Are you a victim of Google's Mobilegeddon?

Google recently released new algorithms for calculating the search rank of sites, and for those sites without a responsive design that accommodates mobile platforms it's had significant impact.  This survey of several top sites indicates that some popular but not very mobile friendly sites have lost as much as 90% of their rank when reevaluated with the new algorithm.  Sites listed has having lost more than 30% of their site rank include popular sites like tested.com, boxofficemojo.com, thinkexist.com and walmartstores.com.  Sites that went up in rank include tvtropes.org, foreignaffairs.com, knowyourmeme.com and many others.   Some sites (like newmexicocriminallaw.com) increased their site ranking by over 4000%!

Note that Google's new algorithm will drop your site ranking even if the person searching for you is on a desktop.  It may drop it even more if they're searching for you on a mobile device.

Many web consumers, and particularly the heaviest web consumers, today have smartphones and tablet devices, and research shows they're now doing an average of 40% of their browsing on those tools.  It only makes sense to have a site that displays attractively on both desktop and mobile platforms.  Fortunately for users of CMSs like DotNetNuke you can simply re-skin your site, and maybe move some content around and get a responsive site up quickly and effectively.  Sites that were once flat with non-mobile friendly menus can be converted quickly and usually inexpensively to sites that look like this.

So bring up YOUR site on your phone or tablet. Is it hard to read and navigate?  Or try Google's mobile friendly test to see how your site fares. Might be time for an update. If so contact us to get a quote. 

5 Key Features of 2015 Best of the Web Winners

How does your site measure up versus the best of the web?

Each year Rochester Business Journal publishes it's Best of the Web awards - for top performing and designed sites in the Rochester area.  They publish a summary of all the nominees and give some detail into what went into these sites. In this article I will look at some of the objective results from those statistics.

I hear all the time from customers "I want my website to be the best", or "I want it ranked at the top of the search engines" or "I want tons of hits".  But how do you know if your site measures up? What are reasonable results for your efforts?  What should you expect to spend to get those results?

One way to look at it is to base your evaluation and investment on what the best in the industry have done.  So let's examine some results we can glean from the Best of the Web article in 2015.

Let's start with average age since last overhaul.  Best of the web nominees ranged from 6.25 to .17 years age since last overhaul - but here's the kicker - the overall average for all nominees was just 1.15 years. That's right - the very best were overhauling their sites pretty frequently.  There are great reasons for this - chief among them is that web technology changes frequently.  New browsers and platforms are released yearly or even monthly.  Sites have to adapt to different screen sizes and experiences as mobile makes a huge inroad. The most frequently cited overhaul reason was to adapt to a responsive design that would work on either a phone, a tablet or a desktop.  That's one example of a changing environment but we can find so many more, from new web technologies to offering more sophisticated interactive experiences.  The lesson learned here is that building a website is an ongoing process - not a one time project.

The next statistic we'll look at is number of hits per month. The site with the least number of hits was 150 per month, and the site with the most was over 2.5 million.  Obviously this means that the overall number can vary widely, but the average among all the sites (barring the one outlier of 2.5 million) was well over 77,000 hits per month.  If we put the outlier back in it's over 150k.  In any case it means that sites that performed well were achieving numbers well over 50,000 hits per month.

So what about initial development cost?  How much should you invest if you want to build a best of the web nominated site.  Again, there was a wide range of costs from $2,500 to $80,000.  Many of the larger sites didn't publish cost to produce - frequently because their site was developed internally and they didn't track it. For those site though they frequently listed staffing levels of well over 10 people to build the site and maintain it.  The average cost for those reporting for initial development was $25,128.  The way websites are developed, and the way companies think about their costs, this may be less than accurate.  The reason is they frequently think of their own resources as "free", where in fact they do have a cost, and more importantly they're probably thinking only of the last overhaul, rather than the total cost of ownership (TCO) of all website development to date. But let's say that this is representative of major website project costs - even if not TCO.  How's your budget for web development?  Close to that?  If not you may not be getting what you want.

Next comes ongoing maintenance costs.  Good websites are constantly updated and  maintained, the minimum cost was zero (I find that hard to believe - they probably have internal staff maintaining the site and aren't counting those costs) and $50,000.  That's right - some of the large sites pay as much as $50,000 per year to maintain their site!  The average expenditure per year for those reporting was around $7800.  What is your annual maintenance budget?  Do you have that price range in mind when determining what your website spend will be?

