I was skeptical then and I’m skeptical now as the same media, Digitoday, publishes almost the same piece of news. Except that the company who did the research is different.
(Article from other source in English)

At march it was Webmark who did the research, now it’s Blue White Partners.

Anyhoo.

Article (in Finnish) claims that “Blue White Partners went through over thousand Finnish corporate web sites evaluating their marketing efficiency“. Jolly good.

Marketing efficiency?
Over thousand corporate web sites?

Hmm.

Well, as I last time learned, our journalists can be quite busy sometimes. So off to BW Partners we go to find the press release!
And yes, there it is ( press release as .pdf)

Whee, this is nice.
According to press release,  methodology of the said research is based on “an average efficiency to attract visitors and turn them into customers, based on hundreds of thousands web sites evaluated“.

Errm, what?

And how the hell does one measure that?
And hundreds of thousands web sites evaluated?

Hmm.

Hey, there’s even more!
Again the Press Release states that “the average Blue White Score for Finnish Companies” (sic!) ” is  42, still below the international average of 50″. Now, Nokia, the front-seat student of all Finnish web sites, scores 99,8 and release states “which means that only 0,2 % of companies worldwide have as good or better web site as Nokia“.

Phee.

It seems that the rating goes from 0 to 100, 0 being the lowest score and 100 the highest. 100 obviously means “The Best”, there is no better and 0 that there is no worse site. (Please do correct me about the rating  if I’m wrong)

The top-100 list for Finnish companies can be viewed at BW Partners Web site. All sites, listed in order of ranking, followed by score and change since the last evaluation.
(Small side note: depending on source about 8 % of (Finnish) men are red-green colour blind. If someone wants to indicate something, let’s take change, with colours, do use some other colours than red and green. Or better, don’t use colours alone, use something else. Like a minus-sign in front of negative changes?)

Anyhow, forward.

What’s nice is that I can purchase the evaluation report for only 295 eur!

Pretty cheap, isn’t it?

Conclusion and remarks

As such the evaluation portrayed here is worthless (at least to me). I don’t know the methodology,  I don’t know the sample and so on.

Perhaps they’ll tell in the 295eur-report the following facts left missing in the press release and articles:

1. Exact size of the sample (“over thousand” is not that exact, you know. 1001 is over thousand, isn’t it?)
2. Methods of evaluation (“average efficiency to attract visitors ” and so forth is not that convincing)
3. Sites Sampled (“over thousand Finnish corporate web sites” doesn’t tell that much.)
4. Pages Sampled from every site or the algorithm for selecting the sample (did they evaluate only the front page or what? Did they start from the root and continue to leafs?)

Most likely the evaluation will be covered heavily by Finnish media, which is somehow sad.

Still waiting for the first proper “Best Web Site in Finland” evaluation.
I’m not holding my breath, though.

(Usual disclaimers apply; I do realize that evaluation methodology can be a trade secret, as well as other data. I also realize that business is business and everyone must make a living. )

[Edit 15.45, Arctic Startup has written about the first evaluation done by BW Partners. According to linked article the evaluation score is "is made by investigating content semantics, language, search engine rank and index, and presence in social media."]

Related posts:

1. Nokia’s Site Chosen as “Best In Finland”
2. Helsinki, UN and Certain Surveys.
3. links for 2009-05-04

I don’t know if the quizzes in Finnish are more annoying than the ones in English, still annoying.

And know what?

I take those quizzes. I don’t know why. I hate them.

The Finnish ones are full of spelling mistakes (yhdys sana for example).
Results all either fucked up or just plain stupid.

And know what?

I still take them.

Because it’s so thrilling to see if I’m “a True Finn” or wheter my co-worker does the same things I do this summer. Or is my political view what I believe it to be?

Or the quizz about my military rank? What’s with it? My rank is what my rank is – and I certainly know what it is.

Be Your Own Annoyance

And you know what? I won’t complain more, I’ll just do a quiz of my own.

It seems, according to small empirical test, that the hip app for quizz -making is “Make Your Own Quizz” (link leads to Inside Facebook’s app-page). According to app itself:

“Making a Quiz has never been easier! Making a Facebook app has never been so fast! Make your own quizzes and turn them into your own real Facebook applications!”

Jolly good.

Ok, Iäll just go to app  at FB and make a quiz.

Above is a screenshot about the first page, fugly highlights by me. First highlight is the language – I want my quizz to be in Finnish. Second one is picture, it actually says “This is very important! It will make your quiz more popular!“.

So, I have to have a picture.

