The taskforce’s objectives are to:

• make government information more accessible and usable
• establish a pro-disclosure culture
• leverage the views, knowledge and resources of the general community
• build a culture of online innovation within Government

“Let us imagine a scenario to illustrate the point.

You are thinking of buying a house.

You go online and using mapping data you access the suburb you are thinking of moving into.

With just a few clicks you are able to access information about schools, parks, child care centres and aged care facilities in the area.

You are able to see whether crime is rising or falling in the area, how fast the local public transport services will take you to work, and how congested the roads are at 8am on a weekday morning.

With a few more clicks you are able to join an online forum about the quality of the local schools, and about the pros and cons of living in the area.

Then, after you have moved in, you are able to go online to tell your local councillor, MP or government agency that a nearby road is full of potholes and dangerous to drive on.

This scenario is not far-fetched. We are moving toward it by the day.”

- Lindsay Tanner.

Needless to say, this is an initiative that Gruden fully supports. We have worked closely with government on numerous projects and understand both the challenges and opportunities of putting public sector information online. Having a cross government body responsible for informing and empowering those at the coal face has the potential to really drive openness and interaction and we look forward to doing even more innovative work.

Further information on the taskforce, its scope and aims as well are available at http://gov2.net.au/about/.

1. Clever homepage tracking

Need to know which areas of your site’s homepage visitors are clicking on?

Google Analytics’ “Site overlay” functionality works OK for HTML-only sites but it’s fairly useless if your site includes Flash elements. To get around this add Google Analytics tracking parameters to your internal links.

Here’s an example of how you can structure these links to generate some useful stats.

This link is for a “Partners” link in our homepage’s top navigation area:

http://www.gruden.com/index.cfm/p/partners?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=topnav&utm_campaign=partnerslink

Do this for all links on your homepage and you’ll get a report on all clicks of the “homepage” source, and you’ll be able to break this down by section (e.g. “topnav”) and then by the link (e.g. “partnerslink”).

2. Filter out your own traffic

Traffic stats, especially on smaller sites, can get really skewed if visits from the people running the site aren’t being filtered out.

To fix this, add a new filter using “Exclude all traffic from an IP address”. Add your own IP address, and repeat for any other IPs you don’t want to be included (follow Google’s advice on how to use backslashes before the fullstop characters in the IP address).

Don’t know what your IP address is? Try going here: www.whatismyip.com

3. Get a weekly email report

To get in the habit of checking your site’s stats every week, simply get Google Analytics to email you a scheduled report.

4. See what people are searching for

Don’t forget to set up Site Search reporting on your account. It’s useful when creating content to know what your users are searching for – especially if it’s not something they can currently find.

5. See where people are going

When linking to external sites, track clicks on outbound links and you’ll know which sites you’re sending traffic to.

6. Use Advanced Segments

Google Analytics’ Advanced Segments aren’t really as complicated as they sound. You can use Advanced Segments to group together different types of data and then create a report.

For example, a car manufacturer might want to create a report on visits to its site’s “small cars” content only. To do this include all small car content in a custom segment by creating a series of filters that only include content with particular title text.

7. Know your site’s top-performing times

If you know the times of day when your site performs best you can then time other activity around this – such as only running your online advertising (Google AdWords etc) at these key times.

To do this create a custom report using Time on Site, Pages/Visits, and Bounce Rate metrics and then apply an “Hour of the day” dimension to the report.

Now you know when you’re getting your most serious visitors!

If you’re a Gruden customer and you’re wondering if the site we built for you will look like a mess when your users view it with Internet Explorer 8, we have some good news – you can relax!

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks checking all our clients’ sites with Internet Explorer 8, looking for:

• Usability – making sure all elements of a template were still useable and visible
• Template rendering – making sure the design did not change noticeably between IE7  and IE8

We found only minor issues with a couple of sites.

So why the great results? The main reason is this new version of Internet Explorer is more standards compliant than the previous versions – and we always build web pages with web standards in mind.

One of the main goals of following web standards is to ensure that website code does not need to be rewritten as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and this is exactly what has been avoided here.

Gruden has been involved in the web standards community since the start of the Web Standards Group back in 2003. We’ve even been busy translating web standards articles into Chinese and Portuguese!

]]> http://blog.gruden.com/2009/04/were-ready-for-internet-explorer-8/feed/ 0 http://blog.gruden.com/2009/03/gruden-revamps-ferrier-hodgson-website-with-sitecore-cms/ http://blog.gruden.com/2009/03/gruden-revamps-ferrier-hodgson-website-with-sitecore-cms/#comments Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:41:10 +0000 Guy http://blog.gruden.com/?p=325

Ferrier Hodgson has been getting some great feedback for the new website that Gruden recently deployed for them.

The revamped site has been well received by both internal partners at Ferrier Hodgson and also their customers.

Ferrier Hodgson – Asia Pacific’s highest profile provider of turnaround, reconstruction and forensics services within the financial sector – approached Gruden with a brief to completely overhaul their website’s content management system (CMS), refresh the design and improve their information architecture.

Using the .NET framework, the Sitecore CMS has industry-leading ease of use, flexibility and scalability – so it was a perfect fit for Ferrier Hodgson. The company can now manage web content itself without relying on third parties, ensuring the site is always up to date and able to communicate effectively with partners and customers.

Ferrier Hodgson’s next assignment for Gruden is to implement a Sitecore Intranet service that will not only reflect the design and function of the public site but enable the company to improve internal workflow processes.

For more information about the Sitecore CMS platform visit www.sitecore.com or contact us here at Gruden.