Imagine there was a way you could find out what people are wanting, what they are asking for, what questions they have that have remained unanswered, by simply asking the question: What’s everybody doing? How powerful would that be? If you knew that one of the most asked questions and problems people faced bringing home a brand new puppy was actually  ‘what should I name my dog?’, would you do things differently? How many profitable products could you release based on what topics are really hot right now?

You also know what whenever you search a question in Twitter you will receive a load links to information and affiliate products rather than genuine concerns and questions. Even if you find the good stuff, filtering through the clutter would take forever and a day. So doing the above is virtually impossible without endless days of work.

Well I’ll tell you that it is possible. I’m going to show you a way you can cut through the clutter, find the information you need so you can create relevant products and sell them for profit. Are you ready?

Ok here it is:

Visit Twitter Search. Now Type this in: (obviously replace keywords with whatever you like)

-http Insert Keywords Here since:2009-05-30 ?

What have I done?

1. By putting the ‘-http’ I have removed most links so you don’t get people trying the redirect you through to a page of information or their affiliate product.
2. The ’since:2009-05-30′ asks Twitter search to only find stuff relevant since that date. You can take it back as far as you like to get a larger response. (in the Year/MM/DD format).
3. The “?” at the end tells the Twitter search engine that we are only after questions. ie Anyone know how to stop a dog barking?. Also because we have removed the links we won’t get any questions like this -> Want to know how to stop a dog barking? Visit http://etc etc. So we have filtered out all the rhetoricals and commercial questions and replaced these with genuine concerns. You can remove the “?” and you will get more responses including both statements and questions so either way will work. I just used the ‘?’ in this example to show you another feature you may want to implement.

What do you do now?

Essentially the fiddly time consuming stuff that would usually takes days, even weeks to do, has already been done! Now go through the findings in Twitter, read the posts and jot down the concerns one by one. You will start to notice a pattern developing about what people are after and what’s in demand. This is your market research data. Take this, run with it and create an in demand and profitable product.

To see this in action check out my video at the Bootstrapedia Blog

A lot of what I do everyday is a result of entrepreneurial insight from the region. I Jump on my computer (DELL, Austin TX, USA 1984) check my emails using Outlook (Microsoft 1975 Albuquerque, New Mexico), search using the Google search engine (Menlo Park, California, 1998), visit the Shoemoney Blog (Lincoln, Nebraska) using the Firefox browser (Again North America) and then when I feel thirsty I grab a Coke (take a guess?).

This isn’t surprising or a revolutionary insight by any means but I think its important to note the effect this has had on marketers. I’m an Australian but when I write a post or release a product, I know that the majority of the people making use of what I have to offer will be from the US. When I was writing my eBook I had an extremely enlightening recommendation from one of my reviewers who questioned my use of Kilograms instead of Pounds. I used the word ‘bootstrap’ in the title instead of ’shoestring’.

Tailoring my approach to suit the people most likely to follow me is now second nature to me. Whenever I’m asked to fill out contact details online, I instinctively put a +61 in front of the number. I even get excited when I purchase something and then realize that its in Australian dollars, thinking I’m getting a bargain because I’m so used to paying in US (about 80USc for $1AUS).

However something happened the other day which I never thought would, I felt I had an accent in my own mother tongue. I was creating a screen capture video and realized how ‘different’ I sounded to all the other Internet Marketers. I’m so used to hearing marketers from the US speaking in Audio and Video that my voice, even to me, sounded quite alien. Even after a few attempts I was considering a voice over! Obviously I didn’t take this route as I understand the importance of using myself as my brand so this was simply not an option, but the fact that the thought came to mind really made me think.

So I’m wondering whether other non US marketers have felt this sense of Internet Marketing alientation. The Internet is such a global medium yet there is a prominant ‘language’ in the IM world. Not that it bothers me at all, its just an observation which I find intriguing.

Twitter is now trying to find a way to make money. Interestingly enough they have no clue how they are going to do it. They have already stated that advertising is not an option they are currently considering for their revenue model so where will it lie?

My take on this is simple: why start a business with no revenue model whatsoever? No you might think that this is quite a narrow minded view but the main reason for thinking like this probably isn’t what you think.

