What does it mean for your website to quit?

Oh, it’ll still be there (maybe) – hangin’ out on the internet, showing off for the occasional visitor – but not really invested in your company. It will continue to be a part of your company – but instead of helping you increase your business profile, make sales, find qualified leads, or gain readership it will just be a leach on your finances. How does this happen?

1. You only care what it looks like, and don’t bother making certain it can really get the job done. It’s a very stereotypical sexist scenario in which the boss hires a secretary on the basis of her legs (or other body parts), but it sure seems to apply to websites. An incredibly complex Flash animation with doohickeys and gewgaws may be an incredible looking website – but you better have made sure it can also give your visitors what they need.
2. You’re asking it to do things it might not like to do. Sometimes, an employee might be asked to do something unethical. They might quit. If you’re expecting your website to invade people’s privacy by collecting personally identifiable information, or by automatically adding them to mailing lists, etc., you might find that behavior to backfire. Visitors don’t always like your service enough to put up with the hoops you make them jump through: and unless you’ve got something really great, they’ll just stop coming.
3. You’re not providing the right tools for the job. If your employee is working with a sad old Windows 95 machine which just barely stays running when they’re trying to type out meeting minutes, they will probably be a bit dissatisfied with their lot in life. Similarly, if your website doesn’t have the hosting package it needs, the bandwidth it requires, or a secure certificate to keep your customer’s data safe you might be screwing yourself. Don’t host your business site with a free service: remember, you get what you pay for. (Well…usually. Don’t just jump on the most expensive hosting out there, either.)
4. Don’t explain what it’s supposed to do. If your new employee doesn’t get any instructions, they’ll just be doing random things trying to keep busy. Is that what you want from your website? If you’re developing a site, make sure you know what you want from it. Don’t just add new features willy-nilly, and don’t just throw up your brochure because you think you need to have a web presence. Your website won’t really accomplish anything for you if you don’t have any clear intentions behind it.
5. Don’t change things too frequently. If you throw new job instructions at your employees every six months, expecting them to learn a new filing system, a new business process or a new shipping procedure they might well rebel. And although your site isn’t going to literally fight against your changes, it’ll certainly suffer: if you’ve reorganized product categories, you might cause search engines problems in finding your pages. You can protect against this, so it’s not an argument against ever reorganizing. However, those robots take some time to catch up – if you go through a reorganization too frequently, they’ll never arrive where you are. Your visitors might struggle, too. Some people like change and others don’t. Nobody will rebel against one redesign: but everybody will struggle with too many of them. Change can equal improvement: but not every change will.

Don’t be a bad boss – invest in your website just like you would an employee. And if it’s not doing the job – fire it and get a new one.

Hey, I can’t count! I’ve added another one…

• 10. Orange XML/RSS Buttons

  Christian protests the fact that these buttons don’t match any layouts. Regardless of the overarching simplification in this reasoning, there are many reasons to keep to a basic orange RSS button. First is the fact that this is, for better or for worse, the accepted standard for this type of button. From a usability standpoint, this equates to delivering the user what they expect – you don’t want to force them to search for anything on your site – and especially not for an RSS feed which might keep them coming back! From a marketing perspective, there’s a distinct advantage to making this feature stand out. Keep it visible, and people will be interested.

• 9. Neutral Submit Buttons

  I won’t claim that neutral submit buttons are necessarily beautiful – but they are intuitive. Unlike most graphical buttons, they provide changing states on :hover, :active, and action. It is possible to create a button which will provide all these states without using the default settings – but most designers don’t go to this kind of effort. I’d advocate CSS modification or even plain, standard buttons. Again, it’s giving people what they expect.

  In this case, I don’t protest the issue of creating custom buttons. However, the method and practice must be considered very carefully in order to keep the level of usability which exists by default.

• 8. Long Blogrolls

  One blog I read regularly has a very long blogroll. Christian suggests that this many links is a usability problem and continues to suggest displaying only groups of 10 links at a time in your blogroll. Well, I disagree. In my opinion, supplying a small subset of your blogroll links on each visit is a serious usability problem. How am I going to find that one link I remember seeing on Bill’s blog if I have to refresh his page a dozen times to find it? With AJAX or iframes this could be avoided – but what a pointless use of the technology.

  To me, a long blogroll is just fine. It’s not about providing a link to these sites, giving them added value, or advertising for your friends. It’s about giving an indication to your readers about what else you are interested in – they can browse them if they wish, or leave them.

