September 20, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Posted by: bogeywebdesign under web design
Just a quick post. I finally got around to submitting two of my themes in the official Theme directory. They were accepted after some minor corrections. You can find them here.
I just happened to check the stats today and between the two I have over 1200 downloads. While not impressive considering some of the other themes on the site, I’m pretty happy with that. It will be interested to see if it starts to be actually used on sites and gives me some linkbacks.
Next: I have to make homepages for the themes. I’d also like to do some updates to them and craft a third. Hopefully all before the end of the year.
Tags: portfolio, themes, wordpress, wordpress themes
April 13, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Posted by: bogeywebdesign under SEO, user engagement, web design
At my current position we are lucky to have a vibrant, active, large, opinionated, and outspoken community. Perhaps it has to do with having a writing site but most users are logical and literate in their arguments which allows us many insights into the usability of our site, potential flaws / bugs, outstanding issues with new (or even seasoned) features, and, generally, into how a user sees our site.
One of the difficulties with being a programmer or anyone that works “behind the scenes” – developing, testing, or specifying features – is that no matter how hard you try or how good you are at your job you have an entrenched opinion about the site that you work on because you have made it. It’s impossible to fully look at it with user’s eyes so no matter how much you think about a particular feature you’re always going to miss something that a user will see. It’s just natural that you assume certain things are logical when in fact the flow, usability, or design of a page might be extremely confusing or present a high hurdle to all, or even a subset of, your users that can render the page from difficult to use to unusable.
This is where an active community is a boon.
By engaging those users – we use a message board (built on the open source SMF software) and a blog (using Wordpress) – you are able to gather information, tips, questions, and insight into the finished product in the wild. Many times it allows us to find where copy or page flow is lacking and provide instruction to users. We have certain community leaders (which we call stewards) that many times will use the information provided by us throughout the boards to instruct other users – propagating the knowledge for us. Other times it allows questions to arise that we may not have thought of and allow us to schedule new features or feature updates to correct deficiencies. Finally, we may have an instance that we did not foresee or couldn’t create in our test environment and only through exposure to users do we see bugs in the site – basically turning our community into testers.
This is an extremely powerful tool that is not always used on large, non-technical sites – where users who are naturally knowledgeable in the technology will speak up of their own accord.
So how do you empower your users and speak out to them in order to have access to this tool?
- Provide tools for them to reach out and communicate with you. Besides the normal help e-mail area we have public facing tools that allow users to engage us and the community for answers. Some of the tools we use are:
- A wiki for our help section – allowing quick searching of a large, complex living document to quickly provide answers to new users.
- A blog for community instruction and brand building – also searchable we discuss features in new releases, reasoning behind features, and other items which are not targeted at new users necessarily but require some sort of “stickiness.” Sometimes a blog post is moved to the wiki to become part of the living help document.
- A community board for user-user and user-employee engagement – besides help sections where users can question logic or features we also have simply community areas where users can just engage each other, build relationships, and have fun. This means they are not providing direct value (content) to the site, however, we’ve seen for the most part that it promotes user happiness and, indirectly, that increases productivity on the site.
- Have employees engage users directly. We have employees from every division practically communicate with users even though we have a department specifically created to do so. Development members like myself, vice presidents, and even our CEO have communicated with users via our boards and blog. This builds rapport and trust with users. It can be frustrating at times and takes away productivity from assigned tasks but the benefits far outweigh that as our users love and respect that they can ask us questions and gain insight that they can’t from other sites – even if they realize sometimes we can’t answer them fully because of proprietary information protection.
- Be as transparent as possible. Let users “behind the scenes” – they love it. Let them know why a certain feature works a certain way. Have fun with users. Make them a part of the team. This is especially important in a “Web 2.0″ or “user generated content” site as they really are part of the team. Be honest with them when you can’t share proprietary information and why you can’t. They’ll respect it.
- Empower motivated, hard working, driven, intelligent, and / or respected users to take control of parts of the site. One of the programs instituted where I work is our steward program. Basically it gives users some amount of power of sections of the site. It might be as small as a leaf channel, larger like a base channel, or in some users cases they have control over our community boards. Does this open the door for abuse? Of course. But communities are self-policing and we’ve had few, if any, abuse issues. For the most part stewards have gone above and beyond what we’ve asked them to do because they are invested in the success of the site just like we are. If we fail, they fail. If we succeed, they succeed. It’s a powerful motivator.
- Really listen to their ideas. I’ve participated in a lot of good debate on our boards about current and future features – what users like, what they want, what they feel they need to succeed. This is ammunition in your pocket. When meetings are held about features the ability to say “users on the boards requested this” or “some users on the blog mentioned that this feature could really use this little extra thing” is extremely powerful. They won’t always get what they want but many times what they want is “low hanging fruit” that can be a big win. There’s nothing like a feature that takes 2 days to build and is lauded about by the community.