Let’s use a few examples (I love my examples!) and take Facebook for example. Now Facebook has always had some type of advertising on the site and I remember the first type of ads were tower banner ads. That was pretty much it and probably didn’t make them a lot of money. But it set a precedence. Users were comfortable with the advertising. So ramping up the ads into a full blown network, although not the most successful, didn’t put too many people off because it has always been there.

Same with Google. I’ve always known Google with two columns, one for organic and the other for sponsored links. Of course at some stage it was just organic search but the ads were put in quite early on, showing a defined revenue model and the users happily accepted it.

On the other hand you’ve got other start-ups like Twitter. These guys have built a massive following and have in no way monetised it. The negative effect isn’t in the fact that they are not making money now but the inability to easily implement a revenue model in the future. Taking the earlier examples, their revenue models crept up early on and didn’t cause to much of a flutter among the users. However Twitter has always been a free, non ad-obtrusive service with a host of loyal followers. Throw in a need to charge for anything and their loyal base will be kicking and screaming. This is their own doing.. they dug a hole from day one.

You can find clear evidence of this when reports came through of an agreement to form Twitter TV and Twitter’s most famous user Ashton Kutcher, made the following statement: “Wow I hope this isn’t true. I really don’t like being sold out. May have to take a twitter hiatus”. This shows any sign of Twitter trying to profit from their micro-blogging service, they are shunned by their most loyal and popular “Tweeters”. I can’t help but feel that if they implemented some type of revenue strategy from day 1… it may not have been so difficult.

To give you a background, I’m a relatively recent blogger, with this blog only starting in late Feb 09 (from memory). So its safe to say that I am a relative unknown compared to some of the super bloggers and IM superstars such as Jeremy Shoemaker, Darren Rowse, John Chow and the rest. I’m not going to try and tell you I’m a superstar because I know I’m not, I’m new in the online world and I know where I stand and don’t really have a problem with it.

An example would be John Chow writing a great article about Blog Marketing vs Email Marketing vs Twitter Marketing. John was able to get several sales out of Twitter promoting a product (a $27 footer ad which I’m suddenly interested in at the moment!) but I have a feeling that if someone not in John’s league did the same thing, the results would be completely different. John has a brand and has effectively and intelligently been able to leverage off his brand to make Twitter work with him.

The guys I mentioned earlier have all lauded Twitter and the utility is has provided them. This is fine and dandy but they have a name and an online presence which not all of us have. By the way, I’m a big fan of the above mentioned bloggers… so by no means am I discrediting what they have to say. But what is it like for those who are not virtual brands like these guys? If they were to state: New blog post “http://ww….” then yeh, a flood of people go rushing to their blog interested in the next post and that’s very understandable as I do it myself. For example if Coca Cola brings out a new drink and a Coke rep tells you that they are bringing out a new drink then immediately, you want to know more, right? However if Florentine says they are coming out with a new flavored milk what would you say? Exactly what I would say; who the hell is Florentine? Or more appropriately, flip the page, change the channel or check the other Twitter updates.

There is a vicious cycle developing here which I believe has lead to the overwhelmingly skewed favoritism of the network. This is when people go out and read reviews of the site, chances are these reviews are conducted by the very people who already have an online presence, ie the top 20% of bloggers, IMers or webmasters. Well is a proven fact (I have proved it) that the top 20 sites in the world receive roughly 80% of the traffic therefore 80% of the audience are fed with ideas that all is good in the Twitterverse. The other 80% of blogs (the majority) make up the measly 20% of the audience. These lesser read blogs are those that will probably have alternate opinions, the opinion of the majority but because they only receive 20% of the audience, not that many are listening. Here lies a problem where the ideas and opinions are bias towards the top bloggers, IMers and webmasters… who own 80% of the audience.. Vicious circle.

So what if your Florentine? (by the way I have completely made that name up, but lets use it as an example). What is Twitter like for all the other Florentines? Well, it’s a pretty lonely place to be honest. The truth is, apart from friends and family, not many people actually care what you have to say but at the same time they want you to care about what they have to say. You feel like a 8 yr old, you can speak, people can hear you but not many people are that interested in listening. You yell, wave, RT, @, RTT and still silence. No love. Just another 40 Tweets with affiliate hoplinks in them. Well maybe it’s just another step, you need to wait until your a little ‘order’ and maybe people will start listening.

In conclusion, “what are you doing?”. Apart from the select few, does anyone really care?