I chose one about stairs at Pispala and named my quiz to “Kuinka korkealle pääset Pispalan portaissa” (how high can you reach?).

Next page was about the results, screen grab below:

Make A Quiz on Facebook, results page.

Typed some results, put on some images.

My images, however, were too big. The “useful” error message stated “2MThe uploaded file exceeds the maximum file size of %1 bytes.“. Perhaps someone should’ve told about the file size limit earlier?

Anyhoo, downsized the pics manually, tried to upload them.

Kaboom!

Everything gone.

Oh well, another try, luckily not from scratch.

Then the actual questions!

I just basically make something up as everyone does.

Make A Quiz On Facebook - questions page

After setting up the questions, a new app for the quiz:

Setting up the application for my Quiz

And voila, there it is (after just one step – I won’t paste that here).

My own little quiz, whee. (Find it out for yourselves if you fancy).

Conclusions and pondering

• Making ones own quiz isn’t that hard. That’s certainly the reason for all the annoying quizzes!
• Result (of the quiz) can be something totally different than the maker intended as the answers and outcomes are connected in my opinion in somehow awkward way.
• Quizzes can be used to influence people and their opinions
• Quizzes can be used as part of marketing

All in all, quizzes are here to stay (although really, really annoying), so why not use them?

Related posts:

1. My Comparative Study about Facebook Ads (weeklies, part 2)
2. Facebook ads, part n.
3. What Happens When You Win at Elections

What has happened since?

I wrote a short e-mail to Valio Consumer Services about the Gefilus and SEO, linking to these pages. Short and polite reply came pretty quickly, stating that they will deliver the feedback to developers of the site.

And now?

What was earlier like this:

Sivusto vaatii toimiakseen selaimen joka tukee freimejä. Ole hyvä ja päivitä selaimesi.

Looks now like this:

Gefilus – Vahvistaa vastustuskykyä. Sopii kaiken ikäisille

What can I say?

Now the <noframes> -element even has a nice little link to some other site (which sadly is the same Flash-based site as Gefilus.fi).

Power of feedback is remarkable, I’d say.

And why did I do this, someone asks?
No-one paid me any money. Pro bono. Free. Kansalaistoimintaa.

I might have just as well done nothing. Or just laughed my tiny ass off.

I didn’t. Now the problem is somehow fixed.

What else?

At the original posting I wondered who on earth makes only Flash-based sites with no proper content for search engines.

Well, who makes them?

The link at <noframes>-element leads to Vapaatila.net, or actually SEK&Grey, Finland’s biggest ad agency.

Sic.

You might as well draw your own conclusions about SEK&Grey’s own website (Flash, Whoo-hoo!), source code below:

<noscript>
<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0" name="sek" width="100%" height="100%" align="middle" id="sek">
  <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
  <param name="allowFullScreen" value="false" />
  <param name="movie" value="sek.swf" />

  <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
  <embed src="sek.swf" scale="exactfit" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="100%" height="100%" name="sek" align="middle" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" allowfullscreen="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>
</noscript>

I rest my case.

Anyhoo, I’m glad that Gefilus is somehow better;)

Related posts:

1. Gefilus (Valio revisited)
2. Patton and Wonderful Guys
3. Old but Good (Here Comes Another Bubble)

Budget Sport background image at Suomi24.fi

Hmm, well, interesting.

Image only shows at sports -related discussions. I didn’t know this was possible at Suomi24, obviously is.
Just makes one wonder how finely targeted such campaigns one could do... (And what does it cost!)

Related posts:

1. On Viral Marketing (and Finnish Air Force)
2. links for 2009-04-17
3. Nokia Sports Tracker (or Why I Strongly Believe in Nokia Being Stronger in Mobile Markets, Not in the Internet)

When going through the results something caught my eye, Gefilus. Google result looks like this:

Valio

Sivusto vaatii toimiakseen selaimen joka tukee freimejä. Ole hyvä ja päivitä selaimesi.
www.gefilus.fi/ – 2k – Välimuistissa – Samankaltaisia sivuja

Yes, you say, and then what, you continue.

Well yes. Gefilus is a Valio product line in which all dairy products include Lactobacillus GG Bacteria and should be healhty for each and every one of us.

Now, that’s not the point.
The point is the Google result for Gefilus which looks exactly like above. (They even have bought a Google Sponsored link to tell what the hell this is all about!)

Why all this?

Finnish text at Google result says (in english):
“This site requires a browser that supports frames to work. Please upgrade your browser.”

My browser? Oh yes, newest Firefox.

