Category Archives: Web Development

Archived website

Posted by Tommy on July 23, 2009 Comments Off

Whilst messing about with my mother’s business website I stumbled upon a very old incarnation of my first personal site. Enjoy, though the design is classic-retro (but seems to hold together well in newer browsers) and obviously some of the links are now broken!

Website upgrade

Posted by Tommy on December 31, 2008 Comments Off

I have just upgraded to wordpress 2.7, hats off to the wordpress community again as it went very smoothly. Loving the new features, also hopefully you the user should see an improved service.

I’ve also added a Mobile plug-in which should mean the site renders properly from a mobile now.

CAPTCHA if you can

Posted by Tommy on January 10, 2008 Comments Off

Internet security is always top of the agenda and new security technology is continually being released. Although first coined in 2000 CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) technology has only really become more prominent over the last couple of years. CAPTCHA attempts to distinguish between a computer and human by asking you to type in some hard to decipher random characters represented by an image, the idea being that any automatic spamming bots can’t figure out what the characters are (through image recognition) so therefore can’t register/log in to spam the website in question. It’s more of a reverse turin test because the Computer is testing the human rather than vice versa.

An example of a CAPTCHA image, courtesy of Wikipedia.
A CAPTCHA Image - Thanks Wikipedia

Certainly this is a clever solution to the problem of spamming and mass automated marketing but does it work? Well, no solution can be 100% secure and as some research at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada) suggests CAPTCHA is certainly not.

There are of course both usability and accessibility issues with CAPTCHA. Audio versions of CAPTCHA try to allow users who are visually impaired to pass the “test”. Though there is some debate as to how effective these are due to the background noise required to prevent audio recognition.

My personal experiences of CAPTCHA aren’t all that great; sometimes I have found the characters completely undecipherable and have had to refresh the image (where this is available) until something I can understand is displayed.

I sympathize with the websites as I can see why they are using CAPTCHA, after all who would visit a forum which had been completely overrun with marketing spam? However, is it worth potentially alienating or frustrating users of your site? After all, it is the website (a potential business) which should be convincing the user (a potential customer) to register and potentially spend their money there. Not the user which should be convincing the website that they are suitable to use the website. If a website annoys someone and isn’t usable then they’ll simply go somewhere else. With more and more advanced spam detection available websites should be employing a system which combines automatic detection with pre-post moderation to prevent mass-marketing/spamming.

Web 2.0

Posted by Tommy on September 28, 2007 Comments Off

Web 2.0 is an interesting subject; currently I am very tempted to tell customers that we haven’t ‘upgraded to it yet’ and are still in the Web 1.0 world when confronted with pointless requests for Wikis or Blogs. I don’t, not just because I would be talking rubbish, but mainly because I am more concerned with establishing their communications requirement and matching this with the correct area of the communications mix.

Technology used in the right way is what we should be striving for, not a ‘killer-app’ for the sake of it.

Jacob Nielsen’s recent critique of Web 2.0 (BBC Technology News - Web 2.0 ‘neglecting good design’) triggered industry wide debate, I don’t agree with all he says but he has obviously struck a chord.

This Dilbert cartoon (from Dilbert.com) says it all!

Stats hack

Posted by Tommy on September 23, 2007 Comments Off

How many times do you hear the requirement to increase the number of hits by x%. Frequently statistics are used as the best measure of a successful website and it is assumed that the more hits the better. We can bend and twist stats to say almost anything we want.

I do not deny that statistics should be used; but only as part of a multi-pronged assessment. We must use both qualitative and quantitative measurements. Quantitatives give us the graphs and charts that all managers love, where-as qualitative assessments give us the meat with which we can build a truly successful site.

Use statistics to show which areas of the site are actually being visited but assess user opinion to establish which areas of the site they are going to re-visit.