Website Sustainability

Improve your UX with Google Analytics | Creative Bloq : "Web analytics tools have a lot to offer the user experience field. Because the tools have matured and there's so much information out there about how to use them, now is a great time to get started working with them. With web analytics, user researchers can look at much larger sample sizes than is possible with more resource-intensive methods, such as usability testing. This can be useful if you need to establish a high degree of certainty that a particular design change will be effective before you implement it. Analytics also gives researchers an opportunity to come up with answers much quicker than is possible when using in-person activities." To read more go to  Improve your UX with Google Analytics | Creative Bloq : 'via Blog this' If you'd like to find out more about Computing at the University of Northampton go to: www.computing.northampton.ac.uk. All views and opinions are the author's a...

Google Apps update alerts: Deprecating web hosting support in Google Drive : "Beginning August 31, 2015, web hosting in Google Drive for users and developers will be deprecated. Google Apps customers can continue to use this feature for a period of one year until August 31, 2016, when serving content via googledrive.com/host/doc id will be discontinued. In the time since web hosting in Drive was launched, a wide variety of public web content hosting services have emerged, and we think better options are available to people today. As a result, we have decided to discontinue this feature and focus on the core Drive and Google Apps experience. " To read more go  Google Apps update alerts: Deprecating web hosting support in Google Drive : 'via Blog this' All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with.

How to Use Six Google Analytics Reports to Complete a Website Content Audit - YouMoz - Moz : The article look at six Google Analytics metrics that the article's author argues are good measures for checking the health of a website. The six reports include the following: Channels report Landing Page report New vs Returning Visitor report Frequency & Recency report Site Search report Behavior Flow report To read more go to the following to read the full article:  https://moz.com/ugc/how-to-use-six-google-analytics-reports-to-complete-a-website-content-audit 'via Blog this'

Taken from:  Research Blog: Focus Areas for Policy & Standards Research Proposals :  "Twice a year, Google’s Faculty Research Awards program seeks and reviews proposals in 23 research areas, assigning to each area a group of experienced Googlers who assess and deliberate over which proposals we should and can fund. With each call for proposals, we receive a wide array of research ideas in fields that fall within the realm of Internet policy." To read more go to:  http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/focus-areas-for-policy-standards.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/gJZg+(Official+Google+Research+Blog)

How To Tell Search Engines What "Entities" Are On Your Web Pages : "Search engines have increasingly been incorporating elements of semantic search to improve some aspect of the search experience — for example, using schema.org markup to create enhanced displays in SERPs (as in Google’s rich snippets). Elements of semantic search are now present at almost all stages of the search process, and the Semantic Web has played a key role. Read on for more detail and to learn how to take advantage of this opportunity to make your web pages more visible in this evolution of search." 'via Blog this'

13 Google Search Tricks That Make Life A Whole Lot Easier : "You  think  you know how to Google? You don't know how to Google. Even the most seasoned Googler might not know every tip and trick available with just a few extra keystrokes in the search bar." To read more go to:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/30/google-search-tricks_n_5338470.html 'via Blog this'

Coder: a simple way to make web stuff on Raspberry Pi : 'via Blog this'

One of the comments that came out from the user's survey was about searching the 'Tube Map'.    3.  Perhaps a search box on this page that users could use to quickly locate the item on the map would complement the site. A partial solution was to add a search, that search the site. this has been achieved using Google Custom Search to the www.sustainablity.net site (see below) To create the search, yo u need a Google account and then go to  http://www.google.com/cse/ Create a new Custom Search Engine and decide what sites you want to include, the name of the search and whether you want to pay.  For this project I went for the free/standard edition option which means there will be adverts, as well as the search results from the site.  When you include the sites to search the format does matter to get it to search the whole you will need to put * at the end, so for example  http://www.web-sustainablity.net/*  to search all of...

Before starting to migrate the site from a hosted server to a Google sites, capturing the current web contents as static HTML has some benefits: -Even though Google sites does allow for direct importing of HTML. HTML can be added to a Google Site. -Provides all the images in one go. Software selected for this job is the free software WinHTTrack Website Copier ( http://www.httrack.com/ ). It is easy to install and use. This work has been supported by funding from JISC. The site can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/site/emknorg/ or  http://www.web-sustainablity.net/emkn/ Survey about this material can be found at:  http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=67775a0a-336f-45a5-a222-2f1a6615752c  please feel free to fill it in or  http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=cec22f0a-e467-4c15-a319-74d96bb8ed9d

The figure above shows the summary of the usage overall; with a relatively large rise in the numbers of page views in July 2016. One of the most popular traffic source is probably due to the short post about can be Skydrive be used to host webpages  Can Skydrive be used as free  ho sting. (see table at the end of the post) A welcome surprise was the number of page views from the countries other than the UK (with the United States being the largest group).

The website under-development is currently completely separate from the www.emkn.org site and is hosted on a Google sites site with connections to a Dropbox site (used as at temporary measure) Main page: sites. google.com/site/emknorg/home Three examples of other pages are shown below: Example 1: Networking and Good Practice :  sites.google.com/site/emknorg/services/networking-good-practise Example 2: Technological Services: sites. google.com/site/emknorg/services/technological-services Example 3: Enterprise Development:  sites.google.com/site/emknorg/services/enterprise-development The flash based Tube image has been converted into a more search engine friendly image map and HTML links and ALT tag describing the link aiding accessibility. Click here for the image map Content is being migrated from the dropbox to Google Sites Google analytics has been added to the site both Google sites and Dropbox to capture that information. Analytics is also add...

The aim of this project is to transfer the website of the East Midlands Knowledge Network ( http://www.emkn.org.uk/ ) to the free web creation and web hosting service – Google Sites, in order to save the useful resources and make them available after the original web site is closed. Google Sites is a free tool to quickly create and publish web pages and it is available under: https://sites.google.com/ . In order to use the service, it is required to have a Google Account which is also free. Since I have both Google Account and a little experience in creating Google Sites (I set up a website for my maths group project, 2 years ago) I thought that the task would be fairly easy. The EMKN original website looks nice and modern, but it is made only with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. All the data is static and there is no database or server-side scripting behind the website. Setting up the page is very quick, the user just needs to fill in a form where they choose properties of the website, suc...

A Google Site has been started at  site  as in Figure 1. Figure 1 Starting Page One of the areas that has been focussed on setting up the services menu as can be seen  https://sites.google.com/site/emknorg/services  at the moment the image links to pages with their content missing. Figure 2 Starting page Problems found and addressed. Google Sites is restrictive on where certain features can be placed, such as the main image on this page. The image on this page had be handled a little differently as well.  It had to have it's own Google Gadget as an xml file and managed to recreate the colourful menu. It looks almost exactly the same as the original one. There was an initially a problem with the links but this  was fixed by adding  target="_parent"  to every link. An area that is being worked on curent is the interactive map shown in figure 1 at the moment only a portion is being used. This work has been supported by fu...