Hugh Durkin, Irish Internet Guy

Some large, high profile Drupal sites

Hugh — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:22:37 +0000

I’ve mentioned a few times over the past while my increasing high regard for Drupal. It has come such a long way over the past couple of years, and you may not know it but you’ve probably stumbled across several Drupal powered sites in your travels. Here are just a few of the higher profile ones for you to check out.

The Onion

You have to love The Onion. The worlds most famous satirical newspaper moved their website to Drupal ages ago, and it’s a fantastic implementation of Drupal. They have all sorts of cool features, from videos to podcasts to a cool Google Maps feature called Our Dumb World. You should check it out.

Fast Company

Back in 2001 when the dot com bomb exploded, Fast Company was ridiculed for being one of the main media outlets which had been fuelling the crazy venture capital fire. Since then they’ve calmed down a bit, thought twice before penning silly articles, and moved their site to Drupal. It’s quite a simple implementation, but it works well.

MTV.co.uk

Music Television. Hmmmm, not anymore. MTV might as well stand for ‘My teen videos’ these days, but to hell with it, I still watch some of their channels now and again. About two years ago they engaged Lullabot to help them redevelop MTV.co.uk, to incorporate new community features and more interactive stuff - and it’s worked. Their MTV Flux thingy is a great example of how to create sophisticated community features with Drupal.

Universal Music

These fancy Dans have gone to town with this one. The site is massive, and even individual artist websites are not mostly powered by Drupal. They’ve music videos, news, artist profiles, and loads of other stuff. They’ve clearly realised selling records won’t cut it anymore to make money. Three ad formats per page is how they now make money from music.

Google share price back on the up

Hugh — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:21:27 +0000

I previously had a bit of a rant about traders and how they can sometimes lose faith in great shares when the going gets bad. One that I particularly had issue with was the half price drop in the Google share price from within on year. Now, thankfully, the price seems to be recovering - again. It still amazes me though, for the last three years Google have been increasing annual revenues and profits by around 30%+ but, in the last year at least, their share price has tumbled. It’d be interesting to see the combined values that have been knocked off pension funds and government investments because of this. Hmmm.

Overall today tech stocks in online media companies are up, on the NASDAQ at least. Lets hope they stay that way.

Do customer satisfaction surveys by phone really work?

Hugh — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:19:48 +0000

I just got off the phone from a very, very interesting and entertaining customer satisfaction survey phone call - not. It was initiated on behalf of a service I use most days (I won’t get into specifics), and i’ve had a few problems with them in the past, so I said i’d oblige. My god was it boring. It was based on the multiple-choice, 1 for bad 7 for good formula, and I feel very sorry for the poor woman whose job it is to make those calls every day. My head would be wrecked, and my friends would notice a change in my behaviour over time from human to robot. So, do these surveys work or not, and if not, why?

My call certainly didn’t work. The 1-7 formula, along with the bored disinterested woman at the other end of the phone (I worked in a call centre myself once, so I pain), made me start laughing to myself and just answering ‘4′ to quite a long series of the questions. I upped it to ‘5′ for the portion of the questions where I felt the service was performing kinda well, but that was about it.

I just wonder how many people don’t bother going ahead with the questionnaire in the first place (perhaps cos they’re happy as larry), the amount who take part only because they’d had a problem (like me!), and the final portion - possibly students - who are bored shitless and just take the call to take the piss and answer ‘1′ to the multiple choice questions, whilst having a giggle at the same time.

Surely this can’t be a great way to evaluate a business. A series of questions which you answer numbers to? I think not.

Ongoing evaluation must be far more effective - a question here, a question there - not too much to bore the shite out of your customers, and performed over a longer period of time in a less intrusive way than a boring ten minute phone call.

What do you think of phone surveys? Old hat, or necessary evil?

Will Nicky O’Callaghan win The Apprentice?

Hugh — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:02:01 +0000

The Apprentice has been going on for what seems like ages, but at this stage who will win? In fairness, the standard has been fairly poor throughout - in terms of overall entertainment value, the quality of the tasks, and the execution of tasks by the contestants. No offence to Bill Cullen (sure I even have his ‘Golden Apples’ book which is great), but what relevance does selling Garmin satnavs on Grafton Street have to do with the overall scheme of things. I know he’s trying to get each competitor to prove they can sell, but i’m sure neither Jackie Lavin (who used to be a model) or Brian Purcell (PR legend) had to flog stuff on Grafton Street on their way to the top. All that aside, one candidate is showing better traits than most of them, the very easy on the eyes Nicky O’Callaghan.

