“The hardest part of a thousand mile journey is the first step” traditional Chinese proverb

Over the last four years most of my clients have been in London. Friends and colleagues balked at my one and a half hour train journey, but now I’ve really moved to the countryside and my journey’s even longer: A 280 mile  (450km)drive + 40 minutes on trains round trip weighing in at roughly nine hours all in.

Why do I do it?

Because I only do it one day a week. The rest of the week I work from my cottage in the rolling English countryside.

In this age of household broadband, social media and good quality mobile phone reception, there are few reasons why I need to be in an office, except for occasional face-to-face or kick off meeting. Thankfully my current client is enlightened, so I can work from home, avoid unnecessary travel and food bills (never mind the money I’m saving on razors) and work surrounded by home comforts. The client’s basic requirement is that I do the work they want me to, to the standard they want me to and trust me to get on with it.

UK employment law now says that employers need to consider flexible working arrangements and with a young child and a partner with ongoing health issues, for me flexible working is a necessity and not just a luxury.

But … for anyone hoping to spend their working days lolling on the sofa, languidly wafting their fingertips near their laptop and watching Jeremy Kyle / Manga / Frasier reruns (delete as appropriate) there is one vital (but often overlooked) thing you need to get grounded in reality … you still need to do the work you’d do, if you were sat at an office desk.

Some less fundamental, but equally important considerations:

Can you do your work remotely?
Not all jobs can be done without regular face-to-face interaction. If home working’s your goal, make sure you do the sort of job that employers or clients are happy for you to do on your own.

Recall distance
If you do need to suddenly get into the office, how long will it take you? The only reason we didn’t move to a perfectly lovely lighthouse keeper’s cottage on the remote, but internet connected Scottish Isle of Raasay was the 6 hour round trip to Inverness or three DAY round trip to London. The more flexible you can be, the more relaxed your employer / client can be. Also, as I write this, I’ve had a call from home to say that my partner’s unwell, so I’m rushing back home to help and look after our son. Long journey, but it does mean I’ll be there tomorrow as well (and I’ll only charge my client for half a day got today. See … flexibility).

Tools
Make sure you’re kitted out for working remotely. I now use skype for audio calls and as soon as I can find my camera I’ll be using that as well (although I suspect this is more about my client wanting to have a nosey round my new house), I have a broadband connection at home and a mobile dongle so I can move around and work anywhere. As well as the ubiquitous email, I use a lot of social sites for communicating with my peers and doing research, primarily Facebook and LinkedIn.

Setting expectations
Be clear about how you want to work, and understand what you employer / client expects of you. There’s no point arranging one day a week, to be instantly called in for an extra two days. Conversely, you need to compromise – remember, this is about getting the working conditions YOU want, so give a little to gain some more.

How do I find it overall?
On the day I get up at 4:30am to do my nine hour commute – knackering. On the other days it’s relaxing, inspiring, less stressful and I get to collect the eggs from my chickens and see my son grow up.

Signing off in uncharacteristic tranquillity,
The Long Dog

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”

Yesterday I was reminded of this adage, if you’ll pardon the almost certain misquoting, but how do you know if your website, your intranet or your social service is performing as well as it could? There are a number of technological answers to this, some more or less reliable than others.

Hits
This is a classic that everyone’s heard of, and time and again (especially with intranets) I get told that people (usually company seniors) are very interested to know how many hits the site is getting. What are ‘hits’? here are three explanations:

- Register of how many times a page is visited, also called ‘page impressions’: usually the explanation that creates most interest
- Register of how many components on a page load when a page is opened (i.e. the page=1 hit, each image=1 hit each etc): usually the least understood, but most technically correct use of the term
- ‘How Idiots Track Success’: the least palatable, but most accurate explanation

The trouble with measuring hits is that is doesn’t indicate whether the content the user found on a page has served its purpose. It’s easy to send floods of visitors to a page, as the flashing banner ads for poker sites, spurious lottery wins and digital camera competitions show: dangle a carrot and along trot the faithful. What a hit doesn’t tell you is if the visitor that hit represents bought the product, signed up for the newsletter, read the message from the CEO or downloaded the form.

