Since LinkedIn has passed the 100 million member mark, it’s fairly safe to say that if you’re reading this blog post, you probably have a LinkedIn profile.  You may have even added a photo to it, and possibly update your status once in awhile.  You may have used LinkedIn to network, look for a job, or to research a product or service.

With so many people using LinkedIn as a business research tool as well as for networking, it’s only natural to leverage the platform as a marketing tool;  LinkedIn has developed a wide range of tools for this purpose.  Your business probably has a LinkedIn profile page, whether you’ve created one or not.  To jumpstart the effort and provide information to users about companies and organizations, LinkedIn automatically generated company profiles and descriptions based on information provided by LinkedIn members in their profiles.  (So, your first order of business is to take a look at your profile and make sure it accurately reflects what you want to say about your company!)

In addition to your (free) company profile, you can add information on products and services, social media links, videos, images, and external URLs, as well as contact information for specific individuals within your organization (this is all free as well).  You can also post job opportunities to LinkedIn, though there’s a fee for this service (or, you can post the job opportunity to your LinkedIn status and to groups you’re participating in for no additional cost—LinkedIn doesn’t mind this and in fact encourages it).

Let’s take a minute to look at LinkedIn as a recruiting tool.  One of the biggest challenges recruiters face is identifying passive candidates—those who are currently employed and not actively seeking a new position.  Research shows these candidates to be highly productive employees, and so successfully identifying and recruiting them generates a big return on investment.  (I can personally attest to LinkedIn as a great tool for identifying passive candidates—Sanger & Eby found me on LinkedIn and recruited me for what has turned out to be my dream job).

Are people looking at your company profile on LinkedIn?  In a word, yes.  According to a 2010 JobVite survey, 62% of job candidates visit company social media profile pages, and 55% conduct searches for company information on social media sites—including LinkedIn—so it’s well worth the investment of your time and resources to ensure your company profile does you justice.

Career Pages is a terrific tool for highlighting open positions in your organization, and companies with strong recruiting needs are starting to use it.  You can create up to five separate pages focused on different areas of recruiting—technology, marketing, creative, strategy—whatever your job categories are—and users will see the specific page and opportunities best matching their background (so if you’re recruiting strategists and I visit your company page, I’ll see job opportunities related to strategy; if a designer visits the company page, she’ll see design-focused opportunities).

Regardless of what you do with your company profile, keep in mind that as with other social media platforms, it’s important to first define your objectives and build a strategy to ensure you achieve them (and we can help you with that). Also, many of the advanced tools on LinkedIn are highly customizable, including the capability to add design elements to the template-based layout.   (Yes, we can help you with that, too!)

To see a great implementation of Career Pages, take a look at Macy’s company profile, and click on the Careers tab (and by the way, they’re hiring!)

How are you using LinkedIn to build your business?  Tell us about it!

So you’re about to launch a new web site and you’re wondering: “How many people will visit my site?” or “Where will they come from?” Google Analytics provide the answers to these – and many other – questions.

Every time we launch a new web site, we make sure to set up and configure Google Analytics before launching the site. We do this right from the start – Google does the rest, collecting a ton of data about your site’s traffic. We do this because we – and our clients – can use Google Analytics to track site traffic and to answer important questions about the site’s visitors and activity. These answers help us make informed site design and content decisions to create more effective sites and increase site ROI.

But first, what is Google Analytics? As you likely already know, it is Google’s web-analytics and visitor-statistics – sometimes referred to as page statistics – software package. Originally created to support its Adwords and Adsense programs, Google offers it for free to all sites that generate less than 5 million page views per month.

Google Analytics is an incredible tracking and analytics tool. The interface for viewing reports is fast, easy-to-use and flexible. The reports track a very wide variety of metrics. Each report includes high-level charts and graphs that look great. And each report can be drilled-down to very granular levels so that you can slice and dice the data any way that you like.

To new users, the robustness and depth of Google Analytics can be overwhelming. To help ease that feeling, I have outlined a few questions that site owners frequently ask and where the answers to these questions are found within Google Analytics.

