IIA Annual Conference 2012 – “BUILDING BRICS” – Thursday 10th May 2012, Aviva Stadium

Looking outwards towards Brazil, Russia, India and China is the inspiration for this years Irish Internet Association Conference. It features a twin stream approach with speakers and workshops running concurrently throughout the day (with the exception of keynote speakers).

You can expect to see the likes of:

• Sean O’Sullivan, Managing Director of Avego, and new dragon on Dragons Den
• Sharon Walsh, Marketing Director of Heineken
• Deborah Lynch, Developer Technical Services Manager of Paypal
• Constantin Gurdgiev of Ireland Russia Business Association
• Fergal O’Byrne, Managing Director of SONRU

who, along with many others will explore how the elements of Social, Mobile and Localisation can be used to the advantage of businesses looking at overseas opportunities.

For more information and to book click on this link.

I’ll be there (as I am on the board of the IIA) so I look forward to seeing you

Keith

Brant Cooper – Customer Development Half Day Workshops. 1st and 2nd May, Dublin

An entrepreneur whom I have known for a long time , Raomal Perera, is holding some great workshops as part of his Lean Startup Initiative.

The next ones are being presented by the author of The Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development.

For more information on these workshops and to book click on this link.

From the author on the workshop format: “My workshops are very interactive. I’ll do some overview slides about customer development and lean startups and then we’ll go through the methods in my book to describe your business ecosystem, document assumptions, identify and prioritize risks and then discuss how you might go about testing the risks. Participants are encouraged to bring real life examples and issues we can discuss and hopefully work through.”

Keith

Stellar Presentations by @shelisrael – review

Repost of my Amazon review of Stellar Presentations:

I follow @shelisrael on twitter and occasionally chat to him there. You can see his website here.

Happened to see a tweet from him last week offering a copy of his book to anyone who would then review it so I took the opportunity. I bought and read a previous book of his – Twitterville and have also sampled his 2006 Naked Conversations.

I really enjoyed it. 71 pages (so as someone else said the price could be a little high) but on the other hand I have previously happily paid that price for really well written books which were also an hour’ish in the reading.

This is a topic I have read about and taken advice on for years and this summarises the best of that. He teases out the contradictions in the space and gives entrepreneurs the confidence to go out and win audiences over. Precious little structural stuff (you know the bullet point, image and font size kinda advice) and much more so about the tone and passion which are so essential in the delivery of a memorable pitch.

Nice one. Or as we say in Ireland “deadly”. Oh, should say it is $4.99 on Kindle for April. That hikes it nicely from 4 stars to 5. Link to the Amazon listing here.

As an addition to this I am interested to see that this is self-published using the www.createspace.com service. I know a number of entrepreneurs right now who are actively exploring the self-publishing route.

Keith

The Anatomy of a Successful Web Project – 18th April Workshop

My next workshop on this topic with the IIA is coming up on the 18th April – click here for more information and to book.

In preparation for that workshop, which will include topics such as:

• Initial ideas on what you want and what you need – realistic expectations
• Writing a specification document – format and detail
• Running a tender process – selecting developers, shortlisting and interviewing
• Managing the build once a developer is selecting
• Design
• Information Architecture
• CMS Integration
• Content Strategy

I summarised the 4 key phases of a successful build in the following document – please download and use as you wish.

Keith

Techovate Conference 2012 – looking forward to chairing the Technology Panel

This is going to be fun – as part of a new 2 day conference coming up in Wexford this coming Wed & Thur (21st and 22nd March) I am chairing the morning session on Day 2.
Entitled Software and Services it will explore the key trends in the application of technology which businesses and organisations need to plan for in the next 18 months to 2 years and beyond. These are the 5 speakers who will then also take part in a panel discussion at the end of the morning:

Dr. Mícheál Ó Foghlú, CTO, FeedHenry

Adam Grennan, Country Manager, Cisco

Joel Wachtler, Head of Strategy, Eircom

David Walsh, Co-Founder & Group CEO, Netwatch

Stephen Moffatt, Head of Smarter Computing, IBM

For more on what each of them will be covering, together with the full conference details and booking information go to the website www.techovate.com. It is being held in the new Wexford Opera House – possibly one of the nicest venues for this kind of conference in the country.

Keith

Designing a user interface – the Clear ToDo app

I am a design groupie – I have always enjoyed well thought through and executed design of both physical and virtual objects. Not that an app is an “object”!

What is Good design?

It is not about glossy or quirky or brand identity or even just a strong visual statement – it is one of the key factors which makes a website or app useable for an individual. That is always a strong focus which has to be at the root of every web project I undertake with a client.

Simplify with Clear

This upcoming Clear app makes full use of the unique properties of the iPhone interface and while beauty is there the build from scratch reminds me of Flipboard too – leaving behind all traditional user interface conventions.

Clear for iPhone (Coming Soon!) from Realmac Software on Vimeo.

I like it a lot and look forward to the release of V1

Keith

Thanks to thenextweb which is where I spotted this

How To Get Things Done (in 1:07)

Chris Courts emailed me recently to show me to link to a video his company (Epipheo Studios) made on the topic of getting things done.

This is it – covers an impossible amount of information and concepts in just over a minute! Nice work.

More on this topic – Destressing your workplace and How to Get Things Done in our Dublin Workshop on 7th February 2012.

Keith

Conversion – or getting a website user to do something

Conversion

This is an art form, not a science. It involves focusing your site on a key objective (or user journey) and clearing the path from the landing page (the first page they arrive on) through to the completion of their task.

What are typical conversion goals?

• Selling a product – that one is easy to define
• Downloading a technical product specification
• Clicking the Chat Online Now button and engaging with a sales agent
• Filling in a Contact Us form
• Signing up to an email newsletter
• Liking your Facebook Page

Whatever the goal there are a multiplicity of things on your site which impact on the conversion rate and this new site is a fun way of gathering case studies in what works and what doesn’t.You can play it here: Play the ConversionSkills.com conversion optimization case studies game

You can see a previous post of mine on conversion here.

Keith

Information Architecture – or the sections and pages in a website

I am close to finishing the information architecture (IA) work for a large client project and have been using Omnigraffle for the first time.

While I am familiar with another product from their stable (Omnifocus) it took me a while to get used to this new one because it has such a different use. My choice of it was driven by IQContent (lead designers) as they used it for their initial IA overview.

However I am glad I made the effort because it made the visualisation of the site substantially easier. This is the format of the document it outputs.

I used colour coding for each layer of the site with the main navigation in green being successfully held to 5 choices and then each of those breaking down into upto 8 individual sections. The lowest level content (yellow) is very specific and limited to a relatively small user audience.

This document is used to drive:

• The requirement for content templates
• The allocation of sections to content editors for content preparation
• The identification of workflow paths with the new CMS

Keith

Digital Strategy in the Pharma & Healthcare Sector

I was doing some research last week for a client project and came across something which is rare enough – a research report written by a consultancy which is actually useful.

When you are developing a digital strategy this kind of marketing report gives you valuable secondary data on which to make decisions.

This is it – the L2 Digital IQ Index Pharma

It assesses all the major US pharma brands for both their owned and earned digital media (ie websites/blogs and social media) so you get great exposure to the various elements in place on what they judge to be the leading websites in this space.

If you are curious the No.1 brand is Concerta by Johnson & Johnson.

Keith