API's with everything

If you work in and around any sort of company that is undergoing a digital transformation, you will almost certainly hear the term "API".

Short for Application Programming Interface, put simply it provides a way for one system to be used by another in an agreed way. In other words, you can run some specific functionality or process elsewhere (e.g. within you organisation or across the Internet) via a set of published instructions.

APIs aren't a particularly new idea (I've been working with them since the 1990s), but they have grown in prominence and usage as other technologies and approaches such as Digital and SaaS (software as a service) have become more popular. It is therefore very likely that at some point or another most large organisations will have built APIs for their customers, or for their internal use.

Some  might therefore possibly state that we have currently "reached peak API use"... were it not for the likelihood that API development and adoption is set to increase further as more companies look to standardise and expand their digital integration capabilities.

It is also one of the reason's I called our company "Ideal Interface".

What's in a name?

"So why did you name your company Ideal Interface?" is a question I have heard quite a lot in the 11 years since it was founded.

This article may explain:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-ideal-interface-hayden-sutherland/

Ideal Interface is looking for a part-time administrator

Ideal Interface is a privately owned, strategic digital & eCommerce consultancy based in Bishopton, Renfrewshire. The business consults to a number of household names on all aspects of online sales, marketing and delivery.

Due to continued growth in the business, we now need a part-time administrator to help with key support tasks including:

• Processing of contractor expenses
• Creation of monthly invoices
• Basic client assistance (e.g. website updates)
• Interaction with suppliers

Skills you will need:

• Computer literacy (Windows, Excel, Word, etc.)
• Numeracy
• Good communication skills
• Attention to detail
• Basic internet (browsing, social media usage, etc.)

What we offer:

• A flexible working approach
• A competitive rate
• An opportunity to be part of a growing company 
• An opportunity to learn about Digital Marketing and the future eCommerce environment

Note: Because we are flexible, this role might well suit a parent who wants to return to work part-time.

8-16 hours per week.
Non-smoker and own transport preferred.

Ideal Interface website gets its sitelinks back

In October last year I rebuilt the Ideal Interface site, with the aim of making content easier to update and creating a mobile-specific version. The effort to do this was mentioned in this post:
http://press20.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/rebuilding-new-ideal-interface-website.html

One of the consequences of moving to Wordpress's own hosting service was the need to change from a 'www' URL prefix to http://blog.idealinterface.co.uk . This unfortunately meant that our listing in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) not only dropped in comparison to what it was before, but also lost its sitelinks.

For those who don't know, sitelinks are those links shown below some of Google's search results that allow users to jump straight to pages below the homepage, thus allowing them to quickly find the information they're looking for. However, Google only shows sitelinks for those sites it deems appropriate, based upon how easy it is for the search engine to find key pages and their relevance.

For now, we have just two sitelinks, compared with four that are presented for larger and more relevant sites, however this is a good step forward in the recognition of our site by Google (and in the SEO work of our own site).

Learnings from migrating the Ideal Interface domain

Last week I migrated the Ideal Interface website across to the sub-domain http://blog.idealinterface.co.uk and mentioned at the end of this blog post how I was concerned that it may affect our SEO rankings. 

Well a quick check on Google has show that we have still retained the top spot for a search on "Ideal Interface". However we have lost our site links, the series of lesser links under the main listing that link off to other pages on this site.

It is also strange to notice that Google still gives our old site (http://www.idealinterface.co.uk) a third place listing, behind an Australian User Experience consultancy.

Hopefully, when our old site completely disappears from Google's listings we might get back our site links back in time. Until then, I think it is safe to say our listing has been affected by our domain migration.

rebuilding the new Ideal Interface website

The old Ideal Interface company website had been up for about 3 years and was looking  a little dated. Not only was it out of date from a content perspective (as well as having our old London address & details, it contained references to an association with a parent company that has now folded) . On top of this, the CMS we had used required upgrading and given that the site was only a small, I thought a blogging platform was more suitable. Oh.... it also wasn't mobile compatible, which I see as a must in the current online world.

I therefore made the decision last week to redevelop the site, but this time using the Wordpress blogging platform.... The site's main purpose is to house a small amount of content based around our central proposition of eCommerce and Digital Marketing consulting, so I thought a blog was the ideal vehicle going forward. But here was the challenge I set myself...... get it done for no charge (except my time).

The first issue I had was exporting the content from our current content management system (Drupal) to our new one. Despite looking at several ways to do this automatically, I eventually settled for a 'copy and paste' approach. This actually turned out to be quite time efficient, given that Wordpress accepted most of the formatting from the old CMS.

The second one was migrating the domain across. You see the forwarding of our company email addresses is managed via one domain name provider, but migrating the DNS across meant losing this forwarding (which was not available in Wordpress as far as I could see).
Note: I only found out about the lack of forwarding by stopping the company email addresses for a period of a few hours. Luckily these were saved by our DNS ISP and eventually came through. Ooops!
The remedy to this issue was to give the website a subdomain and eventually I settled on http://blog.idealinterface.co.uk
However, Wordpress did charge me for the mapping of this subdomain, at a cost of about £9.

