Archive for the 'news' Category

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Nokia’s Site Chosen as “Best In Finland”

Published on 19.3.2009 in news, rant, survey and web. Closed Tags: , , , , .

[Update: I was contacted by Webmark about the survey. Read Updates at end of post.]

According to various (finnish) sources (Tietoviikko,  Digitoday, Tietokone etc),  Nokia.fi was chosen as “best web site in Finland, 2008“.

I don’t even want to begin to conversate about Nokia.fi’s pros or cons – I’ll just focus on how this achievement was published in the news.

Well yeah.

I spotted the news at Digitoday. It states that Webmark, “a company that measures quality of web sites”,  found Nokia’s website the best in Finland (according to their evaluation/survey).
Then Digitoday, as well as all other publishers, continues jabbering about survey/evaluation done, which sites made it to Top-10 and so on.

Nice.

Except that:

  • I didn’t find a single link to survey/evaluation made
  • I didn’t find a single line mentioning tools used in the evaluation
  • I didn’t find a single line mentioning source for this bit of news
    (Where did it come from (Heaven?)? Was there a press conference (where? when? who was invited?)? Did the company post a press release?)

Jolly good.

Now, as I’m by nature mean, nasty and curious, I googled Webmark first. Found eventually their finnish site. And yes! There it was, the press release about “Best Site in Finland, 2007″.

Wait, what?

2007? It should be 2008 now,  shouldn’t it?

No press release about year 2008, just 2007.

Nice.

Well, back to Google.
Tried “webmark suomen paras verkkosivu“. No source, no press releases from original source, just different posts with (virtually) same content. (Other queries returned same results, too.)

Back to original post at Digitoday.  CEO’s of Webmark and Accenture are mentioned, as well as that “at the same time published research done by Accenture” – hey, I’ll just see Accenture.fi for origins!

Nothing at all about these things at  “press” -part of their pages.

Makes one wonder.

Hey guys at Webmark, Accenture, Digitoday and so on, if you read this, please post (all or at least one of the following):

  1. original press release
  2. origin of this news (if it was published at conference or something, where and when?)
  3. actual evaluation data
  4. methods used at evaluation

.. and then I’m willing to believe Nokia.fi is “the best web site in Finland, 2008″.

Update 25.3.2009

I was contacted by Webmark about this post and spent interesting times discussing the survey and methods. I also received some additional material, which made some points mentioned above quite clear.

  1. Original press release was published at the given date at Webmark’s site, only in the afternoon (read it here, pdf)
  2. Announcement was made at “Vuoden verkkosivut 2008″ -conference, 19.3.2009. (See the program here.)
    Why didn’t I find the link     nor the page? Only mention at Webmark’s front page about the announcement and conference (symposium?) was a flash -based banner, which got caught in my Adblock (it’s not a good idea to name banners “banner”, you know.). And when it comes to no origin at news about survey, thank our beloved and overworked reporters!
  3. Evaluation data is not available, but is based on methodology by Mr. Harri Oinas-Kukkonen from University of Oulu.
  4. See point 3 and press release.

(Bit more later…)

Should We Test It a Bit More?

Published on 3.3.2009 in news. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

[Editor's note: Do read the comments of this posting about Jokakoti.fi.]

Always the big question; how much should we test it? When is it ready?

When should we launch the product? Should we launch alpha or beta (private or public)? Is it ok to launch so called perpetual beta (take Gmail for example)?

Pretty good questions.

Lately I’ve read that one should always launch early (see Startups in 13 Sentences for one example).

Well, today I received an e-mail from Mtv3 inviting me to beta-test their new real estate service (jokakoti.fi). I can’t actually remember if I signed for invite – might have done that.

Anyway, used the link provided in the e-mail. Whee, HTTP-basic authentication set to protect the pages! Professional? Not so, IMHO. Typed in the general user name and password combo (was there an ad agency who came up with these?) – what follows?