Microsoft launched their attack on Google with their own search engine, Bing. It’s meant to change the way we think about search engines, or something like that. So I decided to search: “what is bing” using, none other than, the Bing search engine. Interestingly, this new generation search engine was unable find me the answer of what it actually is! I got results for an electrical shop (BingLee), BING the rigid polyurethane insulation industry in Europe and a bit of information about Bing Crosby. Naturally I head to Google and good old faithful tells me straight away.

Obviously I don’t have the greatest first impressions but I’m an open minded type of guy, I won’t judge right now.. I think time shall take care of that.

Anyone actually used it and found anything interesting or out of the ordinary compared to other search engines? I would be interested if you’d share a few things we could have a look at that exploits its potential.

Thanks - blogs.sun.com

I do have a couple things to say more specifically in regards to Twitter. I’m sure anyone using this platform understands how addictive and also how useful it can be. Yet there is a level of frustration of how much SPAM you get on this medium. Also one other frustrating thing is knowing that any time you spend away from your Twitter hub you miss out on plenty of great and valuable resources which would have possibly solved a current problem or issue.

So I have a couple of suggestions.

1. Introduce a user rating – rated by their peers, this rating gives you an idea of what people think of this persons Tweets. Would be simple to implement and would help improve the quality of followers you wish to follow.
2. Have a post rating. At the moment the inclination is to Retweet popular or useful posts. How about implementing a system Like Digg or Reddit where you can vote for your favourite Tweets. You can only see common “Tweeted” Tweets on your sidebar so every morning you get up… have a look at your sidebar and read all the interesting stuff.

What do you guys think?

(Image www.wtnphotos.com)

What an odd heading. What has your (and my) success got anything to do with women’s Tennis?

I’ll start by listing the top female players in the world using the WTP tour rankings . This was done at the time of writing so if it changes by the time you read it don’t worry… I’m strongly convinced that my point will still stay valid! Well for the next 5-10 yrs anyway.

Top 10 – Women

1. Dinara Safina (RUS)
2. Serena Williams (USA)
3. Elena Dementieva (RUS)
4. Jelena Jankovic (SRB)
5. Venus Williams (USA)
6. Vera Zvonareva (RUS)
7. Ana Ivanovic (SRB)
8. Victoria Azarenka (BLR)
9. Svetlana Kuznetsova (RSA)
10. Nadia Petrova (RUS)

I know your thinking, where am I going with this? Your looking at the similarities and considering whether your name should end in an “a” or that you need to be from Russia or the Balkans in order to become successful. You could try that but there’s a little more to it.

Let me give you a brief run down of the dominant nations here, namely those countries that form part of the former Republic of Yugoslavia as well as Russia. I can see you just sitting there thinking I’ve gone mad with nostalgic school history delirium. Maybe I have a bit but bare with me, just give me 3-4 minutes of your time, it will make sense shortly.

I’ll be going through a very brief time-line after WWII. I’m doing this because that will give us a bit of a background of the Baby Boomers, ie the generation that belongs to the parents’ of these top players. Please note I’m using the great resource of Wikipedia and Infoplease.com for the first example. I’m not that gifted to be able to remember these facts my own!! By no means have I covered everything but there is a chance, and probably have, the facts a little bit mixed up but that’s not my point here. I will get to this a bit later.

Courtesy www.yale.edu

Countries that form the former Republic of Yugoslavia:

• On January 31, 1946, the new constitution of Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was formed
  
• The country distanced itself from the Soviets in 1948 and started to build its own way to socialism under the strong political leadership of Josip Broz Tito.
• After Tito’s death on 4 May 1980, ethnic tensions grew in Yugoslavia, especially in Kosovo between ethnic Albanians and Serbs.
• 1991 Slovenia and Croatia each declare independence. Because 12% of Croatia’s population is Serbian, Yugoslavia fights hard against its secession for the next four years. As Croatia moves towards independence, it evicts most of its Serbian population.
• 1992 Ethnic tensions strain to the breaking point, and Bosnia erupts into war. Thousands die and more than a million are displaced. By the time a tenuous peace is achieved in 1995, the country has been partitioned into three areas, with each region governed by one of the three ethnic groups.
• 1996 In the southern Yugoslavian province of Kosovo, the militant Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) begins attacking Serbian policeman.
• 1998 Milosevic sends troops to Kosovo to quash unrest in the province. A guerrilla war breaks out.
• 1999 After peace talks fail, NATO carries through on its threat to launch airstrikes on Serbian targets.
• 2000 A popular uprising begins. A general strike is called and one million people flood Belgrade. Mobs attack Parliament building, security forces join them or retreat. Milosevic support crumbles, he steps down. Kostunica takes office. U.S., European Union begin to lift economic sanctions
• 2001 Milosevic is arrested by Yugoslavian authorities and charged with corruption and abuse of power.

