Lately the Internet industry is abuzz with talk about the coming death of its beloved page view metric. The logic holds that newer technologies such as Ajax and Flash are slowly making the page view irrelevant because a user can load and consume content without refreshing the whole page.

Steve Bryant explains how a huge site can lose page views by improving its user experience:

Yahoo, to take a common example, rejiggered its home page this year to display more information without the need for a page refresh (and corresponding extra page view). MySpace, on the other hand, is built in such a manner that requires a new page to load every time you click a button.

Page View Pallbearer and Edelman SVP Steve Rubel predicts that content providers will actively resist in-page functionality just to keep page view metrics high:

Media companies love to promote how many page views their properties get. They’ve used the data to build equity. They will fight it tooth and nail to protect it, perhaps by not embracing interactive technologies as quickly as they should.

Lost in this page view panic is a sobering reality that few industry insiders care to acknowledge: page views have never been synonmyous with popularity and have always encouraged bad behavior.

What Page Views Measure

As its name suggests, the page view enables analysts and ad buyers to know exactly how many times a particular page or group of pages was downloaded. To its credit, the page view is a much better metric for the Web than ratings are for television or circulation is for print media. If your logs say that your travel review of the Hilton hotel in Paris, France got 120,252 page views last month, you can bet the server farm that somebody downloaded that page exactly 120,252 times. But is raw accuracy enough to save this problematic analytic from the recycle bin?

What Page Views Don’t Measure

Here are some really important marks of success that a page views have never measured:

• Relevancy: Sure, someone visited your Web page, but did they find what they were looking for? Your users may have been looking for something completely different when they Googled “Paris Hilton” and landed on your hotel review.
• Identity: Who are the users who visit this page? Survey data can tell you a few things, cookies can tell you others, but page views don’t tell advertisers who the page is reaching. If an advertiser is trying to reach 18 to 34 year old men, but the content attracts 13 year old boys, the page views aren’t meaningful. A search spider or a malevolent DoS attack can generate page views that aren’t viewed by a human being.
• Quality: Maybe the page contains information that users are looking for, but are they satisifed with the content of the page once they arrive? Does the page make them feel good about staying on the site or coming back again? Is this a page users would return to or recommend to a friend?
• Information Density Not all pages are created equal. The front page of a blog might contain 10 different posts, each of which has as many words as a newspaper article. Meanwhile, a photo gallery with 100 images and one image per page might generate 100 times more page views by offering a lot less content and a lot less engagement.

Some media companies design pages with the intention of driving up page views at the expense of the user experience. Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson has even accused MySpace of being a “click factory.”

• Engagement: How much of the page did users actually view? Did they read most of the text? Did they even look at the ads? Or did the content of the page cause them to hit the back button?

Some experts even think we should find ways to measure engagement. Tech Evangelist Robert Scoble explains why:

As an advertiser I want to talk to an audience who’ll actually DO something. Yeah, I’m hoping to get a sale.

How do You Measure Engagement?

Everybody wants to measure user engagement, but the most obvious methods seem to fall short.

You could measure the amount of time between the moment when a page is loaded and the moment when a user leaves the page. However, in the age of multitasking, it’s very common for users to open a page and then move on to another browser window without closing the page.

If you have in-page comments, you could look at the amount of users who post comments about your page. However, studies have shown that 90% of users are lurkers. That doesn’t mean they aren’t engaged.

You might look at how many people have “dugg” or tagged your page, but these metrics won’t tell you anything about the silent majority of users who don’t use digg for every page they visit, even those they like.

What will Replace the Page View?

What metric will replace page views? Does there even need to be a replacement?

In an age where only part of each page reloads, we will see more advertising units which are tethered to the content, rather than the page itself. Salespeople will stop referring to page views, but will keep referring to “available impressions,” a term they already use.

Potential clients, investors, and the media will continue to be impressed by unique users, numbers of pages, sessions per user, time-on-site, click-throughs, aquisitions, and a wide-variety of demographic data. Does “a billion page views a month” sound better than “we have 50 million users who visited the site an average of 5 times in the past month and spent 10 minutes a session?”

You say you want screen resolution? Usability guru Jakob Nielsen recently gave his predictions about the future of screen resolution:

Many users have large displays. Currently, about 18% of users have at least 1280×1024. The percentage of users with big screens is growing, though not as fast as I would like . . .

