Using Twitter for customer testimonials
When reading customer testimonials on websites I sometimes wonder how genuine the words are. There is often no way of knowing whether the quote even came from a real person, whether it was unsolicited or how old it is. As a business owner you have to keep these testimonials fresh and remember to request new ones from customers and clients. Despite these problems customer testimonials feature on many sites and can really help to reassure people before they purchase.
When we launched Perch, just over a year ago, we used Twitter extensively to get the word out and to respond to our potential and new customers. Drew and I have been using Twitter socially since not long after it launched so it made sense to promote Perch that way. As people started to buy and use Perch, they began to post nice things to Twitter and so we added them as favorites for the Perch account on Twitter, over time building up a large list of nice comments from our users.
When we launched the recent redesign of the Perch website we used the Twitter favorites as a way of putting testimonials on the site. In the footer of the Perch website is one of our Perch birds tweeting a tweet drawn from that list. These display randomly, so as a visitor moves around the site they will see a variety of different testimonials. Each tweet links through to that status on Twitter – so the testimonial is verified as being from an actual person. On Twitter you can see the date it was posted, so it is possible to tell how old this testimonial is. In addition the visitor is able to click through to the grabaperch account or search and see all of the mentions of Perch – not just the ones we really like!
You can get your favorites from the Twitter API. What you should avoid however is having something running on your site that gets the favorites every time someone visits. Instead, use the API to pull back the favorites and store them locally (in MySQL, another database or a text file) and then display your latest or random favorite from that data store. Twitter is often unresponsive or very slow and that will effect your site if you do this in real time.
Using the favorites list to add content to your site gives you a very simple way to add moderated Twitter content to your site. High profile sites have had problems in the past by displaying content based on a hashtag, as then anyone using that hashtag can get their thoughts displayed on your site. By using favorites you keep control and choose what goes into the list. Although you have chosen which Tweets go into your favorites, the visitor can use Twitter to find out more about you and the person providing the testimonial. This is a very open and transparent way to display testimonials and I believe this makes them far more useful to a potential customer or client.
Web Directions @media 2010
I’m back home this weekend after Web Directions @media. The first day saw me present on “Core CSS3″, in the design track, and the perspective I took on the use of CSS3 was the perspective I take as a developer. I took a look at the parts of CSS3, certain modules and parts of modules that can safely be implemented, have reasonable browser support, degrade gracefully when a browser doesn’t have support and also have ways of working around lack of support – usually using JavaScript.
You can take a look at my slides, and also resources and the worked examples here.
I was pretty relieved once my own presentation was over so enjoyed just being part of the crowd for day two. The day opened with a keynote from Andy Clarke, who is a friend and inspiring speaker. I certainly could learn a lot from his presentation style. Afterward several people asked me my thoughts on the presentation – given that my pragmatic approach seems on paper to differ so much from Andy’s Hardboiled ideas. I think that one of the things Andy does really well is cause people, including myself, to think. He challenges current wisdom – which we definitely need in our industry. I would love my design agency clients to hear Andy speak as I think they could learn a huge amount about the modern web from his thoughts, ideas and sheer passion for the web.
However, I do feel that some of the fantastic stuff that Andy has to say gets lost as soon as he shows that slide of IE6 being served completely barebones, no-design CSS. I think it gets lost when he says it is ok to have a much simpler design for IE8 – the current version of Internet Explorer. I think it gets lost because the reality is it is not difficult to serve IE6 a simpler version of your design, not perhaps trying to hack in support for opacity and Alpha PNG images, but a reasonably designed experience. I don’t spend a lot of time messing about with IE6 these days – but the sites we develop all have a decent implementation of the design in that browser and one that our clients are comfortable with.
When it comes to IE8 – or even Firefox which lags behind Webkit browsers in some instances – I don’t think it is helpful to say simply design for support. I think it is entirely reasonable for clients to expect a site to look pretty much the same in the most recent desktop browsers. Understanding and designing for the different experience of a phone, games console or iPad is one thing, but the desktop – clients and designers generally expect that to be one thing. I say that as someone who has long been a exponent of the fact that sites do not have to look the same in all browsers and all devices – I wrote this in 2002! However that has to be balanced by practicalities and the reasonable expectations of the people we do this work for. In addition, the fact remains that it is very easy to add support in IE8 for most of the things Andy demonstrated with some pretty trivial jQuery (for example). If you are going to use Modernizr to detect support and write different CSS you are already using JavaScript, why not go the rest of the way and implement transitions and so on with JavaScript? Yes there will be a very small number of visitors potentially with IE and no JavaScript but very few, a much much smaller number than those who will lose out on the interface if you cut out everyone with Internet Explorer.
I think that what Andy showed us was inspiring and I hope every designer and developer in that room was encouraged and excited by the possibilities. However my take is that an approach that attempts to recreate that experience at least for all modern desktop browser users is a requirement for most of us. The good news is, of course, that with Internet Explorer 9 we are going to find that the latest version of IE will support a lot of this stuff, and so the scene shifts again and the decisions we and our clients make may well be different in a few months time.
Other highlights of day two for me included Relly Annett-Baker‘s presentation, “All the Small Things”. Relly is an engaging speaker and understood that the audience she was talking to were designers and developers who sometimes end up having to write microcopy because no-one else does it. Her presentation was very funny but also drove home serious points about how to help our users with the messages we display at login or through a checkout process.
