Virtual Desktop Screen

If you are like me where you have to give support on several different systems and are constantly hopping desks looking for a free mac or linux, or you have several machines in front of you and you are having to switch between machines using a kvm switch you are going to love this tool synergy.

I lined up 4 Desktops and monitors with different OS that I constantly use. I then installed synergy on all machines, after 15 mins I was in control of all machines using only one mouse and keyboard and Scrolling typing and opening programs from left to right across all desktops as if the computers where welded together
Matt Cutts shows how to configure Synergy in six steps
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Surface Computing

Ever thought you could exchange Pictures from your PDA or Camera buy simply placing your device on top of the table,
or Placing an order a la minority report style

Microsoft have finally revealed Surface Computing a technology where users intereacts with the desktop
Completly by touch.

Official Surface Computer Site

Video Demo By Znet

Building a PC

Have you ever thought of building your own PC, but have been put off due how daunting the task maybe?
Well if you can put together a lego kit you can put together a pc from parts.
Jeff Attwood has written an excellent article he explains how to put together the components, test stability and overclocking the PC.

Build PC Part I
Build PC Part II
Build PC Part III

How to irritate an online shopper or “Philfing”

Given that shoppers are a fickel lot it’s probably best not to annoy them too much, particularly if they have bothered to visit your website. 

However, a survey of 2,400 UK online shoppers commissioned by MoreComputers.com has revealed the irritation many shoppers feel when shopping online. 

Particularly, the most annoying thing an online retailer can do is something called “philfing”. The term ‘philfing’ stands for ‘purposely hiding what I’m looking for’, and the survey found that 93% of UK web users are annoyed by such things as hidden delivery charges or credit card charges.

Other e-commerce practices which irritated shoppers included:

• Having to register before buying – this annoyed 57% of those surveyed, while 14% said this would make them abandon a purchase.
• 35% found hidden delivery costs annoying, while this would prevent 64% from buying from a website.
• No phone number being supplied for the site annoyed almost everyone, and rightly so.  48% found this annoying, while 50% would never purchase anything from such a site.
• Interestingly, 36% found the type of ‘people who bought this, also bought…’ information typical of Amazon annoying, while 5% said this would put them off buying.

At the end of the day it’s all about trust.  Establishing customers’ trust in the buying process is essential, and it’s difficult to re-establish once it has been broken. Not providing a phone number or hiding extra charges until the customer has gone through the checkout process is guaranteed to break this trust. This is all obvious stuff youo might say but it’s amazing the number of companies ignoring these simple steps.

Why do so many shoppers abandon shopping carts.

According to a new report from Marketing Sherpa shows that almost half of all online retail transactions are abandoned at the checkout stage. This constitutes the single biggest loss of revenue for many e-commerce sites.

There are large variations on abanodment rates ranging from as low as 15% to as high as 90%. The chart below shows the results of survey, and gives an idea of the variety of  reasons for customers leaving the checkout process.

Some reasons may be omitted from these answers, such as customers’ level of trust in a website, but the data suggests some important conclusions:

1. Many e-commerce checkout processes are suffering from design and usability problems which can be easily rectified.
   These include hidden charges, lack of clear delivery details, or poor usability.
2. Business processes within the checkout area give customers problems
   User registration, shipping costs that customers consider too high, or overlong checkout processes.
3. Some carts are abandoned for reasons beyond the control of the retailer.�
   Some people will add items to their basket and reach the checkout when comparison shopping, with no intention of buying.

These conclusions suggest that there is much that online retailers can do to reduce their abandonment rates. Case studies suggest a 10-15% reduction can be achieved through redesign, split-testing or a combination of the two.

For more, see our the full report by E-consultancy’s website (Online Retail 2007: Checkout Special by Dr Mike Baxter, which examines checkout best practice) or talk to me, Robert Faulkner on 020 8600 0500 for a verbal digest of the report.