Despite being in the firing line on several occasions, Nicky has managed to not just wade through each and every confrontation, she has fought her corner ‘like a bleedin’ warrior’ (as Bill might say), and has a gob on her the size of her native Cork. No harm in that at all, she’s very well able to stand up for herself in a very persuasive and articulate manner, hence being in the last handful of contestants left on the show.

It’s also apparent that Nicky is what Bill is looking for - she’s young, hard working, has plenty of experience already (like me she went straight from the Leaving Cert into the workforce), and is well travelled. She spent three months on her own travelling Australia, according to the TV3 website. No better way to toughen up and learn to stand up for yourself.

One thing that might annoy some people is her accent. In the boardroom it’s grating, slightly monotone, and she never raises her voice above the acceptable level. She’d be such a pain in the hole to get in an argument with, cos she’d probably win.

Anyway, it’s great to see two women in the final. Girl Power and all that.

Writemaps - a handy visual sitemap tool

Hugh — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:49:56 +0000

When planning a website, everyone has their own way of figuring out which content should go where. Loads of people use spreadsheets, others use downloadable and installable purpose built tools and - ashamedly - I’ve been using a good old piece of paper and pen for about ten years. After a while though, it can become quite a pain rejigging your site plan time and time again. Today I was once more editing the visual sitemap for Shares.ie to accommodate some new content I signed contracts for today, and pretty much lost the plot because it was becoming such a pain to plan a site with that much content. After a quick search on Google I stumbled across a web based tool called Writemaps, and what a saviour it is!

Writemaps’ mission statement is as simple as their site is to use:

WriteMaps was created to provide a fast, fun, and easy way to plan your websites. WriteMaps’ aim is to enable any user, not just web professionals, with the tools they need to get their ideas mapped out in a visually pleasing environment.

Signing up is a breeze, with the registration form consisting of username, password, and email address - that’s it. You don’t even need to verify your email address, and the site logs you in as soon as you’ve signed up so you can start building sitemaps instantly.

You’d need to be a thicko to not figure out how to use Writemaps from the get-go. You’re presented with a blank sitemap with just one top level index page icon. On this you’ll find a little green icon with a ‘+’ sign on it - just click on this to add the next item / level to the site navigation. Easy eh?

It’s simple to rename items in your sitemap, and each item is drag-and-droppable, so you can easily reshape your visual sitemap on the fly. There are two view options, an outline view and a tree structured map, both great options whether your site is one level or ten levels deep.

Another great feature is the ability to change the ‘Page Info’ for each sitemap level. You can add notes, a url for each level (more about this later), and the ajax powered interface makes editing both of these a breeze.

There is a clear and easy to use menu bar at the top of the application, and by clicking the ‘File’ button, you’re presented with several options, including several export functions - you can export as XML here, which’ll create a sitemap for your site, and if you’ve added values for the url using the ‘Page Info’ tab at each sitemap level, your sitemap will be crawlable by Google, Yahoo, et al. Handy eh?

It’s also possible to share sitemaps with colleagues, and you can control whether those you share with can only view the sitemap, or make changes to it too. Great for collaboration, and for sharing information with clients.

Organicsupermarket.ie - putting a friendly face on a friendly place

Hugh — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:43:09 +0000

Unfortunately, more often than not, offline businesses think of having a website as a bit of an ‘extra’ that they don’t really need, but will get round to one day when they’re bothered doing it. The majority of businesses - when they do get their website sorted - put a half arsed effort into it, just displaying their contact information, location, and some blurb they’ve not revised since 1991. Thus, it’s refreshing when businesses do make the effort and treat their website not just as a necessity, but as a powerful marketing tool which they can use to engage current and potential customers, to help make the business better for all. An excellent example is Organicsupermarket.ie, courtesy Ray at Intrigue and Ken Stanley.

From the get-go, everything about this site is friendly. The cartoon style animation on the homepage is pretty hilarious really, and does a great job of getting past the usually difficult task of introducing each and every member of staff to potential and current customers. I love the way the female member of staff hides behind the till, avoiding work, and leaves the main man to run around and do all the rough and tumble jobs!

There ain’t nothin like a big old ‘Thank you’ now and again to ensure your customers are smiley happy people and come back again - and Organicsupermarket.ie does this in style on the homepage.

Right below the ‘Thank you’ is an excellent feature - ‘Request a product’. Not only is this feature handy to have, it clearly works. As of today 174 products had been requested, with 142 of them sourced to date. Not bad at all. Clearly they’re listenting to their customers!

Site navigation is simple, and a ‘Go Organic’ link tells you all you need to know about switching to organic produce and why you should make the move. A ‘Products’ link gives you an idea of what the shop stocks - to me it looks like everything the normal consumer would ever need, and then some.