Screen capture below:

MTV3's new real estate service, Jokakoti.fi as seen with FF 3.0.6, newest Flash installed (and working), running on WinXP

MTV3's new real estate service, Jokakoti.fi as seen with FF 3.0.6, newest Flash installed (and working), running on WinXP

Pretty nice, isn’t it?

Plain blue, small tick mark from Adblock showing that there’s some Flash present.

A quick peek at code;  almost valid HTML, awful conditional comments used for IE and yeah, that’s about it. Flash and Ajax, which don’t seem to work with my sturdy old computer.

Nice.

Accessibility? Can’t even evaluate it as I don’t see the content. Oh wait, I can, can I?

Yes I can: accessibility is not that good.

Lessons learned so far:

  • In order to use the site I have to have Flash 10 (latest version) installed.
  • Beta testing is a fine way to catch some bugs – as we see here;)

Small test with IE7 – no surprise – it works. (Screen grab below)
Pretty nice, though the slides are sluggish and so on.

jokakoti viewed with IE7

jokakoti viewed with IE7

Lessons learned so far?

  • not all users have the latest plugins installed
  • not all users have up-to-date computers (I’d reckon this works like a charm with my laptop)

Last but not the least, a small test with my favourite mobile browser, Opera Mini, using their wonderful Simulator/Demo. (Screen grab below, screen states that one has to have Flash and JS support).

jokakoti viewed Operamini simulator

jokakoti viewed Operamini simulator

Conclusions?

  • Developing cross-browser, accessible websites is not easy
  • One can’t rely on users having newest versions nor fast computers
  • Beta testing is worth one’s while.

Playing With Google Maps (part 1, sadly)

Published on 22.2.2009 in news. 4 Comments

As some people may know, I’ve been interested in Google Maps for quite a while already.

I can see almost endless possibilities when it comes to combining data with location information. Oh all the mashups! (You may get a pretty good idea about Google maps mashups from Google Maps Mania or Mashable).

I’m also an enthusiastic WordPress user and as suchwould very much like to combine these two, thank you.

During the last years I’ve tried several WordPress plugins for Google maps (inlucuding this one) but they just didn’t do what I wanted them to do. Either they were a) too small scaled for my needs b) too hard to use or c) just plain bad.

Today I installed yet another WordPress Maps plugin.

First impressions? Well yeah, pretty ok.

In every post there’s now a new content box, “Google Maps for WordPress” where I can type location name, address and description (plus map measures), then press “send map to editor”.  Let’s try it with this post!

Yeah, I’ll type “Sonecta”, address “Hermiankatu 8, Tampere” and desc “Sonecta HQ” and press “send” -button. Voila, what happens?

Nothing.

Another try, with map width and height.

Nothing.

Quick save  if something went wrong there – boom, everything I typed at map box is gone. Sweet.

Another try. Nothing.

Well, let’s hope it works when I save and publish this one..

Perhaps this version of WP is not supported? Don’t know. Perhaps I’ll try it again. Or not.

Anyway, what I wanted to do in the first place was to provide users a way to tag events or something else on a Google Map. That I can certainly provide in other ways, but would be nice to do it with WordPress.

Perhaps some day…

I’ll continue babbling about Google maps quite soon.

Updating Is Fun

Published on 5.10.2008 in news and wordpress. Closed Tags: , .

Updating is fun, isn’t it? Well, updating WordPress is quite ok, no problems usually (yesterday was happily no exception).

This blog is running atm:

  • Wordprwss 2.6.2
  • K2 RC 7
  • some plugins (mainly seo/meta plugins)

If I only had some time, I’d make something nice here, starting with posts;)

Helsinki, UN and Certain Surveys.

Published on 8.7.2008 in accessibility, article, news and survey. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

United Nations (UN) just released their survey about municipal websites, world wide. Actual title was “Digital Governance in Municipalities Worldwide (2007) ~ A Longitudinal Assessment of Municipal Websites Throughout the World” (PDF-link!).

