jQuery Support in Zend Framework 1.7

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In Zend Framework 1.7 there will offer native jQuery UI support.

The link above offers good documenation on different potential use-cases for jQuery UI plugins as helpers and how they will be implemented in Zend Framework. There is also a link to some examples and some comments on how the implementation may look like. Interesting. I made a list 1,5 year ago on why jQuery will win the race as the standard JavaScript library and it looks like number 9 in that list is the thing that will make sure that John and jQuery sets the standards for how You are going to work with JavaScript solutions in the future.

There are more interesting things in the 1.7 Preview Release, though not feature complete. See list below and download the Preview Release from http://framework.zend.com/download/latest

While 1.7PR is not a feature complete release in the 1.7 series, it
nevertheless contains some very important features scheduled for the 1.7
production release:

* New Zend_AMF component
* Dojo Toolkit 1.2.0
* New ZendX_JQuery component
* Support for dijit editor
* Metadata API in Zend_Cache
* Google book search API
* Performance enhancements
* Application-wide locale with other i18n enhancements
* File upload form element enhancements

John Resig + Ars Technica = True

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John Resig, Mr jQuery, has his first article out on Ars Technica, it is about Extreme JavaScript Performance, where John discuss performance of JavaScript Engines SquirrelFish Extreme, TraceMonkey and V8.

Interesting to start read John on Ars Technica. He plans on being a regular poster:

I plan on contributing an article per week, or so, on topics related to JavaScript, browsers, and standards. I consider this to be a good challenge for myself – I have to perform considerably more research (interviewing, etc.) than I would for a normal blog post (which isn’t to say that I won’t for my blog – but that this is starting to get me in the good habit of doing additional fact-checking).

 

jQuery announces partnership with Microsoft and Nokia

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jQuery looks more and more as the standard JavaScript-library, distributed with Microsoft Visual Studio and Nokias SKD:s for widgets in the future.

“Additionally Microsoft will be developing additional controls, or widgets, to run on top of jQuery that will be easily deployable within your .NET applications.”

“Nokia is looking to use jQuery to develop applications for their WebKit-based Web Run-Time. The run-time is a stripped-down browser rendering engine that allows for easy, but powerful, application development. This means that jQuery will be distributed on all Nokia phones that include the web run-time.”

“In fact their [Microsoft and Nokia] developers will begin to help contribute back to the jQuery project by proposing patches, submitting test cases, and providing comprehensive testing against their runtimes. As with any contribution that comes in to the jQuery project it’ll be closely analyzed, reviewed, and accepted or rejected, based upon its merits, by the jQuery development team – no free ride will be given.”

Read more:

http://jquery.com/blog/2008/09/28/jquery-microsoft-nokia/ http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/28/jquery-and-microsoft.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/jQueryToShipWithASPNETMVCAndVisualStudio.aspx

Building the Perfect WordPress Theme

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I am looking for a WordPress theme for this blog. The problem with 90% of all themes available is that they focus only on design, not so much on all the other aspects you have to take care of when running a blog/website. Instead of just complaining, I decided to try to define what I believe is needed in order for a WordPress theme to be professional and worth installing and maybe even buying (Who the hell pays for themes with just a slick design and no functionality added to it?). Now you may ask me why I write this article instead of creating a theme that fits my purpose? Maybe I will, if I find the time, for now you have to stick with me ranting on about why we need better themes for WordPress.

Admin section

One of the most important things in order to offer a professional wordpress theme, is to create an admin interface, enabling the publisher to manage functionality, look and feel and performance settings. Ideally in this section you could drag-and-drop containers for different types of templates and setup thing such as areas for widgets. Build page templates, edit headers, footers, navigations etc etc. The theme should also implement some kind of frontend cache on top of WP Cache in order to keep database connectivity to a minimum for widgets and template data.

Integrated functionality out-of-the-box

No one thinks it is great fun to enable 25 different plugins and set them up, whenever they are installing a new WordPress instance. Why not integrate functionality for the most popular plugins into the theme, and make that functionality managable from the admin interface.

Designed with ad standards in mind

Whether you like it or not, a lot of people will show ads in some sort on their blogs/websites whenever they start to get visitors to their site. The theme should make this easier by adapting to standard for ads.  Ad Unit Guidelines at IAB.

