Novamedia blog

You may have seen our UK map game that we launched recently. You haven't? Well here it is: http://www.novamedia.co.uk/ukmapgame/. Warning: it's mildly addictive.

The idea came to me one day that it might be something that we can put together quite quickly that will afford some diversion to our clients (a few minutes away from your busy schedule never hurt anyone) whilst at the same time showing off our web application building skills. Add in a bit of subtle marketing for Novamedia and it's a winner all round. (The marketing aspects will change over time having received some pertinent advice from fellow business people).

You may be interested in how we put this together and how it all works. We've been building web applications for 13 years and we're pretty good at it now. So much so that this map game took less than a week from start to finish.

As with all web applications it relies on a database in the background and a web application 'language' in the code to interact with that database. Our preferred solutions are MySQL: for the database and ColdFusion for the web application development.

There are two database tables, one for all of the places on the map and another to hold the results. The places table is very simple. It just contains the town or city name, its X and Y co-ordinates on our map and its level of difficulty: easy, medium or hard.

We had to make sure that the co-ordinates were accurate. We didn't want people coming back to us and telling us that we'd got our location wrong. To do this we downloaded a free Ordnance Survey large scale map of the UK which contained thousands of place names. We used this map to produce our blank graphic map and then developed a formula to convert the co-ordinates from the large scale map to the co-ordinates required for our online map and therefore our places database. We added over 300 places in all and this was probably the longest part of the job.

Designing the user interface is important in any online application and we gave this a lot of thought in order to make it as user-friendly as possible. When the user has selected their level of difficulty, the system takes them through a series of 10 places and the results of their guesses are shown in a table that builds up on the right.

Working out the results was quite simple. You remember the Pythagorean theorem from your school days? Of course you do! The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. By using a right-angled triangle from where you clicked to the actual co-ordinates of the location, it's easy to work out the straight line distance between the two points. Multiply this by a factor that converts pixels to miles and bingo, you have your result.

These results are held in memory until you have completed all 10 guesses. Then they are added to the results database table. Again it's a simple table. It contains your score, the level of difficulty and a timestamp to show when you played the game. It also contains your IP address. This is just there to show us how many different people are playing to give us some idea of the popularity of the game.

Knowing your score and level of difficulty, it's then easy to work out where you rank in the list of people who have played the game at that particular level. We can show you your position and a sad, neutral or smiley face depending on how you fared compared to your fellow players.

We've built many web applications over the years mostly a lot more complex than the map game but I hope that this little look 'under the bonnet' gives you a small idea of what goes on behind the scenes when building an online application.

This week's blog is a bit of back to basics, answering one of the questions we often get asked if we have set up a domain for a client: How do I set up my email accounts?

I'm not going to go through every different software program in detail but just cover in general terms the information that you need to set up email accounts using your preferred software.

The first thing you have to do is to decide what email address or addresses you want to use and get these set up on the system. If you have a control panel for your domain then you will be able to do this yourself. If not, you may have to ask your ISP (Internet Service Provider) or the person who looks after your IT to do this for you. (If you've got a person who looks after your IT in-house then he or she can probably do this whole thing for you anyway, so there may be no point in reading on. Go and put your feet up and have a cup of tea!).

But let's assume that you have to set all this up yourself. We'll choose and email address – let's say fred@novamedia.co.uk. The control panel will ask you to enter the email address and select a password for the email. You'll need both of these things when you set it up on your email program. Your control panel may well have other options too but you can ignore these for the time being.

As soon as you have set this new email address up, any emails sent to fred@novamedia.co.uk will start going into Fred's inbox on the mail server. The mail server is the server your ISP uses to receive email on your behalf. When you set up your email program, it interrogates this mail server to see if there are any emails in Fred's inbox and downloads them to your PC.

You don't actually have to set up your email software if you don't want to. Most ISPs will offer a webmail service where you can just log in to the mail server and view and send emails from there and in fact this is basically the way that cloud email services work such as Google's GMail.

But we'll assume you want to receive emails on your PC otherwise this blog post is going to end much sooner than expected.

So you go in to your email software and go to the bit where you set up a new account. You'll need various bits of information:

• Your email address
• Your password
• The POP server address
• The SMTP server address
• The server port numbers if the defaults are not being used

Now you know the first two already but you'll need to find out the last three and these are questions you need to ask your ISP. It may well be documented on your control panel. What are these things?