Google’s browser? Why that’s a whole different matter – and believe me or not, it’s not Chrome.

Google has no eyes or ears. It doesn’t support Flash or frames properly (and it’s not even supposed to, IMHO). (See Wikipedia on Web Crawlers for more information.)

And as Googlebot, Google’s search robot (or web crawler), doesn’t support frames, the only content Gefilus.fi shows to Bot is the (in principle properly used, mind you) <noframes> -element and it’s content.

Thus the awkward Google result.

Conclusions

• If you still use frames at 2009, do use the <noframes> -element.
• … and if you use the noframes-element, put some meaningful content in it, because that may be everything the allmighty Google sees.
• … and if it’s not in Google, it doesn’t exist, does it?
• …which leads me to wonder what the hell  the ad agency behind Gefilus.fi thought when doing all this? (Flash, frames, page titles (whole Gefilus.fi is named “Valio” according to HTML)).
  Looks pretty, yeah, contents are fine but what about the technical side?

Related posts:

1. The Power of Feedback (Gefilus, once again)
2. Valio.fi – anna elämän maistua.
3. Opera Mini 4.1 (or my mobile browsing, revisited)

Home - Valio.fi's front page

Above is a screenshot of Valio.fi, front page (in english).

The english version of finnish site is somehow empty, so I’ll use the finnish side instead (sorry!).

I’ll review the site shortly on three two aspects (as I’m lazy, this is my blog and the third category, usability, got me bored):

1. Design and looks
2. Technical side
3. Ad Hoc usability and Information Architecture

Design and looks

In my opinion the new design looks good and fresh – as it should when advertising dairy produts;)  Compared to old design the contrast is great, or what would you say? (Screen grab using Archive.org below)

Especially the orange compared to new blueish theme is somehow annoying in the old version,

Flowerish logo theme is repeated at page background and images, nice!

Technical side

Platform

On technical side the site uses Oracle Portal as platform (as did the old one, too). Oracle’s platform is sturdy enterprise level publishing platform which suits high traffic sites like Valio (although according to TNS Metrix it isn’t one of the 250 Top Finnish sites).

HTML Validation

• returns HTTP 406 when trying to validate with W3C Validator.
• using Firefox HTML Validator returns over 100 errors, starting with no Doctype declaration.
• Result: terrible, doesn’t validate as anything.

Opera Mini Simulator Test (mobile use)

• works pretty well

Styles

• What site at 2009 uses document specific styles (with <style> -element)? Ah, I remembered, Valio.fi.

Random

• Page naming is awful (simple SEO, Search Engine Optimization,  anyone?)
  • example 1, front page is titled “Etusivu” (front page)
  • example 2, Tilauspiste page is simply titled “Tilauspiste”
  • would it be better if it read Valio somewhere?
    for example:
    Etusivu – Valio.fi
• URL‘s are quite pretty, no page ID’s used, nice.
  But:
  • technical platform is visible in every URL:
    http://www.valio.fi/portal/page/portal/Valio
  • so, get rid of the /portal/page/portal/ -part and yes, better!
    

Conclunsions

• Redesign looks good and sports some nifty new contents.
• Quite good a redesign on top.
• Technical side of the site is sturdy and working, but doesn’t validate.
• It’s generally good idea to select a CMS (Content Managemment System) to suit one’s needs. Perhaps Oracle Portal is the best solution here.
• URL’s are are important, too. They get printed on magazines, on milk cartons (sic!) and sides of cars.
  Try printing:
  • www.valio.fi/keittokirja in stead of
  • http://www.valio.fi/portal/page/portal/Valio/Keittokirja
  • See any difference?
    

Related posts:

1. Gefilus (Valio revisited)
2. What’s Wrong With Finnish Theatre (Or My Short Trip to Tampereen teatterikesä)
3. Pretty URLs (or Aamulehti redesign)

Social software and Web 2.0, yeah, great things. But – should be applied carefully!

First things first, I use Firefox as my browser. I also have the marvellous adblock -plugin installed and basically all the finnish ad servers blocked.

Anyway, pretty URLs¨(Uniform Resource Locators). What does it actually mean? URL is “in normal” use the address for certain web page. (I’ll use URI, Uniform Resource Identifier, in this posting as almost the same as URL). For example URL for this page is:
http://ilkka.kaikuvuo.com/2008/06/pretty-urls-or…lehti-redesignpretty-urls-or-aamulehti-redesign/
, where http is the used protocol, kaikuvuo.com is the domain name and stuff after it represents the structure of the site (used to be folder structure, nowadays is something completely different).