Allow functionality for integrating with 3rd party data providers

A lot of people will use their WordPress installation as a Web Content Management System and there are few sites out there that do not provide dynamic product data or other data provided by a 3rd party data source.

Navigation solution that can handle both wide and deep structures

In order to be able to manage larger websites, the theme should offer either very flexible templates for pages or several templates to choose from in order to achieve different types of navigation depending on depth in site. 

i18n and l10n enabled

Not all websites are written in english for an american market. Some sites even target multiple markets. A professional theme should take care of this with translations enabled and the possibility to show specific content for specific locations/markets. 

No need for editing files

There should be no hardcoded values in a professional and useful theme. There should be no need at all to change anything in any file distributed, this should be taken care of by adding admin user interfaces for things that can be changed/modified/edited.

Object Oriented MVC approach to coding

In order to make it possible to extend the functionality of the theme it is good programming practice to strive for object oriented code even when programming themes for WordPress. 

Make use of only standard libraries for CSS and JavaScript

A big problem when it comes to frontends is the compability problem with the browser clients that will request your sites. By using standard libraries such as BluePrint CSS and jQuery you will make sure that you are building your frontend code on foundation that will work on a large number of clients. And I guarantee, no matter how good you are at JavaScript or CSS, you will not create as good code and you will not test it as thouroughly as those libraries have been tested.

Delivered with variations available

What it all boils down to is the look and feel and people have different opinions about this and in order to increase the spreading of your new professional theme, you should add variations in look and feel for your theme, or themes within the theme if you like. 

Conclusion

Today 99% of all themes are just designed simple xhtml/css/javascript themes with no extra attached for those who see and use WordPress as Web Content Management System. There are even people charging for this kind of themes (AND PEOPLE BUYING). What will happen now is that publishers will have higher expectations and requirements for the themes they are using on their websites. A lot of the things I have discussed in this article is somewhat difficult to add to a theme without rewriting already exisiting functionality. I see two ways this will go, first you will see 10+ A-grade open source themes that will take a big part of the market as they start to implement a lot of the features I discussed (and features I have not even thought about of course). The next step after that is of course new software bundles where WordPress is just the base and we have a lot of CMS-functionality on top of WordPress. There are a lot of different bundles now that are sold as “Universal Solutions” for Made for Adsense-sites and Spam-blogs, but I am sure that within a couple of months a large free software bundling WordPress will show its face to the public and become very popular quick. Whatever political or religious opinion you might have on WordPress, it is here to stay and will be the base in a lot of publishing systems not yet developed.

WordPress is not just Blog Software, it is Web Content Management Software and should behave and used in such a way.

Friday Updates with some links

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Google Adsense Data in Google Analytics

Darren Rowse, ProBlogger.net, reports that Google Analytics will integrate Google Adsense data into the number one web stat tool. Interesting to see where you have your biggest earnings, and potentially it will be a lot easier to tweak and tune your Adsense ads.

Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld Episode 02

Another episode of the (in)famous ads with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates is out. I like it, some people complain that there is no product advertising, but I believe it is good brand building. See the commercial on YouTube or at Microsoft.com

SEO Black Hole

SEOBook.com has an interesting article about anomalies in the ratio between links in and links out on websites, saying that over optimized pages where link building has been good, but linking out, creates SEO black holes. I believe they are right, when they analyze and believe that in the future linking out will be more important in order to rank higher. Linking out is an altruistic way of showing other count as well, and I believe it suits well with how the web is evolving.

Long term, Science and Evaluation

As I wrote yesterday about how long term dedication will pay off, seomoz.org has a good article on the importance of evaluation, testing and long term stratgies when it comes to SEO work.

Amazon offers Video on Demand

Amazon has started to offer american customers video on demand. “With Amazon Video On Demand, customers can now instantly watch movies and television shows commercial-free on Macs or PCs.  With this new service, you can offer your customers the ability to enjoy instant playback of hit Hollywood movies and the latest TV shows. ”

Long Term vs. Short Term Online Business

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I work in an industry where a lot of people try to chase after the big money with small efforts invested, looking for quick cash. Seldom their expectations are met. What brings the cash in is long term dedication towards strict economical, and other measurable, goals. This holds for true with online businesses as well, a lot of people is looking for the big cash-in, either through advertising, affiliation or selling one of its properties. Instead of buying useless “Universal Solutions” for making you a millionaire over night, try to set the correct goals for being a millionaire within 5-10 years instead. Otherwise you will only feel frustrated every single day, when you miss out on your short term goal to become an online millionaire. Of course there will be a YouTube sold to Google every year or so, but I wouldnt put to high expectations on it happening to me. In this article I will think out loud about starting up your own small online business. 

