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Över 40.000 besök

Under sitt första år har designfavoriter.se fått hela 40.355 besök (35.627 unika besökare) och 118.123 sidvisningar. Inte illa med tanke på hur lite tid jag haft att lägga ner.

Andelen besökare har till 91% kommit från sökmotorer, vilket ligger i linje med målsättningen med siten. Antalet sökord som lett till den trafiken är 11.076 vilket tyder på att jag lyckats bra med long tail-optimering (fråga 11.076 är ”äkta mattor i design”, så optimeringen ligger i ämnesområdet).

Vad har gått bra?

När jag startade designfavoriter.se hade jag som mål att nå topp 10 i Google på ett par utvalda ord. Jag nådde topp tre på väldigt många fler än jag trodde skulle vara möjligt. Ett ord som ”dansk design” som jag utgick från skulle vara hårt konkurrensutsatt nådde jag topp 5 hyggligt fort.

Antalet besökare har förstås gått bra, det finns en stadig ström av besökare.

Vad har gått mindre bra?

Jag har inte haft tid att skapa så mycket content som jag skulle vilja. Tiden har helt enkelt inte räckt till.

Eftersom siten kretsar kring designmöbler hade jag som förhoppning att kunna länka in priser och länkar till butiker. Det har inte alls gått av det enkla skälet att det inte funnits en enda ehandlare som publicerat några produktfeeds. Den första produktfeeden dök upp först i höstas, tack till http://www.designonline.se. Jag hoppas kunna använda deras feed mer under våren.

En annan sak som gått mindre bra är att antalet kommentarer är väldigt lågt. Jag hade gärna sett en högre andel interaktion och kommer göra en del förändringar för det.

Mål 2011

Det främsta målet för 2011 är att dubbla trafiken på årsbasis.

Ytterligare ett mål är att bredda ämnesområdet genom att sätta upp fler bloggar på egna domäner, genom statistiken har jag hittat lämpliga områden för att täcka upp ett bredare fält.

Jag har också som mål att ta in ett antal gästbloggare som ska få skriva om just sin ”designfavorit”.

Lärdomar

Ibland brukar man raljera över att bilbranschen ligger långt efter på webben. En alldeles uppenbar lärdom är att möbelbranschen är hopplöst långt efter. Det finns bara en ehandlare som publicerar priser på PriceRunner, det finns bara en ehandlare som har ett affiliateprogram och 70% av alla siter är Flashbaserade i mer eller mindre sin helhet. Flera av de större ehandlare är långt ifrån sökmotoroptimerade, och ett ytterst litet fåtal av alla möbelhandelssiter (ehandlare och fysiska butiker) kan klassas som ”OK” eller bättre.

Onwards and upwards!

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Jag passade på att registrera följande 10 domäner:

jagslarvad.se
Ett projekt som jag snart kommer skriva mer om och som ett experiment dessutom lägga ut en öppen inbjudan till. Jag har även registrerat jagslårvad.se, vilket borde ge en hint vad det handlar om

letakurser.se, letakonferenser.se, letautbildningar.se
Jag och @crusell kommer under hösten släppa ett API för att enkelt geografiskt knyta ihop innehåll, http://www.hittastad.se. Tanken med letakurser, letakonferenser och letautbildningar är att förhoppningsvis använda det API:et för bygga en sökmotor kring utbildning/kurser/konferenser med geografisk anknytning.

snyggabarnklader.se
Jag håller på att sakta rulla ut ett annat sidoprojekt, BarnEvenemang.se, en site där familjer enkelt kan hitta barnaktiviteter där de bor. Eftersom jag är småbarnsförälder känns en barnklädessite som ett bra komplement till BarnEvenemang.se.

unconference.se
Antalet unconferences verkar bli fler och fler. Jag har ingen klar idé kring domänen än, så den får ligga till sig lite först.

hittasistaminutenresor.se
Målet för domänen är nog rätt uppenbart. Den här domänen föll nog mer under spekulationskategorin, jag har inte planer (ännu) på att sätta upp en resesite. Fast det skulle ge en del roliga erfarenheter med olika rese-API:er så varför inte som ett experiment.

hittaapps.se
iPad är på väg til Sverige, det finns överhuvudtaget en uppsjö appar. Något kul kring det borde nog gå att göra.

hittarecensioner.se
Som konsument är recensioner av olika slag alltid intressant. Böcker, produkter, filmer etc etc. En sökmotor kopplad till domänen kanske?

hittaord.se
Jag gillade namnet. Svårare än så var det inte. Någon som har en bra idé och vill göra något kul med domänen så säg bara till

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1. What’s there.
2. What’s not there.

