So I thought I’d see how the Websites for New Zealand Universities stacked up:

University	Things they tend to have	Score	Things people are looking for	Score
Auckland University of Technology	Yes: Full Name of school, Alumni in the news, Promotions for Compus events, Statement of School’s Philosophy, No: Press releases, Letter from the president, Virtual tour	5/8	Yes: Full Name of School, List of Facility phone number and Emails, Usable campus map, Campus Address, Application forms, Campus police phone number, Dept/Course lists, Parking information No: Academic Calendar	8/9
Lincoln University	Yes: Alumni in the news, Promotions for Campus events, Press Releases, Statement of School’s Philosophy, Full name of school No: Campus photo slide-show, Letter from the president, Virtual tour	5/8	Yes: Full name of school, List of Facility phone number and Emails, Campus Address, Application forms, Academic Calendar, Dept/Course lists, Parking information, Usable campus map No: Campus police phone number	8/9
Massey University	Yes: Full name of school, Alumni in the news, Promotions for Campus events, Press Releases, Statement of School’s Philosophy, Letter from the president No: Campus photo slide-show, Virtual tour	6/8	Yes: Full name of school, Campus Address, Application forms, Academic Calendar, Campus police phone number, Parking information, Usable campus map No: List of Facility phone number and Emails	8/9
University of Auckland	Yes: Full name of school, Alumni in the news, Promotions for Campus events, Press Releases, Statement of School’s Philosophy, Letter from the president No: Campus photo slide-show, Virtual tour	6/8	Yes: Full name of school, Academic Calendar, Campus police phone number, Dept/Course lists, Parking information, usable campus map No: List of Facility phone number and Emails, Campus Address, Application forms	6/9
University of Canterbury	Yes: Full name of school, Alumni in the news, Promotions for Campus events, Press Releases, Statement of School’s Philosophy No: Campus photo slide-show, Letter from the president, Virtual tour	5/8	Yes: Full name of school, List of Facility phone number and Emails, Campus Address, Campus police phone number, Parking information, Usable campus map, Dept/Course lists, Academic Calendar No: Application forms	8/9
University of Otago	Yes: Full name of school, Alumni in the news, Promotions for Campus events, Press Releases, Letter from the president, Statement of School’s Philosophy No: Campus photo slide-show. Virtual tour	6/8	Yes: Full name of school, List of Facility phone number and Emails, Campus Address, Application forms, Campus police phone number, Dept/Course lists, Parking information, Usable campus map No: Academic Calendar	8/9
University of Waikato	Yes: Full name of school, Campus photo slide-show, Promotions for Campus events, Press Releases, Statement of School’s Philosophy, Letter from the president No: Alumni in the news, Virtual tour	6/8	Yes: Full name of school, List of Facility phone number and Emails, Campus Address, Application forms, Academic Calendar, Academic Calendar, Campus police phone number, Dept/Course lists, Parking information, Usable campus map No:	9/9
Victoria University of Wellington	Yes: Full name of school, Campus photo slide-show, Alumni in the news, Press Releases, Promotions for Campus events, Letter from the president, Statement of School’s Philosophy No: Virtual tour	7/8	Yes: Full name of school, List of Facility phone number and Emails, Campus Address, Application forms, Academic Calendar, Dept/Course lists, Parking information, Usable campus map No: Campus police phone number	8/9

In all cases I opened up the site and searched around for up to 30 seconds for each item. I used the links off the front page and the search tools on the site. When possible I tended to be fairly generous with awarding points. So if the University calendar was browsable rather than downloadable it was okay or you could enrol online rather but not download the documents you also got the point.

Out of the sites I found Auckland’s the worst in that it was large and confusing (See below) while missing the basics. The other universities were all a lot better to the extent I can’t really pick between them.

Notes:

• I found the University of Auckland’s website very hard to actually use. Pretending I wanted to enrol in 1st year Computer Science I found it very hard to find out what courses were offered, which ones I should take and how I should apply. The process seemed to involved jumping back and forth between half a dozen computer different sections of the website. Very bad for a core function of the website.
• Many of the sites had separate websites for depts and other organisations within the University. I found that it was often the case where a search for “Maps” or “parking” would sometimes show the the dept’s version of that page rather than the campus-wide one.
• I think just about all the sites would benefit from a usability test. Create a list of 10 common things people want to do at the website and pull some people off the street to try and do them. The things in the “What people are looking for” could be a good start.
• Search quality seems to vary a lot between the sites. Those using Google search usually are worst. Having the option to highlight certain pages to ensure they appear at the top of search results is a useful feature.
• In most cases I could easily find the campus security number by searching for “Security”. Good enough in most case but perhaps some improvement needed since people might be in a panic when dialling the number.
• It’s good to see that in most cases the sites were trying to be user-centric. However in many cases the “follow this path to enrol” didn’t interact well with the rest of the sites (eg when it came time to look up course information). Part of this is possibly the high complexity of enrolment and the regulations but the experience could be better.
• Best page I came across on my tour was the Otago University Parking Page , with notes like “All phone calls to the Parking desk are recorded”you can tell that is a fun place to work.