POP stands for Post Office Protocol. It's got nothing to do with the GPO (that ages me!) but is simply the protocol used to describe how email messages are received. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and is the system used to describe how messages are sent. Often the server addresses for these will be the same. For example, our ISP uses mail.flintmedia.co.uk.

There are two port numbers, one for the POP server and one for the SMTP server. By default these are 110 and 25 respectively. Your ISP may use different port numbers and you may need to check this. If you are setting up an email address on our system, the SMTP port is 587.

Finally there may be a checkbox that you need to tick if your ISP's server requires authentication. Again, your ISP should be able to make this clear. Our ISP requires this to be ticked.

That's basically it and I hope I've given you enough information to enable you to set up your email address using your chosen software program.

There's just one final thing. By default, when you download the emails from the mail server, they are transferred to your PC and deleted from the mail server. However, most email programs will enable you to choose if you want to leave the message on the mail server. This can be useful in some circumstances. For example, you may want to have access to your emails from other devices such as your smartphone or a laptop but still want to have all messages downloaded to your PC. You can set up your email accounts on your smartphone or laptop in the same way as described above but click the box that tells the system to leave messages on the server. When you get back to your desktop PC and download your emails, these messages will still be there and will therefore download to the PC and then be deleted from the mail server.

(If you've been pointed to this blog post as one of our clients and anything isn't clear, do give me a call).

Dear readers, I have to warn you that I am about to go into Grumpy Old Man (GOM) mode. I'm not normally a GOM (although my wife might dispute that) so please indulge me as I let off a bit of steam (or alternatively, don't read on, it's entirely up to you).

Now I've been using Twitter for quite a while now and, day by day, more and more people enter the arena. More people are following me every day although I've got a long way to go to get to Lady Gaga's 20 million followers (in fact I've got well over 19,999,000 to go but that's not the point).

There are a lot of people who use Twitter perfectly well. They are interesting, engaging and, funnily enough, they get my attention. Strange that, isn't it? But there are many others who don't and these people I tend to ignore or even unfollow.

So what are these people doing that gets my goat. I've listed a few things below. You may agree or not agree with these – I'd like to hear your comments.

People who sell all the time
Yes we know you're on Twitter to get new business but if you keep tweeting 'Buy, buy, buy' then I'm afraid it's 'Bye, bye, bye' from me.

FFs without a reason
If you want me to follow someone of a Friday, do one at a time and give me a good reason. If you tweet '#FF' followed by a bunch of names, why am I going to click on any of them to find out why I should follow them? Hint: I'm not!

People using quotation books
This one winds me up. If you haven't got anything interesting to say, don't pick up a book of clever quotations off of your shelf and tweet these ad nauseum. And if you've stuck a whole bunch of these in scheduled tweets then shame on you.

People who are not interesting
Try to be interesting on Twitter. You'll get my attention. Even be a bit edgy as long as you don't go too far. Then if you throw in a proportion of business tweets as well, they'll also get read.

People who tweet loads all in one go
I keep my tweets in lists. It's mostly the people I find interesting and engaging that are in these lists and they are the ones that get looked at the most. But if you fire off a large number of tweets in one go and take over my list so that everyone else is pushed down, you're going to get removed from the list which means I won't see any of your tweets.

People who use loads of hashtags, links and gobbledegook
If a tweet is just a link and a bunch of hashtags I'm very unlikely to click on it. If I can't make sense of the tweet in a few seconds then I'll move on to the next one.

Thinking it's OK not to spell correctly
There are two schools of thought on this one. Some people say that it's OK to fire off a tweet in a hurry and not worry about the spelling. I guess you could argue that a badly spelt tweet that gets click-throughs is better than no tweet at all. But even better is a correctly spelt tweet that gets attention. Good spelling and grammar is also polite. If it's not correct, it forces the reader to work harder.

Not having the nous to précis text
If you can't fit everything into 140 characters, learn how to précis. That doesn't mean converting 'your' to 'ur' (Ur was an ancient Sumerian city – see you can learn something from reading my blog!). Try to re-word the tweet whilst still keeping it readable. It only takes a few seconds to do.

Social media 'experts'
I'm followed by loads of social media 'experts'. Now I'm not saying that there's no such thing as a social media expert but I don't want to be on Twitter just to be told how to use Twitter all of the time.

