Sidenote : Please note I know about the funky formatting problems. I have to fix them. ukgimp.

If you are interested in usability and the users perception of your website you can do a lot worse that start to initiate some focus group sessions. You will find out information that that you never dreamed possible. Some of the suggestions you receive will be golden and you never really would think of. It is up to you act on this information and you would be foolish If you did not as these are your customers, you should listen to them!

So how do you go about conducting a focus group session? There are many ways but here is mine so hopefully it will give you some ideas of your own or at least make you enough of an expert to quiz your professional focus group service provider.

The Aim of the Focus Group
First off you need to plan what it is you are trying to find out, basically ‘the aim’. You can see a typical ‘aim’ later on this post where I have added a real focus group script. Be aware that without proper planning you will crash and burn, waste money and look like a right tit in front of the people who attend and maybe even your boss when they ask what you found out.

Choosing Focus Group Attendees
Choosing who attends is critical to the success of your focus group and I recommend somewhere between 4 and 8 people from your site demographic. If you have several demographics you may need to run a couple of sessions, for example students and lecturers. It is important not to mix clearly defined groups of people as you wont get the best from your attendees, as they may be looking for different things or features.

When ever I have conducted a focus group session I stick to a familiar script which broadly consists of the following sections:

1. Background Questionnaire to get quantitative results. (age, surfing habits, hours per week online etc etc)
2. General introduction to website and fact finding mission
3. Demonstration of the service/website
4. Group feedback session
5. Tea break with accessible flip charts for discreet comments with Good/Bad columns
6. Additional services feedback and questionnaire
7. Fun task, in small groups
8. Small scale presentation to get feedback
9. Free food

You can see the above sections in more detail in the full script.

Tips on Running a Successful Focus Group Session and Getting all you can:

• Plan that session!
• Call people the day before and on the day of your session as no people mean no results and that isn’t any fun!
• Offer some money, plus a free feed for the attendees.
• Make your attendees feel at ease, tell them this is anonymous and you value their opinions.
• Record the session, I recommend a digital recorder and omni directional mic, discrete and powerful, and this saves you writing notes like loony
• ACT ON YOUR FINDINGS, these suggestions are from your chosen market/audience, they know what they want and they expect you to deliver it, after all they are your customers!!

I hope that has offered some help to you and the example script below is of some use:

Sample Focus Group Script

Aim
The aim is to find out about the way students and academics find the information they need from the Internet to conduct their research and studies. The second aim is to determine the current perception of Site X and generate feedback on possible additional services.

Part 1: Background Questionnaire (completed on arrival)

Part 2: Present Searching Techniques (30 Mins)

• What are you favourite and least favourite web sites for searching?
• What do you like/dislike about these websites?
• Give an example of a website you remember?
• Do you use X, Y, Z or other specific websites?
• What do you like about these sites?
• Have you used Site X? If so how often?

Part 3: Site X User Demo / Exercise (10Mins)

Part 4: Group Feedback on Site X (20 Mins)

• Have you used Site X before?
• What did you like about the site?
• What aspects did you dislike?
• How could it be improved?

Part 4: Tea Break with Free for All Feedback
During a ten minute tea break set up two/four flip charts with headings, good aspects, bad sspects. Totally anonymous, say what you feel.

Part 5: Additional Service Feedback (20 mins 2X 10mins)
Look at the following two additional services and then make comments on the two sheets of paper provided. Spend around 10 minutes on each.

• Conference/Events
• Personalisation

Part 6: Design a Portal (30 Mins)
You are an Internet concept consultant hired by a large multinational company to design the key features and functions of a new (insert subject) portal that would appeal to the (insert subject) community consisting of (student/academics). You must create the look and feel of the website and use a flip chart to design the main layout. You must consider the features you would like to see and how you would like them presented. At this stage the sky is the limit. Think about how you would promote it as well, eg adverts in journals, word of mouth, email.