Anyway, pretty URLs? Human readable URLs?

The above example is pretty clear, domain is ilkka.kaikuvuo.com, then comes the year, month and the title of this posting. Pretty pretty? (Also nice for search engines!)

Sidenote: do read the “Cool URIs don’t change“!

Ok, back to Aamulehti.

Why do I think the redesign sucks?

• URIs are not that pretty. For example the front page’s address (cool URI is http://www.aamulehti.fi) is:

  http://www.aamulehti.fi/cs/Satellite?pagename=KAL_newssite/GoToHomepage

• Front page is full of ads (except that it isn’t, thanks to Adblock) or empty space (using Adblock)
• Site is very, very heavy with all the AJAX goodness
• Lue lisää (Read more) -links used heavily on every page – WTF? Basic thing: don’t use phrases such as “read more” in links. Is bad for screen readers, is bad for search engines is bad for (list continues)
• News on the front page are cropped automatically, which results in awkward sentences and so on.
• Redesign caused the pages to crash (hey yeah, lot of requests? Get used to it!) for hours.

Bah. I don’t seem to have the energy to rant anymore, I give up. (Could go on and on about the blogs and everything).

There are some good and nifty features too, at Aamulehti.fi. But as the Site is down, no report on them. Perhaps later.

More redesigns that suck:www. hel.fi (the city of Helsinki) reports as follows:

15.06.08 Hel.fi pages were transferred on a new technical platform

The City of Helsinki web pages www.hel.fi were transferred on a new technical platform during week 25. All the URL addresses of the pages changed.

Did I say something about cool URIs earlier?

Could someone please, please, give me a great redesign? A finnish one?

Please?

Pretty please?

(Small editorial comment: I’ll add some screen grabs if the site works for an hour or two in a row…)

Related posts:

1. Tampere United Redesign
2. Valio.fi – anna elämän maistua.
3. Nokia (Yet Again) Chosen as “Best Web Page in Finland”

Tampere United, my local football (soccer, natürlich!) team, just released a redesign of their site.

My first opinion: WTF?

Flash, Javascript, font size even smaller than it used to be, almost everything displayed as images (and the list goes on and on and on).

77 validation errors (according to W3C’s Validator). And yes, although valid HTML is not the key to happiness, it is certainly a measure of quality.

News -section at front page done with flash (sic!). WTF?

Antti Pohja’s so-called Blog: no RSS, no proper archives, no commenting. Nice stories, though, no complaints to Ato!

Tested with Opera Mini Simulator (latest version):

• with mobile browsing off (no mobile view):
  Looks quite nice. News don’t work. Menu doesn’t work. Sponsor -list doesn’t work. Images look terrible (at lo-res).
• mobile browsing on (mobile view):
  Fucking awful (imho)! (Menu comes first, news don’t work at front page, ad’s are really, really big and so on).

Visually the redesign is quite ok. Huge player up front is a nice touch, visually speaking. Colours go well with the team colours (blue and green).

Bearing accessibility and usability in mind the redesign is a total failure:

• Menu system is based on drop-down menus (CSS-based, I’ll give you that!), but still really hard to use for people with disabilities or for the elderly.
• Layout is fixed (try to enlarge the text, see what happens! How about lower resolutions, like 800×600?)
• Reading order (linearized) is not logical.
• Alternative texts for images and other content are not that informative (like the picture with team’s goalie, Mikko Kaven: Icon 01 Kaven) or seem to be missing completely
• No images? Almost no content at Front Page! (Screen capture to the right)

Summary:

I don’t like this redesign. There’s nothing new for me and the old features are even worse than they were. But, as I already am a fan of TamU, perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Perhaps time will tell if I grow to like this one, too. Like I did with the older ones.

Edit:
There seems to be some new features, though. One is videos from games attached to reports (example), with interviews. Too bad this isn’t, technically speaking, not that good. Flash video, yes. Why, oh why does it start automatically?
Overall quality of videos is good, have to give you that!

Related posts:

1. Pretty URLs (or Aamulehti redesign)
2. Enter the Tampere United feed
3. Tampere United and Feeds

Juoksusta on tullut yhä tärkeämpi osa allekirjoittaneen arkea vuosien varrella. Ja kyllä, musiikkia pitäisi pystyä kuuntelemaan juostessa.

