SportGator

I am a bit of a sports fan, and one of the things I wanted to be able to do from my mobile phone was to get the latest sports news - not the articles - just the headlines, and quickly.

So, I put SportGator together. What it does is aggregate sports news from 2 of the biggest providers, into various categories. (You can filter by clicking on the top or bottom category menus.)

This means I can get updated in under a minute - remembering that this is from my phone. When I want to read full articles, I’ll do so in front of my PC.

The site is still new, so if anyone has any suggestions - like adding another news feed - please let me know!

Vodacom’s The Grid - I had a look…

As per their website:
””The grid is a mobile social network that allows you to chat to friends, see where they are on a map and share photos or videos with them. You also get to view photos and videos relevant to the area you’re in.””

and:

””The grid uses your cellphone’s position to locate you on a map to show you content that is relevant to that area. The grid can also show you where your friends are, if they choose to share their location with you. Once you are located, you can chat with friends who are on the map as well, and even share pictures and videos [called BLIPS] with each other.””

(See a cool video ad for it here.)

The website is very cool - definitely targeted at the Facebook and MXit generations. It allows you to firstly plot your location on a map, and to then have access to all the cool features:

- Add friends and chat to them and view their Blips
- Add your own Blips - Pictures, Videos and Text - onto the map. (Like a marker)
- View Blips in and around your live geographical location

(Definition of Blip - a way to share content - image, text and video - that is related to a geographical location.)

The Mobi site - it’s not that visually great to be honest. I know Mobi sites are restrictive, but you can only use that as an excuse so far. It does use LBS (Location Based Services - based on cellular tower triangulation) to do a location look up on you - although this is briefly mentioned in the T&C, there are no obvious warnings about this. Now this is where, in my opinion, the Grid is awesome - you can search for Blips in your area, while on your phone… and these Blips are not just personal, but include “points of interest” such as restaurants, night clubs etc. Very nice, and geographically relevant. I’m not sure about how pleased WASPS will be though, as WASPS are charged by the Networks to do LBS look-ups, while essentially in the Grids Model, the end user is not charged. So WASPS either have cause for complaint, or they need to be really clever with their billing models.

They do have a Facebook plugin, but it’s called “YouAreHere” and says it uses Google Maps (Not AfriGIS?) to plot your Facebook friends location. Pretty simply as well… a map with your contacts layered!

Their interface is great. Really clean, Web 2.0 feel with lots of space and nice colour shading. Perhaps even a nicer layout than Facebook, although they have less features so maybe not fair to compare. Fairly easy to navigate around.
The only things I did not enjoy are the small “page 1,2,3,4″ paging links, and the way it takes you to a new page and ONLY shows a confirmation of what you have done… so you have to navigate away from the confirmation to get back into things.

They use a lot of advertising - appended to the free SMS, banners at the top of the mobi site and web site, banner at the bottom. It’s different to how Google and Facebook approached advertising - they established a huge user base before.

I think it’s pretty cool that you can share your life, through personal media - photo’s, videos, twitter like updates - on a geographic level. It gives it a new kind of relevancy.

Although the maps are great - speed and detail are good - I felt they should be displayed bigger when integrated into the website. Possibly an option to make the map bigger with a grayout layer opening up on top, without the page refreshing. In general I felt the visual “friends on map” / “Blip on map” element was not prominent enough…

I would also make the “Buzz” page (where you are updated as to your friends recent activites) the default page. It worked for Facebook…

I also do not personally know a single person who uses The Grid… but I personally know around 150 people who use Facebook, from ages 12 up to 90. I think this will be The Grid’s biggest challenge going forward, and I’d re-look at getting some up to date Facebook plugins, and definitely look at integrating Facebook Connect, with the aim of bringing existing communities into it. That said, I’m sure they must have thought of this already…

All in all it’s an extremely cool application and one that can grow big time if they get it’s positioning right.

Durban 2010 Website should be a Wiki

There has been a lot of press about the launch of the new Durban 2010 website. The budget over the next few years for this is 6.5 million rand, and while it’s great to see investment like this into digital media, I think they might have got it wrong.

For starters, it’s not valid to the people who want to consume content and interact with the website to have to download a 5MB file. To be presented with this on the home page is poor. (A frustration free experience?)

I could also find no way to browse it nicely on a mobile phone. Surely visitors will not be sitting in front of their P.C’s while enjoying the Durban lifestyle?

The content itself is not great - if you want to find out where to eat, you need to click through to another website. So what’s the point? Why don’t they mention famous eateries like Johnny’s Sunrise Chip ‘n Ranch - the best roti’s in South Africa?

Or even better, why don’t they let the owners and clients of Johnny’s create the content?

Let the community help create the content

This website should be a Wiki, where the Durban community and Durban visitors could create, manage and consume the content. Using my example above, there would be a page dedicated to and titled “Johnny’s Sunrise Chip ‘n Ranch” with a picture of the eatery, map and directions, opening times, menu’s, tips on the favourite bunny chows and comments from clients.

All this content can be created by the community.

How cool would that be? And best of all, the software needed is open source - that is, free. The only real cost would be site management ,which can be easily trained, and lead to full time employment and a “door” into the I.T world for disadvantaged people.

Sometimes we lose sight of what and who we develop websites for. Ease of use, community created content, interactivity and mobility are key. This website offers none of these.

Banner ads - the overlooked benefit

Seems that those annoying banner ads - the ones you never click on - do have a legitimate place in marketing. That place is definitely not generating a high volume of click through’s per page impression though…

According to Seth Godin, they seem to almost fall into the same advertising category as Billboards, with the similarities being broad reach and high frequency levels, as well as to push brand awareness, recognition and recall.

The concept here is that you’d rather buy something from a familiar brand. Simple as that. So use banners to remind, and to create and re-inforce awareness - over and over again.

You can read the article here.

On a related note, we advertised a competition on one of our corporate focused websites. We initially advertised it by using a banner at the top of the page - quite a striking and pretty one - that asked users to click on it to enter a “feedback” competition. Entry was free, and we had around 60 responses in a month. We then decided to be a bit more “aggressive”, and used an interstitial to display upon login - and we got 80 entries in 2 days.

Click Density maps, Google Adwords and Analytics: A merry trio

We’ve recently started using a web site tool that monitors clicks on specific pages on your website, and produces a nice “heat map” report based on this.

Click Density is easy to use and pretty cheap too. Have a look at the Demo to see what it is exaclty. You can sign up for a free trial for one website page, to see if it is going to offer value first.

All you need to do is add a few lines of JavaScript just before the end of your HTML “body” tag, and then sit back and watch the reports. I’ve heard that some of these tools slow your website down, but we have not had any side affects to date.

Why get an overlay of clicks for your website pages?

Reasons are numerous. One example is the home page of the one website we monitored: we soon saw that clients mainly used it to login to access their accounts. This helped us to design the content around this.

But our primary use for this is to use it in conjunction with Google Adwords.

We’ve built landing pages for all our Adword click throughs: that is, we try and take the client to a page that is directly relevant to the search keyword used.

Once they are there, we can see with the Click Density tool what links they are clicking through to. We can then also compare the total clicks to the total visits to a page in a set time period, by using Google Analytics, and this shows us what percentage of clients are clicking links on the landing page.

Nice.

And of more importance than seeing where people are clicking, is seeing where people are not clicking. You can then try and boost these “dead zones” or just take them out to avoid clutter. For the popular links, maybe try adding information or making the information easier to digest, allowing the client to share the content or have it sent to them.

This is really a fine tuning system for your website, and you’ll be amazed how you will notice client activity becoming more interactive as you build better web pages.