Let's finally look at staffing.  The number of people working on the sites ranged from 1 to over 20 in the case of the site with 2.5M hits per month.  The average staff that oversaw site maintenance and development was 4. Now they may not all be full time - but most sites listed out who did what and there was significant work being put in. I'd hazard a guess and say that these labor costs weren't factored into the site costs, based on comments in the website descriptions.  So in addition to the above paid maintenance costs, many of the best of the web sites had additional internal labor costs to maintain. And if they're employing that many people to maintain the site, you can bet that they're constantly updating and keeping the site relevant.

Some keyword analysis from the judges comments show these words trickling to the top, indicating their importance in the overall rankings of the sites. I'll exclude words like "site" that don't really indicate anything about the value they were looking for:

• Design (50 times), usually associated with the word "clean".  They are looking for uncluttered, easy to navigate and pleasing page design.
• Content (40 times), in the end a website's value is determined not by how pretty it is - but by the relevancy, usefulness and indexing of the content itself.  Content is king.
• Social (34 times), How well the sites were integrated with and reflected their social media use and branding was highly important to sites.
• Easy (32 times), Usually associated with the word "Navigation".  How easy is it to get around the site, find the content you're looking for.
• Home (30 times) - referring to an attractive and inviting home page design
• Mobile (30 times), Responsive design and a nice look and feel on all platforms was an important consideration. With over 30% of traffic now generated by mobile devices this is key.
• Other important keywords included Link (31 times), Media (27 times), Responsive (22 times), Slideshow (17 times), Scroll (17 times).  These all indicate key features the judges thought were important enough to mention in the comments.

Some info on the statistics themselves. There were 37 sites reporting, only 35 gave counts on hits per month, 24 gave initial development cost numbers, 28 gave maintenance cost numbers.  The rest of the statistics were completely filled in by the 37 respondents.

So let's develop a quick checklist:

1. When was the last time you overhauled your site?  If it was over 2 years score a -1 if under two years score a 1
2. How many hits per month are you getting?  If over 50,000 score a 1 if under score -1
3. What did you spend to develop your site initially (or in the last overhaul)? If your budget was over $25,000 give yourself a 1, otherwise -1
4. What is your budget for maintenance costs per year?  If over $7500 give yourself a 1 otherwise a -1.
5. How many people within your company help maintain the site?  If over 3 give yourself a 1 otherwise a -1.
6. Is your site responsive - does it operate well on a phone?  If yes, give yourself a 1, otherwise a -1. 
7. Do you have a well executed and integrated social media plan that is reflected in your site design? Give yourself a 1 if you do, -1 if you do not.

How did you score? Positive or negative?  If you scored negative and you are dissatisfied with your site's results and performance, you can identify where you may have gaps based on the negative scores you achieved.  If you want a full evaluation of your site and a more complete analysis of performance vs benchmarks, contact www.os-cubed.com for more information.

Why Wearable Tech is Here to Stay

Lately the news has been buzzing with the latest in wearable devices.  Devices such as Google Glass, integrated watches by Samsung, Apple and other vendors, Vuzix Goggles (a Rochester, NY company) and Oculus Rift are starting to enter mainstream vocabulary.  Prototypes and beta software are starting to roll out and consumers and developers are getting to start to play with these devices hands on.  Some companies are even looking at creating heads up contact lenses!

This has all happened before of course - we've seen everything from surround vision helmets to heads up displays.  But never before has the actual technology really met the expectations of potential users -  whether it's limited use scenarios, bulky or cumbersome form factors, or poor integration and adoption by other platforms - many such ventures have started and fizzled.

So why is this time different?  Well there are a few reasons:

• Between advances in optics, small screen and flat panel displays, and miniaturization of essential components the visual aspect of the interfaces have gotten smaller, more useable, and more convenient.
• The ubiquity of extremely powerful cell phone devices means that processing and communications can be offloaded to that device, rather than needing to be integrated into the wearable platform.
• The improvement in wireless communications reduces  the size, and increases the range of components.
• People's addiction to ever-present ever-accessible media, through the use of always on and always connected internet devices has increased to the point where people crave the convenience of making that as quickly accessible as possible.
• Current interface methods through products like phones require hands-on interaction and attention distracting form factors.
• Voice recognition - by uploading to the cloud and analyzing in real time - has improved dramatically.
• Battery technology is improving dramatically making use of such devices more convenient.
• Movie media has started to prepare people for this reality.  We see fanciful interfaces in movies that mimic the interfaces that these devices give us - and we want them.

