Make the Web Work

Welcome to the sixth edition of Make the Web Work, published by the University Website Office for all people undertaking web development at The University of Western Australia.

We're particularly interested in your feedback and suggestions for future articles. If you're aware of a particular example of good practice on the web, whether your own or someone else's, have a quick tip, question or suggestion, then please let us know at weboffice@uwa.edu.au

In this edition

• Email newsletters, how to avoid them becoming spam and measuring responses
• Oz-IA Conference & Retreat
• Conducting online surveys using web forms
• IBC Solutions Workshops
• Make money on the web!
• Exemplar page

Email newsletters, how to avoid them becoming spam and measuring responses

You have spent a lot of time crafting your email newsletter, your database of email addresses is up to date, the content is relevant, you have proof read and spell checked it, so how can you ensure it does not end up tagged as spam and how do you find out if people have actually read it?

The Spam Trap

After spending a lot of time preparing an email newsletter the last thing you want is for it to end up in someone's spam folder. Unfortunately, unless you follow some basic rules this is what can happen.

A lot of anti-spam software works on a scoring system. When an email is scanned points are allocated against various criteria. Once a certain score is reached (set by the email system administrator) then the email is tagged as spam and is potentially deleted or diverted to the user's spam folder, never to be read.

There are a number of things that can get your newsletter tagged as spam. The first thing that can start the scoring process is if your email is in HTML. Simple HTML won't cause a big score but the more you format it the higher the score will be. Heavily formatted HTML with excessive use of colour, particularly if it contains form or JavaScript elements will score the most.

The spam score will also increase if you use excessive capitalisation or lots of heading tags.

Certain words and phrases can cause your email to be tagged as spam. phrases like "Compete for your business", "Marketing solutions", "Stock alert" and "You have been selected" will all contribute to an increasing spam score.

Spam filters also examine is the email's subject line, exclamation marks, capitalisation, certain words such as "free" will notch up the spam score. The thing that will damage the email the most is if the subject line contains a user name like "to: danpetty"

There are many other things that can raise, or lower your spam score and it helps to learn about them in order to ensure your email newsletter reaches its intended recipients.

• Learn more about spam scoring here
• Words and phrases that trigger some spam filters

Structuring an email newsletter

An email newsletter could potentially be self contained with all the relevant information and news items contained within the email but typically it will instead contain summaries of content or teasers with links to full articles and information contained on web pages.

There are several advantages to taking this approach to structuring your email newsletter:

Firstly, it keeps the email's size down so that the newsletter downloads, displays and loads quickly. It is also cheaper and less of an imposition on available disk space.

The second advantage is that many readers will skim their mail rather than read it in its entirety. Including full articles in an email is no guarantee that all the information provided is going to read by all recipients. Brief summaries of items allow recipients to focus on the information they require and quickly navigate precisely to what they are interested in reading more about.

Finally including links to web pages with the full content will allow you to measure whether people are actually reading and responding to the information provided by recording how many people clicked on a certain link in the email.

Measuring responses

A measure of the effectiveness of an email newsletter might be whether it is apparent that recipients have read the email and clicked on any of the links provided.

To accurately measure these "click throughs" (people who arrived at a web page from the email link, rather than from a web search or existing link on your web site)

1. create a redirect page on your web site for each of the links in the email,
2. redirect the page to the relevant page in your website,
3. be sure to switch of "Show in Menu" so that the page doesn't appear to visitors in the site navigation,
4. monitor the traffic of the redirect pages in your web server logs.

The number of visitors to the redirect pages will give you an indication of how many people are using the links in your email newsletter.

In MySource it's easy to create these pages using the redirect template. Ensure that they are set to NOT display in the left hand navigation, so as not to get indexed by search engines.

The links in your email newsletter need to point to a respective redirect page which will seamlessly redirect the user to the relevant web content and record a visit in the server's web logs.

Oz-IA Conference & retreat

September 30th & October 1st, Sydney, Australia

On the last weekend of September 2006 there will be a conference/retreat on information architecture in Sydney, Australia. There is a packed schedule featuring international and local speakers, you'll get to engage with panels, and participate in group sessions. And of course, there's the opportunity to catch up with your peers, network your way to new contacts, and have a good time.

Learn More

Conducting online surveys using web forms

There are many reasons why it makes sense to conduct surveys online using web forms. Advantages of conducting surveys online include:

• Convenience
• Cost reductions
• Error reduction
• Decreased processing time

Convenience

It is more convenient for your users. They can complete the survey in their own time and don't have to worry about mailing back lots of forms. Telephone surveys are seldom convenient for the person being contacted and can potentially cause ill feeling to your organisation. Mail outs are also likely to get low response rates. Why else would so many surveys offer incentives like prizes for people who complete and return them?