• General background on company
• 900 Gb/s current capacity in aus/NZ
• Proposal to double
• Single cable aus-NZ-USA 5.1 Tb/s
• Maybe other landing stations

• Withoutmedia.wordpress.com
• Asked 200 to do without media for 24 hours
• Many students couldn’t finish
• Students used addicts language
• No loyalty to any news source
• Lots of txt and facebook messages
• Strong loyality to iPhones
• Read out interesting quotes

• Likes eval()

• Hard to know userbase, most don’t know what a browser is
• Hard to market
• What browsers makers will allow
• What browsers to target
• How to make money

• Agents filling out forms in field
• Gives list and addresses of jobs
• Different screens for picking up jobs, on site and stock used, post job
• Server side – timesheets, stock codes, etc

• Cute demos
• Mirror in toyshop you hold up a toybox and shows what is inside
• Zugara YouTube demo shows clothes on you
• Markers ( symbols on sheet that camera spots) or markerless detects face or objects directly
• Facial recognition displays info on person you hold your iPhone up to
• Navigation aids display directs and info over the camera feed
• Tools: artoolkit, flartoolkit, layar

Students have limited general IT skills, can txt or use facebook but does translate into other areas

Academics tend to dislike wikipedia

• unreliable
• non-experts can contribute
• culture clash wikipedia vs academic
• inappropriate
• used as a primary source
• in actual case students tend to actually use wikipedia correctly
• plagiarism very easy to detect

I missed some of the talk here

Assign wikipedia writing to students

• published in public
• critiqued by strangers
• defend argument
• have citations and sources
• favourable to group work, track individual contributions

MPs expenses Couple of conferences

Open govt conference – went fairly well

Data.govt.nz

Grabbed Linz data and chatham islands in openstreet maps built using it. Rolling out to mainland next 6+ months

Igovt login being rolled out across government sites

NZ transport has open API – infoconnect Real time bus infomation often sold to or maintained by 3rd parties

Govt depts tidying up contract to clarify ownership of data

See cat.open.org.nz

NZ book cover images provided by national library

Often councils make very little per year for data they are charging for

Workshop enterprises – 1+ person

What is startup?

• high growth
• not cash-flow positive
• less defined business model
• aggressive targets
• pre-ipo
• high-risk profile
• some industries ( airlines ) startup on completely different scale and timeline

• in SanFran networking for webapps with diggs etc easier
• in NZ easier to meet retailers and customers
• different reports on how easy to get matching funds from development
• easy to start, hard to scale
• maybe launch globally rather than NZ first and then expand
• lot easier with beta customers you talk meet & talk to in person
• CARE really good source for contacts

Examples

• Xero has bank rules which automate creation of invoices
• mail chimp easy mailing lists, free for small groups, pay pretty good too
• CapsuleCRM – list of tasks for customers
• use the capsule API he adds new customers when signed to their own system
• capistrano for automated deploy
• textmate bundles
• gmail labs pre-canned resposes
• hoptoad – monitors logs
• xero – re-occuring in voices
• accounting system checks prod system and looks for unbilled accounts or locks people who don’t pay
• single password systems
• firefox sync, dropbox
• greasemonkey
• insta-paper
• google calendar, trippit
• quicklaunches
• lighthouse, activecolab, atlaysan
• run lint or jslint at commit time

Existing site hard to find stuff, often things listed by product name rather than what people wanted to do.

Around 3000 pages. Huge job to rewrite many of them, many docs written by insiders for insiders.

Key customer profiles for each product , narrowed to 8 customer types. Products matched to some of these types.

New platform is Drupal. Was going to broad RFP but decided to narrow things first. Down to 4 systems Drupal, Plone, Silverstripe, and ruby-on-rails. Lots of alternate vendors for that platform.

Site being built by catalyst. Platform is Ubuntu .

Some product rationalization and presentation changes.

Planned launch in a couple of months

• I’m finally getting around to implementing puppet at work and after a couple of false starts I found example42.com with examples and a huge amount of sample infrastructure to base things on (and in some cases recycle).
• Slides and Video’s from the OReilly Velocity conference ( Web performance and Operations) are being posted. They are still catching up so new talks re being added each day but so far I’ve really liked
  • A Day in the Life of Facebook Operations by Tom Cook
  • Datacenter Infrastructure Innovation by James Hamilton
  • Operations at Twitter – John Adams
  • Mobile Web High Performance – Maximiliano Firtman
  For the videos it’s usually better to view them directly on youtube as they are a bit bigger and easier to read.
• membase has recently been launched by Northscale . It’s a disk-backed distributed storage that talks memcached protocol. Looks quite nice ( I am playing with Tokyo Tyrant for the same thing). The free release on membase.org needs a bit (well any) documentation to be useful but it looks like something to watch.
• Yahoo! have just released boomerang which looks interesting. It’s gives several options for putting javascript web-bugs on your page that communicate back to you with how long the user takes to load the page, their download speed etc. Have a look at the online version of the documentation.

Lonely Planet

• Need tests developed as features are added
• Moved tests to jmeter
• Anyone can run and develop tests ( previous just one test guy who had to write and run tests for 3 agile teams)
• Load test are integrated and tested as part of continious integration

• test important paths and functions daily
• Emails test person and author of recent commit if things (usually load times) get worse
• Graphs of speed of pages

Suggested vendors / Products

• neotest
• cloudtest
• siege
• browsermob ( uses Selenium)
• newrelic

What do we do wrong now?

• Continuous tests? , Against production environment?

• Current test make assumptions about enviroment (each to recreate DB etc)
• Sample app ( twitter clone (tooter) ), in java, maven to google apps)
• http://github.net/TimMoore/tooter , tooterapp.appspot.com
• Tests in “htmlunit” to perform tests again the actual website
• Logs in checks elements on page. Test from logging in, make sure simple errors on logging in are picked up and right error pages produced.
• First refactor was to generalise the tests to able to reuse things like “login to site as user XXX,  password YYY”
• 2nd refactor puts everything in a seperate class. Low level things like login, host, html library all have their own class. Each to change
• Keep data in production database. Have test users or organisations to test against. Perhaps don’t confirm user signups so new users not created each test. Create “test groups” that test users are members of so changes only affect those test accounts, leverage A/B testing infrastructure
• Other tools include cucumber