I used to add my codes manually to the templates. Whenever I changed the template I had to remember to also update the verification code. This became a tedious task and I thought that there should be an easier way to do this. So I looked for a WordPress plugin thinking that someone should have already written one. When I didn’t find one I decided to write my own. This is actually the first plugin I have published. I am planning on creating some updates in the future and am more than happy to hear about suggestions.

Stephan has been a user of Nibbler since we launched the latest version back in October and is currently the 41st highest user.

What I like most about Nibbler is that it simply gives you hints and tips on how to improve your website across a number of areas. When I make changes I can easily track my progress. And when all suggestions and errors are fixed I come out at the top (see one of my websites http://www.ldstoolbar.com)

You can download the wordpress plugin here or search the plugins directory inside your WordPress install for the word “nibbler”. The installed plugin will look like this:

Simply add your verification code and press save. Your verification code is the long string of numbers inside the meta tag we give you when you select to claim a website.

A few weeks ago we announced a competition for Nibbler users to upload a cool background to their profile, and here we’re showcasing our favourites!

Jonghdesign

Stephan Gerlach

Scott Mokler

Theodor Daniel

Man Ma

And here’s a special mention to Clint Creation who I presume has drawn a self portrait for his background image!

Clint Creation

We got an interesting question on our feedback community last week about how Nibbler ranks websites by popularity. I thought the answer might be interesting to anyone else who’s been wondering how we calculate the popularity score.

So I just checked www.google.com and for Popularity it scored 8.1. Looking at the details it says it’s the most popular website. So shouldn’t it get a 10 for this then??
Stephan Gerlach

The popularity score in Nibbler is made up of a few different factors.

A large percentage of the score is determined by the Alexa rank. In this case we can see that www.google.com ranks as the #1 most popular website in the world.

This is great for Google of course, but most websites aren’t this popular. Even if a website is the 1 millionth popular in the world, it might actually be the world’s #1 best pet shop website, although obviously it’s not as popular as Facebook although it doesn’t need to be. So getting a higher rank isn’t everything. Another proportion of the score is decided by the growth over the last 3 months. This is to reward websites that might currently be the 1 millionth in the world, but have actually made a huge improvement recently.

Nibbler says “This website recently saw a slight increase in popularity” this means popularity has increased, but only slightly. For example, this might only be an increase of 10%.

The Alexa rank only gives us a popularity rank for the TLD (google.com). Unfortunately it’s not possible to distinguish popularity for each subdomain (for example mail.google.com or docs.google.com). Nibbler tells us that the main site www.google.com accounts for 69.9% of this traffic, so it could be that it’s lost some points because of its subdomains.

I hope you agree that this actually makes sense and can understand why we do it this way. We’re not scoring websites purely based on their ranked position, it’s more involved than that. We happen to think that this makes it fairer for other websites, but let us know what you think.

And thanks for the question Stephan!

Ever since we heard of the new EU cookie law, it’s been surrounded by confusion. The latest guidance released by the ICO in December is supposed to clarify things, but we’re finding that it’s still unclear what we have to do in some cases.

Reading the document (and we recommend you do, here’s the link) is quite hard going because of a fair amount of contradictions and exceptions. It states that you require prior consent before setting cookies, and that’s the part that most website developers hate because it leads to horrible solutions like the ICO’s own implemented solution.

What’s even more perplexing about this solution though, is the fact that since the ICO introduced this and asked visitors to opt in to their Google Analytics cookie, 90% of their visitors chose not to, meaning they can only track 10% of all web visits. Yikes.

There’s a lot in the document about the different types of cookies, and what the law means for each of these. Cookies which are ‘strictly necessary’ are exempt from consent (remember the ‘add to shopping basket’ example they gave?) but cookies that are merely ‘important’ are not.

Where the setting of a cookie is deemed ‘important’ rather than ‘strictly necessary’, those collecting the information are still obliged to provide information about the device to the potential service recipient and obtain consent. Is this a quote? Should be in speech marks?

So what about analytics?

Analytics tools (like Google Analytics) that tracks visitors to your website has its own specific section right at the bottom of the new document. In my opinion this is the most important part and what most people need to know. Despite the entire document explaining that we absolutely definitely need to gain user consent, they admit this little caveat in the penultimate sentence:

“Although the Information Commissioner cannot completely exclude the possibility of formal action in any area, it is highly unlikely that priority for any formal action would be given to focusing on uses of cookies where there is a low level of intrusiveness and risk of harm to individuals.”

