Spencer's Blog

Is Google Analytics reliable enough for client work?

Last week’s massive data loss has got me reconsidering whether or not Google Analytics is the right solution for my clients.

I’ve long been aching for a logfile-based stats package as I’m utterly fed up of implementing and changing goals and filters and having to restart the stat-count from the time of implementation. A logfile-based solution will apply your new filter/goal retroactively and instantly give you some stats to work with. I’m tired of waiting a month after implementing the smallest tweak before being able to report anything back to the client.

However, a logfile-based solution with the advanced features and adaptability of Google Anayltics is not cheap. Or pretty. Of all of the systems I’ve been able to test, Urchin (which Google Analytics is actually based on) is the only one that comes even remotely close to the functionality I need - and costs an arm and a leg for it.

I’ve looked past the JavaScript-only counting, I’ve endured the countless downtimes, I’ve put up with the 6-24 hour delay in reporting, and I’ve forgiven the odd data loss, but the (possibly) final straw for me has come in the shape of last week’s massive data loss. For a period of over a week data was lost on at least 9 of my major accounts relating to the e-commerce tracking - the most important feature of Google Analytics for me. This has completely skewed my conversion rates, my goal conversion rates, the average transactions/amounts etc. Bascially, that one week of last data can equate to me writing off the entire month for reporting. The only thing worse than not reporting at all is reporting bad data.

Of course, who am I to complain whilst Google Analytics is a free service? Well, I’m a user. They’ve lured us all in with a gorgeous interface, awesome functionality and the best price tag in the world - having coerced us away from paid solutions for the most part - it’s their responsibility to provide a service that’s equally as reliable in my opinion. Why? Because it was their intention to have us reliant upon them. It’s a completely closed platform with no interoperability or export function to speak of. Once you go Google, you can’t go back. This is another of the reasons for preferring a logfile-based solution - logfiles are controlled by you.

I’m going to do some research this week to find an alternative solution, I’ve been playing with Woopra a lot recently and I love it, but again it’s JavaScript-based and appears to have little conversion rate and marketing tracking built-in at this stage. Great for brochure sites, not quite there yet for the big guns.

The most frustrating part of the recent outage is that I had a programmer looking at the checkout processes on the sites that were missing data for hours searching for any inkling of a bug, I briefly toyed with the idea that it could be Google’s fault but thought better of it as normal visits and page view etc. were still being counted - it was only the e-commerce tracking that was missing. I had our lead programmer spend the better part of a day trying to hunt this bug down which equated to at the very least a loss of £750 billable time.

That’s probably enough to warrant an Urchin license (£1500 for 100 sites).

The new site goes live, mostly

So most people that know me will know that I’ve been working on this version of the site on and off for at least a couple of years. Typical web designer story - too busy with client work to finish my own site. Not that I’m complaining, mind.

3 years after the final Photoshop comp it’s sliced, templated and ported into WordPress as the design you see here today. I would have thought that 3 years down the line this design would look a little dated, but I’m pleased to say I’m still enjoying it. For the moment.

You’ll notice that a few areas are still a little rough around the edges. I can but apologise. The gallery has been through at least 5 incarnations, beginning life as Gallery2, then Flickr, then the awesome NextGEN Gallery plugin, then 2.5’s built-in gallery function, and then back to NextGEN again. The same could be said of the portfolio, and these are areas that I will be improving over the next few weeks for sure. Also - apologies for the few validation errors - unescaped ampersands are the bane of my existence of late.

In other news, there’s loads of other news. Life is going swimmingly and I’ve some big announcements to make soon.

Love letter to BT’s Complaint department

I’ve had some appalling service from BT of late, here’s a love letter I sent them on 7th April, I’ll let you know if/when they reply:

I am absolutely shocked and appalled at the service I have recieved. 3 months ago I moved house, and informed you beforehand in order to transfer the line. The line is still not working, despite the many attempts I have made to report the fault.

Your operatives have hung up on me mid-call (usually while transferring to another of your million departments) no less than 5 times. Once I actually managed to get through to somebody to report the fault, and received a text message the next day indicating that it had been fixed.

It hadn’t. Not only has your phone service upset me, but I have not received one single email or letter telling me my new phone number or account number. Therefore every time I actually manage to get through on a phonecall - we have to jump through hoops in order to find my account. That adds an extra £2 to each phonecall. I should be billing you not vice versa.

I’ve never received such poor service in my life. And this is an absolute shame, because I have been a customer of yours for many years and until 3 months ago had no complaints to speak of.