Please retweet
I'll retweet if I think it's interesting. You don't have to ask. In fact if you do ask, I'm likely not to retweet – I'm a bit contrary at times!

People telling me how many followers they've got
You don't need to tweet to tell me how many followers you have or how many you've got to go to get to some landmark number. I can find that out for myself if I'm interested.

Abbreviations and acronyms
Actually I'm OK with a lot of these. I don't mind OMG, WTF and LOL (although I have my doubts if people really are laughing out loud when they type LOL and certainly ROFLMAO is never to be taken literally). But the more obscure ones are unlikely to have me Googling for their meaning so I'll probably just ignore them instead. So DUOA. See?

Abuse, racism, cowardice etc.
Finally of course it goes without saying that anyone using Twitter to be abusive, racist, sexist and so on will be unfollowed and possibly reported. Nuff said.

...and calm...
I feel much better having got all that off my chest. If you're new to Twitter I hope it helped. If you've been using it for some time you might feel there are a few things I've left off of the list - let me know. I'm off to make a cup of tea!

It's like anything in life. If there's a thing you can't do then you have four choices:

1. Don't do it
2. Do it yourself but do it badly
3. Learn how to do it well
4. Get someone else to do it

It applies to all sorts of things. I was up a step ladder decorating my hall about three years ago. Bored and fed up, I got down off of the ladder, put it away in the garage and resolved to give up decorating for good. Next day I phoned Malcolm and he's been doing our painting, decorating and other such jobs ever since (highly recommended incidentally if you need someone in the Bromley area!). I chose option 4 – it was definitely the right thing to do.

Another example is that of public speaking. In business we often have to get up in front of people and talk and it was always something that terrified me. I have recently resolved to do something about it and in this case, I have chosen option 3. I've joined a speakers club and intend to get proficient at this particular life skill.

So down to brass tacks – your website and its content. We have produced sites with content management systems (CMS) for years allowing clients to update those parts of the site that change frequently. But is this always the sensible thing to do? It really depends on if the client is going to use the CMS and use it well.

These are the three factors you need to bear in mind:

• Understand what the website section is for
• Write well
• Update often

If you've got a blog on your website, use it as a blog. Make it interesting and write stuff that people will want to read. If you're using the blog to flag up events or small pieces of news then think about having a separate news or events page on your site custom-built just for this sort of thing.

If you've got various staff using the CMS, make sure they all know how to use it and what each section is for.

This is the big one for me for various reasons and it comes back to the four options at the top. If you can't write well then either learn to do so or employ someone else to do it. We can write copy for you or employ specialist copywriters.

We've got some clients who know how to write well. For example take a look at the Munro & Forster blog at http://www.munroforster.com/blog/. It's interesting and there are no distracting spelling or grammatical errors.

We've also produced a couple of sites where the client's skills in this area are lacking and we have had to talk to them about how they can improve this as well as explain the negative effect this is having on their business. The errors stick out like a sore thumb and people will subconsciously link this lack of attention to detail to whatever service or product you are selling.

And from a purely selfish point of view, we can't put a client site in our web portfolio if it contains bad English because it's going to reflect badly on us as well!

If you've got a blog or a news section then use it. Don't let it sit there gathering dust. Update it regularly and then tweet about it or add the update to your Facebook age. We now set up sections in clients' websites that automatically post updates to their company's Facebook page so there's no extra effort involved.

It also stands to reason that the more, good-quality content you've got on your website, the more stuff there is for Google to index thus helping your search engine rankings.

If you want any help with your website or copy, just get in touch.

The government has given companies until 26 May 2012 to comply with the new EU's Privacy and Communications Directive which requires the user's consent before using cookies. This could open up a hornet's nest of problems and could potentially make websites a lot less useful and user-friendly.

So what exactly is a cookie? It's a small file placed on your PC by a website that they can retrieve each time you visit pages on the site. It is not dangerous and cannot harm your PC and it can only be used by the web domain that stored it in the first place.

Let me give you an example from one of our websites. The World Malaria Day website (http://www.worldmalariaday.org) has an option at the top to view the site in French. If you click on this flag, the website stores a cookie on your PC that holds the information saying that your language preference is French. The next time you visit the site, this cookie is retrieved and the site is automatically shown to you in French. Without this convenience you would have to click on the flag every time you visited in order to see the site in French – not very user-friendly at best.

