With the growing popularity of handheld devices, you should constantly be checking to see what mobile users are seeing when they look up your site. One way is to type the URL into your wireless device, but how do you test on devices you don’t have? Or what if you’re not a mobile user? Now you can use mobile device simulators on your computer to see what mobile users with different handheld devices are seeing.

For a quick and easy look, you can try the pocket device simulator from G-site. This site lets you type in any URL and see what mobile users might see. It displays the page in a generic handheld device.

For example, here’s a screen cap of yesterday’s Webgrrls Wisdom blog using G-site:

Sites like G-site meet many people’s needs. However, they don’t take host files and other local settings into account. To test your site on specific types of devices or to play with more advanced options, you might want to install applications from the different mobile device creators.

Microsoft allows you to download emulators that can be used with or without Visual Studio. Here’s a glance at the same Webgrrls blog post using the Microsoft Mobile Emulator:

BlackBerry also provides its own mobile simulators for BlackBerry devices for you to download, and the Palm Developer Network provides free access to mobile simulators for Palm devices as well.

You can no longer afford to hope for the best when it comes to mobile devices. You should find out what your customers are seeing and then seek out ways to make the user experience on mobile devices simpler and easier to use.

A few months ago, I was speaking with a client who was telling me an all-too-common story of business blogging: he and his team had set up a brand-new, visually-pleasing blog site. It looked great. It matched their corporate website. It had a URL. It had a cool masthead. It had links to other websites and bloggers, and it was ready to go.

But there was one problem. A pretty big problem. The blog was empty. Actually, it wasn’t totally empty, it had a few random posts here and there but they were few and far between.

As he told me his tale of blogging woes, he even diagnosed the problem himself: Unattended Blog Syndrome or “UBS.” (I am not making this up, he really called it that.) Blogs are insatiable when it comes to having enough copy – there is no such thing as ever being “done” with your blog as you might be with another marketing vehicle, like a brochure or a web page.

Don’t let yourself or your company fall prey to UBS. Here are some basic but very important tips for keeping UBS away from you and your team:

Continue Reading “The Not-So-Hidden Dangers Of Unattended Blog Syndrome”

I am constantly and consistently working to hone and improve my skills whether it be speaking, presenting, writing or negotiating, I work with a coach and I practice all of the time. Working with my coach has accelerated my progress at an incalculable rate and I would recommend it to anyone.

I have discovered a great techtalk coaching series of videos that were produced by Google and I wanted to share them with you.

Impactful Communication

Greg Gillis and Lesly Higgins, experienced corporate coaches, will discuss and demonstrate various methods to effectively communicate; whether it is delivering a yearly review to a fellow Googler, developing your group’s strategic vision, or influencing others towards an idea. By learning about Advocacy and Inquiry, Appreciate Inquiry, and Effective Feedback/Feedforward, you will come away from this workshop with concrete examples and experiences to help you get your message across with impact. Watch this presentation.

What Tech Women Really Want

Many technical women face surprising and similar challenges, which are often unspoken and self-imposed. I will present observations and suggestions around the impostor syndrome, feelings of isolation, tendencies to over-analyze, excessive humility, and reluctance to negotiate. I will also present “best advice” offered by women engineers for women engineers, which is taken from an article that I submitted to IEEE’s new Women in Engineering magazine. Watch this presentation

Accomplishing More By Doing Less

Being creative and successful in business and your personal lives requires that you be responsive and flexible as you move beyond your comfort zones. Learn how slowing down and looking deeply can lead to greater business success and personal satisfaction. Learn key practices that can help you:

Be flexible and responsive in the midst of change
Act with calm in the midst of intense activity
Relax in the midst of exertion
Gain clarity and insight in the midst of difficulty and competing demands
Increase creativity and problem-solving skills
Improve listening and communication skills
Improve focus and concentration
Increase work satisfaction
Lead and build teams
Watch this presentation

Leading from Strength: Making a Difference

By identifying and further developing our unique talents and character strengths, we contribute more effectively and enjoy the process. This talk will draw on findings from positive psychology, brain science, and resilience research to describe practical strategies for articulating passions and reaching goals. Participants will hear about two reputable online strengths surveys and learn how to call on the five key strengths that have been correlated with fulfillment and success. Watch this presentation

Create the Career You Want: A Non-Hyped App

Professional satisfaction is a question of creating what you want, not just waiting for it to appear. “The process of creating a life that works for you does not unfold logically. It proceeds in fits and starts, involves unlearning as much as learning, and requires you to push forward amidst ambiguity. You have to act before you’re ready to act, consider that your true interests and preferences might surprise you, and defer evaluation until you have collected a lot of evidence. You have to get out into the world, seek out new experiences and connect with new people. I try to stick to these principles not because they¹re always easy, but because I¹ve learned they work.” This tech talk will be an (entertaining and dynamic) introduction to the basic career- and life-planning principles that underlie this perspective. Watch this presentation

How To Plan Projects With Distributed Teams

Hubert Smits will give a hands-on overview of the activities that are involved in larger agile projects. Larger projects stretch out over more then a few months and have more then a single team involved. Things get more complex when the teams are not collocated. Hubert has based the talk on his paper “Multi Level Planning for Agile Projects” and presents a practical implementation of the planning levels. The experience he uses in the presentation is taken from his work as an agile coach for Rally Software Development, which brings him to projects with teams scattered across the globe: the US, Europe, Middle East and Far East. Watch this presentation

I often talk on the subject of website usability and the importance of designing your web pages with your user in mind.

In the blink of an eye, web surfers make their judgments…they instantly judge your website’s “visual appeal.” If your website is appealing they will look further, if it is appealing and easy to navigate and read…you will have the chance to build trust with your reader and only then can you influence them to take the action that you want …whether it is to click on your ad, call you for a consultation, or just simply come back.

Here are some tools that will help you evaluate and analyze how users use your site so you can improve your website’s design and usabilty.

ClickTale records your visitors’ every action as they browse your website and allows you to watch movies to understand visitor behavior and gain valuable insights and improve your website’s usability.

Price: You can track 100 page visits/week (~400 page visits/month) for free. If you need to track more pages, check out clicktale website for price plans.

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ClickHeat is a visual heatmap of clicks of your website pages, showing you hot and cold click zones. The hot zones tell you the most clicked on areas on the page and the cold zones tell you which areas on the page are being ignored.

This is an open source software that equires Javascript on the client side to track clicks, PHP and GD library (image library that should be installed with your PHP) on the server to log clicks and generate the heatmap.
Price: FREE

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Clickdensity is another great tool that offers different kinds of reports based on your user behavior on your website:

1. Heat maps reports show the most clicked areas on the page
2. Hover maps reports show you the statistics on your users hovering over the links but not clicking on them.
3. A/B Tests allow you to change page elements to test usability and improve user experience.

Price: You can track one page for up to 5,000 clicks for free. If you need to track more pages, check out clickdensity website for price plans.

I’m constantly scanning the web for innovations and trends, and whenever something catches my eye, I try to mention it in this blog. Recently I’ve noticed an emerging trend about the sites that have caught my eye regarding user-generated content online: User-generated content has moved from being supplementary information to being the main attraction of the site. Sites have moved from using customers’ content as an aid while buying products to now making the customers’ content the actual product for sale on the site.

Continue Reading “User-Generated Content Moves from Side Show to Center Stage”