To me, this sentence seems like they’re admitting that analytics cookies aren’t actually that bad, and they probably won’t take any formal action if you use them. Although I wish this would be more clear, “highly unlikely” is a bit vague, are we in breach of the law or not?

The next sentence explains what we have to do:

“Provided clear information is given about their activities we are highly unlikely to prioritise first party cookies used only for analytical purposes in any consideration of regulatory action.”

We need to create a page explaining what cookies we use and why, which I guess isn’t so bad. It’s a much better solution than creating some horrible popups to ask for consent, which distract and confuse the user.

What if I have more than just analytics cookies?

Then it’s a whole other kettle of fish. The entire document gives you better guidance than I can write here. But very briefly, if your cookies are settings to do with a logged-in user, it looks like you can bundle the consent into your terms and conditions that users must accept when registering.

“It is not uncommon for consent to be gained online using the terms of use or terms and conditions to which the user agrees when they register or sign up. Where users open an online account or sign in to use the services you offer, they will be giving their consent to allow you to operate the account and offer the service. There is no reason why consent for the cookies cannot be gained in the same way.”

Although they do recommend asking your existing members to confirm these new terms and conditions.

So if you’re only using cookies for analytics, the law isn’t quite as bad as we first thought when we posted our first article last year, although it does require some work.

Disclaimer

I’m not a lawyer! The ICO do say themselves they’re highly unlikely to take formal action against websites with tracking cookies, but wording like “the Information Commissioner cannot completely exclude the possibility of formal action” don’t make me too confident!

We think it’s time for a new Nibbler competition! We noticed today that some users are using the backgrounds on their profiles to make them look even more awesome, and that gave us an idea! If you upload a cool new background to your Nibbler profile, we’ll showcase it in a blog article in a few weeks time.

You might know that you can choose between some colourful default different background images for your profile, but did you know you can upload your own branded image? Here’s some Nibbler profiles that already have cool backgrounds:

Oisin Conolly's Nibbler profile

Karen Thompson's Nibbler profile

Eduard Weber's Nibbler profile

How to change your background

To change your background, go to your profile and click Edit details.

You’ll see a choice of other backgrounds here , and an option to upload your own.

If your image is small you’ll likely want it to be tiled, this works best if it’s a repeatable image of you’ll have an odd line where the image ends (even if you can’t see this, someone with a higher screen resolution might).

If you upload a cool image we’ll show a screenshot in a blog article in two weeks time with a link to your profile. This’ll be a great way to show off your Nibbler profile so make sure you’ve claimed your best websites!

After you’ve uploaded your photo, why not Tweet it with the hashtag #nibblerbg too?

Or should you? In my last article I highlighted the dangers of using stock photography when I saw a photo I’d uploaded to a client’s website on TV. I’ve had to search stock photography websites many times for clients, and I’ve seen the same faces popping up time and time again all over the place (and all over the world in some cases!): on websites, billboards, posters, leaflets and packaging designs.

So I’ve compiled a list of photos I see everywhere. Maybe you’ve seen these too? Maybe you’ve even used them in your own projects (if so, I apologise now for what follows, but you might want to choose some new images!).

The main culprits:

Writing on screen guy

Who is this guy and why is he writing on the inside of my screen? I usually see this blurry-faced pen wielder advertising web and IT services, sometimes drawing a meaningless diagram or chart of some sort.

Mr Everyman

I’ve seen photos of this guy everywhere: leaflets, websites, in shops, on a bus – I just can’t escape from his cheesy stock photo face!

What is it that makes him so popular? Was there a study done that proves his face appeals to the widest audience? Maybe he’s liked by all genders, ages and races. Statistically his face seems to be able to sell anything to anyone. Maybe it can also stop wars and poverty?

Handshake

Ahh, the good old masculine handshake! Representing trustworthiness, cooperation and partnership.

I know what is symbolises, but I’ve just seen so many dry corporate websites using this same image, that I’m bored already. Can’t they think of something more original?

Tree growing in hands

It’s the ideal image to symbolise growth: nurturing a little tree in your hands. A popular choice for websites claiming they’ll help grow your business (and maybe those selling bonsai trees).

