Search with Design

I’ve been building websites since 96. Honestly. I started in notepad and a ftp program that look more like crunched potato chips under the sofa cushions that a true file transfer software and built a site for a silicon valley company that’s still in business, remarkably. 17 years for a software company is like 98 in human years. I remember walking 12 blocks to the IP’s computer office/closet with my desktop slung over my should while I tried to navigate thru protocols and subdomains. It was so 1996. Thank goodness for wifi, godaddy.com, newsvine, the Big G, and even 12 different ESPN homepages (more on this in some other post due out in late november, if you’re lucky.) The internet has come a long way.

But sometimes, the work flow for a single designer hasn’t. This evening i’m doing something that takes either an incredible amount of boring, blackhole-like time to do, or I just haven’t figured out my pricing structure to hire a replacement junior web dev. I’m doing updates. For more than one site. Several. 4 actually so far. And still 2 to go. I hate the updates. I love the databases, the dynamics, the user updated content. I don’t like to move numbers around, change the font size and then put up this month’s information.

When I first started out in the biz, it was my lifeline to consistent work. I would get the design job for cheap. And then burn them with the cost of maintenance. Now, I couldn’t charge enough to pay for the pain that it causes me. Perhaps it’s my personality, but it just feels so much like paying bills.

Am I alone on this one?

It is becoming more clear every day that big corporations simply aren’t equipped to keep up with the pace of the internet at large. Yes, they may have access to all the latest hardware and software, and the ability to hire some of the best talent, but their implementation strategies leave much to be desired.

Not that it’s anything new. Since the early days of the web, corporations have struggled to find their place among the throngs of people browsing the web. But like the Amway salesmen at your backyard BBQ: they’re all push, no pull.

This irreverent look at the internet in 1996 helps to set the scene for how far behind major companies are and will be (go ahead and read that page through, ‘karjalae’ does a great job of lampooning the cavemen of the internet age).
The inexorable march of progress hasn’t made things any better for the heavy hitters in the commercial world. As any tech-savvy person knows, giving tools like Flash, Actionscript and SQL to the technologically un-evolved CEO of a major organization is like handing a monkey a flamethrower: it’s funny until he turns it on you.

Once the craze of just having a webpage was over, the tech-leaders began blogging. And although it took a few years for the bigwigs to catch on, catch on they did. This time, WalMart got caught up in a scandal, hiring a marketing agency to ’spin’ the idea of a couple who RV across America, staying overnight in WalMart parking lots. The outrage of internet users was surpassed only by the absurdity of the PR firm “that truly gets social media” (Edleman) being called out by BusinessWeek (whose web team doesn’t even have a proper www to non-www redirect working).

So WalMart gets another point in the ‘evil’ column and the internet continues to find new ways to entertain millions, and confound commercial entities.

The latest attempt to substitute corporate dollars for internet know-how comes to us from the Spice Girls, the quintet of British harpies, based on ‘diversity’ and backed by a marketing engine that would make Ferrari whimper. If anyone could leverage social networking into a crowd of screaming fans, they can, right?

Yes and no. Corporations are just now finding out that fan sites make money (a trick internet marketers discovered right around the time the iMac was released), and that you can ask people to vote for where they want bands to appear (how much exposure has Eventful had already?). Meanwhile, internet users are congregating at places like Fark, Digg and Reddit, and web designers and internet marketers are running ahead of the pack, trying to create the next social empire.

So when Big Spice asks folks to vote for what city they should play in, of course the internet’s equivalent of punk-music is going to suggest no other city than Baghdad, Iraq (Fark.com always runs the risk of being NSFW, but the first screen seems sterile).

But when the other shoe drops, we all need to remember that money talks, and in that conversation we’re playing in the corporate sandbox.

The bottom line is that the Spice Girls are going to play any venue they please, whether or not social networking votes them on to Mars.

But it doesn’t mean that they “get it”.

(On a side note, I came across this little gem during my research. Thanks, Dan!)

Not all stats all created equal. And Time On Page is one of those.As a designer, I’m always looking for ways to improve my work and continually that has been directed at delivering quality designs that answer the audience’s questions and provide intuitive design for navigation, content and images. One way to examine your effort is to monitor time on page. But, agh, the TOP stat is so misleading. So for example, I redesign a section of a site to create an easier experience for the user offering more obvious navigation, easy to digest content and a simple tour-style click thru button on the same place on each page. Viola! Great design, great implementation, and yet, the client argues, nothing was gained because the overall time on the page decreased. Is this a valid argument, or could I be right, that a better design makes content more consumable, quicker?