Question: Which pages do my visitors visit the most?
The Top Content report allows you to see the traffic details for all pages on your site. So, you can see the most-visited pages as well as the least-visited pages. By default, Google Analytics will show only the 10 most frequently visited pages, but you can expand the list by increasing the “Show rows” option to 100 or 250.

The Top Content report

You can view these details for any time frame – a day, a month, or a year. This applies to all of Google’s reports. The date range can be easily adjusted by selecting the start and end date.

Adjusting the Date Range for a report

For each page, you can also answer the following related questions:

• How many times was the page visited?
• How many visitors came to the page?
• How much time does each visitor spend on the page?
• What percentage of visitors entered my site on the page and left the site without visiting another page (This is known as the “bounce rate.)
• What percentage of visitors exited my site on the page?

You can review these metrics to determine if your site’s performance is in line with expectations or if site adjustments should be made. For example, if you have a very high bounce rate on a page that is getting visited often, the page may be confusing to visitors or the site content may not be relevant to search engine visitors.

Question: How long do people stay on my site?
The Visitors Overview report allows you to see the average time spent on site by all visitors. You can drill down on this average to see the value broken down individually by hour, day, week or month. This is helpful in determining if site changes affected visitors’ engagement on the site. And, as already mentioned, you can also view the time spent on each page from the Top Content report.

The Visitors Overview report

Question: How do visitors find my site?
The Traffic Sources report breaks down your total site traffic into three separate groups: Search Engines, Referring Sites and Direct Traffic.

Search Engine visitors accessed your site by clicking a link from a search engine. You can further drill-down to evaluate your site’s presence on each individual search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, etc.) including what keywords were used to find you site.

Referring Sites visitors accessed your site by clicking a link from another site, but not a search engine. This allows you to see which popular sites are linking to your site and how effective these links are.

Direct Traffic visitors accessed your site by typing your site’s URL and visiting your site directly, not clicking a site to access your site.

The Traffic Sources report

Question: Where are my visitors located?
The Visitors Map Overlay report gives you a visual representation of your visitors’ geographical location. The report begins by showing a world map, with a traffic breakdown by country. You can drill down on each country to view details by state and ultimately by city. This is a great way to analyze where your visitors are located, especially if you have a service that targets a specific geographical region.

Visitors Map Overlay – USA Map

Question: How many mobile visitors are accessing my site?
Most web site owners see their site only from their desktop, but more and more people are using mobile devices to browse the Internet. You can keep track of your mobile audience by using the Visitors Mobile Devices report. This report will tell you which percentage of your site’s total traffic comes from mobile devices and also breaks down the mobile audience by each device. So, you can see how many visitors are using their iPhone, Android or BlackBerry to browse your site. You might just be surprised. On several large sites that we manage, we have seen mobile traffic double from February 2010 to February 2011.

The Visitors Mobile Devices report

Question: What is my site’s ROI?
Most web sites have a specific end goal, whether it is a sale, a registration, an application, or accessing a specific page. Google Analytics allows you to define specific goals so that you can track your site’s goal performance. When defining these goals, you can assign a value to the goal (for example, average purchase is $100 so the goal value is $100). Every successful transaction is considered a ‘conversion’.

Using the Goals Overview and Funnel Visualization reports, you can evaluate how many goal conversions you had, what percentage of your visitors converted, and you can drill down to see specifically where your non-converted visitors abandoned the site. These reports allow you to quickly see if you have bottlenecks that can be improved to increase conversion rate and ROI.

Sample Funnel Visualization report

Of course, these questions are just the tip of the iceberg. With Google Analytics, we can find out just about everything about site activity – all the way down to visitor languages, keyword analysis and even browser, operating system and screen resolution capability. With Google Analytics – and our own experience and expertise – we’re armed with the data and information needed to make the right decisions when managing our websites.

What’s your favorite information that you obtain from Google Analytics?

