It’s really important to find out how visitors are using your site. Using web analytics you can find out what country they’re visiting from, how many colours their monitor is displaying, and how they got to your site.
There are two main techniques for keeping an eye on your users; log analysis and page tagging.
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Home automation is a bit of a paradox. It’s all inspired by selective laziness. Such is mankind’s obsession with tools, that we will go through all kind of trials, and spend hours drudging, tinkering and designing, to create a labour-saving device. No more exhausting light switches!
But this is nothing new. Through the ages we’ve come from bonfires, to burning torches, to oil lamps, to light bulbs, so it’s in our nature to try to find the next innovation to make things easier and cleaner.
We have recently added WAI ARIA landmark roles to accessible.ie, to improve navigation for visitors using assistive technologies. The diagram below shows how the sections of the page are divided into logical chunks. (more…)
In an earlier post, we discussed some of the wonderful ways communities are harnessing Google Maps, and now we will look at how governments use them. Government Google maps tend to be official, formal, controlled, and with a fixed budget. This has a somewhat homogenizing effect on the maps governments produce; they tend to have predictable features and reliable, if limited content.
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Now that Obama has proven the power of the internet as a political tool, other politicians around the world are attempting to follow suit, and Irish politicians are no exception.
In recent years there has often been a little flurry of blogging and YouTubing around election time, but only a few hardy Irish politicians blog the rest of the time. For many, it’s something they only think about in the run up to an election, because that is the traditional way to do things. Irish politicians have used the internet as if it were a poster on a lamppost; important for a few weeks, and then left to twist in the wind until taken down. The best way to blog however, is to persevere, to post regularly and gradually gather a following. This kind of approach to blogs and social media by Irish politicians is only slowly becoming more main-stream. (more…)