I spy ...

Ever wondered what your visitors are doing on your web page? Ever wanted to record visitors' behaviour? Ever wanted to find out whether users follow your carefully designed and constructed navigation? Well, now you can! And it's as easy as adding a line of javascript to the header fo your page.

There’s a new (currently free) service called userfly that enables you to watch actual movies of users’ browsing sessions on your web site. How cool is that! All you have to do to run these instant usability studies for your web site is add a line of javascsript to the header in your source code. Watching these movies makes you feel like a fly on the wall.

Somethimes it's best to watch a clip so here it is:

userfly.com from Chris Estreich on Vimeo.

Quite amazing what javascript can do.

BUT there are drawbacks.

Currently, when running Firebug on the page that has the line of code, it's taking over 6-9 seconds to load. I still need to find out how and where the data is stored. So for the time being we might use it for testing minor pages, but I would not deploy it on any of the main pages just yet.

New .Net Developer

Today we welcomed a new addition to CIS. Femi Ojemuyiwa joined us as our new .Net Developer. 

We are pleased to welcome Femi on board and look forward to working with him on our exciting new developments.

StudentNET design and security

Another milestone has been passed on the journey towards the new StudentNET. Two major developments are complete.

StudentNET framework design

A revised, final design has been completed by our in-house designer. Drawing on the latest design techniques and online trends, Chris has produced a highly usable, friendly and customisable StudentNET homepage. As well as the layout of the page, Chris has produced custom buttons, panels and icons of every aspect of StudentNET, which, as you can imagine, is a mammoth task in itself. Here is a sneak preview of his design.

StudentNET Security Model

We take security of your data and access to our web servers very seriously and have therefore spent a lot of time planning out and testing appropriate security models to allow us to publish StudentNET pages. External specialists have thus been employed to help CIS proof that it can overcome several security issues.

From our meetings with the company last week, we are now confident that StudentNET will allow us to protect ourselves appropriately while remaining a flexible and extendable application.

If you have any questions about any StudentNET developments or would like to find out how you could be part of it, just leave a comment on this blog post.

Happy new year!

Here's a slightly delayed Happy New Year to everyone. Hope you all had a great Christmas break.