I personally use a 2048×1536 display, and I wouldn’t even call that a really big screen. Within the next 10 years, I expect monitors of, say, 5000×3000 to be in fairly common use, at least among high-end business professionals.

5000 x 3000! I was really excited about a year ago when I bought a Dell 2005FPW monitor with a 1680 x 1050 resolution. I guess I was just thinking small.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen recently published the results of an eyetracking study which contends that online readers view text in an F-shaped pattern:

• Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.
• Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.
• Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

Nielsen’s eyetracking study offers few new details for those of us who have preached text scannability for years. However, I did find this suggestion very interesting:

Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They’ll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

It’s not enough to use subheads in Web documents. You’ve got to make sure the first and second word of each subhead get the message across.

Let’s say you’re writing an article on buying a computer and each subhead in the article represents a question that prospective computer buyers need to answer. Which set of subheads works best?

Subheads as Phrases:

• Should You Buy a Mac or a PC?
• How Much RAM Do You Need?
• Choosing a Monitor
• Why You Need the Largest Possible Hard Drive

Short Subheads:

• Mac vs. PC
• RAM
• Monitors
• Hard Drives: Bigger is Better

According to Nielsen’s study, after the first two paragraphs, online readers scan down the left side of online text blocks. Will their eyes stop to focus on a wordy subhead like “Should You Buy a Mac or PC?” when the first four words don’t convey any specific information?

Even when using subheads, bulletpoints, and other visual cues, my tech writing teacher’s mantra remains the same: “always use just enough words.”

It’s common practice for students to write code that outputs the text “Hello World” as their first program in a new language. If you can get a programming language to say “hello,” you must be on the right track. So let’s get PHP to greet us.

1. Open a text editor.
   Any text editor will do, even Windows Notepad. PHP files, like HTML files, are saved as plain text.

2. Place the text < ?php at the top of your document and ?> at the bottom.
   Your code should now look like this:

   <?php

   ?>

Note: To be recognized as PHP by the server, your code must appear between the < ?php and ?> tags. Any code that appears outside these delimiters will be treated by the server as HTML, rather than PHP. So if you want to put some HTML above or below your PHP, you can do so.

3. Enter the following line of code:

   <?php

   echo “‘Hello World”;

   ?>

4. Save the file as test.php and upload to your server.

5. Load the test.php file from your server.
   For example, if the file is located at http://www.mysite.com/test.php, you would enter that URL in your browser’s address window. You will see the result:

   Hello World

6. View source in your browser.
   You will see that the source code for the page reads simply:

   Hello World

From this one simple line of code, we can learn a few things:

• The command echo outputs text.

• The echo command and <?php delimeter don’t appear in the source code because all PHP code is processed by the server; only its output is sent to the browser.
• Plain text after the echo command must be enclosed in single or double quotes. The print command can be substituted for echo.
• All lines of PHP code must end in a semicolon (;). If you forget the semicolon, you will get a “parse error” when you try to run your script.

In a recent article on A List Apart, Brian Crescimanno takes Web developers to task for creating unusable HTML forms [via Keith Bohanna]. Chief among Crescimanno’s criticisms is the proliferation of ambiguous error messages. He shares a story from his mother, a “reasonably average” user:

When she tried to order a Christmas present from a website recently, she filled out the form and clicked the “order” button. She was then returned to the form with the words “Credit Card Error” in bold, red text across the top of her screen. Confused, she searched through the form to find any indication of where the problem had occurred. Finding none, she searched again to find the credit card input field. She checked the numbers and the expiration date. She even checked the spelling of her name, but each time she submitted the form, the same error message was displayed.

As it turned out, the problem was that the merchant’s credit card processing system was down. Nothing she could have done with the form would have made any difference.

We’ve all experienced confusing and even infuriating error messages. My personal favorite comes from a content management system I used that would occasionally return the following error when I was trying to save a new document:

We cannot complete your request. The reason reported was:

This is not necessarily an error. If you feel this is an error then it could be.

So why do some online applications give us such awful error messages? Quality error checking takes time and input from people outside the development team. In the rush to complete a development cycle, it’s far too easy to leave the user behind.

Here are some ways to make sure your forms are user-friendly:

• Use a Minimum Number of Fields: Ask yourself if each field is really necessary. Do you need to know whether your users go by Miss, Mrs., or Miss? Do you need to ask for extra demographic information?