Let me guess I’ve gone mad now haven’t I? Once again just bare with me a little. Now lets briefly (very briefly) go over Russia. Again I’m looking at post WWII Russia for the same reasons mentioned earlier. Sources used here are Wikipedia and a great Yahoo answer I found which summed it up nicely.

Courtesy www.yvonnefoong.com

• Soviet Union emerged from World War II considerably stronger than it had been before the war. Despite huge losses to its Red Army it extended its control over most of Eastern Europe known as the ‘Iron Curtain’ which separated the ‘Free Peoples’ of Western Europe from the Communist East. (The curtain was made tangible by the ‘Berlin Wall’, which bisected that city after 1961.)
• Despite its power, life in the country continued to suffer. Industrial production was once again concentrated on heavy industry, agricultural failures produced widespread famine, political freedoms were restricted even further, and another huge wave of purges was carried out.
• The Russian leaders also killed an unprecedented number of political prisoners, mainly by shipping them to Siberia or the far north (the ‘gulags’), where they either worked themselves to death or froze.
• In 1989, Russian control of Eastern Europe collapsed, and the Berlin Wall was torn down.

Ok so hopefully you have stuck around to read what I have to say and why I bothered to write a brief history of these nations. What in the world its got to do with womens Tennis and business success?

No one can read through these histories lightly. Many of the incidents that occured are shocking and disturbing. Citizens were subject to the most terrifying conditions where their main goal was to survive until the next day. People who have been subjected to these times of war and hardship have witnessed things people like me, living in the comfort of Australia, don’t dare imagine. These are people of a different mindset and a completely different level of drive and determination. Their drive is one motivated by survival.

As we can see, eight out of the top 10 women tennis players in the world are from these regions. That’s 80%. These are people who’s family history is of an extremely overwhelming background. Their parents were most likely subject to unimaginable hardships and the drive to be successful is paramount. For many of these families, the mentality was that being successful, meant survival. Their drive to succeed was fueled by the prospect of a better life.

You often hear stories of these tennis players starting at an extremely young age, being sent off to Florida alone at the age of 12 in order to make it in professional Tennis. These stories are fueled with over zealous and demanding parents expecting nothing less that success from their children. Why? Because to them, after what they have endured, that success is a matter of survival. Sure, currently the situation in the nations at hand are not what they once were, but the survival mentality and the drive to succeed does not subside.

So to me its not surprising to see a burst of talented Russians, Serbians and Croatians making headlines in the world of professional tennis. The age they enter the sport is rather fitting if you look at what their family and most likely their parents endured.

What I’m trying to get at here is that we can look towards these players for inspiration. Inspiration when it comes to drive and motivation. For us, if we fail we pick ourselves up and try something new. Not all of us have this type of drive and our privileged and cushy lifestyles make it difficult to possess such a level of determination. This is not a bad thing as we take comfort for granted which should not be frowned upon, but understood. If we do fail, its actually not that bad as you can simply pick yourself up and move on or try again.

But I’m going finish this here. I’m not going to conclude my argument or my thoughts, I’ll let you do that. However I will pose this question: how different would your approach to life and success be if failure was truly not an option?

A couple of weeks ago I was raving about how mobile will be the next big thing. What I’m going to do now is start up mobile site from scratch and go over all the steps that I will take to get this up and running and hopefully, profitable. My aim here is not only to set up another income stream but to show you how I do it, step by step. I will be quite candid about the results so if it is a flop, you will know about it!