Headset woman

What’s with photos of incredibly attractive models with headsets? I suppose there’s nothing wrong with showing to your clients and customers there’ll be a friendly young woman taking your call, but photos like these are so common you’re not fooling anyone that she works for you!

Grey-haired businessman

This is one of iStock‘s most downloaded photos of businessmen. Just type that in and I bet he’ll be on the first page. He’s also used in a lot of group shots, and I think I know why. You might see him mixed in with the handsome, young businesspeople so you can prove your organisation isn’t ageist.

He reminds me of Harold Bishop from the Australian soap Neighbours.

Towering office building

I’ve seen loads of photos like this on corporate websites where there’s an unwritten rule that all workplaces should be towering glass office buildings.

They seem to be claiming that this is their immaculate and expensive office building, although in truth it’s a pokey office just off the M6 near Stoke. Just who do they think they’re fooling?

Are there any more over-used stock images that you’ve seen again and again? Put a note in the comments and share them!

When we asked SiteBeam customers what they thought about us at the end of last year, we noticed that many people weren’t aware of certain features or functionality.

We can hardly blame you, since we’ve been improving SiteBeam like crazy this year, and the tool is now more comprehensive than ever. But we thought you’d want to know about these things in particular:

SiteBeam does work on the iPhone and iPad

Several of you mentioned an iPhone or iPad app but in fact SiteBeam already works on both these devices. You should be able to use the tool in exactly the same way as you do normally.

Place names have recently been added to the dictionary

In the last upgrade we added 400,000 new words, including common surnames, company and place names. Obviously this job will never be complete so we plan to continue adding to our dictionary to keep improving SiteBeam’s Spelling test.

You can save which tests you want to run and show in reports

If you know you’ll never want to run a particular test on any of your websites, you can choose to disable it from your account, so that any future reports do not include it. To do this, go to the Account tab and choose Tests. In here you can disable or re-enable tests one by one.

If you want to run different tests for different websites, you can do the same thing but at the Site settings level, not at the Account level. Go into a report for a particular website, click the Site settings button and then choose Enabled tests.

The Help tells you exactly why each test is important & how it’s measured

We know that few people like to read Help sections, but for those of you looking for more detail on how each test works and why it is important for you or your clients, you really should look in there! The Help tab within the SiteBeam tool tells you all this and more.

We do offer custom URLs

We know we don’t publicise this very well at the moment, but you can choose to use your own URL for your SiteBeam account. Just drop us a line: support@silktide.com and we’ll sort it out for you.

In December we asked our SiteBeam customers what they thought about us. Here are the unabridged results (drumroll please):

Overall, how happy are you with SiteBeam?

Average score: 4.29 out of 5.

When we started a year ago this was just 3.69. So we’re pleased to see we’re moving in the right direction.

How would you rate SiteBeam for the following?

Usefulness of reports – 4.58 out of 5

Usefulness of presentations – 3.48 out of 5

Testing speed – 3.77 out of 5

Price – 3.39 out of 5

Ease of signup – 4.19 out of 5

Ease of use – 4.32 out of 5

Support – 4.23 out of 5

We’ve had to summarise the answers to the next few questions because they allowed free text responses.

What do you like most about SiteBeam?

Most people’s answers were about SiteBeam’s:

• detailed and comprehensive reports e.g. “It produces a high quality report, quickly, efficiently, and at a low cost”
• ease of use e.g. “Easy to use and great reports”
• usefulness as a sales tool e.g. “Simple for potential clients to understand and helps sell SEO and websites”

What do you like least about SiteBeam?

Responses were very varied, but included:

• the scoring and fairness e.g. “Some tests have too much weight in the scoring of a site e.g. W3C”
• price, particularly for people who run few reports
• testing speed e.g. “Sometimes the speed of running a test can be slow”
• the 250 web page limit e.g. “Limit of 250 pages on our type of sites can be restrictive”
• reports are only available in English.

What improvements would you most like to see?

Most of the responses asked for:

• more branding options
• better PDF reports
• more SEO tests
• more help and documentation

How do you use SiteBeam?

In descending order:

• 93% use it to improve their websites.
• 89% use it to monitor customer websites.
• 86% use it to sell their services.
• 43% use it to tell SiteBeam reports.

Would you recommend SiteBeam to others?

Yes – 62.1%

Maybe – 24.1%

No – 13.8%

Of the percentage that said “no”, two thirds explained that this was because they didn’t want other agencies to know about their secret tool – wow, we’re flattered!

