I spent today at the Internet World show at Earls Court. Apart from being a good excuse to escape from my trusty laptop for a day, there were a number of interesting talks and even some web usability experts on hand offering some free advice.
Out of the presentations I attended, the most interesting tidbits I gleaned were these:
- Email marketing: 90% of email these days is in HTML format
- SEO: Dynamically-generated pages with very specific titles and content can have a huge positive impact on a site’s search engine visibility
- Legal issues: Sites with user-generated content should have a set of terms and conditions that users sign which releases the copyright on the content they create, allows the transmission of their personal data outside of the EU and allows the site owers to release their details to law enforcement agencies
- Mobile devices: Developing web content for mobile devices remains a minefield (multiple markup standards, asset format issues, range of screen sizes, browser bugs). On the plus side, photos can look great on small screens
- Amazon web services: S3 service offers very cheap storage and bandwidth. Hosting largest files on S3 could help sites to scale
- Behavioural segmentation: Users can be segmented into competitive and spontaneous vs. humanistic and methodical. You top of your landing pages should cater to competitive and spontaneous visitors (e.g. with a “Buy it now” button). The rest of the page can cater to the other types of visitor (as they will tend to read the rest whereas the others won’t)
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