I need an idea. How do I come up with a concept? Well I looked to the online world for inspiration. I asked myself what online business have taken off yet are relatively easy to replicate in the mobile environment? My first step was to visit Alexa and have a look at the top 100 websites for inspiration. There are the usuals such as Google, Yahoo etc. Some of the most obvious ones are in the ever expanding field of social networking, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter etc. However a prerequisite to my concept was that it needed to be easy to replicate and these social networking sites would definitely not be easy to replicate. The possible exception to this would be Twitter but Twitter has a great mobile interface and many people are “Twittering” via their mobile, so that was out. What else? Amazon? Probably a little complex and advanced for mobile (at the moment). Wikipedia? ahhh… no.

Then I took a second look at Youtube. My first look was interrupted by those little voices in my head saying “yeh right.. good try!”.. and “.. Youtube, I wonder what I could look up now?”. Just to introduce you, this is Mr. Negative and Mr. Procrastination.. I have been trying to evict these guys for the last 26yrs but they manage to find their way back in occasionally. So on my second look I managed to focus objectively and break it down to get a clearer understanding. What is Youtube exactly? Well in its essence, its a place you go to watch videos and share your videos to the world. Obviously there are far greater capabilities including networking and social interaction but in its most basic form, its just a video sharing site. Would a video sharing site be that hard to replicate?

The next question is to ask myself what is currently available in terms of video sharing in the mobile world? We know that Youtube has its own mobile version so why would people come to my mobile video site? Also what can I do to separate myself from the others? I did a search on Google mobile: mobile video sharing. There are a few present, namely Vringo, Livecast and Yamgo among others (interestingly Youtube didn’t come up). But looking through these and other sites it was obvious that they were either grossly deprived of content and you could only download a couple of bad quality videos, or they were too difficult to find what you want and start watching by requiring you to download some software or sign up with an account. The beauty of Youtube is that anyone can just jump on, watch a few videos without having to fiddle around with accounts and logging in etc. When browing on your mobile you don’t want to have to download software or log in everytime, it’s not like a PC where you can open tabs and have multiple windows on one screen. Mobile needs to be simple, straight forward and to the point. Give the users what they want straight away so they are more likely to come back. Give them a convoluted sign up process and time consuming ways to access content then you have lost them. Simple.

It’s looking more and more like I will head down the video sharing path but I need to differentiate my business from many of those out there. Obviously the biggest competitor will be the video sharing bohemoth Youtube. So what is their mobile offering like and how can I better it? To be honest, their mobile offering is pretty fantastic so there is no point in me going in there are doing the exact same thing with 10 videos asking people to use my site instead. That would be ridiculous. They do a better job than anyone else in the mobile marketplace by making the streaming of videos to your mobile so simple. You do a search, click the video your after and then watch it streamed onto your mobile.

Not worth competing? Well actually I see an large gaping opportunity presenting itself immediately. The problem with one type of mobile video site is that you need to do a whole lot of mumbo jumbo before you can start watching a video. The others that offer a simple download to mobile service (in 3gp format or similar) don’t have much content. Finally, Youtube makes it easy to watch videos but you have to stream them everytime and this costs you a fortune in data as well as the time it takes to download each time.

So I’m presented with an opportunity here. What if I can take the best of all these mobile video services and combine them into a single, easy to use video sharing service where you can search, submit, download and stream videos? It sounds simple enough. Now all I need to do is find out how I can actually do this!

That’s one big problem with the net I believe, the lack of ability to see people who are browsing your site or blog. You know you get traffic and possibly sales but that’s about it. In the traditional retail environment you can see people walking in and out of your store, have a chat, and measure a good or bad traffic day based on what you can see compared to what you have seen in the past. On the net you can do this only with the use of analytics so saying that its important is a gross understatement.

Google analytics is undoubtedly one of the most popular, if not the best analytics program used on the net today. It extremely simply to install and just as easy to read. The first screen you see is the analytics dashboard relaying information such as visits, page views, pages per visit, average time on site and a couple of others. This is probably as far as many users will go and that’s a shame. Everyone has their own way of analysing traffic and pretty much everyone uses the basic dashboard, checks out a big of geographic info on their visitors then moves on. So what I’m going to do is, instead of going through all the relevant features (trust me, there are too many to list!), I’m going to let you know a couple things which I like to with analytics and why I do them.