Thank you

If you filled in the survey, thanks for taking the time. We’ll be looking through every single response we had to help us work out how best to improve SiteBeam for existing and future customers. We have a lot planned for 2012!

Prize draw winner

Everyone who completed the survey and left us their details were entered into a prize draw to win 3 months of free subscription to SiteBeam. The lucky winner was Viper Marketing – Congratulations!

Our website testing tool Nibbler will award you with badges when you claim certain websites. We’ve given you a bit of a head start on how to collect some of these badges here, but we’ve deliberately left some a mystery!

Some of these badges are much harder to collect than others. In this article we’ll show you some badges that are really difficult to collect, and even some that nobody has claimed yet – could you be the first?

If you’re interested in winning $100 of Amazon vouchers this December, pay extra attention! There are three lots of vouchers up for grabs in our Christmas competition but you’ll need to claim plenty of badges to win.

Hard to get

A-List

A-list is one of the new popularity badges we’ve added recently. To claim this badge you need to have one of the 100 most popular websites in the world (as ranked by Alexa). This list includes superstars like Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia and other really well known websites. So far this badge hasn’t been claimed; maybe you’ll be the first to receive it?

Link bait

It’s a fact that some websites are linked to more than others. Many sites are useful sources of information so attract lots of links -think about how many websites link to Wikipedia! The Link bait badge is awarded to websites with over 10,000 other sites linking to it. Any site wanting to climb up the Google search rankings should be looking to get as many incoming links as possible, but it’s not that easy, so this badge is a small reward for all your hard work.

Memetastic

Gay sharks

In series 1 of Glee, Brittany the cheerleader created an internet meme when she asked “Did you know that dolphins are just gay sharks?” We created a badge awarded to any site mentioning this popular phrase, but it’s never been claimed. Maybe there’s not many webdevelopers who are fans of Glee. Who knew?

Charlie Sheen

Clearly nobody is ‘Winning’ as much as Charlie Sheen, as this badge hasn’t yet been claimed. Get yourself addicted to the drug called Charlie Sheen bro!

TV/Film badges

This parrot is dead…

Quoting Monty Python sketches might annoy your colleagues, but it’ll actually earn you a badge in Nibbler! If Nibbler finds some lines from the famous dead parrot sketch on your website you’ll get a special badge. There’s also a separate badge to collect for quoting a certain song about lumberjacks too. Currently nobody holds this badge, so what are you waiting for?

Futurama

With one of the characters called Nibbler, the cartoon Futurama holds a special place in our hearts. If we find character names on your website we’ll award you a Futurama badge, and if you claim it today you’ll probably be the first.

Badges for geeks

Big Bang Theory is a US sitcom about geeks. Nibbler rewards mentions of characters from the series with a special badge. There are also badges available for sites referencing popular words and character names from Star Trek, Star Wars and several other geeky films and TV shows.

Tongue tied chemist

Chemistry has lots of really long and complicated words. We thought we’d reward chemistry websites with a special badge,although the words we look for are probably quite niche like Tetramethyldiaminobenzhydrylphosphinous and Formaldehydetetramethylamidofluorimum (yes these are real chemistry words!). Currently nobody has claimed this badge, and to be honest we’d be surprised if someone did. Go on, impress us!

Technology

Browser wars

We’re quite glad that this badge hasn’t been collected many times. Any website that includes the text “best viewed in Netscape” or similar browsers will be awarded (if that’s the right term) this badge. So far only one user has claimed this badge – it’s not something to be proud of.

HTML5 black belt

We want to reward web developers who work long and hard making great websites with modern technology. If you claim over 30 websites built using HTML5 you’ll be awarded the HTML black belt badge. So far only one person has claimed this badge, could you be the 2nd?

Of course, some of these badges were created just for fun , so they only add a few meagre points to your overall score; but some of the more difficult badges will reward you handsomely for your efforts. And who knows, this might just rocket you up the leaderboard if you’re trying to win our December competition.

This can be both a real asset and a curse. Training your mind to notice errors in spelling, grammar and so on, is a bit like opening Pandora’s Box, or taking the red pill in the film The Matrix.

Typos jump out at you from everywhere – from shop signs, menus, TV ads – until you begin to wish you could go back and take the blue pill; erase what you know just to have a quiet life.