So are the new wearable devices perfect yet?  Not by any means.  While the hardware is starting to catch up there are software and social aspects that must be overcome.  How will having an always on and available camera change the way people interact?  If anything you say might be recorded and uploaded to the internet in real time - how will that change society?  There is significant social resistance to people using products like Glass and those issues will need to be addressed if it's to succeed.  And there are still plenty of technological issues to overcome.

I say to you though - these advances are inevitable.  Rather than railing against them your time might be better spent determining how to make best of use of them. Outside the personal use of such devices - the business uses are outstanding.  Imagine a tech having all his manuals and instructions available at will, and having both their hands free.  Imagine being able to shop or price compare by just looking at the bar code on a product.  Record a meeting for playback later rather than taking notes.  Video your professor in class.  Imagine your UPS or FEDEX person abandoning their scanner and just snapping a photo of the package barcode, and recording the GPS coordinates of the delivery.  These are all very real and very doable scenarios without any significant improvement in existing technology.

The advent of prescription wearable tech from Rochester Optical (another Rochester Company) for heads up display is particularly exciting - since the wearers of that tech are already used to having glasses, adding a heads up display is no leap for them - they are used to the idea.  Fashion designers have been pushing glasses as fashion accessories rather than for vision correction - paving the way for the addition of Google Glass and other displays into the world of non-prescription glass wearers.

So with wearable tech being inevitable - how are you planning to leverage that with your new products?  Is there a way you can enhance the use of your product with wearable tech?  Provide an alternate interface or display screen?  Integrate heads up vision?  Are you ready for this revolution and tapping it's potential fully?  OS-Cubed is - ask us how!

What does a Best of the Web website cost?

The Rochester Business Journal holds a Best of the Web competition each year.  OS-Cubed is proud to have developed sites that have qualified in the past as a finalist - though this year none of our clients submitted an entry.  The RBJ's competition looks at websites in a variety of categories including Not for Profit cultural, Not for profit human services, Banking and Finance, Education, Business and professional services, Government and Community, Health care, Legal Services, Manufacturing, Real Estate, Retail and Tourism.  In short, a vast cross section of the web services industry.

One of the more interesting questions they ask (and not everyone answers this) is the cost to build the site and the annual cost to maintain it.  Note that the interpretation of these amounts is left up to the submitter of the site and (for instance) may not include internal development costs, volunteer costs (on the part of Not for Profit companies) and other non-accounted for expenses.  Nonetheless, the study offers a nice cross section of the community and what it costs to build and maintain an award winning quality website.

If we look at the data gathered from the information provided, the initial cost of development of an award winning site is roughly $40,000 on average with a range of $325,000 to $2500.  The cost of yearly improvements, upkeep and maintenance arrives at around $6700/year or around 17% of the total cost of the initial site and varies between a few hundred and tens of thousands. 

Award winning sites are typically redesigned every 3 years or so, the cost of which isn't surveyed, but we can expect the cost to be somewhere around 1/4 to 1/2 the initial design cost for a content managed site, and as much as the total design cost for a "built from scratch" site.

So what does this mean for the average company looking to build a site?  Budgets in the over $10,000 range should not be surprising to you.  Depending on features and functions (retail, real estate and banking sites probably cost much more than not for profit or information only sites) you could be anywhere along a continuum of a few thousand dollars all the way to hundreds of thousands.  You also should be expecting to expend somewhere in the 15-20% range to maintain, update and improve your site each year.  As new browsers come out (is your site compatible with IE10 for instance?) sites may well need tweaks and updates to function properly.  Security updates need to be applied, and content needs to be changed and updated frequently.

None of these budgets included demand generation activities including SEO, direct marketing, social media, pay for click or other marketing costs.

Of course you could also opt to build a site for much less than that and not go for a "best of the web" site.  Why you would want to do that when there are competing sites that are better than yours is an exercise I'll leave up to your Marketing manager.  Good luck with that discussion :)

With budgets in that range though, you will want to carefully pick a developer and designer for the long haul - one that has your best interests at heart, and will help save you from costly mistakes - as well as recognize when an investment is worth it.