We’re delighted to announce the launch of the new Macy’s Diversity Leadership website; designed to increase awareness of the company’s diversity efforts and drive deeper engagement with the target audience, it features Macy’s holistic plan for diversity as well as perspective from senior leadership within the Macy’s organization.

The fresh, new, focused look includes information on how potential vendors and suppliers can connect with Macy’s and rich content for prospective employees, including an overview of Macy’s involvement in communities across the country, information on sponsorships, and honors and recognition the company has received (there’s quite a bit!).

A new marketing library features current and past advertising images from diversity campaigns.  We’re excited about this great new resource and its great potential to help Macy’s realize its goals in diversity leadership!  Check it out at http://www.macysdiversityleadership.com.

Cold and empty – is that how feedback on your latest and greatest website feels? It might be very insightful to see just how every one of your million (I’ll be generous) users navigates your website. And because standing over your visitors’ shoulders isn’t a very sound idea, heatmapping might be just what you’re looking for.

Before you can improve a website, you have to understand how visitors are using it now and understand their frustrations and elations.  Usability testing in the design stage provides preliminary direction and can help eliminate potential problems, but tracking how a site is used once it’s launched is critical too.  Feedback from tracking page visits, link clicks, and user comments all are important tools to measure how people use your site – but they’re not the whole picture.  What doesn’t come through in these metrics is where users are struggling to find what they’re looking for or to complete a task.

That’s where heatmapping comes in.

A heatmap is a graphical overlay that shows frequency of an event. In the world of websites, a heatmap commonly displays an overlay with all visitors’ clicks tracked, aggregated, and represented by a simple color scale. Blue (fewer clicks) to red (most clicks) shows the location and frequency of where your visitors click.

Heatmapping Overlay of Google

Here is an example of a heatmap on Google search results. What can immediately be gleaned from this information? The top left corner is the most common area for activity; on the right side, heatmapping reveals the effectiveness of ad placement. The prime real estate is the topmost ad slot, which is valuable information when you’re running a pay-per-click campaign and need to understand what you’re paying for.

Now that we understand the basic premise, let’s think about how it applies to your site. People come to your site for a specific purpose: to learn something, do something, or buy something.  Understanding where your visitors are clicking can help you redesign a page to emphasize your most important call to action—and generate the results your site was created to achieve.  The easier you can make it for your visitors to achieve their goals, the more successful you’re going to be—and that’s worth paying attention to.

So how do heatmapping tools work?  Though they can be somewhat complex to set up, the way they work is simple and the results are amazingly intuitive and useful.  Commonly, a snippet of Javascript implemented on a page will track the x and y coordinates of the mouse as it clicks, and feed the data into the backend system where we can see it and learn about how visitors like to interact with a page.

As a site receives more and more visitors, a heatmap will start to show a pattern of activity; when this visitor activity is overlaid on a webpage, you get valuable information about what’s intuitive on your website and what’s not (and where and how to improve to increase your return on investment). The power of the visual overlay is that it lets you look at all your visitors’ interactions in a way that relates to each other. High popularity spots become immediately apparent without digging through page clicks, as to problems—as we see in the sample website below:

Heatmapping overlay demonstrates user experience issue; in this case, one that's costing the organization money.

The heatmap makes it apparent that a lot of users click on the images rather than the text to get to “Café Prepay”—but the image is not a link. Every user who clicks the image expecting to navigate to another page is being told that their intuition is wrong.

Standard link tracking will record only the positive hits, not the negative ones where the visitor doesn’t get the expected result. In looking at this overlay, you know immediately that the image should be clickable, and can reduce user frustration and improve results.

Every little step toward making your site intuitive to your users will keep vistors engaged and coming back, and that means better results for your business.

Want to learn more about heatmapping?  Contact us (we bet you’ll be able to find it easily—at least that’s what the heatmap tells us!)

Anticipation and excitement consumed me the morning before I started as a marketing intern at Sanger & Eby.  The night prior to my start, I aimed to eliminate all controllable stressors; I prepared my lunch, programmed my GPS, decided on an outfit and went to bed early.

