An information architect will create the structural design of a website and the process flow with a user’s experience in mind. They will guide the designers, developers and clients on how best to deliver the information that a user is looking for and how to simplify tasks that you want them to complete. An information architect is involved in a website from start to finish. Post project, they look at how the user experience and conversion rate of a website can be improved.

We are currently looking for an Information Architect to join our team. Is the job described above something that you have experience in, or an area that you can see yourself getting involved in?

Let us know if you are already an information architect or are a graduate that has studied relevant courses and wants to progress their skills further.

Confidence is a preference.

The job, based in Manchester would involve dealing with all stakeholders in a project, initially with the owner of the project and some potential users, then onto the designers and developers. Once a project is live, you would be feeding analysis and recommendations back to the SEO team.

A few handy skills that an information architect would have or need:

• Understanding user data and constructing personas
• Wireframing/prototyping
• UX design
• Process flow (including some experience of card sorting)
• Conversion rate optimisation with usability testing experience
• Insatiable appetite for continuous improvement
• Project management expertise would be a great addition

Speak to Dave if you fit the bill.

dave@evolutiadesign.co.uk

0161 868 0008 ext 104

We’ve recently launched the latest version of The BMC website (http://www.thebmc.co.uk) and we’ve had some great feedback. One of the ideas to motivate and incentivise the staff to write articles was to provide analytics for each article right in the CMS. That way they could easily see how popular their article was without having to trawl through google analytics every time.

As the site is written in ASP.net web forms I went straight to http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/mgmt/v3/mgmtLibraries.html to look for a c# library which at the time of writing this is still in beta. I ran into a few problems getting everything to work out of the box. Here is what I did to get everything running smoothly

OpenAuth 2.0

With version 3 of it’s analytics api Google strongly pushes you to use OpenAuth 2.0, there is already a mature library which google uses in it’s samples – DotNetOpenAuth to do the leg work. Unfortunately I was getting the follwing error when trying to redirect to gain authorisation;

DotNetOpenAuth.Messaging.ProtocolException was caught

Message=Precondition failed.: !authorization.AccessTokenExpirationUtc.HasValue || authorization.AccessTokenExpirationUtc < DateTime.UtcNow || authorization.RefreshToken != null

Thanks to the following thread http://code.google.com/p/google-api-dotnet-client/issues/detail?id=174 I established I needed to add

response.Headers["Location"] += “&access_type=offline&approval_prompt=force”;

to the outgoing request, this would force the refresh token to be added to the response.

Retrieving Data

Now that I could authenticate the application I could start querying analytics for data. I soon ran into a problem with the ReportResource.GetRequest.Dimensions property, internally it’s converted into a List<string> but that conversion fails with.

Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializationException was unhandled by user code

Message=Error converting value “ga:date,ga:pagePath” to type ‘System.Collections.Generic.IList`1[System.String]‘.

The only way I could get it to to work was to copy the Google.Apis.Analytics.v3.cs to my project and stop using the pre compiled dll. I then changed the Dimenstions property and dimensions field of the QueryData class to type String rather than IList<String>

As I said this file is generated from Google’s services so it is only a temporary solution.

As these c# libraries are only in beta hopefully these kinks can be ironed out soon.

Once again it’s time for us to up sticks and relocate the HQ of Evolutia. To be fair we’re not moving very far (over the road) and we’re still saying in the same science park – Manchester Science Park that we have grown up in, still it’s a logistical nightmare. This will be the third office we have moved in to, and that’s the beauty of staying in a business/science park, they can accommodate your growth (or decline) without having to move very far.

From the small office we started in with just three of us and a shared 28.8k baud dial up modem we are now twelve mighty web warriors. The biggest reason for the increased rate of growth is our SEO side of the business. We’ve just launched a dedicated site – http://www.evolutiaseo.co.uk which features our new branding (which we’ll hopefully incorporate into this site soon). Initially we weren’t too keen to offer SEO as a service, but we found that we couldn’t find a partner company that matched our expected level of customer service and professionalism.

Now we have a dedicated SEO team we’re getting some excellent results for our clients and it’s a great complimentary service. We’ll continue to grow our SEO team and we’re really excited to be offering a whole new range of services to our clients.