Without wishing to confuse matters, there is another type of cookie which is non-persistent and which expires when you leave a site. These are called session cookies and are strictly necessary to hold web pages together. For example, if you have entered a password to access a site then every page you go to on that site needs to know that you have logged in and are able to view it. It can check a session cookie to do this. Without it, each page you went to would say "sorry we don't know who you are – go away!".

A similar thing might be used to keep your basket contents when shopping. Not being able to track this would be like having a supermarket basket with the bottom missing. Every time you put something in, it would immediately fall out again and your basket would remain forever empty.

A bigger impact will be felt if third party applications such as Google Analytics have to get permission to use cookies. If people are able to opt out then the reporting you are getting about your website visitors will be less accurate and therefore you will be less able to make informed decisions about your marketing. Will there be an alternative technological approach that can be adopted? It seems a wait and see approach is what is generally being recommended in the hope that analytics companies will come up with a solution.

As far as our sites are concerned, the majority just use the necessary session cookies but we will be carrying out a review and implementing changes where necessary.

When we set up the distribution list database to send an email campaign, we also add to it some test addresses. These will of course contain one or more of our addresses but will also contain at least one of the client's email addresses as well.

The first thing we do is to send the email to ourselves and run a series of checks to ensure that everything is working:

• Does the email work in both its HTML and text forms?
• Does the unsubscribe link work and go to the correct unsubscribe page?
• Does open tracking work?
• Do all of the click-through links work? (We test these whether or not they are being tracked).
• If personalised emails are being used, are all merge fields working as they should be.

We also check the email to ensure that it isn't spammy and also that it looks good in a number of different email systems such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo.

When we are happy that everything is OK, we send a test email to the client so that they can check it and make any final changes.

Once the client is happy that it all looks and works as it should, we send the email out to the distribution list. We use specialist email marketing and sending software which will take each email and send it out separately to each recipient on the distribution list.

Then the interesting bit starts. Our system records all sorts of things to help you to analyse the success of your email marketing campaign. It records who has opened the email, which links they have clicked on, which email addresses have bounced, which email addresses are badly formatted and who has unsubscribed from your mailing list.

The open tracking is done via the insertion of a tiny invisible image in the email piece. If a user's email software has images turned off then the open event will not be recorded. However, the result is still a good indicator of how successful your email marketing campaign has been. We have had open rates in the range of 10% up to 85% though a typical open rate range would be between 20% and 40% and anything in the higher end of that range can be regarded as a good figure.

We usually leave it for a week before producing the email marketing report that is then sent to the client. This gives enough time for most of your recipients to have had a chance to look at the email. We can send the report earlier or later than this depending upon your requirements. One of our clients has customers who are out working in gardens all day long and who may not look at their email as often as the rest of us and so they prefer a two week wait before the report is produced.

The report is produced as an Excel file and emailed to you.

For further information on how our email marketing works, see...
Part 1 – Producing the email piece
Part 2 – Setting up the campaign
Part 3 – The distribution list

We run email marketing campaigns for many clients and these go to lists of varying sizes. You can supply us with a list of recipients or, as we do with a lot of clients, we can use the opt-in list from your website. For some clients we have actually constructed and manage their website as well so we can access the online database which we will have built in order to download the latest additions to the mailing list.

It is important that all lists only contain the names and email addresses of people who have actually opted in to receive communication from you or people who are legitimate contacts of your organisation.

It is also important that you offer all recipients a way of opting out of receiving communication and that you actually carry out their request when they have asked to be removed from the mailing list especially if you are managing your own lists. For those clients for whom we hold their definitive mailing list we make sure that any unsubscribe requests are actioned so that the contact doesn't receive any more emails.

If you supply us with the list, we process the list to get it into a format we can work with. More often than not distribution lists are supplied to us in Excel format but they can be supplied in any database format that we are able to read. Check with us before sending.

If you want to use merge fields in order to personalise the email, then these will need to be included in your list as separate columns. There's more about this in our other blog post in this series: Part 1 - Producing the email piece

The process of setting up the database also includes adding in the columns that will record the opens, click-throughs, bounces, bad format emails and unsubscribe requests. These columns are used to report back to you the results of your email campaign.