AOL Disabling Images in Online Mail Clients

You may have noticed that AOL recently rolled out a new web based mail client for AOL.com. As part of this change, they are now disabling images by default. AOL are not alone in doing this and they are among a dominant group of clients that block images by default. So the result is that you just have to expect that a vast majority of your contacts will first see your message without images; it’s just a fact of life.

What can be done?

Hopefully most contacts will choose to turn images back on by default, but not everyone will choose not to do this. For those customers who won’t add your From to their address book, and who haven’t turned images on, you need to take the next step: Alternate Text.

Setting Alternate Text

What is Alternate Text? Alternate Text, often called an Alt Tag or Alt Text, is an attribute of an image that is shown when that image isn’t loaded. You can easily add Alternate Text to any image in your message within the image popup in your message editor. And you should always do this to every image as a rule. If you are editing HTML by hand, you just need to add an Alt attribute to your images.That’s it, there’s not too much to do on your part. Hopefully any serious email designers out there were already using Alternate Text for all your images. For those of you who weren’t, now you know, and you should start implementing these changes right away!

The Scoop On Outlook 2007

Among many other draw backs of office 2007 it is also going to cause headaches for email marketers.

What’s happened?

Previous versions of Outlook used the Internet Explorer engine to render HTML emails.  This  meant that designers were able to use sophisticated, CSS-based designs which is why most email messages look so good these days.  You could be reasonably sure that  if the message looked fine in IE, then it would look fine in Outlook. 

The bad news is that instead of using the IE-based HTML rendering engine, Outlook 2007 will use the Microsoft Word HTML rendering engine.  This is bad news.  Word is useless at rendering html and this move by Microsoft signals the end to many of the tricks that email designers rely on to create professional email designs. 

For example, of the effect that this will have take a look at two examples:
Sample email in Outlook 2003�
Same message in Outlook 2007 email client. 

The good news is that these issues are solvable, so dont despair, read on.

What will be different?

For a quick overview of the highlights, read below.  (Note that many of these changes affect HTML-level elements in your email design.)

1. No longer will you be able to have background images in DIV tags and TABLE cells.
2. No nested background colors. A background color in a DIV or TABLE cell displays fine.  However, if you nest another TABLE or DIV within the element, the background color will disappear.
3. No FLOAT or POSITION attribute in DIV tags.  In other words, CSS-based layouts won’t work in Outlook 2007.  Tables only going forward.
4. No FORM tags.  Embedded email surveys will not work in Outlook 2007.  Even worse, Outlook 2007 actually strips out the form elements, so your recipients will not be able to tell if a form was there to begin with.  No animated .gif files or Flash content.  Animated .gif files just won’t animate.  With Flash, you’ll just get a big red X.

If you are a web designer, we suggest that you read the complete, sleep-inducing overview of the design conventions that will not be supported in Outlook 2007.   Also, Microsoft has provided a downloadable validator that will help you validate your HTML for the Outlook 2007 engine.

What does this mean for me?

If none of that made sense, then you’re probably not a web designer.  In which case, you need to know the following:

1. Don’t panic.  The whole world isn’t going to switch to Outlook 2007 overnight, thus, you have plenty of time to re-think and re-work your email design(s).  Given that many of your recipients will migrate to Outlook 2007 over time, you and/or your designer should obviously take these restrictions into consideration going forward. 
2. Email design isn’t dead.  These restrictions will not bring back the days of ASCII text in a telnet terminal.  You’ll still be able to convey your brand and “design” in your email marketing communications, you just might have to jump through a few more hoops to get there.
3. Some Bronto templates will need an overhaul.  For those of you that use Bronto’s default templates, we’ve already identified those that we will need to re-design in order to adapt to these changes.  We’ll get started with these soon, so stay tuned for an update.
4. Test!  You can download a free trial of Outlook 2007 and add it to your testing routine.  Whilst Outlook 2007 is not widely used at the moment, undoubtedly it soon will be.