• Use Intuitive Field Labels: A user interface has to speak for itself. You can’t assume that users will click on help icons or read detailed instructions to find out what you mean. User test the interface to make sure you’re getting the message across.
• Write Custom Error Messages: Write custom error messages for every contingency and user test them.

• Provide Help Text on Demand: Give users a help icon next to your more complicated fields so they can click and get some extra help.

• Accept Multiple Types of Input: Crescimanno suggests that the computer, rather than the user, should be responsible for data formatting. If users are asked for their phone numbers, they should be able to enter them as 212-555-1212, 2125551212, 212.555.1212, or (212) 555-1212 and have the server handle the data.
• Use JavaScript to Idiot-Proof Your Forms: Using the power of JavaScript, you can ensure that the form alters itself to keep up with user input.

  For example, the other day, I ordered a DVD from Amazon UK. The address form had fields for “country” and for “county” (rather than state). As an American, I had to figure out that I should enter my state name in the county field. However, after I selected United States from the country list, Amazon UK could have helped me out by transforming the field label from “county” to “state” and giving me a menu filled with the names of all 50 states.

If you’ve decided to learn PHP and MySQL, your first question is probably “what do I need?”

I have good news and better news. Which do you want to hear first? The good news is that all the tools you need to create PHP scripts and MySQL databases are free, with the possible exception of Web hosting. The even better news is that you probably have most of the tools you need installed on your computer right now.

Hosting

If you want to learn PHP so you can improve an existing site, your Web host may already have PHP and MySQL support. If not, you can buy an inexpensive hosting package that features both. Here are a couple of suggestions

• Lunar Pages Their $7.95/month basic package features unlimited MySQL databases and PHP support. I use Lunar Pages to host this site.
• Go Daddy Go Daddy’s economy plan features PHP and up to 10 MySQL databases. The economy plan costs only $3.16 a month if you pay for 24 months in advance. If you don’t want to commit to two years of hosting, you can pay $3.99 a month.
• FourBucks.net offers unlimited MySQL databases as part of its Classic FourBucks plan.

A Text Editor

PHP, like HTML, is an interpreted language. You write PHP code in a plain text editor such as Windows Notepad, save it as a plain text file with the extension .php, and upload to the server where the code is run by the server each time someone visits a Web address ending in .php.

While you can use Windows Notepad or Mac OS’s free TextEdit application to code your PHP, I recommend a text editor with more features. You download a dedicated PHP editor like PHP Designer 2006 or pick a text-based HTML editor like HomeSite (my favorite), BBedit, or NoteTab.

FTP Software

You’ll need some kind of FTP software to upload your PHP files to the server. You have several choices:

• FTP Through Your Browser: I don’t recommend it, but you can upload files using Internet Explorer or Firefox, just by typing ftp:// before the name of your FTP server. Your browser is a clunky way to upload files.
• FTP Through Web Authoring Software: If you have a good Web authoring application like HomeSite, Dreamweaver, or BBedit, you already have FTP support built-in.
• A Dedicated FTP Application: You can download free or inexpensively purchase FTP software for Windows (ex: WS_FTP, CuteFTP) or Mac (CyberDuck, Fetch). Dedicated software is the best way to go; I recommend this option.

• Command-Line FTP: If you don’t mind the command prompt, Windows has FTP built-in, but it’s not easy to use.

A MySQL Client

You’ll need a way to send commands to your Web host’s MySQL server. You can use either:

• phpMyAdmin: A web-based client for MySQL that most Web hosts offer for free. phpMyadmin is clearly the simplest solution, if your Web host has MySQL, chances are 99% that it also has phpMyadmin installed. If your host has phpMyadmin, I highly recommend you go with this option.

• A MySQL Client for Windows/Mac: You can download a free client from the official MySQL Web Site. You can also download a fancier for-pay MySQL client like MySQL Client by EngInSite.

It’s great to have pictures, but pictures should never stand alone, without captions or an explanation. Images should illustrate a point being made in your text.

Take a look at this article” from New York Newsday’s Jon Heyman, entitled “The Dirty Dozen.” The slideshow claims to be a list of the 12 worst sportsman of the year, but the entire feature is nothing but a slideshow, with no explanation as to why of athelete appears on the list.

So, bully for me, because after clicking 12 times, I know that Heyman thinks the NFL’s Terrell Owens is the worst sportsman of the year, but I have no idea why. Newsday appears to assume that its readers know each of these athlete’s sins, but you know what they say about assumption.