For further information on how our email marketing works, see...
Part 1 – Producing the email piece
Part 2 – Setting up the campaign
Part 4 – Testing, sending and reporting

Once we have designed the email piece we can then set up the campaign. This involves various steps and settings within the email campaign application that we use.

Some of the most important are settings that our client has to supply such as:

• The From Name
• The From Address
• The Reply-To address
• The message subject

I won't blabber on about the importance of the From Name mainly because I have already written a blog post on this very subject. The From Address will typically be the email address of the person in the From Name but it doesn't have to be. The Reply-To address can be different to the From Address if you wish. Then when the recipient clicks Reply in their email application their reply will go back to this person instead.

We can personalise the email and set the From Name and Address dynamically based on a column in your distribution list. For example, if you are sending a campaign from several different people such as when sending to a list supplied from various sales reps within your organisation. This example is also when the separate Reply-To address might come in useful as you may want all replies to be co-ordinated from one central address.

The message subject is important and I will be writing a separate blog post about this in due course – watch this space! Suffice to say at this stage that the subject line should trigger some sort of recognition within your recipient so that they don't look at it and immediately dismiss it as spam.

What else do we do when setting up the campaign? Well we need to make sure that we are tracking bounced emails and to that end, we set up a unique email account to collect the bounces and record these in the database so that you can see which addresses have bounced. We can set it up so that you collect bounced emails instead but we don't recommend this especially if it is a big list as you could end up with hundreds of emails coming into your inbox.

We also set up all of the click-throughs so that these too can be recorded in the database and reported back to you.

One of the things we can do is to add an attachment but we hardly ever do this unless we are sending the email to a very small number of people and the attachment is a very small file size. Adding a large attachment to an email can massively increase the amount of time it takes to send and also runs a higher risk of being rejected as spam. What we recommend instead is that the attachment is uploaded to a web server and then we add a link to it within the body of the email. This gets round the two issues mentioned and has the added benefit that we can track clicks on this slink to see who has downloaded the attachment.

For further information on how our email marketing works, see...
Part 1 – Producing the email piece
Part 3 – The distribution list
Part 4 – Testing, sending and reporting

The first thing we do when working with a new client is to design an email template which will be used for the email marketing campaign and also any subsequent campaigns. We will set up text styles, colours, fonts etc. and incorporate logos and images as required.

It is essential that the email piece to be sent out is designed to look good but, more importantly, is also 'designed for the inbox'. This means that it should work in whatever email software the recipient is using. In practice it is impossible to ensure that it works 100% correctly in every email program because they all render HTML content differently, but we can ensure that the design is as flexible as possible so that as many recipients as possible can see the email the way it was intended to look.

However, we always create a fallback in the shape of an online version. In the version that you contact receives we place a link at the top that says something like: 'If you are unable to read this e-mail, please click here to see our online version.' Therefore if the received version doesn't quite work the way it should, they can still see the email designed and laid out as intended in the online version in their browser. We also use this online version as the one that we show to the client as the email piece is being put together. Once they have approved the online version we then proceed to produce the HTML and text versions (see below).

There's the possibility that a contact's email software won't let them view HTML emails so we also produce a text version of your email so that these people don't miss out on your message. The email is sent out in what is called 'multipart' format – i.e. both HTML and text – and the recipient's email program will decide which part to display.

If you want the email to be personalised then this can also be done. For example, you might want 'Dear FirstName' at the top of the email (where Firstname is a column from the distribution list database). You might also want the email to be signed off by different people such as when sending to a list supplied from various sales reps within your organisation. The text version needs a bit of work: all 'click here' type links have to be converted into the full URL, graphical text has to be re-typed and we have to make sure that text referring to any images is re-worded so that it makes sense.

It's even possible to insert a completely different block of text / images in an email based on criteria from the distribution list database. Let's take an example to show you what I mean. Suppose you were organising three conferences in different locations and you wanted to show a picture of the recipient's nearest conference centre and its address in the body of the email. Your distribution database would need to have a column containing a location name and we can code the email to look at this location name and then display the appropriate content.

We can also track click-throughs on any links within the email piece should you wish to do so.

When all is said and done, it is the content of your email campaign that is the most important factor. It is that which will decide how many people respond to your call to action. I think another blog post might be needed on that very subject in due course.

For further information on how our email marketing works, see...
Part 2 – Setting up the campaign
Part 3 – The distribution list
Part 4 – Testing, sending and reporting