What was the survey about? (Bolding by yours truly, quotes from the summary part of the survey) In the survey they “evaluated the websites of municipalities in terms of digital governance and ranked them on a global scale”. Cities and nations were selected as follows: “The top 100 most wired nations were identified using data from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)…”.  and “The largest city, by population in each of these 100 countries was then selected for the study and used as a  surrogate for all cities in the respective country…”

To summarize: top 100 most wired nations were under inspection, of which biggest cities’ websites were evaluated. Helsinki is the most crowded city in Finland, so Helsinki’s website (www.hel.fi) was evaluated.

Five components were evaluated:

  1. Privacy/Security;
  2. Usability;
  3. Content;
  4. Services; and
  5. Citizen Participation

I’ll leave other aspects alone and concentrate on the second component, usability. On the survey they examined “three types of websites: traditional web pages, forms, and search tools”. Sounds like a good selection to me, although in my opinion those are just parts of one website. What was then, in fact, evaluated? Branding, structure, consistency (colours, navigational elements etc.), requirements stated (clearly), availability of sitemaps and alternative versions for documents, basic forms’ usability, search tools and so on. Quite good a selection (imho), again.

In the content-component they also evaluated the “Bobby compliance” (sic!) or access to web site via a TDD Phone Service. (Side notes: Bobby was originally “a free online tool provided by the Centre for Applied Special Technology (CAST) used to validate websites for WAI and Section 508 compliance” (Wikipedia). At 2005 it became “Watchfire WebXACT” -tool (still free to use online) and was finally integrated by IBM at 2008 and is nowadays part of IBM’s Rational Policy Tester Accessibility Edition and therefore not available for free use.)

In the usability section Helsinki was ranked fourth overall and in the content section sixth overall. Not too bad, eh? About Helsinki was said: “Helsinki increased in its overall score and its ranking
significantly from those in 2005 and 2003. Helsinki was ranked 35th with a score of 34.62 in 2005 and was not ranked in the top five cities in any of the categories.” Now Helsinki is among top ten in four out of five categories (privacy, citizen participation, usability and content – if I’m not wrong).

Hooray for Helsinki and hooray for Finland, as the survey quite clearly states that “(The largest city, by population … was … ) used as a  surrogate for all cities in the respective country“. Points for Finland, not for Helsinki, I’d say, although finnish media wanted to state so (for example Helsingin Sanomat says that “Helsinki’s Website is the third best in the world” /  (HS: Helsingin verkkosivut ovat kolmanneksi parhaat maailmassa).To claim that Helsinki’s site is the 3rd best in the world is at best misleading and at worst just plain wrong.

Anyway, pretty nice results.

Why am I not pleased?

Helsinki’s site is in my opinion not as good as all this hype could lead us to believe. Good, yes, they’ve done a lot of work, but still! The URI structure is awful (take http://www.hel.fi/wps/portal/Helsinki?WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT=/Helsinki/fi/Etusivu as an example), layout is table-based, front page has a lot of HTML errors and so on. Quite minor things, have to give you that.

The thing I’m worried about at the moment is that the given UN Survey will now be used as a way to measure basic quality of web sites in Finland (“Survey says that www.hel.fi is the third best in the world!”) and the not-so-nicely-implemented features will be forgotten (at hel.fi and other sites, too). Quality of finnish sites has improved but is not that good when accessibility and usability are taken into account. Even technical quality can be questioned in many cases.

To sum things up: Helsinki (or actually Finland) scored pretty well on municipal websites survey. Overall quality is ok, but in my opinion not as superior as the media tends to say. we still have a lot to do!

My Comparative Study about Facebook Ads (weeklies, part 2)

Published on 3.7.2008 in facebook and news. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Phew, time for facebook ads, again (weekly #1).

Ten random clicks at Facebook and ten times Facebook “contextual ads”, here we go!

