties etc.

Use professional networking websites such as LinkedIn to locate or arrange a Christmas party. LinkedIn has an excellent event finding tool which is already listing several Christmas networking events, take it one step further by hosting your own Christmas networking event and post it on LinkedIn and any other social networking site the business gets involved with.

Whatever you choose to do for your business this Christmas the best advice we could possibly pass on is to keeping talking about your brand, just because business is quiet it doesn’t mean you can’t continue helping the customer make their decision in your favour or increase the brand visibility with your target market.

A recent study written by reformed burglar Michael Fraser for insurer Legal & General, reveals that 38% of social network users post status updates with details of their holiday plans while others discuss trips away from home outside the privacy of their own page.

In his report Michael Fraser states that by discussing such private information they putting themselves at risk of burglary, according to Fraser criminals are using social networks such as Facebook and Bebo to target individuals. The report warns that by listing private contact details such as your address then openly discussing your holiday dates Internet users are putting themselves at risk of being targeted.

Further research conducted by insurer LV= has found that over 8 million adults have given their chip and PIN details to someone else to make a purchase on their behalf over the past year, resulting in 24% falling victim to fraud.

Online users particularily the 16 – 24′s, who are reportedly the worse age group for posting sensitive information online, need to be made more aware of the risks they face when they log onto social networks and pick up emails.

Did you know that 90% of internet users have email addresses? This makes checking emails one of the most common uses of the internet . So for successful business online, using regular and effective communication is key, making email marketing a popular and cost effective way to get your company message out there.

However, in order for your email marketing campaigns to reap all of the benefits follow our tried and tested pointers:

1. Use an effective email list. There are many ways in which you can create unique emails lists that are tailored to your market. Use your established customer’s details, get people to sign up at events you attend, or let people subscribe to it through your website.

2. Keep your emails regular. People like consistency so whether you are planning to send emails once a week, once a month or once a quarter, stick to it.

3. Make your emails interesting. Make sure that whatever you want to say in your email will be interesting to the readers. Whether it’s about new products or services, there has to be some advantage to the readers for the emails to make them take action.

4. Speaking of action… do your emails have an effective call to action? Don’t just send through information, make sure that your emails get your recipients to follow through to whatever outcome you want, whether it is getting them to buy new products, or using your services again.

5. Keep it short. People are less likely to spend time reading a long email, so the more concise it is, the more you can expect your emails to be read.

6. Don’t spam. Try not to make your emails spammy, if you do, it will just go into spam/junk mail and will probably never be looked at.

7. Can your recipients easily unsubscribe? To make your company and its emails more legitimate, you should make sure that they can easily opt out of receiving the emails.

8. ‘DO NOT REPLY’ email address. There is nothing more off putting for your email recipients than seeing that the email is sent from this type of addresses. Instead you should be encouraging interaction between your company and its customers, which may give you some additional insight.

9. If your sending mass emails out, use an email marketing software product. It will save you a heck of a lot of time!

10. Measure its success. The best thing about email marketing is that you can measure its effectiveness easily, so take advantage. You can record how many people opened the email and how many times the embedded links are clicked through. This can allow you to adjust your strategies to increase the response rates.

If you have any more pointers, we would love to hear them. Happy emailing!