I hate the answer, both are right. So lets look at when time on page counts and when its worthless.

It counts

Flash sites - most flash sites are designed as one page, housing all the content and media in one browser-sized block. The greater the time on this page is also seen as the greater the experience. You could however add tracking to items that could be clicked on to better dissect the audience.

Trailers / Tutorials / Flash Demos - Here time does matter. How far did the visitor get? It’s much like the shopping cart effect. Watch to see where they dropped off, then improve that section of the demo. This was studied by Sesame Street creators and well documented in Malcolm Galdwell’s book, The Tipping Point.

One-page sites - This is close to, but not synonymous with Flash sites. This included ajax sites, and clever javascript sites as well as a good portal with the latest trend of the panel boxes (See yahoo.com as an example)

Checkouts / Registrations / Searches - But it’s the opposite here, you want less time, not more. Time here is a factor of how quickly you can process a request. Think of user errors, indecision, pages in the process, render and download times, authentication of credit cards, server loads, etcetera. If the world was buying your book on your eCommerce site, how many could you process in an hour?

It doesn’t count

Established websites - if you are already receiving traffic and you want to make a change and detect the effectiveness of the new design to the old you need to pick large metrics, like conversion actions not time on pages. When you make a large enough change it become impossible to compare apples to onions.

Advanced web surfers - with Cable internet access and not dial-up, with tabbed browsing now on IE7 and obviously on Firefox, along with “restore session” you can hang on to a site not via bookmarking it, but just tabbing to it, and tabbing off to anything else and tabbing back. I’m notorious for a tab bar full of sites I’ve visited over the last 48 hours. This would swing the metric with just one visitor like me into a different world sending the complete wrong signal to the designer and client alike.

Blogs / News articles - traffic is measured by uniques and total visits, or more basically, page requests, or page renders. If I’m buying ads, I want to pay for the page request, not for the 3rd 30 second time slot on a popular news article. Blogs are basically just creative content. The total time alloted to digesting an article depends on a great number of factors, including how bright your audience is, how tiny your text is, how distracted the reader is, if you content is work safe, and on and on. Time means nothing compared to total page views. How big is your audience, not how slow.

Pages with the print button - If you can print it, you can read it offline. Again, blogs, news, even business sites that have details about their product. I don’t mind reading online, but there are some people who can’t stand staring at text illuminated by a big dim flashlight pointed directly at their eyeballs.

I left thinking I didn’t list everything - that I might have to come back and add a few more. But basically, I’m also left trying to defend TOP as a stat, but not as the standing metric. In any design process going forward I will devote some attention up front to whatever stats I’m looking increase and concentrate on getting buyoff and commitment to those metrics to build better designs.

Well, since my partner-in-design has taken over reporting on new Google features this week (thanks Luke!) I’ve decided to try out a new series of posts responding to some topics from Search Engine Strategies New York.

Recently, a client emailed me a list of ‘notes and things to try’ which he received from one of the attendees of SESNY.  He asked me what he could be doing with each note that would help the optimization of his website. Rather than waste the hour or so I spent putting together the answers on one person, I thought I’d spread the responses around for the benefit of all.  I’ll try out a few of these posts and if it catches on, I’ll make it a series for the next few weeks (there are 39 points on this list in front of me!).  So without further introduction…
Note #1.   We can use Google geo-targeting ads to get an extra line of ad text that lists city and state in the ad.

To clarify the note, let me first explain that if you use geo-targeting in this way, Google will place a line beneath your ad denoting where your business or branch office is located.   Geo-targeting is not quite the right word, and ‘local search’ would probably be more appropriate.  You can see what I mean at the right.  Notice how the AOL ad doesn’t specify a location, where the Athena Capital ad does.

(As a side note, AOL is using half their title line to showcase the word Denver.  You could say that they’re not taking advantage of local search, but I would guess their ad gets more clicks when someone is looking for something in ‘Denver’)

So, where would I recommend using this kind of tactic?  Any industry where being local might be an advantage, or help to differentiate your business.  For instance, if I am a searcher looking for ‘motorcycle parts’ I might be wanting a local shop to help me select and install parts, or I could be looking for an online store.  If your ad doesn’t tell me you’re local, I’m going to assume that you’re national and click or not click depending on what I need.  In this case, the local store would lose business to people needed someone local and would gain excess (untargeted) clicks from shoppers needing a national store.