Most of these should be common sense however most sites ignore their users – thinking them too ignorant or that they are not proficient enough to know what they really want. Sometimes it’s true – users don’t always have the “big picture” vision to take your site to the next level. However, they do have the knowledge of the nuts and bolts of your site in order to polish what you currently have. Many times, it’s much easier and a better return on investment to improve your existing infrastructure instead of simply plowing forward with new features. While everyone likes the “shiny new toy” if your base is not solid you won’t succeed.
Anyways, that’s my thoughts, opinions and insight after having been a part of an amazing and active community for over 2 years now.
Tags: user communities, user community, user engagement, users
March 28, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Posted by: bogeywebdesign under SEO, internet, web design
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a strategy to allow a site to rank in search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask) for terms. Typically the goal is to rank in the top ten for terms relevant to the main focus of the site and within the top 1-2 pages (10-30 results typically) for secondary focus areas. Since most new sites are found via search engine results this becomes the main source of traffic for smaller sites like blogs and startups. However, even main web staples rely heavily on this referral traffic.
In order to SEO a site a dual strategy is needed.
Internally, a site must have good technical design and well-written content. This makes it more attractive to search engines and helps with “natural indexing” a search engine spider finding a single link to your site and being able to traverse the entire site tree to add it to it’s database.
Externally, a site must rely on strong inbound links in order to build the trust factor associated to its domain by search engines (mainly Google). Means of accomplishing this include using social book marking sites (Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia), social news / technology sites (Digg, Reddit), popular blogs (TechCrunch), and niche link building (inbound links from other sites that rate for the same search terms).
Internal Design
Internal design should focus on semantic web design and well-written content. On the web, it’s said that “content is king.” Well-written content will trump any attempts at “keyword stuffing”, hidden keywords, or any other “black hat” SEO strategies (those frowned upon and/or banned by search engines). While black hat strategies might earn a short term gain inherently the search engines catch onto the strategy resulting in a long term loss either in reducing the site’s trust so they rank lower or simply banning them from the index altogether.
Semantic design is the process of writing HTML code so that content on the page is contained in semantic elements. This movement came about after the fiasco of 1990s web design including “table-itis” using tables and other semantic elements non-semantically in order to display the page the way the designer wanted. With the widespread acceptance of CSS and the (mostly) widespread implementation of it in browsers such as Firefox, Opera and IE 6+ the move to semantic design seriously began and started gaining a foothold in the web standards community.
At it’s heart, semantic design is basically wrapping content in elements that describe it semantically paragraphs in p tags, lists (many times navigation links) in ul (or if ordered ol) tags, tabular data (like graphs or excel documents) in tables, definition lists in dl tags, and headers in h1-6 tags. The use of non-semantic tags divs and spans mostly along with liberal use of classes, ids and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) then allow the designer to have semantic content in semantic tags but still display it in any manner that they wish.
The reason semantic design is important is because it tells search engines what the data means it outlines header hierarchies to allow for keyword sensing and allows it to sense how data is formed and related (paragraphs under a header being a “section” etc). Since search engine spiders can only parse and not actually read the data this allows them to parse the site more intelligently and results in better keyword matching for the site.
The final internal design facet is likely one of the most important the title tag. This is a tag that is only shows at the top of the browser window, above the address bar and is thought in the SEO community to be the most highly weighted element by spiders. Having unique, meaningful, concise, and useful titles on each of your pages is the first step to being indexed for the terms you want.
After the title tag is surmised that the header elements h1-h6 are the next most heavily weighted internal element because they perform a function like a “table of contents” for the page. These should be used intelligently and not abused though as this can be considered “black hat” as well.
External Link Building
Beyond good internal design, a well-executed inbound linking strategy is key to SEO. In the SEO community it is thought that this is actually the most important overall part of the process. Search results tend to sway towards this thinking as many times a site that has poor internal design but strong inbound linking for terms will rank higher (many times much higher) than well designed sites with poor inbound linking.
Google is the largest search engine and likely the one that values this most. Although it’s algorithm is unknown many hypothesizes have been put forth by the SEO community and results seem to provide validation.
The first hypothesis is that search engines (specifically Google) place an amount of “trust” on a domain and page (sometimes confused with PageRank). This trust for search terms shares a one-to-one relationship with how that page and domain rank for those same terms.
In order to build this trust, a site must be thought of as an expert for the terms. Typically this is show by inbound links that meet a combination of criteria. The most important is number of links combined with some sort of freshness multiplier. The more inbound links for a term the more trust. The freshness multiplier comes into effect when, for example, an older site might have more links for a term however has not had any recent links for those terms. A newer site with less overall links but many recent links for those terms might then have more trust. The logic is that data is timely so more new links earn more trust than many old links.
Beyond total number of links is links from other sites that have trust for the terms. So, for example, if a site wishes to rate for “dog breeding” having inbound links from other sites that rank well for “dog breeding” show to spiders than those trusted sites consider the linked to site a peer.
Finally, the terms in and around the anchor text of the referring link assign terms. So a link set with the text “dog breeding” in the previous example would pass on trust for that keyword phrase. This is thought to be the least heavily weighted method.
There are many other hypothesizes, however these seem to be the most prevalent and well trusted.
