In this issue

Our little newsletter has proved so popular I thought I would put a little extra effort in to keep all my designer chums up to date with the world of the Internet. So the new format has a bit more heft:

1. Featured article
   This month I re-visit the government e-conveyancing project.  It's not strictly a web issue, but the security technology is related - that's my story and I am sticking to it.
2. Business intelligence
   If I spot any interesting business studies I will mention them here.  This month there is some interesting material about content and about how the human eye looks at web pages.
3. Technical tip
   A monthly tip on search engines, accessibility and similar topics. This month something on the title tag and its importance.
4. News from the web
   I have picked out some of the more interesting stories from the month.

E-conveyancing - it will crash and burn

In my newsletter of August last year I predicted that e-conveyancing would not fly. Well the government is apparently determined to get this off the ground so I change my prediction - it will crash and burn.

E-conveyancing is the attempt of the Land Registry to get into the latter half of the 20th century and automate their procedures. I am all in favour of automation - after all it's my living. And getting the Land Registry to use current technology is a good idea. However one of the central ideas is that all legal documents should be held in a central repository and digitally signed.

If you don't know what a digital signature is, there is a primer in my earlier newsletter. To summarise, a digital signature is a computer file held with a document. The file contents are such that they assure you that:

1. the document has been signed off by the person who is claimed to have signed it off and
2. the document has not changed since it was signed.

So it is obvious that a digital signature is a jolly good idea, isn't it? And storing the documents centrally on a database is obviously going to improve efficiency. So what is the problem?

The problem is simply stated. The average punter doesn't have the technological wherewithal to create a digital signature. So the answer to the bureaucratic mind is simply to have the conveyancer sign on the person's behalf.

Instead of signing the various documents involved in house purchase, you will instead give authority to your conveyancer to sign them (digitally) on your behalf. So:

1. The conveyancer is changed from an administrator who shuffles paper around to a direct participant in a 6-7 figure transaction. This is not going to come without a price tag.
2. The signature on the documents doesn't go away, it is going to be held in an authorisation document held by your conveyancer (tick whichever applicable)
   • who just went out of business,
   • whose premises just burned down,
   • who had their files stolen
   • who just had a disgruntled employee walk out with their passwords and they haven't got round to changing them yet
   • who employed a clerk who transferred the whole portfolio of property to a relative in Hong Kong
3. Does anyone seriously think I am going to give anyone power of attorney to sign on my behalf for a transaction of this importance?  No way baby.

So this procedure is going to be

• more expensive
• riskier and
• hard for customers to accept.

Yet someone up there is progressing this with all dispatch. David Lammy just approved and endorsed the plan.  The tender documents have been issued.

So sit back and enjoy the show as this project progresses through the stages of a typical project: 

1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Praise and honors for the non-participants  

Business intelligence

Content not offers

There is an interesting case study in Marketing Sherpa this month by the Director of Marketing at Cartesis.� He needed to market to very senior people but didn't have a huge budget.� He used a combination of White Papers, a 'thought leadership' web site, webinars and newsletter.�

Quote: "It's worth noting that none of this content was overtly marketing copy or remotely salesy. There were no free trial offers or cheesy giveaways that might turn top level executives off or alert their gatekeepers to stop the message from getting through."�

I love the idea of a 'thought leadership' site.� This was in his case a joint venture with a number of consulting companies who produced a high quality site with a high profile editorial board.� He reports a cost of about $5 per lead which is good value given the seniority of the people he was targeting.
 

What people see on a web page

Anyone involved in web site design should check out the work done by The Poynter Institute, Estlow center and Eyetools. They created a bunch of web pages and then tracked people's eyes as they read/scanned them.���

Most of the consclusions are fairly intuitive, for example people spend most time on the top left of a page, they spend more time on text than pictures and so on.� Interestingly users spent more time looking at text with small fonts than text with large fonts.� Was that because the text was harder to read?�

One interesting effect was that a horizontal line discouraged readers from looking below the line.� So if a headline is underlined readers were less likely to read the blurb below it.� As headlines are often links this runs counter to the useability advice to stick to standards such as links being underlined.�

Fascinating stuff.

Quote of the month from AT&T at the web 2.0 conference

"If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features."

Technical tips

The title tag

The title tag is the most important part of a web page as far as search engines are concerned.� Yet its significance is often under-estimated.

The title of a window is not the headline text in big type.� It is the text that appears in the top of the window.� On a PC it is in a blue bar; do you see it? No - further up, above the toolbar and (on a PC) above the menu!� This text comes from special tags in the html.

The title tag is important for two reasons:

1. Search engines give extra importance to keywords in the title.
2. The title is what the search engine shows first, in bold and as a link to your site.

So the title has to do two jobs:

1. Include the really important keywords for that page
2. Entice visitors to click on it

So long lists of keywords won't do and general 'click here to make more profits' phrases won't do either.�

Make sure your content management system allows you to edit the text in the title separately from the heading on the main page (ours does).� It is worth spending time getting this right.

�

News from the web

Microsoft move into search continues
We have known for some time that Microsoft plans to compete with Google and Yahoo in the search business. This moved closer this month with the announcement of a specialist user group called 'Search Champs'.� A group of specialists is being assembled for a two-day workshop to examine Microsoft's search offering in detail.��

VOIP (Internet telephony)
In my recent�newsletter about VOIP�I mentioned�that a major application was the ability to host a company's internal telephone system on the net.� International Data Corp has just released a study predicting a compound 282% growth rate over the next four years to $7.6 billion in this type of application.�
 

People are beginning to notice that Internet Explorer hasn't changed much since 2001, and there are a few articles this month about competitive products.� Actually Word for Windows hasn't changed much since 1990 but that hasn't stopped Microsoft from issuing a new release every so often with extra features no-one can figure out how to use.���

Google is going to distribute a program which searches your had disk a bit like the Google search engine searches the web.� There are other products around already (I tried blinx and it seems to work but I didn't find it very useful.)��
�Google also announced the launch of shopping site Froogle in the UK.�

Leading ISPs have seven law suits against spammers.� AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and other are taking spammers to court using the CAN-SPAM law.� More power to them.

Two new internet domains '.post' and '.travel' should become available next year.� Other 'new' names like '.biz' and '.info' have not been wildly successful.� Apparently '.post' is for post offices and stamp collectors.� I don't think these will imapact us much.� There is a '.eu' coming soon which migh be popular with euro-enthusiasts.�

George Bush has set up an international exclusion zone around his web site www.georgewbush.com.� Anyone trying to access the site from outside the US gets an 'access denied' message.� My guess is that they had some sort of denial of service attack and this is a defence. Never mind there is always parody site www.georgewbush.org.