On the plus side, I thought it might make for an amusing blog post – here are 15 of the most unbelievable I’ve come across.

Embarrassing signoffs

The other week I met someone at a networking event, who told me that within the last few weeks, she had received numerous emails littered with spelling errors. The most cringe-worthy were:

“Apologies for the incontinence”

and

“Kind retards.”

I also have to hold up my hands here and admit that in my second ever full time job, I made an embarrassing error while typing my own job title at the bottom of a letter.

My job title was Public Information Officer. I missed out the ‘L’.

This letter was sent to over 100 libraries under the control of a local authority. Ouch.

It was around that time that I decided to get seriously good at proofreading!

The curse of the apostrophe

Ah, the glorious apostrophe! So misunderstood and misused.

In one particularly dull yet memorable lesson at secondary school, when we had a supply teacher in English, we were subjected to a 45 minute lesson on just apostrophes. It’s the only lesson I remember being exclusively about grammar, and however tedious, it must have sunk in because I’ve never really had a problem with the apostrophe.

However, plenty of people do. I’d go so far as to guess that the majority of the UK population don’t know when and how to use them correctly.

It’s not their fault of course. Whole generations of children (including my own generation) were never taught grammar at school and as more and more people use them incorrectly in very public places, it becomes a vicious circle – the more you see them used incorrectly, the more you assume it’s ok to use them in that way, and so on.

Here’s some I’ve recently noticed:

To gain entry onto this course, we’ll want to see that your enthusiastic and motivated and that you have the following qualifications…

The classic confusion of your (possessive) with you’re (meaning “you are”). This wasused on the ‘Entry Requirements’ section of a course page on a college website. Ooops. Ironic and highly embarrassing!

“10% of all curtains and fabric’s” – used on prominent point of sale materials inside a shop.

People often seem to think that ordinary plurals are in need of an apostrophe.

“Whose got what it takes to be the next quiz champ?”

Er, clearly not you! A poster advertising a local pub quiz competition; they really meant “who’s” (short for “who is”).

Humiliating mix ups

The classic typo is where letters have been added, removed or mixed up – the mistake is often so slight that it’s been missed by the writer, but can have hugely embarrassing consequences – like these three examples.

On a page about the Music Department in a school prospectus, the writer had mistyped the name of a music production package called ‘Cubase SX’ so that it came out as “CubeSex” instead! Oh dear. Cue hundreds of alarmed parents.

Even worse, a friend spotted this huge clanger on a takeaway menu for a curry house:

“10% discocunt for orders over £10”

Yikes.

And an ex-colleague of mine messed up while writing a very important council document that reported progress on a series of key performance indicators. Instead of quoting the official name of the KPI which was “Older people helped to live at home”, she wrote “Older people helped to love at home”. Now that’s a different KPI altogether!

Lost in translation

Incorrect translations into English have provided hours of entertainment for me in the past. I know these are not strictly typos in the classic sense, but they are still the result of not getting someone confident with the English language to check your wording.

My favourites are:

“Sugar’s little balls”

“Ice cream cancelled”

“Correct coffee”

All of these were spotted on the same menu in a European country I was visiting. I think the first phrase was trying to describe the ingredients of a dessert – presumably “little balls of sugar” – the second I guess might be a neutral flavour of ice cream (perhaps vanilla?) and the last one, who knows!

I also loved this one, which appeared on the instructions to a game found within a Christmas cracker:

“To decompose ball though into floor have fun!”

This has got it all – lack of punctuation, wrong choice of words and a typo!

What the heck?!

I have no idea how they managed to get these so wrong!

A whole pub menu where each description started with “ed with…” e.g. “ed with homemade croutons and wholegrain brown bread”! My husband is called Ed so this photo made for a popular Facebook post.

I once saw a shop misspell their name on their staff uniforms! Now that’s impressive. It wasn’t even a difficult name to spell.

So there you have it – undeniable evidence that people are generally pretty poor at proofreading. Hopefully that’s made you feel better about your own writing and cheered you up if you’ve made the odd gaff yourself in the past. You are in good company.
However, there is hope. Aside from using a professional proofreader, you can at least avoid embarrassing typos creeping into your website by using the multi-lingual spell check in SiteBeam.

By the way, the photo at the top of this blog post is real – I took it while on holiday in North Yorkshire.