• C-kasettisoitin ei 90-luvun kokemusten mukaan toimi juoksun ohessa. Liian painava laite, puskurista huolimatta musiikki hyppii ja pätkii.
• CD-soitin ei kokemusten mukaan toimi juoksun ohessa. Liian painava ja isokokoinen laite, puskurista huolimatta musiikki hyppii ja pätkii. Bonuksena saattaa saada CD-levynsä naarmuille.
• MD-soitin (minidisc) ei kokemusten mukaan toimi juoksun ohessa. Laite on kyllä siedettävän kokoinen ja kevyt, mutta pitkään samoja levyjä kuunneltaessa levyt kuluvat ja musiikki pätkii. Puskurointi toimii pääsääntöisesti, muttei kuitenkaan kauhean hyvin.
• MP3-soitin toimii juostessa, useimmiten oikein hyvin. Keveys ja pieni koko bonuksena. Ongelmaksi muodostuu soittimen paikka juoksulenkin aikana; taskussa? Pomppii.
  Ranteessa? Njooh, jos on sopiva malli ja/tai sopiva rannenauha.

Vuosien käytännön testauksen perusteella ainoa toimiva tapa kuunnella musiikkia juoksulenkin aikana on MP3-soittimen käyttö. Takavuosien kokemuksen perusteella paras vaihtoehto on erillinen soitin; soittimen ollessa integroitu puhelimeen saattaa takaraivossa tykyttää koko lenkin ajatus siitä, että joku voi soittaa.
Ei siis minua varten, vaikkakin nykyiset puhelimien soittimet ovat jo varsin kohtuullisia.

Musiikin kuuntelemisen lisäksi olisi mukava tietää juostu matka, keskinopeus (ja kilometrinopeus, arvioitu tai todellinen). Allekirjoittanut on kokeillut askelmittaria; ei toimi käytännössä, koska juoksulenkillä maastossa askelpituus tuskin kovin montaa kertaa on sama kuin laitteeseen ennakkoon kalibroitu. Ok, kyllähän tämäkin tekniikka on parantunut, mutta…

Ad hoc -jaottelu erilaisista tekniikoista voisi olla vaikkapa seuraava:

1. Askelmittarit
2. Edistyneet askelmittarit
3. GPS-pohjaiset ratkaisut

Ensimmäiseen ryhmään kuuluvat “perusaskelmittari”; siis sellaiset, joita voi ostaa kävelyyn esimerkiksi paikallisesta urheiluliikkeestä. Eivät toimi välttämättä kovin hyvin juoksussa.

Seuraavaan (hatarasti valittuun) ryhmään kuuluvat ns. edistyneemmät askelmittarit, jotka mittaavat esimerkiksi kiihtyvyyttä.

Viimeiseen ryhmään kuuluvat GPS-pohjaiset ratkaisut, näytöillä tai ilman.

Related posts:

1. Saved: Saavutettavuutta arvioimassa: tapaus Avustajaportti.
2. Saved: Tiedon hallintaa sosiaalisten kirjanmerkkien avulla?
3. Saved: rakastaa sinua kuin kissanpentu:

Opera mini on Operan mobiililaitteille tarkoitettu selain, joka sovittaa websivuja palvelinpäässä kannettavalle laitteelle paremmin sopivaksi mm. koon ja asettelun suhteen (lisätietoja englanniksi Opera Minin sivuilla)

Lisäksi Mini tukee 3.0 -versiosta lähtien RSS-virtoja, SSL-salausta ja valokuvien lisäystä esimerkiksi blogeihin suoraan kännykästä.

Minista on olemassa myös verkkopohjainen simulaattori, jolla pääsee kokeilemaan vaikkapa omien sivujensa toimintaa “mobiililaitteella”.

Aikaisemmin simulaattorin ongelmana ollut osoitteiden naputtaminen käyttäen “matkapuhelimen” näppäimistöä on ratkaistu sillä, että osoitteen voi nykyään välittää pyynnön parametrinä tyyliin:
http://www.operamini.com/demo/?url=osoite

Esimerkiksi tämän blogin toimintaa Opera Minilla pääsee kokeilemaan surffaamalla osoitteeseen:
http://www.operamini.com/demo/?url=matriisi.ee.tut.fi/hypermedia/blogs/ippe/

Opera tarjoaa testauksen helpottamiseksi myös bookmarklet -toiminnallisuutta Firefox -selaimelle.

Valaisevaa, eikö totta?

Related posts:

1. Opera Mini 4.1 (or my mobile browsing, revisited)
2. Saved: rakastaa sinua kuin kissanpentu:
3. Saved: Tiedon hallintaa sosiaalisten kirjanmerkkien avulla?