That morning, everything was running smoothly until my skirt became caught in the dryer vent, I forgot my car key in my apartment, and on my way to my car, a van almost hit me. I thought to my superstitious self, “Is this an omen? Am I in for a bad day?” Fortunately, this wasn’t an omen boding bad news.  Sanger & Eby has been nothing but smooth from the beginning.

My first day consisted of getting a feel for the office and becoming familiar with everything I would be involved with.  Luckily, the previous intern left the most helpful notes to ensure an easy transition for the next intern; this immensely eased my transition. No time was wasted, after reading through notes and chatting with my boss, Kat, I was assigned two press releases.

Like a majority of college students, I’m trying to make the most of my education before graduation.  This being said, I wanted an internship that would give me real experience other than making coffee.  Kat put me right in the mix of projects. Important projects involving Macy’s Inc. and other big clients. Sanger & Eby treat their interns like full-time staff members by giving real responsibilities and projects.

Since my start and now going on eight weeks,  I have drafted press releases and distributed them to media outlets; I’ve done research for major projects, and worked on projects for Macy’s and other major clients; I have written post-mortems and I’ve attended meetings involving important clients.

In this economy, graduates don’t benefit from coursework alone but from experience too. Sanger & Eby was exactly what I needed to make the most of my education.  This is truly a brilliant place to be an intern at and I can’t convey any clearer how happy I am to be here.

We don’t have time in the schedule. We don’t have the budget to do research. We already know what the target wants.

There are a lot of reasons not to do research, sure, and they all have merit, at least some of the time.  But doing research doesn’t have to be a formal process or consume a lot of resources—and the benefit it provides can be immeasurable.

A recent project dramatically brought this home for me. We were creating a major new website for a new client, who was reaching out to a brand new target. It was an audience we know fairly well, and we were confident we knew what the focus of the website should be and what functionality was needed as well as what content the target would respond to.  We had limited time and a tight budget, as almost everyone does.  But we made the decision to dedicate a small percentage of the budget to conducting some informal focus groups.

We developed a recruiting plan and developed a series of questions we wanted to ask, and located potential participants through some basic industry research.  We offered them a small incentive for participating and brought them in for a series of three focus groups—one in Cincinnati and two in New York over the course of a week.  It didn’t take a lot of time, and what we found out not only surprised us, but also paid off in a big way.

It turned out what we believed would have tremendous value for our target was something they’re already getting elsewhere from sources they like and trust.  Further, they told us our client’s credibility in that area was somewhat limited…but that the client has tremendous credibility in another area that our target really wants to tap into, and that became the focus of our site content.

We had an idea for a specific interactive piece on the site, one our client really liked.  It would take a relatively large percentage of our budget, but if it worked, we believed it would be worth it. Instead, the focus groups told us it was not only something they wouldn’t use, but were actively opposed to.  Some even told us it would make them reconsider whether to complete the call to action on the site.  We were able to redirect project resources and enhance a key piece of functionality—something that will ultimately increase the value for our client as well as for their target audience.

The ultimate deliverable delights both the client and the target audience, and is well on the way to achieving our client’s business objectives.  Would it have had the same impact if we’d skipped the research and forged ahead with what we thought we knew?  Definitely not.  And the end result provided dramatically greater value to our client and the target.

Have you had a similar experience in research, or do you have a different perspective? Tell us about it!

More and more companies are migrating their intranets to SharePoint, which is often a huge undertaking as well as a very substantial expense.  The question I hear a lot as a SharePoint developer is, “why?”  It’s an excellent question, and there’s an equally excellent answer (or, more accurately, answers).

Though SharePoint isn’t right for everyone, the shortest and maybe best answer is that SharePoint enables multiple users within an organization to update and maintain their sections of the intranet, without having to rely on developers and programmers to make the changes for them. This streamlines what can otherwise be a complex and time-consuming process, and helps ensure data is up to date and accurate. From my point of view, the bottom line is that  it saves time, which means it saves money in the long run.

