Giraffe Forum

Top tasks and council websites
The new Liverpool city council website is one of the best examples of a top task focused website I have come across.
One of the hallmarks of a truly excellent website is that you can start doing the top task on the homepage. So, ten years ago you went to a hotel […]

Know the single most important thing your website is supposed to do.
“I think deciding what our Website was meant to do was the first and most important step to achieving results.” So states John Blackmore, Senior Manager, Web Demand Generation for IBM. Your website, whether it be government, non-profit, intranet or commercial, requires management. […]

Bringing someone to your website is just the first step. Unless they complete a task you have wasted time and money.
The Google homepage is one of the most poorly search engine optimized websites on the Web. If you search for “search engine” (There are 6 million such searches every month.) then Google appears way down […]

The challenge of management is not just measurement. It’s measuring the right things.
There is an old saying among managers: If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. It’s one of the basic principles of management and many would say that whatever is not measurable is not seen as important by managers.
Measurement is essential. […]

A primary rule of web management is: ‘Do as I do, not as I say’. So why do we ask people to say what they’re doing during usability tests?
About a year ago I listened to a university professor explain concisely how he liked to use a particular website. “Now when I have this type of […]

Managing content can yield enormous rewards, but it requires a continuous improvement model.
I was recently testing a website with customers when a simple error became evident. I told the website manager about the error and he said they had already noticed it and would fix it in the next release. This was a basic error […]

The top task identification approach helps you separate the chocolates from the salads and discover what customers really want when they come to your website.
In traditional surveys and focus groups people will say they want salads, but when they’re on their own on the Web they go for the chocolates. For the last nine years […]

Separating the top tasks from the tiny tasks is one of a web manager’s most important responsibilities.
A major publisher has for the last 30 years published technical books that can be up to 200 pages long. When they started moving their books to the Web, they found that the same 20 pages in each book […]

Are you measuring the right things? Could growth in your page views in fact be a negative trend?
“The latest online ABC figures for Ireland show that Daft.ie, the property sales and rental portal, remains the most visited website in the country, with 1,275,630 unique browsers per month,” Mark Keenan writes in The Sunday Times in […]

One of the greatest challenges organizations face is truly understanding the importance of, and managing the completion of, information-based tasks.
I am forever going on about managing the task, not the content or the technology. Once I was speaking at a conference about the importance of managing a website based on task success. A lady […]