Every company needs a blog, but few know how to use them effectively. The Organic Supermarket team have a great blog section with organic recipes, store updates, and heaps of other stuff to help keep their customers informed.

Great work guys, a great example of a small business putting the big old interweb to good use!

Kelkoo sold by Yahoo! - bit of a dumb move?

Hugh — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:55:36 +0000

News has been circulating over the weekend about the Yahoo! disposal of Kelkoo, and now some of the finer details are starting to seep through. Seems that Yahoo! got rid of their price comparison shopping site for around €100 million - quite a hit on the €475 million they paid for it in 2004 (but surely they made some profits from it in the meantime?). But why sell now? Bit of bad timing, no?

As the world lashes into this recession of ours, wouldn’t right now be a great time to ramp up the services offered by a price comparison site, to recruit new users, to find more ways of saving more people money - thus making more money for Kelkoo? From my own experience with Compare.ie, owning a price comparison site is rather an excellent idea - believe me!

Even Kelkoos’ affiliate programme was/is genius. Kelkoo charged merchants on a cost per click basis, and paid affiliates only on throughput clicks from Kelkoo that originated from the affiliate website.

Example: I visit affiliate website, click on a link to Kelkoo… but it’s only when I click on a link from Kelkoo to a merchants website that the affiliate gets paid. Affiliates were only paid for revenue they had been guaranteed to generate for Kelkoo. Legend - Kelkoo couldn’t have gone wrong with that one! Could they?

So why sell now? And why take such a hit on it?

Do remember that Myhome.ie, an Irish property website, was sold for €50 million around the same time as Kelkoo was bought by Yahoo!. Maybe this means that Myhome.ie is valued at under 1/4 of the value it was originally bought at too?

Food for thought, perhaps.

Youtube goes widescreen - another move towards having d’telly on d’interweb?

Hugh — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:21:51 +0000

If you look at Youtube, you’ll notice it’s gotten wiiiiiiiiiiiiider! As mentioned on their blog, Youtube have proclaimed:

“We’re expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them. This new, wider player is in a widescreen aspect ratio which we hope will provide you with a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience. And don’t worry, your 4:3 aspect ratio videos will play just fine in this new player.”

It is really down to the quality of the videos users create? Now really? Sounds to me it’s more to do with the move from Youtube to licence more and more content from movie and TV producers to legally broadcast shows online, supported by video ads. And it’s an excellent move.

Within three years I can see us (with a bit of luck) not just having video on demand service, but telly on demand too - courtesy of Youtube.

Bye, Bye Bebo!

Hugh — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:54:02 +0000

It’s a sad, sad day. After almost three years adding photos, sending ‘luv’, and commenting on other peoples pages i’ve done the dirty on Bebo, closed off my account, and run off to Facebook for good. Why? Mostly because of all the spam i’ve been getting on Bebo lately, and mostly because Facebook is just better. Despite Facebook having heaps of applications - some very annoying - it beats Bebo hands down for usability, speed, and for its supremely good privacy settings.

Bye, Bye Bebo. We had some great times together. To make you feel better, here’s a video of Mariah Carey in her skimpies:

Rootcandy - an excellent administration theme for Drupal 6

Hugh — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:14:39 +0000

One of the - small - downfalls of Drupal is the lack of a really nice built-in administration interface. When you install Drupal, by default the admin area uses the same theme as the main site, and if you’ve a site with heaps of columns, or one that is just plain old thin, your admin interface will be a dog to use. Rootcandy is an excellent admin theme for Drupal that is easy to use and will ensure your site building is a breeze.

So, how do you go about installing it? It’s as easy as this:

1. Download the theme from http://drupal.org/project/rootcandy (it’s for Drupal 6 only at this stage)

2. Unpack it and upload to your Drupal themes directory. For the purposes of being a neat freak, i’ve set up a folder for it at /sites/all/themes/administration - just pop the rootcandy folder in there, and move onto the next step.

3. Log in as an administrator, and browse to http://yoursite.com/admin/settings/admin. Select ‘Rootcandy’ (or the other Rootcandy variants!) from the dropdown, click ‘Save configuration’ et voila - you now have beautiful, and very easy to use admin interface. When your visitors arrive to visit your site, don’t worry - Rootcandy will be replaced with your default site theme.

This is one of the great things about Drupal, the ability to specify an administration theme as well as a default layout for the main site.

Heres a screenshot of the Rootcandy theme, as nicked from the developers site at http://sotak.co.uk. Enjoy!