So now, we have a new site. One that has the same content, is updated using the Wordpress app on my iPhone and works incredibly well on mobile devices. I'm not 100% sure I like the template used on the PC version and I need to include the logo in there ASAP. But for just a very small outlay I can upgrade this template to a premium one or get one developed that I like.

Let's see how it fares.... especially as the domain has now changed and this may affect our SEO rankings.

Ideal Interface launches charity climb website

We’re really please to have built this site (http://www.kili2010.info) to help a group of eleven friends from the UK who are climbing Mount Kilimanjaro for charity this summer.

They hope to raise at least £27,000 for a new unit for Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London.

They should be live blogging as they climb (if they manage to get a mobile data signal up there), so come back regularly to the site for updates on their progress.

Following me on Twitter - what you can expect

I've been a Twitter user now for over two years, clocking up over 1,300 tweets so far (and counting). I've therefore seen it grow from a niche 'early adopter' service to a huge real-time trending tool in that time. In fact I even now use it when watching popular live TV programmes to get the 'back channel' on opinions and buzz (just don't tell my Ideal Interface colleagues that I'm a secret X-Factor viewer).

I've more or less settled into a pattern of using the same account for personal and work stuff, meaning there's a blend of:

• Hyperlinks of stuff I have read and find useful


• Personal replies to people I know


• Retweets that I find useful or just plain relevant to me (and want my followers to see)


• Trivial thoughts or comments that get me through the day


• and more recently status updates from other services (e.g. Foursquare)

I therefore have a question (or two):

Does anybody find this balance right or wrong? Should I use my personal Twitter account http://twitter.com/haydens30 just for personal stuff such as replies & thoughts and use the company one http://twitter.com/idealinterface just for business tweets?

Let me know

Putting a new site live

We've just put our new company website together (www.idealinterface.co.uk) and its been fun to get back to what we do best... building sites that do what they should.

A bit thanks to the following people for their hard work (in no particular order):

• Sarah (design)
• Tony (site and CMS development, hosting, last minute changes, putting up with my late night phone calls, etc.)
• Marc (Information Architecture and copy writing)
• Ben (design, asset production, content changes, learning Kentico from scratch, etc.)
• Tim (feedback)

and if I've missed anyone, then thanks to you to!

Success in 2009

My last posting this year and something a little more up-beat. Personally its been an epic 2008, including: marriage, moving and materity.

I really just wanted to wish all clients, partners, friends & staff of Ideal Interface a fantastic & successful 2009.

Hayden

Podcasting to improve the Influence

I've been planning on writing a blog post on podcasting for a while. This has grown in its consideration far more after my company Ideal Interface has starting working recently with a start-up who is using both audio and video as their main product and therefore their delivery mechanism.

Podcasting is just one of the many channels that companies have available for distributing content, and is the primany way of delivering audio (and increasingly video) to time-shifted listeners. Whilst a lot of podcasts are 'homegrown' operations done with a mic and some free software, quite a few companies are using this medium to get their message across.

This has been particularly adopted by media companies that already produce high-quality content. Obvious examples are:

The BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/directory/


The Guardian Newpaper:
http://www.riverisland.com/gfw/?_ctId=j6i2fUdEqsi9BTk5pz6ugGvEq4eznMpgEzs7w/K08us=

There have been stories recently that raise the question of whether Podcasting is failing? However, these reports are a little premature and do not really understand how the 'Long Tail' can be leveraged successfully by podcasting. The "Power to the People: Social Media Tracker" study in April 2008 estimated that just over 14% of US Internet users downloaded podcasts in 2007. eMarketer also predicts in a recent article that US podcast ad spending will grow to $435 million by 2012 from $165 million in 2007

It should also be noted that Podcasting has additonal benefits such as Search Engine Optimisation, if done correctly:
http://advertising-for-success.blogspot.com/2008/04/optimizing-podcasts-for-seo.html

'Benefitting the Financial Services Customer with Web2.0'

My company 'Ideal Interface' has been working on providing insight into on how Financial Services can benefit their customers with Web2.0. This work has resulted in us producing a white paper in the form of an Executive-level presentation.

This is uploaded here:
http://www.slideshare.net/haydens30/fs-web2-v2/
[comments welcome please]

When putting together the research for this piece of work, its been interesting to see the different ways in which those in the FS space are embracing Web2.0 (and which specific parts). What has become most obvious is that no two companies are approaching this in the same way and that certain companies are leading the way in their extended conversation with the customer.
Wells Fargo seems significantly further than most, for example it has 4 blogs that post regularly:
http://blog.wellsfargo.com/
I've also been listening to First Direct's podcasts as a result:
http://www.interactive.firstdirect.com/podcast.html