Having said that I put my hand up to obsessively ogling the hits on this blog and see it as a measure of successful in reaching my readership. Hits are still a crowd pleaser and it just goes to show that sometimes the Preacherman is the biggest sinner of all (apologies to any blameless Preachermen reading this).

There are plenty of other technological ways to measure website traffic:

- Unique visitors: Number of individuals visiting the site in a given time frame
- Repeat visits: Number of individuals returning (faithful shoppers / readers, customer retention etc)
- Paths or journeys: Tracking the route visitors are taking through the site. Often used to measure speed and efficiently of visitors reaching important content

You can get a huge and I mean HUGE amount of data from web servers, recording innumerable activities by potential millions of visitors. The problem is that data is useless until it’s turned into information, and to do this, you need to work out what it is you want to know.

Ecommerce sites often measure conversion rates, an obvious choice, measuring visitors there to the site and how many of these buy something. What do they want to know? How successful is our site in making sure everyone who visits ends up buying something.

Social sites have much more subtle results: How many people find our service such a pleasurable experience they’ll return frequently and use it again. Off the back of this, they can sell advertising and sponsorship.

Some intranets need to demonstrate efficiency savings for people’s jobs. I worked on one intranet where I successfully proved that while ‘hits’ increased annually and dramatically, the lack of ability to complete online tasks the 20,000 employees were attempting to undertake meant tens of millions of pounds were wasted annually, paying people to fail to use the intranet successfully (never mind the additional time in contacting their colleagues, discussing their problem and having to work out or create alternative solutions).

How to measure then?

Simple: Work out YOUR criteria for success and THEN look for numbers.

Questions on a postcard to the usual address.

The Long Dog.

Traveller: Can you tell me the quickest way to town?
Local: Well … I wouldn’t start here if I were you…

Before you can design page layouts or do the fun bit of creative design, you need to know what it is you’re designing. A good way to do this is to create a ‘site map’: a plan of how all the information for a website is organised, in boringly useful groups, categories and taxonomies.

Even if your site’s a handful of pages, you still need to know what information to put on each page or, if you’re using a team of people with different roles, you need to be able to articulate your concept to the interaction designers, developers, graphic designers, web producers (et al) and not forgetting your client, peers or seniors.

Why bother?

You’ll find it very difficult to create wireframes or page designs and it’s easy to duplicate or forget information without a site map. They also make it possible to think ahead for future expansion (or reduction) and user journeys through your site can be planned to ensure your audience and customers can get to what they need easily and quickly.

How to…

By this point, you’ll have needed to have defined the purpose and business requirements and done your research to understand what information you need to include and how it’s going to be organised. A classic technique that dovetails neatly into the drawing out your site map is card sorting. Ok … so you know why and what you’re building, now it’s about laying it out for you and others to read. Use whatever layout or design package is easiest, just so long as you and others can share the output. I mostly use MS Visio, but use what you like – check out the sitemap I made for the product launch of a mobile phone  (company details removed, I’ afraid).

With layout, like the tool you use, so long as you and those you need to communicate with can understand the organisation and flow of information feel free to use whatever style you like. The most common site maps are organised in a tree structure, like a family tree, often starting with a site’s home page and branching off into the top level pages that in turn lead off. Use boxes for categories and lines to show relationships, but one tip is to use boxes to denote pages and list content separately. This way, when you’re not able to personally brief developers, they can literally interpret the number of pages instead of having to use their judgement as how content is broken down into pages.

In the same way a libraries categories books by number and then number the subcategories (Dewey Decimal Classification), make sure you number the categories and sub-categories on your site map. Again, this is useful for others to see which pages site under which – known as a parent / child relationship.

Example
- “Home” is a major category and numbered 0.0
- Beneath it is “About us”, another major so given its own number: 1.0
- Beneath this could be “Biographies of the board” a child, and subcategory of its parent “About us”, so numbered 1.1
- Also beneath “About us” is the child page “History of the company”, numbered 1.2
- “Products” is a new major category, so is numbered 2.0
- And so on….

Doing the site map is another place where you can check progress, to ensure you’re on the right track with your site.

Any questions?

The Long Dog