Images are awesome. Sounds are slick. But multimedia is useful only when it illustrates, not when it decorates. Nobody wants to see a talking head or listen to a voice reading them an article they could otherwise read themselves.

Jakob Nielsen has an interesting study of Web video, which comes to the following conclusion:

TV users are usually called “viewers,” emphasizing their passive mode of engagement. In contrast, computer users sit forward and drive their own experience through a continuous set of choices and clicks.

Because of this fundamental difference in user experience, broadcast video feels boring on the Web. There’s nothing to do, no choices, no user control.

If you’re going to offer video, it has to be offered in short snippets which users can easily choose from and control. Rather than giving them a 10-minute tutorial, provide 10 one-minute steps or chapters they can click on and choose. If users can’t control what they’re seeing online, they’ll take control by hitting the close button.

Even if your video is two minutes long, you’re demanding continuous user passivity for two minutes. If users spend five minutes reading an article, that’s an active five minutes. They’re placing their hands on the mouse, scrolling down the page, and maybe even considering which link to click.

When users watch an online video, they give up their online autonomy and become desktop couch potatos for a few minutes. The video has to be worth the sacrifice.

Marshall Mcluhan famously wrote that “the medium is the message.” If so, then it is best to understand not only how to write for the Web, but how to use the medium of online technology to your advantage.

Perhaps you already know how to format your text and images in HTML (more recently known as XHTML). But, even if you spend your entire professional life editing articles in Microsoft Word, you should learn how to create dynamic Web pages with PHP and MySQL.

What are PHP and MySQL?

• PHP: A scripting language that takes data (often from a database) and turns it into HTML for the user to see. All the PHP action happens on the server, which means it is compatible with any browser because the browser only sees the HTML it outputs. Users never see the PHP source code.

  In case you’re wondering what PHP stands for, don’t bother. According to the official PHP Web site, PHP is a recursive acronym (it stands for itself).

• MySQL: MySQL stands for “My Structured Query Language.” It is server-side database software that you can use to create web-based databases.

• PHP and MySQL Work Together to create dynamic database-driven Web pages. MySQL cannot output directly to your browser so developers use PHP to act as a bridge between the database and the user.

What Can You Do with PHP and MySQL?

Here are just a few of the things I’ve done using PHP and MySQL:

• Built my own wiki software.
• Stored documents online so different editors could work on them, without passing email attachments around.
• Created graphing programs that use data to draw real-time charts.
• Resized and edited images on the server.
• Created online, interactive quizzes, polls, and other forms.
• Created complex mail merges
• Built Macromedia Flash slideshows without using the Flash program.
• Customized pages based on user login and stored user preferences in a database
• Customized this blog (most blog software is built with PHP).

PHP / MySQL can help you build a better user experience on your site or it can help you and your staff collaborate on the backend. Even if you never type a line of code in the office, learning PHP and MySQL will give you a better understanding of what developers do, even when they’re using other scripting languages and other database software.

If you can learn to think like a coder, you can work more closely with a development staff and give them better requirements. Once you know what is possible, you’ll know what to ask for.

Why PHP and MySQL Instead of Something Else?

• Free, Open Source: There are no licensing fees, no matter how many servers you install them on or how much traffic you get.

• Most ISPs Offer PHP and MySQL: You can get hosting plans for as low as $4 a month that feature PHP and MySQL support. If you have your own domain and you’re using a typical Web host, you probably have both PHP and MySQL functionality available to you right now.

• Ease of Use: If you know basic HTML, you can learn the basiscs of PHP and MySQL in a matter of days.

Every week, I find a new way to make my life easier or build something interesting online using PHP. It’s not just code. It’s part of the message.

In future posts, I’ll be showing you how easy it is to create dynamic content with PHP.

I’m still thinking about the concept of conversational writing versus formal writing. I think one reason why so many documents, both online and off, are written in stuffy style is that writers are more concerned about the means than the ends of their work.

In a recent interview with BusinessWeek Online, Usability Guru Jakob Nielsen stressed the importance of putting the user first:

You have to recognize that the Web is a communications medium, a two-way medium. It’s not a broadcast medium like TV where you want to be glamorous. People go to Web sites because they have questions they want answered. That’s just not being done. We don’t really need any new technology. We just need to use the technology we have appropriately.

Ultimately, most Web content is designed to help someone get information, accurately and quickly. But how often does our desire to impress readers get in the way of our duty to empower them with information.