SharePoint is a massive platform, not a software package, which uses an array of different technologies.  It incorporates a variety of other Microsoft components, including a SQL database for storing content, the .NET framework to write codes, and Internet Information Services for running its websites.  Not every company will want SharePoint’s extra components but each company can benefit from their features; features that offer great opportunity for growth.

In the market, there are other great Content, Document, and Web Management systems; however, SharePoint is the one platform that has superior integration with other top Microsoft products.  Furthermore, SharePoint is expanding with a 2010 version.

“The capabilities of SharePoint 2010 work together to help your company quickly respond to changing business needs. Using SharePoint 2010, your people can share ideas and expertise, create custom solutions for specific needs, and find the right business information to make better decisions. For IT, SharePoint 2010 helps you cut training and maintenance costs, save time and effort, and focus on higher business priorities.“  http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/

As an Administrator for SharePoint, the 2010 User Interface (UI) has particularly changed for the better.  For instance, instead of each click taking you to another page, which requires a screen refresh, SharePoint 2010 now has more dynamic scripting which allows you to enter in the information and submit instead of loading 3 pages to complete the same task (less clicks).  Also SharePoint 2010 now offers the Ribbon functionality to administrators, which is similar to each new Office Programs (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint).  This will allow administrators to customize their own tool bar for task they repeatedly do, thus increases efficiency by reducing time and cost.

Something else I often hear from developers and programmers is that SharePoint is a complex development environment.  I admit it does have its challenges and a fairly steep learning curve, and there are things that take longer in SharePoint than on other platforms, at least in the initial build.   Net, SharePoint isn’t designed to be easy for me or my fellow developers. It’s designed to be easy for the users.  While this means you may incur a higher upfront cost in creating the sites in SharePoint, you may get the payoff in the lower maintenance costs.

As a Developer I am very excited to use Visual Studio 2010 with my Windows 7 box!  SharePoint 2010 now has a sandbox installation on a Windows 7 machine; this means every developer can have their own environment.  Before, we had to rely on Community Tools to develop on a proficient cost/rate, now all SharePoint 2010 extension is in Visual Studio 2010.  In short, this option simplifies the overall process for development, deployment, and debugging for developers.

 Most of us have at least dipped a toe in the social media waters—a Facebook profile, a LinkedIn account, maybe Twitter.  You probably didn’t have a strategy for your personal presence, which for the most part is okay: your Facebook page has a built-in focus—you—and your LinkedIn profile represents your professional brand online.  You can have an unfocused personal presence on Twitter, but unless you’re Sockington or Ashton Kutcher, it’s unlikely many people will care.  This is all fine for personal use, but what about your business?  How should it behave in the social mediasphere?

There’s little question about the need for companies to participate in social media at this point, as it’s fundamentally changed the conversation. We all know that people are talking about our companies and brands online whether we like it or not, and that if we’re not owning or at least influencing the conversation, someone else is—and we may not like the results.  Add to that the fact search engines are indexing Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles, driving increased search engine visibility for companies using social media, and it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t be part of the conversation.  The question now is how and when to participate, on what platforms, and in what voice: in other words, your social media strategy.

So how do you go about creating a strategy?  The first thing to understand is what your organization wants to accomplish through social media.  Do you want to attract more customers and increase sales? Raise awareness about a product or service?  Promote your expertise on a specific topic?  Recruit potential employees?  Enhance customer service? Clearly state your objectives and use them as the foundation for your strategy. 

Macy’s is an excellent example of using social media to recruit effectively; for its executive recruiting team, they have a rich, well-rounded presence on LinkedIn, including an active LinkedIn group and extensive connections.  To target the college market, they’re leveraging Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to great advantage.  There’s not a huge amount of crossover between the two targets, and so the strategies and approaches are very different, though equally effective for their purpose.

Once you’ve figured out the objectives, you’ll need to determine which social media platforms make the most sense for helping you meet these goals; for example, if you’re recruiting new employees, LinkedIn is a natural platform.  For customer service enhancement, Twitter might be the right way to go (Best Buy and Zappo’s are excellent examples of this).   If you’re selling a product directly to consumers, a Facebook presence with an e-commerce component might make the most sense.  The point is, the platforms you’ll utilize need to fit with your objectives. 