What’s There

Well, I can give myself some credit. At place 1, 4, 8 and 14 we see results from designfavoriter.se, which is a web site I run. It actually shows all the posts about Norrgavel I have on the site, which means that I managed to dominate the search results. Good for me, especially when designfavoriter.se is only a couple of months old. What else do we see? Mainly all sources displayed are from blogs or larger interior design sites such as Sköna Hem and StyleRoom.

What’s Not There

Moving on to the more important question – what’s not there? Norrgavel is a swedish brand specialized in high quality and environment-friendly furniture. They only sell their products through their own set of stores and they have a web site which has been up and running for a long time, http://www.norrgavel.se. Where are the images from norrgavel.se?

Norrgavel should be very interested in driving traffic to their own site, especially since they don’t rely on resellers, in which case it would make sence to let the resellers get the traffic. Page after page is filled with images from blogs (even the logo image from designfavoriter.se appears), but there’s no sign of any images from norrgavel.se.

Does It Matter?

Yes, it really does. Traffic from the image search engines are actually quite large.  To quote SavvyAuntie.com (large community site) ”I have more traffic referrals from images.google.com than Facebook and Twitter. [..]”. It is even more important for a design brand to have a strong presence in the image search results, since it is a very visual product.

What To Do?

Remember that every piece of content on your web site is a valuable asset. Make sure to give your images correct names and to use the Alt and Title tags correctly. If in doubt, read this article about using Alt and Title tags.

Note To Norrgavel

Somehow I don’t believe that Norrgavel has any alerts on when the brand name is used online, but if you do and find this, feel free to contact me and I’ll be glad to give you some hints on what you should do with your web site. Love your products, but your web site really does not live up to your standards.

A screen shot of the search result screen is displayed below.

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The public is capable of so much more than it actually knows. For example, doesn’t the online community reproduce (albeit randomly) the works of great authors every day without even knowing it? How long would it actually take for, let’s say Tweeters around the world, to (re)write a famous novel?

I emailed my friend asking: ”Wouldn’t it be interesting to link (every word of) a book to excerpts of people’s discussions and watch the book evolve ”live” on a web site?  We quickly agreed to go with the idea. The world wide release of Tim Burton’s remake of the movie Alice in Wonderland created the perfect back drop for the experiment. We decided that we would let the Twitter community write Lewis Carroll’s old master piece.

Step By Step

We got the text to Alice in Wonderland from Project Guthenberg and split it up into single words. The original idea was to move through the text word by word and search the global Twitter stream to find messages (tweets) that contained the words of the book. Through the course of the project our approach had to be tweaked a few times which created some valuable lessons.

Lesson 1: Time Is Relative

At first the idea was to move sequentially through the information stream, that is, every tweet had to be time stamped later than the previous one. The purpose was to make sure that the text was as close to real time as possible. The way to do this was simply to check the time stamp of a message and compare it to the one previously used. A later time stamp would indicate a more up to date message. Well, that is unfortunately not true. If two messages are submitted simultaneously, one in Sweden and one in New York, there will be a time stamp difference of 6 hours since the time indicated is local rather than from a global time line.

Lesson 2: Twitter API Is Limited

Twitter has applied a limit on how often you may call it. In the original approach we wanted to move through the text word by word, and thus needed to query each word one by one. However, Twitter only allows 150 calls per hour if you’re not whitelisted (which requires going through a manual application process which may take weeks). When making a search through the API you can get away with a higher amount of calls (Twitter won’t say how many), but due to this limitations we had to scrap the idea. Instead of moving word by word it had to be sentence by sentence to make due with fewer searches and instead cache the result and replay it through the web site.

Lesson 3: User Generated Content = Body Count

As soon as you try to harness user generated content, you run the risk of getting explicit content (and we’re not just talking the occasional mentioning of boobs…). This project is no exception. Already in the first test run of only ten messages there was content from the ”red light district”. Still it was decided to forge ahead without any filters, since the experiment is a snapshot in time, and these kind of messages are the reality of the online world today. However, if you plan to run a site with user generated comments be prepared to monitor it, because you will end up with inappropriate content.

Lesson 4: Leave An Opening

One of the features of this project is that there are words that probably aren’t mentioned too often (like the names of some of the characters). If we stepped through the text and only displayed the result world for word, no one would be able to foresee upcoming words and (hopefully) include them in tweets to move the process forward. To remedy this we display one page of the book at the time and show the progress by highlighting every tweeted word. This is not in line with the original idea, we believe it will make it more visually interesting.

Final Thoughts

This experiment is meant to capture a moment in time. The Alice in Wonderland-text will only be run once and when we reach the end the ”gathering of words” is over. We then have a static version of Alice in Wonderland expressed through thousands of twitter messages posted globally during the time of the experiment. It will be a snapshot of dialogues, expressions, ideas and mumbo jumbo seen through the lens of Alice.