Inbound links are typically generated though networking in the niche community a site is looking to enter as well as using popular social networking sites (Digg, Reddit, StumpleUpon, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia) to increase the exposure of the site and, hopefully, gain inbound links from various sources. A campaign of using social networking sites intelligently to garner inbound links is typically referred to as “viral marketing.”
In conclusion, SEO relies on both internal and external methods. The most important is a strong campaign of collecting links from valuable sources preferably in the same niche. The second most important is strong internal design so when a spider reaches the site it has the highest chance of success to index it correctly and rank it for preferred terms.
Random Tidbit: Want to learn more about SEO? Try reading some of the 15 most popular SEO websites. If you use Wordpress learn more about improving it’s SEO – I actually use a different plugin called Add Meta Tags. Finally, check my SEO page on Ma.gnolia for more interesting sites and tools I find.
Tags: internet, SEO, web design
May 29, 2007 at 5:33 am
Posted by: bogeywebdesign under internet, web design, web2.0
At work we recently instituted social bookmarking and networking at the bottom of our items. Apparently our users – while smart, resourceful, motivated and on a web 2.0 site regularly – were in many cases unaware of the phenomenon. While the values of Reddit and Digg are well known – though in the case of Digg not very useful in my opinion based upon recent stories of gaming, mass exodus (over the HD-DVD key issue) and the simple fact that similar stories always seem to populate the front page – social bookmarking seems to be less widely known, used and understood.
It has many uses and benefits that are worth looking into. I will focus on my personal choice del.icio.us – however other sites such as blinklist and ma.gnolia do almost exactly the same thing (and in some cases better from what I understand).
First, and most important to me, they serve as a central hub for all your bookmarks. Once you become a regular web user and get past the 20 or so range for bookmarks it becomes cumbersome to sync your home, work, laptop, etc. bookmarks. With del.icio.us you can post them in one place and access them from any computer anywhere. And using their tag feature you can sort your bookmarks easily so that you, your friends and even complete strangers can find them. You can add notes – which I need to do more of – to remind yourself why you bookmarked the site. For anyone that is into tech news, web design or blogging having this resource is a must.
Second, they’ve become a social search engine. I saw an interesting article about the new search engine that’s better that Google. Basically, it’s about using tags on del.icio.us to find interesting and relevant sites. There are some issues – recently I’ve noticed spam trickling in – but overall it’s a great way to find cool new sites and articles. Add the fact that you can get feeds from it – giving you SEO or CSS content daily right to your RSS reader/site of choice – and it’s almost a no-brainer. Will it ever replace Google? Probably not. But it’s an awesome substitute especially for cutting edge and web related topics.
Third, they allow you to increase your audience if you’re a blogger or webmaster. Basically, by bookmarking your own pages you are indexing your site the way you want it to be. The loss is so is everyone else, however, for a new or smaller audience blog/site it’s a great way to expand your audience and pick up potential regular visitors. It’s something I’ve always meant to do with my site but never gotten around to. If you use Wordpress, your tags naturally flow with the tags on del.icio.us – so someone should (or likely already has) invent a plug-in to do this automatically.
Finally, they allow you to share your bookmarks. You can build friends on del.icio.us (they call it your network) and when you tag something one of the tags will be “for:<username>.” So if find that awesome new CSS site and want to share it with your designer friend – you can. You can even give links to people not in your network (as a reader of my blog did in the past).
You can also share your bookmarks through tag and link rolls – which is how I built my interests, web design and graphic design pages. They also have released an API I believe to be used in mash-ups.
Random Tidbit: I found an article awhile back about 37 Steps to Perfect Markup. Pretty interesting.
Tags: internet, web design, web2.0
May 27, 2007 at 4:59 am
Posted by: bogeywebdesign under microformats, web design, webstandards
I have been reading a lot about microformats recently to try and get a better understanding of them, their benefits and how they affect web standards. I’ve talked a little about them in the past but I wanted to delve more into detail.
The basic idea of microformats is to design a standard XHTML template for common items – for example a hcalendar for events. That template is then the standard for all items of that type. Since all of those items share common elements – in the hcalendar example a h3 with class = summary would be the event description – they are easily able to be encoded into XML and can be aggregated. So sites or programs could aggregate sites using microformats and parse them into easily understandable and standard (hence web standards) displays.
It opens the doors to easily sharing contact information, events, resumes and people relationships with friends, family or even across the web. There are even, already, some microformat plugins for Wordpress and noted blogger and CSS expert Eric Meyer uses them for both his tags and his blog watch. I definitely need to track down a rel-tag plug-in to start getting indexed in Technorati – any suggestions?
I realized I’ve only scratched the surface here. With that in mind I’m going to forgo my usual random tidbit and list some links to sites I found filled with microformats information. Before I do, note that already there have been concerns about identity theft with things like hCards and hResumes so there are many bugs to yet be worked out. It’s a powerful tool though with lots of possibility.
For more microformats information check out the following or my microformats tag on del.icio.us:
Tags: microformats, web design, webstandards