It is not all or nothing

Whenever you end up in a discussion whether or not a solution would fit as an online business and make you money, a lot of people end up saying “That has already been done”, yes of course, but that is not a relly good argument, look at the shelves at your convenient store, there are more than one brand of cereals, right? The good thing with online businesses is that you can choose to target any market you like, even ultra competitive markets can be targeted. With the right online marketing techniques, long term dedication, geographical location and niche you should be able to monetize both short term and long term, but with the possibility to expand geographical location and niche as a long term goal. 

Set up close to realistic goals

Without goals you do not know if your business is running good or bad. You have to have detailed goals; economical, traffic growth, service evolution, budget for online marketing etc etc. It is crucial that you know your market, your future customers and you competitors. By analyzing the competition and competitors offers, you will get better information on how to set up your long term goals. Tools and techniques you can use for evaluation of these things can be:

  • Web services such as Alexa.com and Compete.com
  • Set up comparative analysis tables for 3-5 competitors to see if there is a niche not yet covered/focused on by competitors.
  • Keyword analysis, to find bargain keywords to focus your SEO and PPC efforts on.
  • Check with Commission Junction, TradeDoubler and other Affiliate Networks if you can find affiliate programs that easily can be monetized on your online business.
  • Try to buy adspace on competitors to get an idea of what they are charging for advertising space.

When you have identified the competitors and economic possibilities, try to set a short term goal and a long term goal. The short term goal must in no way compete with the long term goal. My suggestion is to set up goals that are realistic + 20%, that way you are pushing your self. A typical short term goal could be to say “In three months my business must have 5000 Unique Visitors per month” and a long term goal could be to say “Within 3 years my business should generate enough income for me to pay for my car, phone and apartment”. 

Measure and evaluate

Set up different measure points, that will tell you wether or not you are going in the right direction towards your long term goals. These measure points is often called KPI (Key Performance Indicator) and is used to get a health score on your business. What you need to do is to identify things that can be measured and set a value on those kind of things. A typical example could be:

  • A user signup is worth $10
  • A new unique visitor is worth $0.05
  • Conversion rate vistors-to-users, users-to-buyers, buyers-to-returning-buyers etc.

The value of these different actions is of course an equation based on how you convert your users to paying customers, and by tuning conversion rates, values of different actions may increase in value. Of course you can measure “soft values” as well (design, first impression, brand recognition) but for that you need some kind of interaction with the user through interviews or surveys on a regular basis.

Baby steps is better than no steps at all

By taking the scientific approach to your business, you are going in the right direction, and sooner or later you will start seeing result on your daily income from your online business. It can be very frustrating to see that you only make small number of sales and leads early in your business, but the fact that someone is actually doing something making you money, is an evidence that you have something that works for someone. Now you just have to use all your evaluation tools to identify when it works for who. By doing this, you will increase the chances for earning more money, but it can be a time consuming job, that is why long term is the key. Try to identify what works, and tune that, try to identify what do not work and redo that. But remember: What works short term, may not work long term. Adsense ads all over your website may work for unique new visitors, but I bet you see a high bounce rate and low pageviews/visit.

Do not expect wonders

If you have competition on the business you have chosen to focus on, you will have to fight hard to gain market shares and traffic to your business. Sometimes people find a niche where competition is low and traffic is great, but I do not think it happens too often nowadays. Hard long term work will make it work for you, but do not expect short term miracles when applying a long term strategy to your online business. Sooner or later traffic and earnings will explode if you focus hard. There are no easy ways to success (except luck and exceptional timing)

Conclusion

There are no shortcuts to making huge amounts of money online. But you can gain leverage on your competition by setting up long term goals, KPI:s, evaluate daily, weekly, monthly, tune your product, listen to your users and have faith in your business being a success long term. Avoid setting short term goals that may harm your long term product strategy.

The Strategy behind Google Chrome

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No one, not even my wife, have missed that there is a new player on the browser scene, Google Chrome. Though we have different views on the topic, both me and my wife had the same questions and comments popping up.

  • Why are they releasing a browser?
  • If someone can gain market shares on the browser market, Google can.
  • Is this a good or a bad thing?