1. Traffic Sources – located on the left hand column under “Dashboard”. This will give you a good understanding of where your traffic comes from. My favorite bit here is the “Keywords” section on the bottom right of the screen. This will tell you what keywords people search in the search engines to get to your site. Like many things in Google Analytics you can dive deeper and in this case I strongly recommend doing so. Click a certain keyword and you will be provided with a host of information about what people who used that keyword did on your site. This is where you can really see what is going on. For each keyword you will be given details of how long someone spent on your site, how many pages they visited, the bounce rate as well as the % of new visits. What does this tell me?

• Is my SEO up to scratch? – Are people who are coming to my site actually finding what they want? If there is a high bounce rate for a particular keyword then I know that this keyword seems to have high priority on your site yet is bringing in irrelevant traffic who are not interested in the information or product. Find those keywords which attract more in depth and longer visits as these are the words most valuable to you. Those which have a high bounce rate should be reassessed and adjusted in your titles or content as they are not attracting the right visitors. For example I have a website called www.thumbdoctorgames.com which provides free, ad funded mobile phone games. I found that many of my visitors were coming in from keyword such as “Doctor Games” or “Games for Doctors”. I had an extremely high bounce rate for these keywords as many of these visitors would just leave the site because they are not interested in mobile games at all. It was the name of the site itself that caused it to be indexed under irrelevant search terms. This told me I needed to look at the site and make sure that references to “Doctor” were minimal or contained in images as it was an irrelevant, yet popular, keyword.
• Who refers the most traffic to me? If there is a site that is referring plenty of traffic to me then I would increase  my exposure on that site or talk with the webmaster and request a contra-link or similar.
• Who is coming directly to my site? I love direct traffic. Direct traffic is solid, quality traffic in my opinion. It shows that someone has purposefully thought of your site and made the effort to visit as your are already in their mindset. To me this is the most valuable traffic you can get so I have this type of traffic in very high regard.

2. Content – The top content on your site is displayed in your dashboard anyway and it’s something I see all the time so I don’t really try to look more into my “top content” section. “Content Drilldown” is where the fun really starts. What does this tell me?

• The content drilldown has a list of your pages and the information about each page such as the usual bounce rates, uniques, time on page, exits etc. However instead of this being site specific it is drilled down to page specific.
• Selling products? This is probably the most important section to look at if you are selling a product online. If you have a sales page with a high bounce rate then you know something is wrong. If you have a pitch page that has a high exit rate then again there is a problem as no one is visiting your sales page.
• Where are they coming from and where do they go next? Very very important! Unfortunately Google does not make this feature particularly easy to navigate to however it is vitally important. Tha’ts why I have highlighted the first sentence. What you need to do is click on a page in the content drilldown section. Now once your there you will see a small dropdown list called “analyse” and it should by default say “Content Detail”. Click this and select Navigation summary. The next two images will show you what I mean:

Access Navigation

Navigation Summary

• When I have reached the navigation summary I am able to see how people got to this page from my site (previous pages), how many entered the site from this page (external) and how many went to another page from this page or left the site altogether. For example if I was after data acquisition and wanted someone to fill out a web form, I would think the sales letter would be in “previous pages” and then the next page would be something like “thank you for submitting your details”. If you find that people are exiting right after they get to the web form page or are heading straight back to “Index.php” then obviously, for some reason, people are not filling out your web form. This is an excellent tool to plot the path of how people are navigating through your site. You may think your site is foolproof and you have a solid navigation funnel but you may be very surprised how people actually flow through your site. Never underestimate this tool. If you only take one thing away from this post then make sure it is this point!

Obviously there is a tonne of information which I have completely missed but that was deliberate on my part. First because it would take me the good part of a year to go through all the possible features and even then, you may have a completely different way to analyse your traffic. What I’m doing here is giving a few more things to consider with the assumption that you already know the basics.

If you don’t know the basics then don’t just ask anyone about it, dive in and learn it first hand as I believe, as humans, that is the quickest way we learn things. Please feel free to share any methods you may have as I would be very interested to know and I’m extremely interested in learning from you guys as well.

Well the truth I believe, is that it is pretty clear cut. Great content accessed easily is the real king. Sure without content you have nothing but if you can’t access it you’ve also got nothing. Back to Steve Pavlina, here is a site with a load of great content (I strongly recommend you go have a read) but what it also provides is a remarkably efficient way of distributing this information. Some people say the site is extremely simple and almost boring but these people are missing the point. The site is laid out in a way in that someone can come to the site, read up- to-date content and at the same time be able to read other interesting articles without even searching for them. The user interface is absolute genius. It’s straight forward, simple, exceptionally clear and allows you to read more with every sitting. All this and he doesn’t even have a logo!

