What The Heck Is Google Upto?

May 30th, 2010 · SEO

As I keep reading everywhere, with code names such as “May Day” and “Caffeine”, Google has been tweaking their search rank algorithm lately. What does this mean to you and me? Well it means that the types of results being returned will change, as relevance for terms on pages changes. On the flip side, it seems that for web content producers with large sites, with large volumes of “item” (often referred to as ‘Long Tail’) pages will see the rank of those pages, and the traffic driven to them fall.

Why Is the Long Tail Being Affected?

The reality is that sites such as Last.fm or Amazon, with may millions of pages, actually contain a lot of pages with similar or a lot of replicated content, such as lyrics or product specifications, and when results are returned with multiple sites with exactly the same kind of information, this isn’t of much use to the end user. As a result Google is using this set of changes to try and demote the content, in favour of more relevant, but less traveled pages. It’s clear that this update is really aimed at the ‘Big Boys’.

How to Get Around This?

The reality is that if you run a standardised eCommerce site where a lot of pages retain replicated content, you are going to be hit. But this shouldn’t be the end of the world. The only problem is that if you are not receiving a lot of traffic already, you are going to find it an uphill struggle to start achieving the kinds of goals you need to combat the problem in the first place, at which point you might wonder if Google isn’t doing the right thing anyhow.

As with any good SEO, fighting this problem is achieved by creating unique and dynamic content that adds value to the results Google provides and which is of interest to site visitors. If, as I said already, you have a high volume of traffic you can tap into this with comments, reviews and other user generated content, but if you don’t you are not completely stuck. With access to social networks it is much easier to drive traffic to your site this days with a certain immediacy and to try and develop this into something more.

Other means include trying to use more natural search terms on these pages, shaping traffic and relevance for pages on your site by using Sitemap XML files for highlighting lesser and greater importance of pages on the website, as well as robust internal linking with recommendations, and external links with widgets and such like. Beyond this driving traffic to your site through other means, which should have been the case anyhow. It’s clear that this kind of update doesn’t need to be the end of the world for large sites.

SEO is Always About Doing Things Right!

This game plan for combating said changes always comes back to doing things the right way. If you are able to draw focus and concentrate quality on fewer pages than you should. Casting your net as wide as possible, isn’t always the best thing, and when you do, you need to ensure that you are aiming for the highest bar all the time. This isn’t just good for you, but it is implicitly good for your site visitors, and gives Google more reason for sending them there.

Illustration courtesy of Bre Pettis. (CC) on Flickr.

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Learning HTML5

May 29th, 2010 · Development

As of today, May 27th 2010, don’t go looking to Amazon for any books on HTML5, all of the titles on search are in the pipeline and only available for pre-order. So where to? Where can you find content for offline reading? At this point I don’t know and I wish I did, because I am rearing to go.

In the meantime the hype, according to The Register in their post HTML5 Unhinged, is over taking the reality and HTML5 is fast becoming all things to all people, just as AJAX and Web 2.0 did in the past. Probably more than just a few of those said people could benefit from actually having a read about the topic, rather than bluff, argument and counter-arguments all round.

Anyhow, for those happy to read online, here are a bunch of useful posts, resources and anything else I deemed might be worthy of an HTML5 learning collection:

HTML5 – As laid out on Wikipedia and the context of its development, from the standardisation to the markup to the new apis, to the different between HTML5 and XHTML and onto other things such as error handling. Definitely a worthwhile starting point for those that are less technically inclined.
Dive into HTML5 – is an awesome online resource in the public domain, styled as if a medieval edition hot off the Caxton Press. It covers a bunch of useful areas from Forms to Canvas to Audio-Video, and on and on. The online document is going to end up in print via O’Reilly and the Google Imprint, and you can pre-order, but until then it is available online for FREE.
API Rocks HTML5 - A nifty online presentation and code examples for HTML5 that bring more of the functionality face-to-face with you, rather than just the written word. The interactive presentation makes it super simply to understand HTML5, CSS3 and JS and how they interact, with plenty of take homes for use on your own site.
Bread & Circuits – Dave Humphrey of processing.js fame and MUCH more has been dabbling in HTML5 and Audio stuff. It’s an interesting insight into some of the possibilities. His distinct style and view make for interesting reading above and beyond the simple realm of pure HTML5.
The WHATWG blog – The blog for the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (Sorry for the mouthful) contains a plethora of really interesting articles on HTML5. With the archives stretching back to 2006 they have a lot of posts on topics ranging from the Browser API to Conformance Checking and onto Tutorials.
HTML5 Tutorials – Talking of tutorials, this web site which is dedicated to HTML5 and the art of the tutorial has a wide range of excellent posts and illustrated articles bringing you up to speed on the topic. They highlight examples, on using the new API such a local file storage, and provide good links to live sites that are already using HTML5 out in the wild.
Preview of HTML5 – A list Apart always does GREAT tutorials and articles, and this HTML5 preview is NO exception. Definitely worth checking out.
HTML5 Demos – Getting to grips with soemthing is 2often about seeing it in action and then dissecting how it works. To this end the HTML5 demos web site is super handy and provides examples of demos from 2 videos playing in sync to interactive canvas gradient and onto drag and drop and so on.
Can I Use - Last but not least is the Can I Use web site which outlines “Compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other upcoming web technologies.” Definitely a useful tool when it comes to compatibility and cross-browser happiness charts.