What you probably don't know about Microsoft's new direction

and why it's important for every Microsoft Developer to understand it...

Microsoft has finally let the other shoe drop on how their new Office/Cloud/Windows 8 strategy is going to work by releasing the details of how Office 2013/365 will be licensed and sold - and it's not just a shoe it's a hiking boot - landing with a big THUD.

There are some important new ramifications about how the entire thing will work - and it's important for you as a developer to understand how that changes what is still the predominant IT ecosystem on the planet.  Let me apologize now to the Linux, Apple and Android developers - this article is not for you - it's for those of us who have been working on Microsoft Apps for the last 30 years.

Let's start with a little history.  Back in the late 70's and early 80's a revolution happened.  Until that point computers were large, relatively complex beasts, controlled by a corporate entity (because they were too expensive for mere individuals to buy) and had one processor, one set of ram, and one set of hard drives shared by dozens of users through a terminal.  This had advantages and disadvantages.  It was easy to control software and access to that software, and easy to manage since everyone shared the same tools.  Of course you couldn't easily take your work home with you (you might consider that a good or bad thing) and the applications were very expensive and monolithic since it required the developer to have equivalently expensive tools to create the software.  In the late 70's personal computers peeked their way into the American home.  Initially crude and difficult to use - but relatively inexpensive compared to their mainframe counterparts - they created a revolution.  Suddenly you could purchase a system that would let you perform powerful calculations and perform difficult tasks in  your home.  More importantly, through the advent of the business PC you could have the same platform at work as you used at home and carry data back and forth on a portable storage device.  Also importantly - you could purchase a system to develop for this new platform that didn't cost an arm and a leg - which meant that new software and software improvements increased at an exponential rate.

Since that time we added in the ability to access your computer over the internet - and for computers to have access to shared data on the internet.  At the same time - through some serious investment in infrastruture, it became cheaper to get storage, processor time and bandwidth through major services like Windows Azure, Amazon AWS and other huge interconnected networks.  So in a sense we're back where we started from.  Our current devices are very complex and independent, but we're becoming more and more reliant on apps and storage that run in the cloud - simplifying the requirements for what our personal devices need to have.  Suddenly a tablet running a run of the mill low power processor can leverage gigabytes of data, bandwidth and the processing power of thousands of processors.  This means that - down the road - assuming we continue to live in a connected society our applications are going to become more and more like the original mainframe apps of the 70's and 80's.  Instead of buying machines with gigabytes or terabytes of  local storage we're going to be buying a simple inexpensive machine that leverages that cloud power.   Our operating systems need to be less complex because the heavy lifting isn't handled at the desktop any more, or even at the local server level.

With Windows 8 and Office 365 subscription services Microsoft has moved from the "software as a license you buy model" (which hasn't been eliminated yet - just deemphasized) to the "software  you subscribe to and get as needed" model.  An individual can now - for $100/year - buy any kind of device they want - phone, tablet, pc, laptop or something not even invented  yet, install office software on up to 5 devices they own, use a simpler version of that software on the web, get 27gb of cloud document storage to use or share with whomever they want (plus each of the other 4 users gets 7 gb of storage for a total of 55GB of available shareable storage for $100/year).  They get an hour of free Skype talking and sharing a month.  They get the latest version of office, allowing frequent updates to add functionality without the expense of giant new releases.  They get streaming of the software to a PC that isn't even licensed for Office to edit a document assuming the target is running Windows 7 or 8.  On the corporate side the same thing can be acquired (with slight variations in capability) for $240/year/user for enterprise users or $150/year/user for small businesses - and on the corporate side they add in sophisticated sharepoint capabilities and active directory management (doing away with the need for an active directory server, or minimizing it's need to being just a local extension of the cloud).  For $72/month they can have the same thing, without the locally installed office licenses.  In addition, with either a corporate or Live account your settings, files, and preferences follow you from machine to machine - even across platforms.  By the end of this year Gartner Group estimates that the PREDOMINANT way that websites will be accessed is via a phone or tablet.  It will outstrip desktop and laptop access - in 2013.  That's this year folks.