I think this ease of use has been somewhat neglected with many web 2.0 and other modern day websites. The introduction of Flash and to a lesser extent Java and even Microsoft’s Silverlight have greatly aided the ability to create aesthetically pleasing websites. Don’t get me wrong, there are both advantages as well as disadvantages of using software such as flash however just because they look great doesn’t mean that they have a good clean and easy to navigate user interface. Beautiful isn’t always better.

I came across a few examples recently which I thought I would share. The first came around when I was searching for movie session times. The two main cinema companies where I am are Hoyts and Greater Union. A couple of years ago Hoyts had a fantastic search function which enabled you to find your movie and the session time in about 20 seconds. Now they have decided to get all flashy (literally) and not only created a website that takes several minutes to load due to all the bells and whistles, but also a site that leaves you analysing and strategically thinking about your next move. Any mistake in your browsing skills will no doubt lead you to an irrelevant page that took you 3 minutes to load. Woe be tired anyone with a slow connection, your better off going the old school paper way. Check out this eye-sore:

The ‘Watch’ section on the left is to ‘watch’ movie trailers… not where or when you can ‘watch’ a movie. So you will aimlessly fiddle around with this to no avail and wonder why everything is taking so long while it loads all the movie trailers. So you think about clicking the ‘all cinemas’ tab… and it does nothing. Now your confused. Then you look to the top and think, do I select ’session times’? Also what’s this ‘Buy’ section on the right? Bingo… these will get your your session times (finally) and interestingly enough, ‘Buy’ and ‘Session Times’ both give you the same information yet provide two completely different ways to find it! It’s like taking the back streets or the main road… both will get you to the same place but look different on the way there. What’s the point? Why waste this space and clutter the site up? Why not put ’session times’ as the heading instead of “buy’ and you won’t need that ’session times’ option anymore. Anyway, who goes and ‘buys’ a movie session?? What genius thought up this heading? It doesn’t make sense. Have you ever told a friend “I went to the cinemas the other day and bought the best movie!” I understand they aim to sell tickets (ie buy movie tickets online) but because it’s so unclear, off the bat your confused. Give customers want they want straight away, then give them the option to buy it. First comes first, people will only buy tickets once they find the session they want to buy the tickets for. Give them to right information first then ask for the buy, not the other way.

In contrast you have greater union. Load time is decent however most importantly, as soon as you hit the landing page you know what to do.

Can you see it. Bright blue standing out from the rest of the site? The site leads to exactly what I wanted without me even thinking about it. The first thing you see is ‘Select a Cinema’ and ‘Select a Movie’. They want you to ‘buy’ as well but the site naturally leads you to finding the movie first, its the first thing you see and your first chance to interact. The search section is prominent and stands out from the rest of the site and there are no movie trailers confusing the issue or an unclear heading. Directions are simple; ‘Buy movie tickets online’ as opposed to ‘Buy’.

My other examples came about when I was searching for an online TV guide. Australia has terrible Formula 1 coverage and I wanted to see if Qualifying or Practice was being shown live (of course it wasn’t but that’s not my point. One HD preferred showing paintball! Yes… Paintball!). Here is an analysis of two sites I came across. I’ll put them both right after each other and you decide which one would be easier to find (the non existent) Formula 1 TV times:

Tv Fix Snapshot

Australian TV Guide Snapshot

It’s not rocket science is it? It’s Yahoo vs Google. Its convoluted Vs simple and precise. If your after a TV guide, which one of these would you choose to deliver you your content? And guess which one uses flashy bells and whistles and takes an eternity to load? Some people just don’t get it do they?

I should state that my blog in itself isn’t as user friendly as I would like it to be. I wouldn’t rate it that good either but I’m working on it and it’s a continual work in progress. I believe a simple and precise user interface is a trademark of a great site and the reason behind even average looking sites such as Steve Pavlina’s being so successful. They easily lead you to great content. Don’t get caught up in purely aesthetically pleasing developments to your site as it may just compromise the usability. The key factor to remember is that if people can access good content easily then your onto a winner, having one without the other will only  lead to traffic killing friction.