inter:digital strategies

Recently, I joined the forums at Cre8asite, where I’ve been posting fairly regularly. One of the great things about this forum is that it is extremely active in advocating web standards, quality search engine marketing methods, and best practice guidelines for web businesses. There are some fantastic people involved with this forum - and I’m not going to name any names because there are simply too many great people to get started. You can read the forum and find these people at any time.

At any rate, one of the concerns I latched onto early in my web design career was web standards. The early days of the web were a zoo of design rules using custom tags from Netscape or Internet Explorer - and frequently a page could only be viewed using one or the other. Today, the World Wide Web Consortium has established a solid baseline for HTML standards. Are there still non-compliant tags? Yes. Are there non-compliant browsers? Yes. Do you want your site to be filled with these? No.

I’ve found myself making frequent posts at Cre8asite helping people understand the reasons that it makes good business sense to follow web standards. I’ve been referring people regularly to a great article at Adaptive Path which talks explicitly about the business advantages of web standards. As a result, I’ve been giving this further and more in-depth thought myself.

• Faster Development Times

  Got a display issue you just can’t resolve? Validate your code and you can find any errors you’ve made very quickly. If you’ve still got problems, then you may have found a bug - and there are great resources online for most problems you’ll come across.

• Bigger Audiences

  If you’ve got one of those sites which is usable only in IE, you’ve got a problem. You’ve wiped out at least 10% of your potential market. Similarly, if you’ve got a site which isn’t using standards, you may have wiped out several other classes of users - those with alternate devices, such as screen readers, handheld devices, or perhaps some device which hasn’t even been invented yet. Standards checking will ensure that your site at least meets the most basic accessibility guidelines - and can do much more, if you use it right.

• Reduce Costs

  A standards-based site is almost always smaller and leaner than a non-standard site. Eliminating all those pesky FONT tags, spacer gifs and tables can make a big jump in size. If you’ve got a popular site, where you pay excess bandwidth costs on a routine basis this change can be HUGE. If you receive 1000 visitors a day and you shave 10K off your website you’ve saved approximately 300 MB a month. That’s not a huge savings - but the page savings can be quite a bit higher.

• Faster Site

  It’s estimate that the average user will not wait more than 8 seconds for an unknown website to load. On a 56K modem, this is a website with a total page size of about 40k. If you’ve loaded up that 100k version of your company logo without compressing it, then you’re already looking at 20 seconds before your potential customer will even see that logo. Although standards based code won’t save the kind of bandwidth that total speed optimization can, it certainly could save 20 or 30K on a page, shaving several seconds from your download time.

A good search engine optimization program is based around bringing your site a higher conversion rate, not just more traffic or higher rankings. If your site is optimized to give better access to your services or information, you’ve got a better chance of winning that new customer - using valid code is simply one element towards a better business online.

Some days I feel like there are topics which almost seem obligatory in the tech blogging community.

Today, for example, is the day of posts about Google and the Department of Justice. That’s one thing I like about John Scott’s Internet Marketing Blog - he rarely talks about the things everybody else is talking about.

Makes me feel kind of hypocritical to move forward and talk about his blog, now, but one of today’s posts got me thinking. The post is on internationalized domain names. There is a proposition outstanding (being incorporated, actually) to incorporate non-Latin characters and letters with diacritics into the domain name specification. John talks extensively about the negative side to this - but I’m going to try and address the positive aspects.

The most obvious advantage to internationalized domain names is the increase in availability of non-Latin names. Many languages utilize characters which cannot be represented in domains now - and have to make use of alternate characters or spellings to approximate their names.

Most people will predominantly use websites in their native languages. They will have keyboards which are configured for that language, making it easy to type the needed characters. Users of websites which are not in their native language are already accustomed to needing special characters in their repertoire. Personally, I have a little note next to my desk with the unicode representations for ö, ü, and other commonly needed characters auf Deutsch.

I doubt that internationalized domain names will ever be of particular use for major international sites, who tend to protect their brand in every way possible, but they may well see extensive use in eastern European and Asian countries for small, local businesses and personal sites.

John comments:

In an extensive poll I conducted, only one person preferred IDN to romanized domains. The other two people who responded preferred romanized.

I’m well aware that John’s "extensive" adjective is tongue-in-cheek. Regardless, I’m moderatley confident that none of his interviewees were native speakers of a language using primarily Romanized characters. Had he interviewed a native Romanian, Lithuanian, or perhaps Japanese speaker the proportion may have come out differently.

Most websites are maintained for marketing purposes, as John says - however, many websites are only intended to serve a market which is essentially local. Restaurants, local stores and personal homepages are commonly targeted at non-global markets. These entities could make perfectly reasonable use of internationalized domains and provide their customers with easier access to their websites.

I was thinking a lot about Google’s rapid rate of acquisition recently. I was planning on giving a serious look at the acquisitions Google has made over the last 5 years or so…

Fortunately, I don’t have to. One of the first things I read today was a recent post from William Slawski - Another Google Purchase. The first line of the post gave a link to his own list of Google’s acquisitions. It’s always nice to run across these things before doing a lot of unnecessary research!

Looking at the scope of purchases, there’s a fairly even mixture of new projects and additions to existing projects. They’ve purchased a couple of statistics companies - Urchin and Measure Map. They picked up Keyhole, which has been plugged in to Google Earth, and have now purchased a company with 3d design software - @Last Software. These projects seem to tie together, since @Last does have a plugin for Google Earth already.

The latest purchase, Writely, does seem a significant step in a new direction. With the
constant rumors of a Google web-based operating system and the recent
GDrive rumors, one has to wonder where Google is heading. There is a clear trend towards web services which can provide a tremendous degree of functionality - but I feel it’s more accurate to say that they’re working towards a "universal office" - accessible anywhere, using any operating system, with any device.

To me, an operating system is exactly what Google doesn’t want to get involved with - it would open a whole new area for them, branching into hardware compatibility and driver issues. Why should they take responsibility for your hardware? Instead, they’ll provide online services which anybody can use, as long as they have a computer which works. How it works is somebody else’s problem.