Woopra is an online website stats package that is currently in Beta. Hold on, no need to fall asleep! ( I saw those eyes glazing over!) Woopra makes monitoring your site stats fun (yes really)!

Sure it has all the usual graphs showing the most common web browsers that have visited your site and which sites are linking to you and so on. What makes Woopra stand out is that unlike other packages that only update their stats perhaps once a day, Woopra stats are live. Thanks to a world map you can actually see where each visitor is surfing from and you can see which pages they click on (including links that take them from your site) as they click! In fact you can even strike up an Instant Messenger type conversation with them (might freak then out though to think you’re watching them…).

Video of surfers hitting our website:
[See post to watch Flash video]

The radar “blobs” show which of our sites is being visited (Woopra can monitor more than one site) and the name of the referring site is provided in yellow.

Woopra tracks over 40 different statistics providing information such as:

Visitor Browser (eg Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer)
Visitor Platform (eg Windows, Mac, Linux)
Visitor Screen Resolution
Visitor System Language
Visitor Country
Most Popular Pages
Landing Pages
Exit Pages
Most Popular Outgoing Links
Most Popular Downloads
Referring Sites
Referring Social Networks
Referring Search Engines
Search Keywords
and more…

You can “tag” visitors so the system will recognise them again next time, although it will automatically recognise registered users (eg if you have a blog)

Integration with your site is easy. Simply download the client software which is available for Windows, Mac OSX & Linux:

then add the tracking code to the bottom of each of your pages (if you are running a Blog you can install a special plugin instead).

We have been using Woopra for many months now, it was originally an invitation only beta, but is now open for anyone to apply. Sites are approved as capacity is added to their systems, so expect some delay before you are approved. 30,000 sites are already being monitored by Woopra. It is currently free while it’s in beta, and when it finally launches there will be free and paid packages available.

HALF A MILLION WEB PAGES PER SECOND…

Makes you wonder if maybe you should get your website spruced up ( or even actually get a website at last! ) doesn’t it?

Treating your company’s online presence as an afterthought really isn’t an option any more.  This is no flash in the pan.  It’s not a fad.  It’s not even the future.  It’s right now.

Contact us and we’ll painlessly and inexpensively bring your business into the new economy.

This is a new open source system and the day it launched we grabbed it and got to grips with it, peeking under the hood and figuring out (there is no documentation yet for developers such as ourselves) how to modify it to look and work exactly as our clients would want.  We’ve added a load of eye candy so your stores will really stand out against your competition..

As soon as our first live project is completed (which should be a little over a week from now) we’ll post a link to it but until then, here’s a sneak peek of the work in progress:

[See post to watch Flash video]

You've got to love the eye candy right?!  The product flies into the shopping cart, featured items on the homepage are presented in a 3D carousel with reflections...  and we've got more tricks up our sleeves!    

This new system supports:

• Special deals (price reductions, gift vouchers)
• Top sellers on homepage
• New items on homepage
• ‘Free shipping’ offers
• Cross-selling (Accessories)
• Order out-of-stock items
• Paypal, offline credit card processing & Cash-On-Delivery (COD) payments
• Merchandise return (RMAs) & credit slips
• Package tracking
• Offer gift-wrapping & recycled packaging
• Sale of virtual goods (downloads) as well as real products
• Newsletter opt-in
• Unlimited categories & subcategories
• Unlimited product attribute combinations
• Multiple images per product images with automatic resizing optimization
• Multiple currencies
• Multiple tax settings
• Tax by state, country, both, zones, or no taxes
• Offer volume discounts
• Real-time currency exchange rates
• Inventory (stock) management
• Multiple language support
• Minimum order amount requirement
• SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption

It’s a free download and allows you to manage your Wordpress based blog quickly and easily.

So,  first impressions?

Well, as a test I wrote this post using the app.  It seems fairly buggy, while taking screenshots and flicking between the various screens I’ve had a couple of instances where the app quit unexpectedly.

As the editing is fairly limited in terms of layout (pictures are easy to add but not exactly easy to move around) I created the post on the iPhone, then did my final adjustments using my Mac.  This is no problem and is to be expected but take note of the warning below…

IMPORTANT WARNING!

The app is native to the iPhone and uses its own database, not the online one that actually powers your blog.  This means the iPhone does not know if you update a post on your computer.  If you then decide to edit the post on your iPhone in future you are in effect editing an old copy of the post…  I learnt this the hard way when I edited the post on my Mac and then decided to add additional screenshots via the iPhone.  I didn’t notice that the iPhone was unaware of the changes I had made via the Mac, and when I added my screenshots and posted my update, all the layout changes I had made via the Mac were lost.  Thankfully I was able to use the revision feature in Wordpress 2.6 to revert to the previous revision.  I then hit the refresh page on the iPhone app, and updated the correct version of this post.  Incidentally, I can’t spot a way to access the revisions via the iPhone app.