Of course there are no definite answers to any of the questions, and I think they have the chance to gain market shares if they manage to make the integration with their services in such a way it feels natural to use Google Chrome instead of any other browser available (and fully functional).

But the big question is why they are releasing a browser and how it effects the end user.

I will try to reason around this issue, without getting into the conspiracy area (just touching it slightly).

In order to understand Google Chrome, we have to identify where Google have their biggest earnings and what focus Google have. Google focus on search and their income comes from a lot of different services both for end users and for businesses, with their biggest income generating from advertising. They are building a solid online office suite, Google Apps, and they probably make a dollar or two on other services as well, but the big thing is advertising. I believe that there are three main reasons Google have entered the browser market.

1. Increase Possibility to Target Ads

Google have strategically and slowly moved the positions when it comes to knowledge about user behaviour. In the beginning long time ago (10 years exactly), the user was “anonymous” and only shared entities such as geographic location, recurring visits, clickstreams etc etc, the ordinary web analytics stuff all websites without user accounts get by using Google Analytics.

Later Google Account was released via services such as GMail, Search History, iGoogle and other personalised services enabling Google to gather more data for business purposes such as ad targeting and personalised search results. With Accounts enabled on these services, Google could gather personalised data while using services where you needed to be logged in.

Google Toolbar was the next step in further evolving the possibility to gather personal data, but still Google only gathered information from people who actually installed a toolbar, I do not know the numbers, but I believe that the ratio may be pretty low. Still Google could increase the knowledge about those users, gathering information when surfing on other properties than Googles, but, and a big but is that they made this sharing of private material opt-in, and probably lost a lot of information that way.

By offering a browser, focused on usability, stability and ease-of-use, they will now target the really big audience, and they can hide the privacy issues in a EULA. By owning the browser chrome, they will gather enormous amounts of user data, making it easier to target people with ads contextually targeted both to content and user behaviour.

With their own browser, they can start showing targeted ads even on websites that do not affiliate through their Adsense program.

2. Remove Technical Barriers for Earning Money on Advertising

By owning the browser, Google can make sure that targeted ads do not get blocked. Maybe this is not a huge problem right now, but as a strategic decision, it is important, by trying to move the masses to start use Google Chrome, Google can be sure that whatever technical solution they choose for displaying the ads, they will know that ad impressions will be higher and given that, conversions will rise, and given that Google Inc. will earn more money.

3. Distribution Platform for Coming Services

Google Chrome is Googles iTunes. I believe Google are building a distribution platform, enabling them to start targeting new markets, where companies such as Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Rhapsody and other companies earning their revenues from micro-payments.

Google are going to increase the marginal for advertising revenue, but in order to really grow, as fast as we have gotten used to, they need to find new mass markets where they really can earn money from transactions. So believe me when I say that within a couple of months Google will start taking market shares from Apple and Amazon on digital items such as music, movies, applications for the web and Android.

Conclusion

Matt Cutts says that there are no hidden agenda behind this, they just wanna make the web a better place. If I where a share holder on Google I would not like those kind of arguments. “making the web better” is just that, an argument, not a strategy. And as a public company Google Inc. must find new ways to increase the market value of the company. I believe Google Chrome is the fundamental piece in Googles future platform taking market shares from competitors such as Apple, Netflix and likes as well as the Chrome will enable Google to increase the marginal on their advertising programs.

4 Great Books for Increasing Revenue From Your Website

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Right now I am reading two books on the benefits of collective intelligence, and have just finished two others with focus on optimizing your website technically, in conversion rates, through usability and performance.

All these books are of interest to people who takes a scientific approach to developing and tuning the website he/she is running.

High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders

Steve Souders covers all the different sections from YSlow on how to speed up your website. He shows that you will get most effect from putting your efforts into perfomance tune the frontend before working on backend tuning. I found this book really worth reading as it is spot on on every issue, and very focused on describing gains and implementation details for each and every single section of performance tuning on the frontend. I really recommend this book because I feel that for a serious website owner this book will pay itself in a couple of weeks with more generated sales and less used bandwidth.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

Andrew B. King also focus on optimization and tuning of your website, but the focus is on SEO, PPC-campaigns and Conversion Rate Optimization. He also tries to write some chapters on performance tuning, but when it comes to frontend performance tuning I recommend Steve Souders book instead. This book is really good for people who would like to learn more about optimizing PPC-campaigns and start tracking and incread conversion rates. I recommend this book for those chapters, which are really good and have help me increase incomes on the websites I have PPC-campaigns for.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran

