Stephen Blyth's Blog

For webmasters and other people running NGO websites in Wellington there is an abundance of ways to learn about the craft. As well as fairly regular NGO focused workshops, conferences and networking sessions, there is a whole raft of opportunities for professional website designers, content producers and others. This is of course fabulous for organisations [...]

I’ve promised to run the inaugural NGO webmasters networking event in a fast paced way. The exact words I’ve used in my promotional messages are “Snappy and fun – no sales pitches – no long speeches.” I’ve attended many networking events and public meetings where things drag on. At worst, it’s half time before even [...]

Earlier this year I was bitten by a web analytics bug. I wanted to learn all I could about how website stats could help me understand what visitors were doing on the websites I was working on. The basic reasoning is thus: learn about how people are using a website then give them more of [...]

After the workshop I ran today on making regular usability tweaks and enhancements to your website at the Connecting Up conference in Wellington I really got the feeling everyone would have liked more time to swap notes, share good stuff and raise other nutty problems. With a few exceptions, no one was even close to [...]

As I start to collect people’s contact details for my new email newsletter I realised I might be missing something on my website. I didn’t have a clear, explicit statement about how I’ll protect any personal information I collect. Anyone giving me their details should be able to easily find some reassurance that when they [...]

With the unveiling this month of a new interface and features for the Google Analytics tool for measuring website traffic, the power of numbers is once brought to the forefront of the web analytics world. There is something seductive about being able to try to understand what visitors to your website are doing just by [...]