Hopefully the experiment works, otherwise failure is always an option. Visit http://www.aliceintwitterland.com to follow (and perhaps participate in) the process.

Press release (swedish):
http://www.mynewsdesk.com/se/pressroom/wannaplay/pressrelease/view/twitter-anvandare-valrden-over-skriver-om-alice-i-underlandet-klart-paa-24-timmar-379945

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Read more: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/02/kindle-more-than-an-ebook-reader-its-a-development-platform.html

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I give you http://www.designfavoriter.se!

In a series of articles I will explain the strategies behind the creation of the site, the tools and technologies and all the bits and pieces I can come to think of. The article series is not meant to be a dive into technical stuff, but rather an overall view suitable for everybody working with online communication.  The article series will deal with all the things that are important to think of such as content strategies, user generated content, spam protection, SEO etc etc.

The Article Series

The first article will be Content Strategies or How To Get 61 Pages From 13 Articles. This will be followed by an article on Getting Jiggy With Mashups or How To Use Yahoo Pipes. In all in I have planned for about eight articles, including a WordPress-dedicated article stepping through the inside configuration of the site.

Designfavoriter.se is connected to SIS-index, a swedish service that publishes visitor statistics , in order for you to be able to follow the progress of the site, http://www.sis-index.se.

If you want to follow the article series without the hassle of going here every day, make sure to add my RSS feed by clicking this link: http://jensode.se/blog/feed

And A Little Tip

If you are interested in design furniture or run an interior decoration blog, please feel free to register your blog on the blog index on the site: http://www.designfavoriter.se/ny-blogg/.

And if you know any design stores in Sweden that you would like to recommend, please feel free to add them to the store index (you will get a free link to your own site for every store you recommend): http://www.designfavoriter.se/ny-butik/.

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Presto, my Netbook is now filled with all those ever-so important documents, files and other stuff that otherwise would be stuck in some other computer. And this is not the best part. The best part is that whenever I change anything in any of those files it is automatically syndicated to my four other computers that I use on daily basis. If one hard disc fails, the files are available on-the-fly from another computer. And when I move from one computer to the other the files are in place and updated.

This cloud service grabs the spot as number one this year. If you haven’t done it yet – get a Dropbox account! As they say, they best things in life are free. And this one will save you a lot of time and headache.

http://www.dropbox.com

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If you have any interest whatsoever in these topics and you haven’t watched the series before – here is an early christmas present for you. All previous broadcasts are available on the site. Go. Now!

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Good. Now, replay the song in your head. Do you have the chorus in your head  (yes, pun intended)? Repeat it to yourself a few times:

In your head, in your head,
Zombie, zombie, zombie,
Hey, hey, hey. What’s in your head

Good, you are getting the rythm. Now, start tapping the song with your fingers while you play it over and over again in your head. Dum-dum-dum-dumdumdidum-dum. You may look a bit stupid, but hey, you’re grooving.

Now stop playing the song in your head, but keep hitting that desk with your fingers. Does the rythm you hear while tapping actually make any sense to you now? Or is it just a random thumping sound with no meaning whatsoever? If the answer is ”random thumping sound” – then excellent, lesson learned! (If not, keep on reading, you’ll need it.) You have been struck by the curse of knowledge. While you played the song in your head the tapping sound made perfect sense, you had the knowledge and expertise on what those sounds actually meant. When you ”remove” the song from your head, it’s just a stream of jibberish and actually quite annoying to hear. Don’t look, but your neighbour colleague is probably thinking about smacking you on the head right now.

Whenever you write copy, design a web site, make a presentation, create a user flow or actually do anything where you need to get a message across and your target audience is not experts on your level, be very aware of the curse of knowledge. As an expert, you have a wealth of references, jargons, ideas and cases that makes perfect sense to you and you are so used to communicate using the perfect terms and the correct acrynoms. To your web site visitor or audience, this may actually mean nothing at all. Your e-commerce stock system is internally probably very well defined and easy for you to understand, but to your customer it probably makes no sense why you keep a certain item in that very strangely named category. What will happen is that your customer won’t be able to to find the item or understand your shop and thus won’t buy anything.

Look at your communication, not as an expert, but as a customer. Try to step out of your world of knowledge and look at what you are presenting without your goggles. Does it make any sense anymore? If not, redesign, rewrite, rethink. It will pay off.

Next lesson is to think of another song, fire it up in your head and visit your colleague. Thump away on his/her desk, ask what song your playing and see for yourself what the curse of knowledge does to your message.

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