Toby Segaran guides us in building smarter web applications based on Collective Intelligence. The book mixes theory and practice and shows how “easy” it is to actually create applications with community based product recommendation system and other intelligent solutions. I found this book interesting as a starting point on how to technically implement some of the web 2.0 features users have become used to use online.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

Wikinomics is the book I have just started reading and it focus on how the community trend will change the enterprises. The focus is on how the masses create something of big value through collaboration. An interesting thing of course is the fact that a lot of people interact in larger communities building a greater value (Wikipedia, Youtube, Linux etc, etc) without getting paid, still the quality of the outcome often exceeds the alternatives built traditionally with labour and investment banks.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

How iPhone and Android Will Change the Web

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The iPhone is getting more and more popular around the world, and soon we will see mobile phones implementing Googles mobile platform Android. For years we have been waiting for the mobile revolution on the web, but the revolution has been more like a breeze with 3G-enabled services for small screens and the Blackberry-concept. In order to make the revolution speed up we need molotov-cocktails such as usable services, standardized platforms, large user base and a change in behaviour. With iPhone and Android, this is what is about to happen.

In this article we have choose to focus on four areas of the web that will change when the mobile revolution starts.

Technical

Anyone who has ever built or run a web serving platform, knows that multiple platforms are a bad thing and adds to complexity and maintenance time and money. In order to serve both traditional web and web for iPhone and Android, changes to the platform will be necessary (Of course, there are always someone who “took aim” for this in their platform when building it). The biggest changes we will se is an even stricter separation of the presentation layer from the business layer. In order to make a platform able to serve x number of types of devices, we need to make sure that nothing in the business layer makes any assumption on what type of presentation device it will be serving the generated content. The presentation layer must be able to choose the correct presentation resources and device-specific services such as payment methods, social bookmarking tools etc.

Usability

When moving services to a mobile platform, focus tends to move to ease of use and effective use of the service, trying to maximize the usability of the service. It is not as convinient to type on a mobile phone as it is on a keyboard, even if iPhone has wonderful mechanisms for scrolling, zooming and changing viewport orientation, it is still far more difficult to navigate the web via an iPhone then it is with a fully featured web browser on your desktop OS. In order to minimize the effects of these short comings, focus on easier and more focused services will be the case. This will of course effect the services we use daily on the desktop web as well, why should I stick with a semi-usable product on the web, when I know the service provider can do better.

Advertising

There are two things with mobility and platforms such as iPhone and Android that will revolutionize the advertising possibilities on the web.

The first and most obvious is of course mobility itself. With positioning it will be easy to target your advertising on the mobile web geographically making conversions more likely and advertising space bigger. Of course geographical targeting is available today as well, but not to the level of detail possible with mobiles using GPS. I believe this will help to increase advertisers and publishers revenue from ads greatly if implemented correctly.

The second possibility opening up is ease of payment. Often when a transaction take place on the traditional web, credit cards or solutions such as paypal are used, adding to the complexity of making a buy, sometimes even customers bounce due to the fact that they feel it is to much hassle to grab the VISA-card or finding the password for your online bank solution. With platforms such as iPhone and Android implementing transparent payment solutions will make conversion rates pop due to the fact it will be easier for the user to actually make a buy, the integration of the purse into the platform makes a buy more like an ordinary buy in a store. On top of platform solutions for payment, mobile phone operators may implement solutions where they charge the user on the next bill. This is a win-win situation for the operators and the users, operators can start charge percentage on credits not payed within 30 days, and the users get a free payment option, as long as they pay within 30 days. I believe this is where mobile web will revolutionize the web the most.

User Expectations

As soon as the iPhone and Android-enabled web services have grown in numbers, user base and revenue people using these services will start to expect all good services they learnt to like on the desktop web will be available and mobile enhanced. This change in expectations will effect market shares in the long run, as the web services able to adapt and serve mobile services as well as the old plain web services will get more users and bigger revenue.

Conclusion

iPhone and Android will change the way we build, use and monetize web based services. The mobile revolution has just begun, and it is important for companies acting on competitive markets online to implement solutions for their customers, because they will start to expect that mobile services are a natural complement to their traditional web service. These days are interesting times.