I’m at the point now where I would like to request a full refund for the 3 months of service I have not received, and a termination of my contract. If only I could actually get hold of an English-speaking operative to explain this. The last customer services representative I spoke to refused to put me through to his supervisor (despite requesting it no less than 4 times) adamant that he could resolve my issues. Of course, he only inflamed them.

I suggest somebody gets back to me ASAP.

They’ve definitely made my Top 10 list of Companies To Avoid Like The Plague™

An update: 7th May 2008

This matter was finally resolved today. After 4 or 5 missed calls from their customer services department (always when I was right in the middle of a meeting typically) I spoke to a very nice Irish chap who got it all fixed for me. The faceplate was apparently replaced on March 11th (though nobody told me) and so, my line has been working since then. I didn’t know this because one of my phone cables had stopped working, but that isn’t their fault. I’ve now been refunded the line rental I paid during the start date and the date of the repair and I also have a working line. I’m happy as pie.

Bottom line with BT is: if you have a problem, kick up as big a fuss as you can. They almost certainly read this blog entry (hell, I’m #4 in Google for BT complaints)  and handled the matter in a better fashion accordingly. But do, I repeat; do double-check your phone and cables, else you’ll be in the same embarrassing situation as I was this evening after complaining about the service for ages, then meekly admitting “oh actually, it works, sorry”.

Calibri & Lucida Grande - the winning combination

If like me you’re fed up of using Arial and Verdana as the body typeface on web sites, why not experiment with two very beautiful typefaces present on OS X and Vista.

Calibri

Calibri comes bundled as standard with Windows Vista and Office bundles post-2006 and should therefore be present on a large portion of visitors machines.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibri

Lucida Grande

Lucida Grande is another humanist sans-serif typeface and has been included with Apple’s OS since X. It is especially popular among web designers who have seen the light and use Macs, and incredibly envied by those on Windows machines.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucida_Grande

Although Lucida Grande produces absolutely gorgeous body text (especially with Apple’s lovely text rendering engine), Calibri edges it slightly as my favourite of the two because it works just as well as header type, check out this logo I recently designed using Calibri as an example:

So, how do we take advantage of these two gorgeous-but-underused typefaces? It’s simple, just add the following to your stylesheet:

body{ font-family: Calibri, 'Lucida Grande', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif }

By specifying Arial and Verdana we are also allowing those users that don’t have Calibri or Lucida Grande on their system to see the text rendered in Arial or Verdana, instead of their default typeface (more than likely Times New Roman, which just isn’t pretty at small sizes).

Problems with this method

I’ll be the first to admit that this solution is far from trouble-free. The most difficult thing to account for is the different sizes, ratios and kerning of the two typefaces. They don’t just differ slightly, they differ a lot. This can lead to problems such as orphans appearing in navigation menus, overlapping elements, all sorts basically. Always test your designs on both Windows and Mac with each of the typefaces turned on and off at different points to test each possible outcome, and try and tweak the font-sizes to cater for all.

Hacking the WP-Imagefit Plugin

It’s actually surprisingly easy to make work with non-hAtom-based themes (i.e. the Default theme).

How do I do it then?

First things first, ensure your posts are wrapped in a block element that has a class, for instance the Default theme wraps each post in a <div class="post">.

Open wp-imagefit.php and on line 20, change:

jQuery('.hentry').imagefit();\n to jQuery('.post').imagefit();\n

Obviously replace .post with the class you used in your HTML. I’ve only tested this on a custom theme and the Default theme but it seems to work fine for me.

Hope it helps other people.

Alternatively, if you’d rather edit your theme than the plugin, simply edit your theme templates to wrap each post in a <div class="hentry">

Sidenote to plugin author

Excellent plugin, thank you for making it. At some point you could rewrite this so that the plugin automatically injects a <div class="imagefit"> around each entry in the loop, then call that class in the jQuery instead. Limiting this to hAtom only themes seems unneccesary to me.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-imagefit/

Where I’m currently at

Getting this site up and running has taken a lot longer than expected, mostly because my life is going so great. By great I also mean busy, I barely have a moment to spare and those I do have are spent mostly on the Xbox screaming “that was a headshot!!!”.

So, what’s happened recently?