Part 7: Presentations (5-10 mins per group)
You must give a short “run-around” of your concept, giving reasons for including individual aspects and the overall layout.
FREE LUNCH

Hello All

Here is the next instalment and it comes in the form of a few Q+A’s from the link bait king Shoemoney. So here it goes:

<--starts-->

The picture of that adsense cheque has probably encouraged a lot of people. So are they still that size or have you been hit by the changes?

I am not sure what you mean by changes? The check is from over 1 year ago much before I discovered PPC. It was 100% organic. The site that generated that income has since signed direct deals with advertisers. I was really really new to learning how to best monetize websites when I got that check. I thought that was a ton of money for 1 month but really anyone doing that kind of cash contextually with a white hat site with organic rankings can make a ton more signing direct deals. I just did not have the contacts back then that I do now.

Are you still learning PPC, if so what have you learned recently that you might be willing to pass on.

Wow that’s a whole interview in itself. The one thing I learn everyday about ppc is that I don’t know shit. I spent a few days with pepperjamsearch who has a full 20 person team that does nothing but manage PPC campaigns and you really realize you don’t know shit. Sure they are at the top of the bell curve but that’s pretty intimidating when you’re a 2 person shop.

Rank for Shoemoney competition, what was that all about, profile raising, laugh or something else? And do you fear the ‘gray wolf’ after all he seems to relish these sorts of challenges.

It was just for fun. My blog always ranked crappy in Google and still does. I did not think it would be that hard to knock me out of the top spot. Its pretty neat to see the creative ways that people came up with (white and black hat) to try to knock me out. I don’t really have anything to fear about my blog getting knocked out of the serps… its something I write for fun and I write for myself. I ended the contest early (due to circumstances out of my control) but paid out I think double what I said and I even emailed the front runners privately and told them I would pay out if they were able to rank over me in the time frame specified. Just publicly I had to say the contest was off.

Am I correct in saying that your background is security/hacking, if so how has that helped you in the SEO game.

Yes I was a security admin for about 6 years before starting my company. I fell into this whole ‘seo’ thing by accident. I build sites that people find useful and go from there. I don’t really think there is a big mystery to seo. I have yet to come across a site that offers a great, unique, service to users that doesn’t have sweet organic rankings.

When I tell people that in person they look at me like I am lying… like I really hold the key to some secret way to rank for huge terms… Well the key is just hard work over time. Anyone can bust ass for a few days but go a few years and you will not fail.

How do you protect your assets, by assets I mean sites, identity, disguising interlinking of sites. Got any tips?

Anon registers, I don’t cross link… period. I really don’t have any huge tidbits here just common sense stuff. Financial speaking when sites get to a certain point they should become there own legal entitiy. This makes it nice when you want/need to sell companies/sites off.

Are you a long tail person or a big term player and why do you do it that way?

Well again I don’t really build sites for search engines other then very basic seo. I build them more for functionality then whether or not search engines care about them. My blog for instance gets pretty good traffic yet less then 1% comes from a search engine.

How do you deal with getting large sites indexed these days?

If a site is setup properly then sitemaps with a good amount of internal linking seems to work very well. Again Seo is not really my cup of tea so this probably seems pretty basic to most people.

Do you ever see Google losing their strangle hold and what do you make of their $500 per share, madness yeah?

I don’t. Google GETS IT. They make such a huge profit off Adwords/adsense and they just keep land grabbing that space. They totally cockblocked yahoo and Microsoft when they bought uTube. They had done the testing on adsense video (which I beta tested) and they saw huge numbers then they looked at how they could expand and obviously uTube was it.

Is it madness? Well only the future will tell on how madness it is. Here in Omaha Nebraska we have a investor by the name of Warren Buffett. We bought stock in his company Berkshire Hathway when it was at 72,000.00 a share. As of right now its at $107,610.00 a share.

Google is kind of following the warren buffet model in that they just keep reinvesting in themselves. They don’t have a lot of idol money. I think right now GOOG is a VERY SHALLOW and will take about 10+ years to really solidify. Until then its going to be massive ups and downs. I have felt from the beginning that Google will be the next BRK.