The day finished with a presentation from Scott Berkun – “Myths of Innovation: remixed and remastered”. When I saw his name on the schedule I thought it looked familiar but until the session started didn’t immediately place him as the author of a book I was reading while preparing for presenting at @media, “Confessions of a Public Speaker“. If you do any public speaking, and particularly if you are nervous of speaking I would recommend this book highly. I have read many books on the subject but this book has a practical tone, and contains advice from Scott’s many speaking engagements around the world. Having now had the chance to see him present I would recommend it even more as he obviously knows what he is talking about as his was an excellent presentation. Thinking about ideas and innovation was a great way to finish the conference, the subject speaks to everyone in all the different roles attendees are employed in on the web. I am going to try out the idea of writing down ideas and thoughts in a journal for the next few months to see where that takes me. Scott also comes highly recommended if you need someone to order Dim Sum for you. I think our group of assorted geeks may well still be in the restaurant right now had he not taken charge and made sure that the non-fish eaters and vegetarians were all catered for!
@media 2010 was a thoroughly enjoyable event. John and Maxine from Web Directions managed to bring their own organisational style without damaging the feel of a conference that is pretty important to a lot us in the UK. It would have been sad if it had turned into a import from outside rather than keeping a distinctiveness about it. In terms of content, even as someone who gets information better by reading than listening, there was some truly great stuff. I have returned home tired but I feel that my work and thinking has been refreshed by the experience. That is what conferences should do. A chance to sit back, listen and find ways to improve what we do and how we do it.
Perch 1.5
Having just recovered from the shock of my daughter becoming a teenager, or more to the point, me being old enough to have a teenage daughter, we had another milestone to celebrate. Perch, the “really little CMS” that we have developed over at edgeofmyseat.com, is now a year old.
To celebrate we rolled out our 1.5 release, a free upgrade to existing licenses, which contains some very exciting new features which we think will change the way many people use and think about Perch.
Since launch, people have really taken to Perch and we get a lot of emails and suggestions on our forum for new features that users would like to see make it into the product. The thing with Perch though, is that we want to keep it really simple. We have never aimed to make it a competitor to some of the big CMS products out there. We want people to be able to be up and running with an editable site in a few minutes, with no fuss and only the most basic of hosting requirements.
One of the biggest features that people have requested is the ability for people to add new pages to their site. However many other users absolutely don’t want the client to be able to add new pages to a carefully thought through site architecture. Adding new pages also adds an additional layer of complexity and server requirements if, for example, you then want to do url rewriting to give friendly page URLs.
Thinking around this issue carefully we came up with the plan of creating a Perch API. The API allows us – or other developers – to create “apps” in PHP that can add new functionality to a Perch site. These just drop in and appear in the Perch admin and could be used for all kinds of functionality that you might need in an otherwise simple site. The Pages app is essentially the first Perch app and allows creation of new pages – for those users that want to use it.
Drew and I recorded a quick podcast last night discussing Perch apps and other new functionality added in this release.
University of Abertay Dundee
Yesterday I made the trip by train up to Dundee to speak to the students at the University of Abertay in Dundee. My slides and some supporting links from the presentation can be found here, although the slides aren’t particularly useful standalone.
The University had asked me to come and speak about what I felt was important in terms of web design and development today and also what I saw as being important in the future, given that students on the course today had anywhere from 1 to 3 years to go before they would be graduating and working in the industry. This is a pretty broad subject, and I knew that students were interested in a range of web roles, so I decided to home in on some of the core skills that anyone working on the web needs to have and also look at some of the interesting things that are becoming a possibility.
I get pretty nervous about presenting and like to be very organised and have time to set up so I was a bit thrown by the fact that so many people showed up to the talk we had to move from a small informal room to an incredibly steep lecture theatre. The experience of presenting in this room was a bit like speaking to people some of whom were on eye level and others stood at the top of a hill. I also ended up presenting without my notes and onscreen timer as with only a short time to set up I could only get the projector and my laptop showing the same slide – rather than having Keynote’s presenter view on my screen. Thankfully, I’d rehearsed this a few times and so knew the presentation well enough to do it without my notes. I had printed out a copy of the slides and notes – 4 slides to a page – using Keynote, however somehow they had ended up in a strange order on the page which was confusing rather than helpful!
Despite presenting uphill and without my notes I think the session went well. My hope had been that I wasn’t coming to speak to the students with anything amazingly new, but that what I was saying would underline the things they were already learning and demonstrate the importance of these things in the real world. In the second part of the presentation I talked for a short while about some of the interesting things that are on the horizon with regards to HTML5, CSS3 and also with typography on the web. Many of these students have 2 years to go before they graduate so by the time they are looking for work these technologies will have far better browser support and be skills they need. As students also get to do a larger project in their final Honours year this is potentially a great chance to play with technologies that might be harder to use commercially at the current time but make a great study for a final project – and mean that the project is an interesting concept to show off.
I finished up the presentation with some suggestions gleaned from my recent blog post as to how students can best prepare themselves for work in web design and development so thank you to everyone who contributed to that.
In the evening I re-ran the presentation, slightly tweaked for an audience that consisted of people from local design studios. Having had to get up at 4.30am to travel to Dundee I was pretty tired by that point and grateful to be in the smaller room and to be able to get my notes up on screen!
I really did have a lovely day, the feedback that I gave had so far has been good and I really enjoyed talking to all the students and hearing their questions. Many thanks to Malcolm and all the folk at Abertay for making me feel so welcome.
Web Directions @media 2010
I’ll be speaking at Web Directions @media in London this year on the subject of “Core CSS3″, this will be a practical session getting to grips with what is available in CSS3 and how we can get started using some of this shiny goodness right now. I’m excited to be speaking at @media, the rest of the line-up looks great and I think it will be a useful and fun couple of days. If you missed out on Early Bird pricing you can use the promo code ANDREW at checkout to get a ticket at the price of £499 – which is a saving of £50 off the current price.
I’m also going to be heading off to Dundee in a couple of weeks time to present to the students on the Web Design and Development course at The University of Abertay. I’m really looking forward to speaking to these students and I’ll be taking lots of your advice with me.