There’s almost too much to cover in one small blog but I’ll try to. Work’s going great, got a few small promotions over the last year or so and my official title now reads something like UI/X & Accessibility Consultant but I do have a few other key roles - most notably that of heading up our blog department (over the last year or so I’ve installed, configured, skinned and manage over 40 of these - not an easy task by any stretch) and I also play a key role in our design team, unofficially appointed as the CSS guru and I’m still lucky enough to build a few eCommerce sites along the way.

We moved - again!

The flat was getting a little cramped - especially with the new addition to the family (read on). My pay’s increased considerably and Mia is doing absolutely incredibly at her job as a Recruitment Consultant, so we found ourselves in the position to get a house. After a few weeks of viewings and haggling, we’re now enjoying the luxuries of a 3 bedroom house in the middle of suburbia, long old driveway for both of our cars, garage and a good-sized 1/3-decked garden for summer and the dog. “The dog!?” I hear you say.

Yes, we got a little puppy!

We’ve been talking about it for a long time. I’ve longed for a Staffordshire Bull Terrier ever since my dear Pugsy passed away 7 years ago. Mia had her heart set on a Whippet, but when my friend John brought round his new Blue Staffy puppy ‘Herbie’ she - well we - absolutely fell in love. Blue Staffies are really very rare and are a beauty to behold. We made a swift visit to the breeder and returned the proud parents of ‘Ronnie’, a gorgeous (then) 12-week old. He’s lovely, really well-behaved and surprisingly easy to train. We went for a pedigree as it settled my fears about illness, as my poor Pugsy was rescued and not from a very good line, and suffered most of her life with various ailments because of it. Ronnie wasn’t cheap - though we got a very good price in the end - but he was worth every penny.

I bought Mia a car

It was her birthday and I wanted to make it special. She’s been needing a car for travelling to Uni and work and with the move we’re now a lot further away from any train stations - too far to walk really, so it was pretty much a necessity. I managed to find her ideal car (a metallic blue/purple 2000 reg Peugeot 306 with all the extras) and she had no idea - should have seen her face when I led her out to it, it was priceless.

I have my own office/studio now!

Shortly after moving in, we made a roadtrip to Ikea and decked the 2 spare rooms out as studies for each of us, and I’m absolutely enamored with mine, sleek minimalism and finally a quiet space I can resign myself to, to get work done and make some long-overdue music. Admittedly most of the time I spend in here is wasted on Call of Duty 4 on my disgustingly large monitor, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

We’ve booked our first holiday/s in years

The past couple of years have been a real struggle for both of us. It isn’t easy keeping your head afloat financially whilst juggling a part-time job and University at the same time, and I myself have had to be very scrupulous in order to wipe the slate clean of the debt I accrued in my less sensible youth. But anyway, we’re off to Centre Parcs in a few weeks for a nice, relaxing long weekend of Spas, Saunas, Massages, Paintball, Bowling and general good fun. Then in June we’re off to the Isle of Wight fesitval with my sister and her other half, which should be excellent fun - and my first proper festival! In August we’re off to Mexico - though if things keep going the way they are we’re going to put that holiday back to September and have it as a honeymoon for an Autumn wedding! We’ll see, but either way I’m dead excited.

So, what’s going on with me?

Well I’m going back to basics with the music, learning keyboard (again) and learning the guitar. I got really sick of just rapping over other people’s music (because really, any mug can do that) and decided I’d try to create an album entirely composed by me. It’s going really quite well, and I’ve been fortunate enough to purchase almost all of the studio equipment I used to drool over in Computer Music magazine. The setup’s practically good enough to rent out for studio time, but it’s just for me for now.

I’ve also had some really exciting opportunities on the design front recently, with some really good freelance work coming in and the possibility of partnering with a few highly-respected peers. Watch this space! I sorely miss talking on Podcasts about design and web development so I’m hopefully setting something up with that soon, bit hush-hush for now though.

I’m writing two books. The first book describes my experiences - both past and present - with Bipolar Disorder, and the second book is about Web Design. Whether or not the world really needs yet another book on Web Design will probably be the decision that venture rides on, but for now it’s a nice side project.

Mia’s considering sending me to Gamers Anonymous. Call of Duty 4 really is simply the most awesome game ever created, and though I only own 3 titles on the Xbox (limited myself to only buying absolutely top-notch games - Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Assassins Creed) the other 2 get no play whatsoever. I probably play at least 2 hours a day - if not more. I run 2 teams on GameBattles (one clan and one doubles team) and slowly but surely we’re creeping up the ranks. Expect to see a few montage videos on here soon as we really are getting quite nasty at quicksniping.