  1. Title:
    Voita XXXX-lahjakortti (win a gift certificate to XXXX ) (Name of a swedish furniture company censored)
    Content:
    Company’s logo, background is a cloudy sky. Text tells that one can win a gift certificate byt the sum of 2000 e to this particular company. (Click here!)
    Relevance (to me):
    Well, everyone needs furniture sometimes. Quite relevant.
    Origin:
    Finnish (Swedish?)
  2. Title:
    Omega Seamaster (Same ad as last week.)
    Content:
    Picture of a watch. Ad for 1 cent auction.
    Relevance (to me):
    Watch looks ok. Don’t do auctions online (or otherwise)
    Origin:
    Have no idea. Probably translated.
  3. Title:
    Linssejä halvalla hinnalla … (Lenses at low prices …)
    Content:
    Animated gif. Apparently sells glasses (or lenses for glasses). Annoying animated gif.
    Relevance (to me):
    Relevant, as I wear glasses (while working). Just bought a new pair, actually.
    Origin:
    Finnish.
  4. Title:
    World Vision -kummiksi (Sponsor a child)
    Content:
    Picture of a young boy’s face. Text urges you to sponsor a child with under 1 eur/day.
    Relevance (to me):
    Hmm. Don’t know. Relevantish.
    Origin:
    Finnish. (Or international, but the given web address points to finnish partner).
  5. Title:
    Lainaa 1000 – 4000e (Get a loan of 1000-4000e)
    Content:
    Company’s logo. Loan ad.
    Relevance (to me):
    Not relevant. Don’t do online loans.
    Origin:
    Finnish.
  6. (Facebook crashed)
  7. Title:
    Upea rusketus (Great tan)
    Content:
    Picture of naked (man’s) chest. No bodily hair. Has a hand over left nipple. Text says something about a perfect tan.
    Relevance (to me):
    Not relevant. I get my tan outdoors, plus that pictures of naked men aren’t just my cup of tea.
    Origin:
    Probably Finnish.
  8. Title:
    Subway xxxxxxxxkatu
    Content:
    Some daily discount prices at Subway (just opened a new outlet quite near me).
    Relevance (to me):
    Quite relevant. The outlet in question is neareast to me and on my way to work. Go to Subway sometimes.
    Origin:
    Finnish.
  9. Title:
    KUN ARKI ON JUHLAA – et elämääsi tuhlaa (When every day is a party – you won’t waste your life. Actually sorft of a word play, can be translated but just don’t feel like it.)
    Content:
    Huge animated gif stating that one’s life can be a party/celebration/whatever every day. Quick online loan.
    Relevance (to me):
    Not relevant. Annoying picture, don’t do online loans.
    Origin:
    Finnish.
  10. Title:
    Voita luksusmatka (Win a luxury trip)
    Content:
    Pic of a girl sipping some beverage from a huge glass. Arrow pointing to her head. Minuscle text about location (St. Tropez). Text says that you can win a luxury trip to St. Tropez for two!
    Relevance (to me):
    Not that relevant.
    Origin:
    International? (translated).

Not that funny results this time.

Some random remarks:

  • same ads keep repeating most of the time (tried to spot different ones)
  • most of the ads are about 1 cent auctions, loans or stuff like that (which is not suprising)
  • quality of translation depends, a lot. Some are better than others.
  • some of the ads were perhaps more relevant this week?

Till next week!

Pretty URLs (or Aamulehti redesign)

Published on 18.6.2008 in finnish, news, rant and redesign. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

My almost weekly series of (failed or bad) finnish redesigns continues. This time my local newspaper, Aamulehti, decided to jump in the social train, big time.

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…)

Blog (re)opened.

Published on 28.4.2008 in news. Closed Tags: .

Hi ya!

This is the new incarnation of my weblog. Former “official” blog used to live at TUT HLab, but as I no longer work there I had to find a new home!

I’ll write mostly in english, though some postings will almost certainly be in finnish, too.

All the older postings, saved from “Hypermediaa ja elämää”, are also in finnish.

Comments and such are welcome.