Bottom line:  Make sure you hit that refresh button in the posts list before you edit any of your entries…

Screenshots

The “Home” screen:

The “About” screen

The first step is to add your blog, just fill in the appropriate info:

Your blog will then appear in the list on the “Home” screen

Tapping on a blog shows the posts and the important refresh button in the lower left:

Tap the icon in the lower right to create a new post or tap on an existing post to edit:

Add photos easily (note, they get added to the end of your post):

Selecting a post category is straightforward:

As is adding a new category:

The post status can easily be set between draft or published etc

The post date and time can be adjusted:

The post settings screen doesn’t contain much, mainly the opportunity to password protect the post:

The preview screen is very basic as it ignores your CSS:

With just a few limitations (lack of flash compatibility for example) an iPhone can happily browse most standard, well written web sites.  So why bother going to the trouble of making a specific version of your site for the iPhone?  There are several reasons:

• Make the experience a lot more pleasant for the user by helping them avoid zooming and scrolling around
• Pull out the iPhone incompatible bits so their experience is flawless, while maintaining eye candy for regular users
• Make the experience quicker (and thus bearable) for the users who are browsing over a (relatively) low bandwidth connection.

That last point is, I believe, the most important.  Remember a few years ago when we were all obsessed with the size of our web pages, trying to save bandwidth to keep load times down for 56k dial-up users?  A 2G iPhone (of which there are millions out in the wild) on a cell network tends to get similar speeds to 56k users of old.  Even the new iPhone running on a 3G network (where available) is never going to win a speed contest with a broadband connection.

Thanks to the flexibility of CSS based web designs, making an iPhone specific site is a lot less work than it could have been.  Some simple javascript to detect the presence of the iPhone is all that’s needed to point the iPhone to a different CSS file.

If your site is powered by the Wordpress blogging/cms system it’s even easier as the hard work has been done for you as there is a plugin available called IWPhone. Once installed and activated it automatically redirects iPhone users to a separate iPhone specific theme which is tailored to the smaller screen size and reduced feature set.  You could just install this plugin and forget about it, but if you want to be slick you should customise the accompanying theme to at least match the colour scheme of your normal site.

The blog on our site is powered by Wordpress and we have installed this plugin along with a heavily customised theme for the iPhone, however the images used in the posts, such as the screenshot of the iPhone on this page, are the full sized versions as used in the normal theme.  The majority of the page load time is down to these images but adding platform specific images to posts is not straightforward.

Time for some tests!

The times below are the number of seconds it took a 3G iPhone to load this very post using our iPhone specific theme.  The number in brackets is the time taken to load the post using our normal theme.

Each test was repeated 5 times to get an average time with the cache being cleared before each attempt.

• Wi-Fi with full signal – 5 seconds (11 seconds)
• 3G with 2 bar signal – 9 seconds (17 seconds)
• 2G GPRS with 4 bar signal – 41 seconds (108 seconds)

NOTE: As I couldn’t get an EDGE signal this evening I’ll update this post tomorrow with those figures.

This preliminary data shows that it is worth having an iPhone specific theme as page load times are almost halved.  Obviously the speed gains will vary depending on the design of both your normal and iPhone specific themes.

On a side note, the 3G iPhone certainly seems to be a worthy upgrade, performance wise…

So why should you care?  Well, do you share your photos by uploading them online?  If you’ve darkened down your photo because you thought it was too bright someone with a properly calibrated monitor will see it as being too dark.

Do you print your pictures?  Ever wonder why the colour and brightness doesn’t match what you see on your screen?

Calibrating your monitor is worth doing to ensure what you’re seeing is correct, and it’s virtually essential if you make your living as a designer or photographer.

There are 2 ways of calibrating your screen:

1) If you have a Mac you can go to system Preferences -> Displays, select the colour tab and click calibrate. This takes you through a step by step process where you make simple adjustments based on what the utility shows you on the screen. It’s fiddly time consuming and not especially accurate unless you have a really good eye for this stuff.

2) You can buy a gadget that attaches to the front of your monitor and by using special software it will look at your screen output and make the adjustments for you quickly and accurately. The bad news is that these gadgets cost the wrong side of £200.

Well not any more!

Pantone have released a new monitor calibration tool called the “Huey”. It’s available in 2 versions, the basic Huey and the Huey Pro. Both calibrate your monitor but the Huey Pro can handle multiple monitors and gives you greater control over the process. The Huey costs around £69 whereas the Huey Pro costs around £99. There is a software upgrade you can buy to get the Pro functionality at a later date.

I run a dual monitor system so I purchased the Huey Pro as I only have one monitor and I have no real need for the additional manual adjustments available with the Pro version.

The package contains a CD-ROM which use you to install the software, the USB Huey stick (and USB extension lead) and a desk stand. They also thoughtfully include a couple of moist screen wipes for you to clean your monitor before you begin. The Huey works on LCD screens and old fashioned CRT’s.

Simply install the software and run it. You will be prompted to connect the Huey to a spare USB port and place it on the desktop stand. You must ensure the LED’s on the Huey are pointing away from your monitor towards you, this is so that it can take a reading of the ambient room light. The software will then instruct you to attach the Huey to the centre of your monitor using the built in suction cups. Once you’ve done that click “next” and the software will begin the calibration process. Less than a minute later it’s all done and you can flick between the uncalibrated settings and the new calibrated settings so that you can see the difference. Then you just tell the software what you will be doing with your computer (eg Web and Photo work or Print Design). Job done!

As our perception of colour changes with the light around us you can leave the Huey on the desk stand (LED’s facing you) and it will constantly adjust your monitors output based on the lighting in the room, for example to compensate for the light fading in the evening.

The Huey is easy to use and compared to calibration hardware of the past it’s cheap.
I was surprised to find my iMacs display was off by a fair bit being too bright and very warm in appearance before calibration and then much cooler (bluish) afterwards but once I got used to it the new settings do look better and no-one else finds it bluish so it’s obviously just me being used to the warmer settings of old.

Everyone should have a calibrated screen…