Cost Reductions

An on line survey doesn't need to be printed out first so there is an elimination of printing costs.

You won't need to employ someone, or assign someone to the task of inputting the data from the returned surveys, giving you a cost and time saving here too. There will be less need for manual intervention if there are any errors or ambiguous survey answers because the online version can include error checking only submitting the form if the answers are in the correct format.

Error Reduction

Processing errors can be drastically reduced through the use of online web forms. There's always the chance that a correctly filled out printed form ends up being input incorrectly when it is manually re-keyed after it is received for processing. The form checking features mentioned in the previous section about cost reduction also help to ensure error reduction, for example, prompting the user if a certain mandatory field has not been completed. This is next to impossible with a printed form.

Decreased Processing Time

Delivery of the information is virtually instantaneous, as soon as the user hits the "Submit" button the data will be available to you to use in a spreadsheet or database. In addition to the cost and error reduction wins, web forms decrease processing time as the data does not have to be transferred manually from paper form to a database or other processing system.

The MySource Custom Form template is a good way of conducting a web survey. It is already being used by many sections of The University for just this purpose. The following screenshot is from a music survey being conducted by a student at the Graduate School of Education:

The Custom Form Template is easy to use and fully featured. you are able to add rules to control input format, control the layout of the survey, you can send the results to multiple email addresses and you can log the submissions in CSV (comma separated values) format which can be used in just about all database and spreadsheet applications.

The example below shows how you can specify a field in a web survey to be mandatory using the Custom Form Template:

The user will see the following message if they have not completed the field labelled "Name"

Here you can see how easy it is to access your survey's submission logs, choosing a date range and the CSV file format:

Your CSV file is ready to open:

Caveats

When asking someone to complete an on line survey you might need to take the following points in to account. To begin with, if the survey is of a sensitive nature and you are not asking the user for identifying information you might want to assure them of the survey's confidentiality.

Another thing you will need to do is estimate how long the survey is going to take and make this clear in the survey's preamble. If you estimate the time conservatively the user may be pleasantly surprised if it takes less time than they thought it would.

Finally, if you are going to paginate the survey, that is to say present a few screens of questions rather than have them all on one long screen then you will need to give the user an indication of their progress through the survey. You can do this several ways but a typical progress indicator might look like this:

[ PAGE 1 of 4 ] or [1 2 3 4 5]

• Some handy tips on creating an online survey

IBC Solutions Workshops

How to Successfully Plan Your Next Website: Interaction Design

Date: Tuesday, 12 September Time: 9:00am to 10:30am
Cost: Free, Register Here
Presented by: Richard Keeves, Managing Director of IBC

Are you thinking of your next website? How do you want it to look and feel? How do you want your visitors to use it? How do you expect them to use it? What do you want them to do on your site? Are you aware of the issues you need to consider when planning the usability of your site? The second of a series of four informative workshops focuses on how your visitors will interact with your new site: its usability, functionality, information architecture, content planning and interface design. Before you plan your next website, you must attend this workshop.

Successfully Managing Your Brand Online

Date: Thursday, 14 September Time: 9:00am to 10:30am
Cost: Free, Register Here
Presented by: Rob Donkersloot, Group Account Director of IBC

You've invested plenty of money building your brand, but do you know how it is perceived and presented online? How are you being positioned? Are you being talked about online? Do you know what is being said? Many organisations underestimate the importance of an online brand management strategy. This unique workshop identifies issues and gives you practical advice that could be critical for your success.

Location: The IBC Training Room, First Floor, 116 Edward Street, Perth.
Map: Click here for map
Parking: Free parking available at IBC

Make money on the web!

Following on from the earlier article about how not to make your email newsletter look like spam I couldn't resist giving this segment a typically spam like subject heading. But it's true, there are many sections of the University opening new revenue streams by transacting online.

Whether they be selling books or allowing people to pay for conferences or symposia, hundreds of thousands of dollars are transacted every year at UWA using secure on line credit card transactions.

The easiest, and one of the cheapest ways of doing this is to use MySource's Shopping Cart Template

Examples of people using the Shopping Cart Template can be seen here:

• UWA Press (click on any title)
• Institute of Advanced Studies

People are also able to use the Shopping Cart Template to make donations. They can enter an amount at their discretion into the on-line form and donate the money safely and securely - even receiving a receipt via email.

Exemplar page

In this edition I have chosen to highlight the registration page for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference on the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) web site.

I have chosen this page because it incorporates some of the elements featured in this edition of Make the Web Work, like an on line form using the Custom Form Template which has been placed at the top of the page using the Nest Content Cell Type. The links to register for the conference take the user directly in to the IAS' shopping cart page, each link adding an item in the users shopping cart.