Graham Charlton's Blog

Twingly is a new, European blog search engine which has just launched in beta. It aims to beat its rivals by providing "spam-free" results.

Marks & Spencer revamped its website last year, and enjoyed a successful Christmas online, increasing its web sales by 78% in the 13 weeks to the end of December.

The M&S website scored badly in a usability study last year though, so there may still be room for improvement to the user experience.

We've identified 10 areas of the site that M&S may want to take a look at...

MySpace has teamed up with three of the four major record labels, Sony BMG, Warner Music and Universal, to make their catalogues available via MySpace Music.

Amazon this week introduced a new service in the US that lets customers buy products from the site by text message.

With the new system, dubbed 'TextBuyIt', mobile users can text a product name, search term or ISBN number to Amazon, and will get the top two results from the search sent back to them.

German firm Siemens has the best corporate website, while eight of the top ten websites are those of European firms, according to a study of 75 top company sites.

The FT Bowen Craggs Index looked at the effectiveness of corporate websites, and finds that more of these firms are now taking their web presence more seriously.

One guaranteed way to disappoint your customers online is to have them search and decide on the product they want to buy from your website, only to find that it is out of stock.

Visitors who find that an item is unavailable to buy are likely to form a bad impression of a retailer, and seek to buy the item from a competitor, so what is the best way to handle this problem?

There is plenty of room for improving the user experience of some of the UK's top travel websites, according to a new usability study.

Webcredible's Flights Online study looked at the flight search and booking process on 20 travel agent and airline websites.

The highest scoring website was Opodo with 67%, while Monarch came off worst on 38%. On average, travel agent websites were more usable than the airlines' sites.

Overall advertising spend in the US rose by 0.6% last year, but online ad revenue continues to rise, growing by 18.9% compared with 2006.

These figures (PDF) are from the Nielsen Company, and show that online advertising is still growing much faster than all other categories, though growth has slowed from 35% between 2005 and 2006.

More and more email users are using the report spam buttons to unsubscribe from emails, so is another option needed on email programmes to improve deliverability?

A survey found last week that 56% of email users consider uninteresting or irrelevant email messages as spam, and concluded that the report spam button is 'broken'. 

The BBC has followed up the launch of its new homepage last month with a redesign of the news and sport sections of the website.