Writeyness :: Info to snack on

The Guardian has published a list of their most useful websites of 2006 — The new 100 most useful sites.

It’s interesting to compare this list to their previous one in 2004 — Cream of the crop: 100 most useful websites.

They rightly point out (taking the UK-view, as a British newspaper):

“In 2004, the internet was a different place: there was, for example, no YouTube, and most Britons online didn’t have broadband. That’s changed dramatically: now, more than 75% of users have broadband, and the arrival of Web 2.0 has brought sites where the interaction is as fast as if it were on your machine.”

Here’s another tool that’s worth checking out. Snap offers a free service that lets your visitors preview a site before clicking through to it via a link on your page.

Hover over the Snap link above or any other on this blog and you’ll see what I mean. It makes for a nice user experience, and saves people clicking through to pages they’ve already visited or might not want to visit.

It’s easy to add to your site, especially for a non-techy person like me. You just paste a small snippet of code into your template and you can choose to use it with all links or only ones you specify.

As an aside, the importance of a clean homepage, ideally with a compelling headline, is nicely illustrated when you view the thumbnail preview pages using Snap. Think about which ones make you want to click through and which ones fail to grab your attention. It’s also handy as a quick way to check for broken links on your site. Just hover over a link and, if it’s broken, you’ll see an error page instead of the expected page in the preview.

Update: There is now a Wordpress Snap plugin available — here.

I love Grazr.com’s feed tool. It lets you create a feed reader in three very easy steps, and provides the code for you to place in your web page.

With apologies to Blue Peter, here’s one I made earlier…

(If you can’t see the reader above, click here.)

You can use it to promote your blog’s content on your main website or anyone else’s you can persuade to carry it. And you can configure a reader on your site to display feeds from other non-competing sites your visitors might be interested in.

The promise of a little dynamic content — when relevant — can drive repeat traffic to your site.

The great advantage of online marketing is the amount of info you can gather about your target audience — and then use to improve the effectiveness of your site.

Google Analytics is a brilliant free tool for this. And another is Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg’s big selling point — apart from being called Crazy Egg obviously — is its “heatmaps” feature that allows you to see which links your visitors click on your Web pages, and which ones they pass over.

You need to pay to take advantage of all their features for your whole site, and you don’t learn anything you can’t learn through other analytics programs, but it looks cool…

SolutionWatch has a review.

I’ve been collaborating on a project with another writer, as well as three remote stakeholders — all of whom need to see, comment on, and approve some online copy.

We’ve found Google’s online wordprocessing tool — Writely — great for this.

You open an account, save your documents and invite the other people who need to view them to sign up wth their own login. Everyone’s comments are visible to all invitees for a particular document, and anyone can make amends, leave suggestions, etc. Chalk another one up to Google — it’s really a very handy tool.

Update: Writely has been rebranded and incorporated into Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

Every website needs a “bug” or task list, made up of stuff to fix… stuff to do… stuff you’d like to do… stuff someone else needs to do.

And for a small business owner, who is often webmaster, project manager, chief cook and bottle washer all rolled into one, keeping track of everything tends to get lost among all your other tasks. So a bug list often takes the form of notes scrawled in diaries or on post-it notes stuck to the corner of your PC.

A great solution to this problem comes in the form of Google Spreadsheets — another product from the prolific eggheads at Google Labs. It’s an online spreadsheet application that lets you store and share spreadsheets. You can access your spreadsheets anywhere, and a number of approved users can help maintain it.

There are other online to-do lists (e.g., Ta-da Lists) but GS lets you export and import spreadsheets, sort entries and perform other spreadsheety functions.

So I keep my bug/website to-do list on Google Spreadsheets, and anytime I get an idea, find a glitch in the site, or create a new task for myself, I update my saved list at the Google Spreadsheets site.

Then I check it every morning (or so) and try to get as many of the high priority tasks done that day.

The important thing is to prioritise tasks and also log the date of entry, relevant web page, a brief description, and — if appropriate — the name of someone assigned to complete the task or fix the bug. You can also sort them into categories like marketing tasks, writing tasks, nice-to-haves, etc.

If you’re anything like me, it’ll become a list that always seems to grow and never shrinks, but at least it feels under control.

Talking of free wireless (“Provide free wireless and they will come”) this is a handy site for finding free wireless hotspots in your area. Just plug in an address and you’re away…

Free-HotSpot.com

BrowserCam shows you what your website looks like in every major browser and on every major operating system out there, and provides downloadable screencaps of the results. Their free trial gives you up to 200 screen captures.