What is your biggest achievement in terms of search, or if you cant be arsed with that, what about biggest achievement in life?

In Search – At PubCon 2005 I went up to the SEO INC booth and asked if I could take the SEO Challenge. They said sure what keyword do you want to rank for. I said “Ringtones”. Then they asked me what my site address was and I told them. I was #1 on Google, MSN, and Yahoo they told me to get lost.

In life – I met my wife and my life changed completely. I lost 240 lbs, quit smoking after 10 years, and started my own company.

What do you think of the current search scape and how and what one thing would have the biggest impact?

I think the more blacklists search engines maintain the more they prove that a algo based search engine is just not the way of the future. At the first ses Larry and Serge said that there was no such thing as search engine spam. Now they blacklist domains left and right and to me that is the same as them throwing up a white flag. So what’s the future? – Social voing. When I want to find news or good information on something technical I search Technorati or Digg . I almost always find what I am looking for with more relevant and up to date results.

<--ends-->

Cheers Jeremy, it has been my pleasure to ask you a few questions

Of course you can catch up with Jeremy in many places, but the best is probably the Shoemoney Blog

ukgimp out

Have you ever been in a position where you have lost or been presented with the loss of the mysql root password. Oh yes, much fun and this happened when someone in authority needed mysql access.

We I tried the –skip grant tables, did not work so time for a different approach, enter the realm of the sever bodge (a bodge I would use in future unless other sites would be affected)

1. OK, log into the sever with SSH
2. find the mysql files, on fedora they are in /var/lib/mysql/mysql
3. Change the name of the three files user.frm, user.MYD and user.MYI, don’t delete them, call them user1.frm etc.
4. Log into another server with which has mysql and and you know the password and download the three user files. Transfer them to the original server.
5. Change the owner and group to mysql

chown mysql:mysql mysql

6. Change the chmod to the same as the other files in that directory, probably, 660
7. No you are nearly ready to go, you need to restart mysql so that the new password if activated as you need to flush the old privileges

Service mysqld restart

8. Right, if you have live sites on there this is the fly by the seat of the your pants bit as any of the usernames and passwords wont be present. So now open up phpmyadmin and use the root UN/PS. Bada Bing, your in. Got to the mysql db and look, you should see the new table called “user1”. Go into that and do a dump. Now take that dump and put it back into and sql window. Make sure you remove the root sql insert as you wont be able to overwrite this and quite frankly you don’t want to be able to either. If you don’t want to go through this last stage I suppose you could add the missing users before you do 5.

Hope that helps.

Or at least they should be, check this out:

www.thrifty.co.uk

They do some mental H1 stuffing after a nice redirect.

Having real quick peak they have lots of lovely doorway pages and that’s just for starters!
Why of why do these big companies get so stitched up by dodgy SEO’s, they could rank so easily with what they have at their disposal.

Sidenote: I am available if the pay is right

Have you ever had to reinstall your system, of course you have! Well one of the most important things is getting profiles back for things like the great SSH package, WinSCP.

Most things are fine but WinSCP is a bit of a bugger to sort. WinSCP has an import option, which is tickety boo if you have file to import! So it would seem logical that an Export option would be available. No, that’s too much to ask.

When you have as many WinSCP SSH profiles that I have it would be a ball ache of biblical proportions to find all those settings.

Well here is a quick guide to doing the task, after al there is no ini file, or something hidden in the windows local data settings.

Go to Start and Run
Type in “RegEdit” in the little box.
Then go to top left and click my computer
Then Click Edit > Find
Now search for “Martin Prikryl” (he must be the dude that made the software)
Then Right click and export the key and contents.
Now copy this file onto your new system
Go to RegEdit again and import the key (File > Import) and locate the file

May I make one suggestion that when messing with the registry, back that mutha up, as without a working one you could be heading for a reinstall and many hours of fun.