Of course, if you have a national business that is commonly mistaken for something local, this will compound the problem.  For instance, if you offer national foreclosure listings, but people looking for help with their foreclosure commonly click your ads looking for assistance, adding a locality tagline will only increase the number of untargeted clicks.

I would definitely recommend taking a careful look at which keywords these pros and cons could affect before enabling a local search campaign.  Make sure you are using them wisely.

Luke and I have come up with a great idea for a new consulting business come web application that has the ability to evolve over the next 5 years or so. It provides a service used by huge amounts of people every year, but that has been traditionally handled by a professional. The hook is that we would use SEO tricks, social networking and quality design and style to augment (or replace) the activities of the professional. Let me see if I can explain more clearly with an example…

Let’s say yachting suddenly becomes extremely popular. Folks who already own yachts might see their’s begin to go up in value. To find a buyer for your yacht you can employ a broker for a % of the sale amount and he will track down a buyer, do some negotiating, etc. Because the broker has never really been in a “hot” yacht market before, he only knows his old tricks: calling his friends in the boat business, placing a classifieds ad, etc.

If we were to apply our model in the target industry (sorry, the boats are just a metaphor, we’re not in the yachting market… yet) we would create a stylish one-page site for each yacht, we would make it a thirdlevel domain on our aged and SEO’d website (say TradeWinns.YachtParty.com), and we would make the social/viral elements easy to access and use. The one-page design would also allow buyers to browse a ton of yachts in a day, and because we’ve standardized the photo gallery, the pricing info, the features, etc. it’s all very easy to compare.

Now, a few other ‘YachtParty.com’ ideas have sprung up already, but none of them have been successful. We believe it’s because the first adopters of the idea are trying to hard to replace the Yacht brokers instead of allowing them to gain value from the system too. Also, a lot of these websites list way too many items on the page, when buyers only really want to see pretty pictures and a price first, and then browse a features list and so forth second. They don’t need to know what the weather is like where the boat is docked.

So here’s our hurdle: we can’t think of a name. The industry in which we’re operating is highly saturated with spam and personal sites, and almost every domain name we can come up with is taken or subpar. Here’s a list of how we’ve approached it so far:

1. We’ve tried coming up with 10 names we liked and trying those out, without doing any pre-research.
2. We’ve tried brute force dictionary combinations, using a thesaurus and WhoIs to find unused combinations
3. We’ve tried stepping way outside the boundaries of our idea to drive at the concept of why people buy or sell a yacht.
4. We’ve recently tried to go Web2.0 and drop the ‘e’ off of a fun word (yachtr or sailr anyone?).

That’s where we’re at now. Do you have any tips on how you find a good domain name? We could really use the help.

Nancy Simonson’s marketing and promotional products company, Adfigo Marketing went live today. Their goal in offering high quality service, attention to detail and their ability to find the perfect fit for their clients all played into the clean lines and comfortable blue tones that etch their new site. There’s plenty more in store, including some great gift ideas, so stay tuned.

Congratulations Nancy and Kelly. I think this is a great step forward in your industry in provide quality over quantity, relationships over revenue.

Yesterday I was recalling an article I read about some guy’s rant on up time. It was mocking those sites that claim 99.9% up time. Which made me think, how much downtime is that, really?

So, the basic calculation:

60 seconds X 60 minutes X 24 hours x 365 days

.1% downtime would equal 31536 seconds, or 8.76 hours.
Thats just a third of a day. That may not sound like much, or it may, depending your experience, your IT admin, your servers, but 8 hours in a power failure could mean big money losses for even a small company.

Ryan spoke of a report where they listed the downtime for the top 20 sites on the web.

Yahoo - zero downtown. None. Google, 7 minutes. I wonder what that cost them?

Up time is basically irrelevant. It’s cost per hour or minute in downtime that matters. How much would it cost you to be down, for say a week should be the major factor in the amount of money you put into solving the uptown equation.

Yahoo! Pipes is a great GUI interface for something that has previously been done only by developers. The ability to filter, sequence, add, combine and translate RSS feed content any way you like is a great tool to have; especially for bloggers, avid RSS readers and website owners.

