Scottish Usability Professional Association Event

January 29th - Implementing usability changes on an already successful site, Tamlin Roberts, Mercurytide

Entrance will be free to UPA members and £10 for non members (£5 for student non-members).

Venue: Scottish Enterprise Atlantic Quay Glasgow

Time: 18:30

If you already have a site that is doing well, have lots of visitors and they are using the site as you want them to, then should you be changing it? Many will argue that ‘if it’s not broke, don’t fix it’ but others will say that you have to constantly update to keep ahead of the competition.
The property market is highly competitive and in Scotland this company is no small player, but when they we were asked to update an already successful site we had to be sure that usability was a priority and that we were going to add something to the mix rather than take it away.
Come along to this case study presentation to learn how usability can be applied on a commercial site with a wide audience and extensive content. A wide range of user centred design methods, as well as AJAX web design were applied to provide an overall positive user experience.

If you would like to sign up for this SUPA event, please do so via our website at http://www.scottishupa.org.uk/events.html

Pandora Shuts Down in the UK

As did many others, on Monday I got an email from Pandora, my preferred internet radio station, telling me the following:

" in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible"

It appears that both the PPL and the MCPS/PRS Alliance have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so one of the best internet radio stations has had to close.

This seems to have happened just at the same time as DRM and digital copywright legislation are being dropped making music much more freely available. I am now using Last FM

Great Discoveries of the Month

January has so far been a great month for discovering fantastic tools on the internet - mainly because I finally started using Stumble Upon properly.

1. I first have to mention a company called Carbonite who provide a great online backup service. Carbonite is really simple to instal and use. It takes a couple of days to complete the initial back up but after that is a dream to use. Whats more its a fraction of the cost of my previous back up solution.
2. Take a look at this SEO tool from Quinu - its got everything including the kitchen sink. What I like about thids tool is that it provides data on Back Links, Indexed Pages and Social Bookmarkinig all in one page.
3. Next ever want a temporary email address try Guerilla Mail which gives you an email that lasts 15 minutes - what a great idea.
4. This is an old one but I've just started using it - http://tinyurl.com/ which is so useful particularly for printed material.
5. Compete - I've known about Compete for sometime but I must have been on vacation whne they launched their Search Analytics service. Compete Search Analytics provides you with the most common keywords used to find a site as well as the domains that are most commonly found against your choosen keyword. It provides the sort of information you get from Hitwise but is affordable to the smaller company.

Well thats all folks.