No doubt more will be added in due course, here, or in supplementary posts, but it s a good start for now I think. And if you have any good suggestions, feel free to shout them out in the comments. Thanks in advance!

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What Matters More? Speed or Perfection?

May 26th, 2010 · Development

In my various travels online today I came across an interesting post Taking Stock on the Museum in a Day web site, the blog used to keep track of a project to start and finish a museum based site in a day using cheap and cost-effective means to design, code and implement.

Of most note was a comment made about half way through the post itself:

“… although no museum is every likely to (want to!) build a website in a day, there is a tendency for the timescales created by the political nature of museum decision-making to actively damage projects. The raw enthusiasm and energy that is created by doing things rapidly, cheaply and – frankly – without the polish of perfection – is hugely important to any project.”

Having been fired up with a passion for an idea before now, I completely understand where this point is coming from. Capturing that raw unfettered power of enthusiasm and harnessing it for some good is critical to the success of a project and the maintenance of that ‘esprit de coeur’ throughout the lifetime of any project is also key to its success.

Any aspect of a project and the management of it, from planning to execution, needs to be underlined with best practice. As projects become more and more drawn out there is an easy tendency for them to veer away from the initial intent, for changes, scope creep and backtracking to occur, which undermines the will and the drive of those actually putting things in place, the developers.

To maintain a critical mass for any project and for it to succeed you need to apply yourself in a dogged fashion and to persevere. The following high level overview to do so makes sense:

Draw up an outline – What you wish to put in place and how this ultimately benefits your site users.
Break down the workflow – Assign tasks based around the outline and agreed means implementation.
Build, Test and Roll-out – Get on with it and finish it as quickly as possible.

Getting from A-B as quickly as possible makes total sense, on many different levels, but mainly because it avoids deviance from the initial plan. Any incoming requests for changes, unless critical, should be pushed off to a second phase of, yes you guessed it, another round of A-B. Some of the beneficial side effects of this route, include, but are not limited to:

Savings – Both in terms of cost and time, less time spent = less money spent.
Quality – Deviance, changes and more only lead to hacky code that requires re-factoring in the long run, proper planning and execution of said plan tend to avoid this, notwithstanding poor coders.
Feedback – Following up on yesterday’s long post, smaller, iterative, implementation phases allow for feedback earlier in the process so bigger changes don’t have to be made later.
Thought – in waiting for the following phase to start, this gives you time to think about your needs and desires, and to search out evidence and justification for the requests you want to have implemented.

Working with so-called stakeholders, managing their expectations and making sure that they now when and how their input is required in the process and the implications of any requests, and how they fit into the grand scheme of things will help ease the flow of the project. Constant and disruptive input can only harm your project, whilst at the same time, elongated time lines and the opportunities it provides to upset initial implementation plans provides exactly the same issue.

So back to the starting point? What makes sense? Speed or perfection? To my mind speed. This is because speed doesn’t mean reaching an end, and then stopping, with no more opportunity to finesse a product, but to accomplish set goals as quickly as possible and then to move on as quickly as possible the next ‘pre-planned and scoped’ phase so that everything can be outlined and accomplished in an orderly and sensible fashion, without undue and unnecessary pressure.

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Mircea Milcovitch – Nude Shapes & Forms

May 26th, 2010 · Personal

Mircea Milcovitch, a sculptor whose work I admire and have had the privilege of including in my life through my father’s own purchases of his amazing sculptures, and through oft ‘chance encounters’ in Parisian galleries, has had his work published in the second annual round up of nude sculpture, painting, art photography and installation.

Included as part of this little ‘sortie’ and exercise in promotion, my father has published the following text, describing the very nature of Milcovitch’s work:

The sculptures of Milcovitch express a sense of unique breath in modernity and tradition. Organically linked with a creative principle, his sculptures unveil the spirit ensconced in stone. While using sober forms in the creative process, the artist is guided by a basic rule: the conservation of the purest form, polished to the perfection that does justice to this noble stone – the Carrara marble.