Although it’s getting more user-friendly all the time it can still be quite an inapproachable application for the beginner. Inspired by GrayWolf’s blog post on Yahoo! Pipes, I’ve written this guide, designed to help you get a basic grasp of Pipes so that you can start experimenting yourself. It’s set up in two parts, a ‘Quick Start Guide’ and the ‘Quick Reference’

Quick Start Guide

What is Pipes?

Yahoo! Pipes is composed of 4 items: Modules, Pipes, Pipe Output, and Input/Outputs spots. Modules take RSS information through their inputs, operate on the data, and export the data to their outputs, where they are delivered, by a pipe, to the pipe output.

The easiest way to think of Pipes is to imagine each Pipe as a sentence: modules are the verbs, RSS feeds the nouns, the output box is a period, and the pipes are the “and, but, so, then”; the conjunction words.

For instance, the sentence “Fetch the RSS feeds for Google Base and Craigslist, using a user-inputted location, and limit the results to apartments.” could be made into a pipe using 2 fetch modules, a user-input module, and a filter module.

Here is a quick example of how you can use Yahoo! pipes. Spring is just around the corner, and it’s time to find a new bike. This pipe will take all the bike listings in a Craigslist feed, analyze them for a certain style or brand of bike, and output the results to a new RSS feed.

“Search Craigslist for My Favorite Bike Brand.”

This pipe makes use of 3 modules: Fetch, User Input, and Filter. Fetch gets the craiglist URL for the SFBay Bikes section, the User Input asks for the keyword (bike brand, type, etc.), and Filter allows only those items with the keyword in the title to be passed to the final feed.

You can try out the pipe for yourself here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/Wl07ZY_H2xGsZ4mql7okhQ/

How to build the pipe from the example:

1. Start a new pipe.

2. You will need to get 3 modules for this Pipe:

a. Open ‘Sources’ and drag the ‘Fetch’ module out to work area.

b. Open ‘User Inputs’ and drag ‘Text Input’ to the work area.

c. Open ‘Operators’ and get the ‘Filter’ module.

3. Go to Craigslist.org, find URL for the ‘Bikes’ section in your area.

4. Copy this URL into the Field in the Fetch module.

5. In the User-Input module, add some appropriate text for the Prompt and Name boxes, you should also add a keyword about bikes to the ‘default’ and ‘debug’ sections.

6. Change the fields in the Filter module to read ‘Permit’ ‘any’, and then change the first pull down box to ‘dc:title’ and leave the second one set to ‘Contains’

7. Now connect the pipes as I’ve done in the above picture:

a. Fetch > Filter

b. User-Input > keyword field in ‘Filter’

c. Filter > Pipe Output

And now you have a personalized RSS feed to find the bike you’re looking for on Craigslist (Please note: does not apply to the droids you’re looking for).

Click ‘More’ to see the Quick Reference…

(more…)

I know, this is a design post coming from the SEO, but that’s the point! I have no eye for color when it comes to design. I’m influenced much more by the geometry of the piece.

For instance, I saw this template online and thought the design was great:

Crispy Cut

And geometrically speaking it is. But color-wise, it needed work. Now I could sit all day and not come up with anything much better, so I headed over to Kuler, and found the ‘Japanese Garden’ scheme (a very popular one on the site):

And once I got done applying that theme, and using a couple of other tricks, I have this:

Promotions Guide

I know it’s not the greatest design in the world, but you can see how a little color change can really change the look of the site overall.

Use Kuler!

I don’t want to blow the whistle prematurely on a respected website like this one, but Luke brought to my attention yesterday that they ranked pretty highly for the Google search [switch]. Now the page appears in the Google index as “Apple - Switch,” but the page title on the linked page is “Apple - Get a mac.”

Strange.

So, checking the cache date, I notice that the page is 7 days old. Okay, maybe they’ve changed the title. Nope, the title is the same on the cached page as it is on the live page today.

So I fire up the good old Lynx-Borland browser and navigate to the same page. The no-Javacript browser says the title is the same as the live version.

Maybe it’s a backlink thing? My backlink analysis shows that less than 3% of links to the page contain the word “switch.” I wouldn’t think that would be enough recognition to warrant an editorial title change by Google.

Checking DMOZ, Apple has over 900 entries, none of which seem to have this page with the ‘Switch’ title.

So the question is: how does Apple get a different title in their search results from the title their users see on their website, and from their DMOZ entries?