What will your messaging be? And in what voice?  Social media is a conversation, not a lecture, so the voice is different—and it’s important to ensure it’s strategic, and on target with the platform.  If you’re a conservative financial institution, you don’t want your “voice” to include things like “LOL” and “OMG.”  Oscar de la Renta has decided to designate a carefully chosen employee and let her be the voice of the company, interjecting personality, energy, and fun into the mix and making the company seem smarter, edgier, and more engaging.  That’s not the right approach for every company, but for Oscar de la Renta, it’s strategic. And smart.

Determining how you’ll measure your success is critical.  While many companies use quantity of fans as a success metric, in reality, merely attracting fans is not enough.  Your success metrics must be based on your objectives, and they must be measurable, showing how they’re contributing directly to achievement of the stated objectives.  This is what builds the business case and lays the groundwork for maintaining and extending your social media presence in a way that truly builds your business.

I recently read a blog post arguing that you don’t need a social media strategy, and that strategy can in fact stifle your participation in social media.  The writer makes some salient points, and just as with anything else, it’s important to find the balance in how you interact in this arena.   But frankly, some potential interactions SHOULD be stifled, and having a strategy helps you know which ones to pursue and which ones to leave alone.  A long time ago, Laurence J. Peter said “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.”  That’s more true today than it ever was.   And it perfectly captures why you need a social media strategy to guide your online presence. 
So, what’s your take on having a social media strategy? And what’s your organization doing? Do you need a social media strategy, or not?

Upon hearing news that my summer internship plans were no longer going to happen, panic began to sink in. It was the week before semester schools let out, and here I was jobless and no idea where to look. I had always planned on having an internship the summer before my senior year to experience the work world and prepare me for any ventures I may take in the future into the world of PR and marketing. In a panic I started at square one. All of my personal connections were exhausted with the first company idea I had and so I went to the internet. Knowing I wanted to go home for the summer, I typed in anything I could think of that would find me internships in my field in Cincinnati. “Marketing firms in Cincinnati”; “Summer internships in Cincinnati”; “PR internships in Cincinnati”. I called many companies; both with internship programs and without, thinking maybe they’d like the sound of an intern and hire me. After hearing, “no, we’ve already hired our summer interns for this year,” what seemed like 1000 times, I found the ADCLUB of Cincinnati. Not even knowing who I was calling I dialed the number and fate took its toll.

The phone number I stumbled upon online led me directly to the Executive Director of AdClub Cincinnati, Judy Thompson. After saying she had already had plans to hire her summer interns upon finalizing details she asked me to tell her a little about myself; so I did. From there this summer was out of my hands it seems. Judy asked me to send her my resume and said she would follow up with me if she felt it was appropriate. A few days later I got an email from Judy, followed by a phone call. Sure enough she had hired her interns for the summer but being in the Ad business in Cincinnati she said she had a lot of connections and she wanted to put a word out about me and help me find something. After a couple phone calls of empty responses I received an email from Judy that she had heard of an internship at a local strategic design and technology firm that was looking late for a summer internship and that she had already forwarded my information to them. I was shocked to say the least that in the business world, Judy Thompson, a complete stranger to me except through a panic-driven phone call would take the time to ask me about myself and take her time to find me an internship. I received an email from Kat Jenkins at Sanger & Eby a couple days later and set up a phone interview. After discussing the logistics of what an internship at Sanger & Eby would look like, and sharing about myself, I offered to drive home to interview in person and Kat accepted. I interviewed with Kat in person and went over some more logistics and received a call later that afternoon with a job offer for the summer. Ecstatic to not be jobless for the summer and eager to gain experience I accepted the position.