He carries on:

From the “hermetic objects” of these primeval form to the anthropomorphic beauty of his “Memoires Antiques”, this work is devoid of any aesthetic vagaries and represents a natural extension of the best and greatest exploits of Modern Art.

I love the organic shapes and forms drawn out in stone from the nude form, sometimes overly apparent and other times lost in a disparate flow of angles. In some ways so geometric, undermining the natural shape and form from which pieces are inspired. It’s this kind of artwork that inspires me to dig in and get on with my own paintings, from the series I have started of Marilyn Monroe and of other works. Anyhow, if you want to see more of his work, head on over to Milcovitch’s website, it comes highly recommended.

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Do You Really Need To Update…?

May 25th, 2010 · Product

Whilst away on vacation I received an email from EasyDNS to say that they had updated their interface. At first sight of this email I winced. Why? Not because I am a stickler for change – though no doubt some might agree – but because most of the time when there is an interface upgrade, there is no real “value added” when it comes to usability.

Any assessment and need to upgrade, update or change something should always be a value added proposition. What’s the point really in making it no easier, or harder, even, for your userbase to go about their daily tasks, right? So it leaves me even more mythed, when I go to login and review the new interface which seems to do nothing more than make the processes more complicated.

This is the second time in the last year that I have been faced with so-called web site upgrades, that leave me feeling nothing more than “rather meh” about the changes. So here are a few points I think are valid in tailoring the end result of a site or service upgrade:

Implicit User Feedback

The massive opportunity in doing an “interface upgrade” is that you have existing usage data, or at least you should, if you are doing any tracking at all. Knowing how people use your site, the process flows and such like, is a massive step in understanding how you can make their lives easier, reducing what might take 3 or 4 steps, and compressing them into one.

Usage stats, implicit in nature, are like a recommendation engine for any good UI developer. Briefing and informing them of the next best step. The primary question I would ask myself in the course of “upgrade” planning would be to understand what it is that users are doing, and what tools can be used to improve their processes, and no, AJAX requests and Web 2.0, are not one of them.

The real advantage of such stats at least means you are not making a complete stab in the dark when developing new functionality and layouts. If you ever make assumptions about use cases, when you have clear data, you are only doing your company a disservice.

Explicit User Feedback

Anyone will likely tell you that any web site or service should be defined by the users. The point about a wealth of usage stats underlines this very fact, but as clichéd as it is, so many sites and services online are designed and implemented without any regard for anything other than stakeholder’s intent (i.e. the business owners).

Obviously the larger your userbase the more fertile the ground to harvest from in terms of usage stats, but in the absence of this, the next best opportunity comes from directly questioning them. In the early stages this means identifying those who will provide useful and coherent feedback and tapping into that, from which you can take their concerns and issues and elucidate them in terms of new features (or NOT as the case may be).

Once you have implement this round of features, the next round of testing and feedback should involve more open beta testing, not launch or soft-launch as some developers deem fit to do. This process should bring about a final round of changes prior to a soft launch and/or further testing. Working with your userbase the entire way through the process is a definite key to success, as I have mentioned many times before, not least as a means to circumvent negativity that can come out of sudden and unexpected changes for users.

On-going Feedback

It seems obvious, but there is money to be made in listening to your users. Giving them the service they desire and need develops loyalty and new business. Providing support is one tool and avenue for on-going feedback, but more direct channels and requests for feedback are another means to solicit for free advise that can help improve your online offering. You might think you know your customers inside out, but they truly do know best, even if the feedback isn’t coherent or well collated, that’s is your job, and it is to your benefit to listen.

Above and beyond this explicit feedback over a long period of time, it is worth using A-B testing and tracking to ensure that your changes are creating the desired results and are not in fact impeding users int he course of their business on your site. This type of approach brings the view of updates full circle and provide a shining light on what can often seem like impossible to see dynamics in site use.

Making It Easier & Avoiding Pointless Changes

If your site or service has to use jargon, you are already heading down the wrong path. Nothing says more to me that a group of developers has hijacked a good ship than if you see a pointless footer tag, proclaiming “Generated in 0.215 second(s).” I am glad they got that one cleared up fast hahaha.

Product development and process management should be the driving forces behind changes, and these fact are underlined again and again in the points I have made. Not sure I can make ‘said things’ any clearer, and if it isn’t an improvement it shouldn’t be introduced. Even more so when resources and time are at a premium.

That being said, and to round things off nicely, if your are going to do nothing more than change the design and layout without improving form and function then you might as well not waste your money at all on any ‘upgrade’ to your site. Identifying hurdles and removing them is key to your success, and this should be at the forefront of your guiding light.

Don’t forget, that providing tools that allow your users accomplish their tasks at lightning speed and seeing them use it, not least register their appreciation of that fact, is very fulfilling, and it ultimately makes the job you do a lot more fulfilling.

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