Lorenzo Alberton shares with us his experience on the internet and on company websites
Lorenzo Alberton is a computer engineer who has been living and working in England for the last three years. He’s been programming with languages like PHP, Java and C/C++ for over 10 years. He designed and implemented scores of websites, among which those of BBC and Channel 5 have been the last but not the least. Lorenzo is also in charge of GC&P’s website. We interviewed him on a theme of topical interest: how to make websites really effective.
Lorenzo, we know you are very busy at the moment, so first of all we thank you for accepting to give us some of your precious time. Can you tell us something about your career path?
I graduated at the “Politecnico di Torino” (Engineering university). While working on my graduation thesis and during the following year I took part in a R&D project on machine learning, natural language processing and information extraction.
In 2008 I moved to London where I worked as a consultant for big companies on scalability, security and performance problems of their websites. For instance I worked on the BBC homepage which has 11 millions accesses every day. Thanks to our work we improved the performances from 40 to 950 accesses per second on each server.
What are you dealing with at present?
Nowadays I am working on the development of a new platform for analyzing data present in the new media: Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Linkedin, Myspace and many others. In practice through our platform we can filter and analyze in real time millions of messages, blogs, etc, we augment them with sentiment analysis and authority ranking, and we draw from them information useful for our clients, or simply deliver the messages that match rules (sometimes very complex, with thousands of parameters) defined by our clients.
Can you give us a few examples based on your experience?
We have devised a system to correlate Stock Exchange price fluctuations and of what people say on the web, their opinion and their mood.
We’ve also implemented an application for large events. On the basis of messages sent from Twitter or Facebook, and depending on the number of “followers”, we can detect authoritative sources and opinion leaders, i.e. people who can influence other people. When combining this data with the geo-referenced information tied to each message sent from a mobile device, we can also detect the “hot spots” at any given time, i.e. those in which there are more opinion leaders. The information we draw can be supplied to newspapers and magazines or to companies always in search of opinion leaders, or even to the participants who want to know where the “cool” people are gathering.
A remarkable experience indeed! Let me ask you an obvious question: why did you leave Italy? Are we so backward in our country?
Well, as a matter of fact in London you have many more opportunities in the ICT field. Here they appreciate your merits and your competence more than your seniority. Furthermore London is a sort of European Silicon Valley where you can find the latest technology and the best European ICT talents and where, if you have a good idea, you can always find people to execute and finance it.
London can be seen as a “hub” where ideas from all over the world come together.
Working methods are more advanced, there is less bureaucracy, decisions are faster and so is the progress rate.
For three years I have worked on very innovative technologies and lean processes. These technologies are well known here, while in Italy they are almost unknown.
You touched on the subject of “lean” in ICT. It seems an interesting topic, doesn’t it? ?
I think we could easily compare the application of lean thinking in manufacturing and in ICT.
Suffice it to say that in our projects we daily apply concepts similar to “concurrent engineering”. I would like to talk extensively on this subject with people like you who are experts in lean manufacturing, lean product design and lean accounting but this is beyond the scope of this talk.
Indeed it is, so let us come back to the theme of this interview and talk about websites. How should a good website be? How can we evaluate the quality of a site?
From a merely technical point of view we evaluate first of all security, i.e. the ability to neutralize hacking. Secondly we evaluate performances in terms of page generation time and rendering speed, i.e. the speed to make a page available in its entirety.
As for “usability” (how intuitive the site is) what really matters is how easy it is to move inside the site in order to reach what the visitor is interested in. The design should be clean and easy to understand.
Another important factor is accessibility. Can a visitor navigate without a mouse? And what about a colour-blind visitor? And is a blind person allowed to visit the site all the same? Some technologies like Flash can have serious accessibility problems.
What about the contents?
People return to a website only if it is continuously updated.
Information should be relevant, concise and clear, because the visitor’s attention span is quite short. A visitor confronted with a very long article goes elsewhere.
One should avoid praising himself or his organization: the success of a product or a service is tied to the success of the users in reaching their goals and – as a consequence – to their level of satisfaction, not to the product used to get there. The user is not interested in knowing that the service company is the market leader, all they care about is solving their problem with the minimum effort.
Common places and banalities should be banished. For instance: GC&P’s slogan: “We support our clients to create value for their customers” could probably apply to a telecommunication company or to a bank or to any other service company! The decision to remove it has been a wise one.
One of the most critical aspects is the updating of contents. Can you give us some suggestions?
I would suggest to keep a “news area” and to see that the site has the right mix of fixed, semi fixed and variable areas. Also, it is not necessary to write much. An idea, a thought, a tweet is often enough.
What about the various programs that measure the accesses to a website? Which in your opinion is the best? What indicators on accesses are more meaningful?
It all depends on what you want. A well-known and widely used program is Google Analytics, which is free of charge, fast and offers a number of functions. In addition it allows to measure “conversions”, that is where visitors come from and how they move in the site. The most effective indicators are the number of visits, the number of one time visitors, the average time spent on the site, the percentage of new visitors, the bounce rate. For international websites, visitor’s path analysis can reveal how different cultures or geographical areas respond to different site areas or to different content.
What is the relationship between the new media (facebook, linkedin, tweetter) and traditional company’s websites?
If you have accounts in the new media services, it is easier to communicate to people and it entices active participation on your website. Since more and more people are on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter it is worthwhile being there. It’s an easy and effective way of opening a communication channel.
Can you tell us something about GC&P’s website? What are its technical features?
The site is written in PHP (with a popular framework) and is backed by a MySQL database. The site is now integrated with Twitter, and the contents translation system is innovative and very effective. At the moment the site doesn’t have high technical complexities because the number of accesses is still comparatively limited.
What about contents, do you like them?
Yes I like them. I find them interesting, concise, and rich of ideas and information. I think the site presents a balanced mix of static and dynamic areas, photos, videos and texts. I like also the fact that the protagonists of the site more than the firm are the persons. And I find the reports on real cases and projects particularly interesting and stimulating: real-world examples are an excellent way of describing your activity, focusing on the client rather than on yourself, and many companies can relate to similar problems.
What changes can we expect in 2011?
Well, we have already activated a service of instantaneous news linked to Twitter. In a short time we will work on a “press room”.
A final question: what are your projects for the future?
I would like to further specialize in distributed systems architectures and to improve my experience as leader of system development projects. I would like to apply more and more the concepts of Lean Thinking to software development. In addition I think I will continue to lecture in various parts of the world. In the near future I will be in Verona, in May I will fly to Canada.
Lorenzo thank you very much and let us hope you will some day come back and work in Italy. God knows how much our country needs young people like you!