You often hear of networking as a means to meeting the corporate world and establishing connections, but I was not a pro at this. I used a few simple tactics and got in with the right people and boy did I experience networking at its best! I would offer people a few hints of advice:

1. Don’t ever hesitate to call. You may end up on the line with an Executive Director or someone simply willing to share connections.
2. Always offer to go above and beyond (be willing to share, provide information, or go the extra mile—sometimes literally. The 2 hour drive for an in person interview seemed well worth upon being offered a job).
3. Do your best to maintain connections you make along the way. Especially today this is so easy to do with social media, but people will be blown away by showing you appreciate their help (a personal thank you card goes a long way).

Now, I know I am only a college student and many would say I have a lot to learn; however, through putting in the extra effort I was able to navigate my way through the corporate world into the right helpful hands!

One of the reasons why I love the technology industry – and specifically the Internet subset of it – is that it is always changing, and usually changing very quickly. I love learning about new concepts and new ideas, and there is certainly always something new to learn about in the Internet development industry.

One of the current fast-growing Internet trends is to push more control over functionality and animation to the client-side browser, now that newer browsers are powerful enough to run them natively. In simple terms, this gives us as designers and programmers more flexibility when coming up with creative solutions to problems. (Or, I could just say, we get to do more fun stuff!) One of the leaders of this trend is jQuery, which is a JavaScript library that is very powerful.

With jQuery, we can develop all kinds of solutions that improve the user’s experience, from improving form usability and validation, to more-engaging photo galleries, to a very fluid and dynamic browsing experience. And just as importantly, many times with jQuery we can build these new solutions more quickly and with less code than prior coding techniques. It’s the ultimate win-win: our clients get better-looking and better-functioning web sites without an increase in cost!

Today, I’d like to talk about one specific jQuery component that I have used on a recent project. It’s a plug-in named DataTables. From the DataTables web site, DataTables is:

Hmm. Maybe that definition doesn’t help us very much. To simplify, here’s my DataTables definition: DataTables gives programmers a set of tools when displaying a table of information that provides instantaneous pagination, sorting and searching. DataTables replaces the old, standard way of these three functionalities of having to send the request to the web server and wait for it to respond. An example:

Old way:
1: While browsing records 1-10 of a table, you click a link to go to the next page, containing records 11-20.
2: The browser sends the request to go to the next page back to the web server.
3: The web server passes the request on to the database server.
4: The database server then works with the web server to get the data for the next page and sends it back to your browser. While this process is happening, your mouse becomes an hourglass while you wait for the page to load.

New way: When you click a link to go to the next page, the browser instantly updates with the next page’s information! You click the link, and the page updates.

Sorting and Searching provide similar experiences. Here’s an example of a table of information using DataTables:

So, what you see here is a table of information showing browser statistics for visitors to sangereby.com during July 2010. As a small side-note, we are always reviewing browser statistics for audiences of our web sites to understand which browser and screen resolutions are relevant to our audience (again – it’s another principle of ever-changing trends in the Internet industry). Okay, let’s talk a little bit more about each feature:

Pagination: As already stated, the primary benefit of this pagination approach is its speed. It’s just blazing fast. But, almost as importantly, DataTables generates all of the pagination links and functionality automatically – we programmers do not have to develop custom code to generate the pagination. So, less code, faster development.

Sorting: Okay, you can already guess – it’s ultra-fast and minimizes code to write. Great! The sorting feature also packs some extra bells and whistles. Instead of coding only one primary column to make sortable, all columns are instantly sortable. In the header row, you get the wonderful icons and background-color indicating which column is currently sorted and whether it is sorted low-to-high or high-to-low. You can even sort on multiple columns, to further sort sub-sets of data (hold down SHIFT and click a second column heading).

Searching: Of course, the quickest way to find the information you’re looking for is to search for it, right? So, we have a search box. But, think of it as a high-powered search box, because it searches keystroke-by-keystroke. Go ahead, try it! Start typing in “M-a-c” to see all Macintosh users. The results filter with each keystroke – amazing!

As someone who loves to dig through data and find the information buried within, tools like this that improve a table’s functionality are just plain outstanding. I look forward to using it (and learning about and using other jQuery tools) on future projects! If you want to know more, or have other jQuery recommendations, let me know in the comments.