That’s enough of an update for now, I’m sure I’ll post some photos of all the new things very soon and bore you to death with details of all of my latest escapades. Until then…

Congradumalations are in order!

I’m getting married. I’m so happy I could explode. Mia proposed to me (we like to break the mould) on the 4 year anniversary of the day we met, also Shakespeare’s birthday, and naturally I said yes.

We’re planning to have the wedding in September 2008 sometime, and in true bloke style I’m leaving all of the decisions regarding it to Mia. That way she gets the wedding she wants and I get to sidestep the stress of it all. Win-win. 

We went ring shopping in Brighton shortly afterward and got the perfect rings for each other (yes, I have an engagement ring - how cool!) and we also decided to seal the deal with his and hers tattoos.

I can’t believe we managed to find each other again and I can’t believe I’m going to get to spend the rest of my life with her. This is what life’s all about. 

The Cult of the Mac

After years of preaching to friends, family and co-workers the benefits of switching over to Macs, I’ve finally managed to rustle up enough money to join the Apple Elite myself. And I’m stoked. The machine itself (a 12″ MacBook) is an absolute beauty to behold and a dream to use.

I’ve been using Macs through work for a few years now but I’ve always longed for one at home. Now I get to combine the best of both worlds with a portable home and office, and I’m continuing to be surprised by its tweakability.

I’ll be writing my own personal guide to The Switch™ over the next few weeks, and listing the invaluable resources I’ve used to get my Mac to do awesome things like detect if I’m near the computer by the bluetooth on my mobile and enable/disable a password-protected screensaver accordingly. But that’s not half of it, sneak on my baby while I’m not looking, get the password wrong and it’ll take your mugshot via the built-in iSight and email it straight to my phone.

Beware, snoops.

The fun is never-ending, and gimmicky fun aside the Mac has already improved my workflow despite having owned it only a week.I am a little worried though, I’m so taken by this machine that in all likelihood I’ll become another dreaded Apple FanBoy™ by the end of the month, seeking to replace any and all of my mediocre electronic devices with their Apple-branded counterparts. If only they made cars.

My set up’s fast becoming something to envy and you can bet I’ll be keeping this blog updated with its developments. Nothing gets me excited quite like some hardcore geekery and audiophilia.

Apple for Life, yo. 

Life Ambition #1: Complete (Get out of Bognor)

Over the past few years I will admit that I’ve grown a little fond of my home-town, but at the same time there have also been issues arriving that have cancelled out that fondness. Anybody else that has grown-up in Bognor will know what I mean, and for those that don’t I’m not sure that a blog is the right place to explain.

Nevertheless, I will miss the Bog a great deal. That said, re-iterating the title of this post, leaving Bognor was my first recollectable ambition in life. It goes back to the early 90s, 10 years old discovering television and the simple fact that there’s a whole world out there. Small towns are uninteresting and stifling at best, I’ve always wanted bigger things, though I’m sure I’ll want bigger things no matter where I end up.

So I’m in Worthing

It made sense really, I’ve been working here for just over a year now, Mia’s also been working here for a little while, and we’ve made a few good friends here. But most of all, we’re sick of the commute. Rush hour traffic turns the simple 20-minute drive into an hour-long slog, each way. I was constantly tired, constantly stressed, and spending far too much on petrol. Now we live a 10-minute walk away from each of our workplaces, in opposite directions. It’s also right in-between Brighton and Bognor which is perfect for Mia and I, half-way in between each of our lives and starting a fresh one, it’s almost poetic. We won’t be here forever, but we don’t plan to be anywhere forever. I can’t understand why anybody would.

I quite like it here, it seems to have a lot more character than Bognor and is a lot less busy than Brighton. It’s still close enough for the Brighton Nightlife, the train services are better (for Mia’s Uni, and trips to London etc.) and there’s a plethora of great restaurants for us to sample. Rent’s only slightly more expensive but when you take into account the saved money on petrol and public transport we’re quids in.

The new flat’s lovely. Ridiculously high ceilings, sash windows and Georgian architecture score high on the Spenny ratings. Poor TV reception and space for only one of my cars score lower. If only we’d bought I’d turn the place into Automated Heaven, but we wanted to see if we like the area before committing to a mortgage. I’m not massively keen on house prices at the moment either but needs must.I just can’t believe I’ve done it, finally. Almost everyone I know is dying to get the hell out of Dodge but can’t muster the guster.

So cheers, and wish me luck.