Category: Tutorials

How to capture your website on a regular interval

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We’re proud to announce the release of scheduled captures on GeoScreenshot. You are now able to schedule your captures to run in the background on a daily, weekly or monthly interval and archive your results for future viewing.

Our customers requested this feature to help them track the consistency of their captures over a long period of time. You can also use this feature to maintain an archive of website changes from various locations and configurations.

We’ve released it to all subscribers of our monthly plans. You can schedule as many screenshots as the maximum allows.

To get started,

1. Capture your URL

Go to the capture page and capture your desired URL as you normally would. Feel free to fine tune your capture settings according to your needs.

Capturing www.office.com from 50 locations. The captures are displayed grouped by country.

2. Convert your recent capture to a scheduled job

Once your capture is done, you can click on the Schedule Job button to convert your capture into a job. Give it a descriptive job title, and proceed in the dialog. Your capture settings from your capture (in the example, www.office.com) will be automatically carried to the second step of the flow.

You can click on the schedule button to convert your existing job into a recurrent capture. Your settings for the capture will be automatically persisted.

3. Customize your capture schedule

On step 3, you can choose to run your capture daily, weekly or monthly. You can further customize the schedule by customizing it further by setting the day of week, hour, time zone and limiting the maximum number of runs. In addition, you can choose to limit all jobs to a time window.

You can expand the Advanced Options section to fine tune the capture schedule to meet your needs.

4. Confirm your final schedule

As a final check, you can preview a forecast of the run times and get an estimate for monthly credit reservations. When your job is active, it will reserve the necessary number of credits from your prepaid and subscription pool. Once you deactivate your job, any unused credits will be refunded to your subscription credits.

Click Save Job when you are done.

You can make changes to your schedule and click Preview to see how it will affect the actual dates and monthly credit costs

5. You are set!

Once you have configured your jobs, you can click on the schedule tab to see a dashboard of your upcoming runs.

You will get a comprehensive report of your latest runs from all your scheduled jobs on this screen.

6. Give us feedback

Email [email protected] with any questions or feedback. We’d love to hear your suggestions for improvement.

Testing HTML5 geo-location at scale – Store locator example

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If you want to get very precise geolocation information about your website’s visitors, the HTML5 Geolocation API is a very reliable method for fetching real-time location information. Most browsers support the JavaScript API and there are many tools for implementing it.

Many sites use the Geolocation API to fetch the user’s information. For example, McDonalds.com prompts the user for permission to access the browser’s API. Without explicit permissions, it will show an input box for a user’s address.

Other sites like Starbucks.com use a hybrid approach of GeoIP and HTML5 geo-location. By using GeoIP as the default provider, they pre-populate their list with relevant store information and improve the precision of the targeting once the user grants privileges.

Example:

Once granted, it will show a populated results page with the nearest locations.

Starbucks.com
For a tutorial on how to implement HTML5 geo-location, please go here.

Testing HTML5 Geo-location – Starbucks Store Locator

  1. Log in to your GeoScreenshot account

https://www.geoscreenshot.com/login

2. Go to the capture page, enter the URL, make sure “HTML5 Geolocation” is enabled

3. You should see a grid of results

4. Click on a specific screenshot to look at the details

Screenshot

How Do I Localize My Website?

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If your website has a global audience, localization is an important element of success. It’s not just about translating the language. It’s about ensuring that the site is ready to inspire targeted users to take the desired action – to buy, join, subscribe, share and visit again. It’s about making sure every element of the site takes into consideration a user’s language, perspective, behavior and cultural norms. In order to do that, the site needs to be evaluated from various cultural perspectives. And you should expect that to lead to a redevelopment of content and branding if you truly want to resonate with international audiences.

Automatic language translation can cause issues with tone, clarity and grammar. But even if a website was translated by the most qualified professional linguist, the site may still fall short of important nuances that create a positive and comfortable experience. Consider design elements such as colors, sizes, and shapes; cultural content involving humor, etiquette, symbols and beliefs; and functional content such as date and time formats, contact information, and reviews.

Some localization experts not only adapt web content to cater to national or regional market preferences, but may also recreate or “transcreate” advertising and marketing campaign messaging to maximize cultural appeal—and avoid potentially embarrassing or offensive communications.

Source: http://thecontentwrangler.com/2016/06/22/translation-versus-localization/

Use Location Data

Don’t exhaust yourself conforming your site to every possible culture. Google Analytics or Alexa will help you determine which countries generate the majority of your visits. And once you’ve decided on some geographic targets, be deliberate! Geographic information will help you make smarter decisions about targeting and messaging, and it will increase the value of your advertising inventory. Businesses with tighter budgets will appreciate a tighter geographic focus.

Just watch the traffic and conversions grow!

Do Some Research

Get in touch with some agencies in the local region that can help you understand the market. Make sure that the products or services would be in demand there, and that they will integrate well with the values of the target audience. Know how their customs and practices differ from ours. The last thing you want to do is offend an audience you want to capture.

Keep Updating

Think of each version of your site as a living entity. You want it to continue to develop and improve as time goes by. As you add content, products, promotions, and functionality to the original site, you should plan to do the same to the other versions each and every time there is a change. The users will feel their importance and your commitment.

Make Sure It’s Working

If something isn’t displaying correctly, be sure to fix it fast. Always have skilled translators available to help you update content. Geoblocking and censorship will be an issue in some countries. Make sure you know if your site is up and how it looks and functions from every targeted location. GeoScreenshot allows you to test your website from over 50 geolocations.

Just like concerned parents and website owners can control content, some foreign governments choose to limit what can be viewed in their countries. Are the laws of certain countries affecting the visibility of your website there? You bet. If you have a global target audience, you should find out if your website or any of its content is being blocked in certain markets.