So what does that mean for you as a developer?  It means that Microsoft means to make cloud storage and apps it's end game - not just an add-on, and the day of the local server - and even the super powerful end user system are slowly - but surely - ending.  And if you think - well we'll just move to another platform - think again.  The largest competing platforms for end-user computing are moving in the same direction.  Apple (of course) saw this coming years ago and has quietly started phasing out desktop and laptop machines in favor of tablets and other simpler less expensive devices.  Google's play in the Android market focuses strictly on low powered machines that leverage the cloud.  Linux for the desktop?  Nice OS but used only by technogeeks so far. In the next 2-4 years you're going to see a huge shift away from expensive powerful, complex to manage servers and systems in your office or home and towards low priced, low powered systems that leverage the cloud.  And once they go cloud they won't be going back.  Don't believe me?  The only way to deploy a standalone Access application in Access 2013 is to deploy it to Azure and Sharepoint.

So what can you do as a developer?  For one - learn a cloud based system and leverage it's power - now.  I don't care if it's AWS, Azure, SharePoint or some other platform - but you should start to figure out how they work, how to make your apps operate efficiently and actively over a not-always-reliable internet connection, and how to make them scale so that you don't have to sell additional licenses to get additional power out of them.  It also means designing systems - whether they be apps, websites, or whatever - to adapt to a huge variety of interfaces and screen sizes - everything from hand-held phones to 50" 3d High Definition living room monstrosities.  They need to adapt to all sorts of interaction interfaces - the old fashioned keyboard, the mouse, the touchpad, the touchscreen, and the "gesture based" interfaces like the Kinect.  It means that data becomes a mix of BYOD storage (Bring Your Own Data) and corporate cloud storage - and how will you manage that and protect the privacy and security of data when it's easy to copy things from corporate sources into a user's private data store in the cloud.

It also means you should start to explore web and cloud based development tools. That quad core dev machine on your desk may well go away someday - and you need to be ready to use some of the new and sophisticated web based tools for software development in project management, compilation, version control, etc.  The distributed nature of today's collaborations will make that a must.

What happens if you don't?  Well how long did terminal based apps last once the PC was out?  How long did non-graphical DOS based apps after Windows came out?  How long did non-web based apps last after the internet took over?  You have some time - this isn't happening overnight.  But it IS happening and if you don't adapt there will be a day when you wake up and find your app or skills irrelevant.  And that day is approaching.

PS - if you're interested in migrating to the cloud and leveraging Office 365 OS-Cubed is a cloud expert - we can help you with migration, support and leveraging your existing infrastructure while using the cloud efficiently. 

We won't feed you a line...

I was somewhat appalled at reading this post, by a blog author I respect Chris Coyier of http://www.css-tricks.com/. He solicited comments and twitter comments on the concept of the question "What if a client came to you with an idea for a project you knew was going to fail, and would pay for it. Would you do the job anyway?".
I must say that the overwhelming number of "web designer" and "web engineering" firms out there who responded to this post basically said "Yes I'd do the job". Wow. Please go read the post. Please read the comments by other "professionals" in our field. Then ask yourself - would you rather that someone gave you the straight honest truth and always acted in your best interest? Or would you rather pay someone to just do it your way? Would you rather rely on their experience and expertise when they LIVE in that world? Wouldn't you want to work with someone whom you know will give you their honest evaluation of an ideas success or failure, act like a partner in your success, suggest better ways of achieving the same goals, or guide you to a more successful conclusion. I would rather turn away a job where I know that the client just hasn't done their homework, than take their money and build them a fail-boat.
Short term I may not make more money this way. But long term I develop 3 key features for business success:

• Loyal customers - I would rather have my customers say "This guy saved me from making a big mistake" than "this guy built my idea, took my money and then it failed". News travels fast, especially in a small city like Rochester.
• Personal integrity - Hey, maybe I'm old fashioned - but I like to be able to sleep at night knowing that I did good in the world - even if I made a bit less money than the guy who did not. If I have to let a customer go because we don't see eye-to-eye I'll do so with honesty, integrity and cooperation. You never know - sometimes they even come back.
• Loyal and honest employees - the way YOU act in the workplace defines how your employees act. If you develop a culture that creates an environment of dishonesty and money-above-everything, you will reap what you sow. Ask Bernie Madoff.

I vow in this post that I will always give a client the advice and product that is in their best interest. If you've got an idea I think is bad I'll tell you. If you can convince me I'm wrong I'll change my mind willingly. I will then help you to develop the best version of your idea that has a chance of success - or tell you that I might not be the right company for your requirements. I invite you all to take the vow and ensure your own personal integrity.