Friedbeef’s Tech

Out of the box, Microsoft charts are the ugliest graph’s you’ll ever see (The person who came out with those default themes for Excel should be shot). 

Enter Juice Analytic’s all new Chart Chooser, a free flash based online solution to finding the perfect chart - every time. 

Chart Chooser is simple.  Firstly, it shows you recommended chart types based on the type of information you want to display - For example, if you want to chart trends, it will show you the best chart types for displaying trends. 

Then, just choose to download a formatted chart template in an Excel or PowerPoint template and insert your data.

That’s all there is to it.  No more fiddling around with colors, formatting and whatnot. 

Bonus tip: You can get some interesting chart layout ideas from the Extreme Presentation Blog

What charting tips can you share with others?  Tell us in the comments!

[tags] powerpoint[/tags]

• Please leave a comment... (1)

Computer errors are an unfortunate and inescapable part of life.  While this article won’t get rid of those errors for you, it will help you get through, and deal with them more efficiently.

1. How to copy your Windows error message to your clipboard

Program errors on Windows are usually very cryptic - as you’ll usually end up with a weird error number like 0×00002e0A, and you need to look it up to make sense of it. 

Some people make a dash for the pen and paper (that used to be me), some take screenshots, but the fact of the matter is that - while not very obvious - the universal copy shortcut, Ctrl-C will actually copy the entire contents of a message box to the clipboard, so you can just paste it across.  (Thanks for the tip ChuckOps).

2. How to quickly lookup Windows Errors

Error Messages for Windows is a small utility that will allow you to look up MS Windows error code numbers and display a descriptive message explaining what the numeric code actually means. If you have software programs that produce numeric error codes now you can find out what they really mean.

Yes, you could look up the same thing in Google, but this just cuts right to the heart of the matter and saves time.

3. How to get around error pages on the Internet

Want to visit a popular webpage, but the server is down?  Hoped to find an old page, which now no longer exists?

Error-Zilla is a Firefox extension that changes the default error page to one which has links to the page’s Google cache, Coralize, and snapshots from the Wayback Machine. 

Now you can tap into these resources to find mirrors, and old snapshots of those pages you want but cannot get to - and you won’t miss a beat.  Sorry Internet Explorer users - Firefox only :)

Bonus Tip #1: Tips on how to implement a more useful 404 page for your website

Bonus Tip #2: Collection of creative 404 pages to inspire you

[tags] windows, firefox [/tags]

• Please leave a comment... (2)

“Statistics are like a drunk with a lamp-post: used more for support than illumination” - Sir Winston Churchill

Get website demographics the lazy man’s way

While it is simple enough to find out where your visitors are coming from using any basic web stats service, trying to find out their profile and demographics would take some amount of effort as you’d probably have to run a reader survey to get the information you need - and even then you’d be getting a sample of people who chose to respond rather than those randomly selected.

Or… you could take the lazy man’s way out - which is to use Microsoft’s predictive engine which analyses a site to give a probable of the make-up of your visitors.

While the methodology isn’t the most robust, it does give an unbiased 3rd party opinion on probable demographics a site would receive based on search information it mined from Microsoft Live Search users.

Here’s what it thinks of Liverpool Football Club’s official website

and what it thinks of HelloKitty.com

So the figures do make some sense, at least from the most obvious standpoint which is gender :)

Check out this tool here.

Get website heatmaps the lazy man’s way

Site heatmaps are a great way of finding where the hotspots are on a web page, and where people would most likely click.  Crazyegg is a service which offers this service, but the drawback would be that it takes time before the results come out, and you would need a reasonable amount of traffic to track those clicks properly.

Or… you could take the lazy man’s way out - which is to use Feng Gui, a predictive engine which analyses a site to give a probable heat map of attention based on previously conducted neuro-science studies.  It is useful to note that it does NOT track clicks like what Crazyegg, but rather the probable attention of the reader.  In short, it lets you know if you’re drawing attention to the right places.

Try out Feng Gui here 

The Conclusion

All in all, these tools are not replacements for actually doing proper testing and analysis of a site, but is great for supplementary information and instant feedback and results.

In what other interesting ways do you analyze your site?  Tell us in the comments!

[tags] stats [/tags]

• Please leave a comment...