Peak Shopping Hours and Day Parting

If you are advertising online, it could be that your advertising network enables you to switch your ads off during certain times of each day. This is so that you can turn them off when no one is shopping and thereby not waste your ad money.

This capability of an ad network is called day parting.

The question that day parting immediately evokes is: “OK, so when do I keep the ads on and when do I shut them off?”

To answer that, you have to know when people are shopping online and when they aren’t. This is something that we at The Magnum Group have been wondering about for some time. However, now there’s a study of peak shopping hours!

May it save you many, many advertising bucks…

Technorati Tags: day+parting, online+shopping, shopping+online, peak+shopping+hours

PDF Writer: Another Free Solution… And It’s Great!

There are several free programs and services to create pdf documents. However, many do not convert images and links in the source document reliably into the pdf format.

We’ve tried out the Google Docs & Spreadsheets document creation service for this purpose and are delighted with its performance.

‘Google Docs & Spreadsheets’ is a free web-based service for creating text documents and spreadsheets. There is one section for creating text documents and one for spreadsheets.

In the text documents section, you can create a document with graphics and hyperlinks, then save it in doc, pdf, rtf, html or odt format (that’s a remarkable range…).

As soon as we logged on to the text document section for the first time, we created a text document with images and hyperlinks and saved it in pdf format. The process was very fast and the result was beautiful… we were impressed and delighted.

To get to the service, create a Gmail account, log onto Gmail and then look at the upper left corner of your screen for the ‘Google Docs & Spreadsheets’ link. When you click on it, you will be presented with a fresh window asking you to select from new text document creation (’New Document’) and new spreadsheet creation (’New Spreadsheet’). Click on the first choice.

The text document section is simple, intuitive and pleasurable to use. The ‘File’ menu drops down to present the various saving choices described above.

We strongly recommend that you try this pdf creation process out the next time you need to create an online document, and are certain that your reaction will be the same as ours!

And of course post your thoughts on the subject as a comment on this blog… we look forward to hearing from you!

Technorati Tags: pdf+writer, pdf, document+conversion, pdf+converter, doc+to+pdf, pdf+format

Great Tool: Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox

If you’re a web developer and using Firefox, we recommend you download and try out the Web Developer Toolbar by Chris Pederick, an outstandingly qualified programming expert.

Now, with this extension, and from your web browser, you can, among a host of other things, do the following:

Technorati Tags: Firefox+extensions, Firefox+add-ons, CSS, web+design

Progressive Disclosure: See It Now

The current thinking on good web design revolves around designing a web site that can be easily used by visitors.

One of the important strategies for achieving this is to minimize the number of links on a page. A key method for planning this is to first present the visitor with only links to the major areas of the web site. One of the links can lead to a very large menu for advanced users to utilize.Those areas can contain links to more detailed areas, etc. (this is known as “Progressive Disclosure”).

I’m sure you’ve experienced being overwhelmed by crowded pages, sometimes enough to run away from the page before it bites you. Progressive Disclosure is a great way to prevent this from happening and to encourage visitors to explore your web site with confidence.

Want to see an excellent example of Progressive Disclosure? Just go to the Google home page. Amongst the very few links there, you can see one called ‘more’. If you click on it, you get a second-level menu with only four important links on it: Books, Froogle, Groups and ‘even more’. The first three links are for non-expert users: they link to specific areas of the web site. ‘Even More’ is for the expert users: it leads to a page with 52 links on it (as of this writing).

To delve deeper into Progressive Disclosure, you might want to see Wikipedia’s tract on it, or read what web design philosopoher Jakob Nielsen has to say about it.

And of course, we prefer using Progressive Disclosure on all the web sites we design.  (Message us here to discuss your web site design with us.)

Cheers!