• 7. Tag Clouds

  All right. I don’t like Tag Clouds either. I’m not certain I agree that they’re ugly, nor do I believe that they’re useless – they do provide an interesting visual insight into the topics a blog tends to cover. But then, so do categories lists. My problem with tag clouds is that they provide no useful information for non-visual browsers. They usually provide no link separators and no indications of importance (the main point of their existence) to a non-visual user.

• 6. Social Bookmarking Buttons

  Is he right? I don’t know. Personally, I don’t use them at all. On my sites, I generally use the Socializer, which greatly reduces the clutter – as well as not requiring me to monitor whether my links are current.

• 5. XHTML/CSS Buttons

  Do any of my readers care about the doctype my site uses? In fact, yes. It may not be important in every industry, but if you promote yourself as a standards-based, accessible web developer, it’s actually pretty important. Now, whether I’d use those buttons is a different story – the default W3C buttons are actually pretty ugly. Using plain text indicators or small buttons is much preferable!

• 4. 80×15 Buttons

  Wow, now that’s a sweeping generalization. I tend to think of this type of button as a badge. These are indications of support you give to particular institutions or memberships you hold in them. Perhaps they don’t "match your design", but they may well match your personality. Blogs are about personality. Christian says nobody cares about your support for Wikipedia or Greenpeace. I simply don’t agree – some of your readers care about your opinions are your viewpoint. Some of them care who you support and who you don’t. That may be one of the reasons that some of them read your blog at all.

• 3. Feedreader Buttons

  Okay, I’ll agree here. I think that having a list of Feedreader buttons is a major waste of space. Give me easy access to your RSS feed (or your Feedburner subscription, if that’s what spins your beanie) and I’ll take care of it myself. Now, I may be biased, since the feed reader I use is never on the list.

• 2. Ads, ads, ads

  I’m not entirely clear that Christian is actually condemning advertising on blogs, actually. It sounds more to me like he’s criticing the use of ugly advertising. Well, so be it. It depends on the circumstances, to me – good testing will determine whether an ad, beautiful or not, will create income for you. But, if your blog isn’t really about creating income – then certainly, skip the ugly ads.

• 1. Your Picture

  Well, that’s just not very nice. I disagree. Putting your personality to your blog can be greatly aided with your picture. Later comments on the blog imply that what Christian was actually referring to was using your picture as part of the core design – reproduced throughout every page. That, I agree, is probably overkill.

Now, I’m sure I’ll receive criticism on this post because this site is not the most beautiful creation in the world. Before that starts, I just want to point out that beauty is not my first priority in creating a site – usability and accessibility come first. I’ve written this post with no intention of demeaning Christian’s perspectives – the design purist has a very different perspective than I do, sometimes. However, to me, the most important issue from a blog is personality – it’s all in the writing. The design is purely secondary, and these "top 10" elements are, for the most part, ways of personalizing your blog.

Once again, thanks to Kim for bringing this to the forefront of my thoughts!

Just look at the titles of articles – Programming your Blog or Website, Collect Data on your Blog or Website, or How readable is your blog or website?. All of these articles convey valuable information, but they also all suggest that a blog and a website are separate entities. I’ve always been frustrated with this perspective.

In my mind, blogging is an activity you perform on your website. It is in no way separate; it is simply a different way of maintaining a site. A blog is a website which is (usually) updated fairly regularly, which allows some form of communication with it’s readership, and which is normally organized in a chronological fashion.

If you are operating a blog, you do have some unique considerations to take into account – concerns which a website without a blog doesn’t require. However, the very first consideration you need to contemplate is the fact that your blog should include every critical piece of information included on any other website.

I started thinking along these lines after reading a post by Kim Krause Berg on her usability blog. The title of her post is Blog Usability for the Considerate Blogger. Her advice is great. It does distinguish between blogs and websites, but primarily on points which actually are differences between blogging activity and non-blogging web activities.

So what types of information are COMMON between blogs and non-blogs? What is UNIQUE to a blog?

Common Information Between Blogs and Non-Blogs:

1. Information about your company or your business. Every site needs to inform the visitor about who is behind it. The way you go about it may be different, as blogs commonly have a more personal, intimate approach than a company website. However, the presence of this information is critical.

2. Contact information. You need to enable visitors to communicate with you. The article comments inherent to blogging are not sufficient; since visitors may not wish their business proposals to be made public. Provide an e-mail address or a contact form (both is good), and a physical address if that’s important in your line of business. Provide a phone number as well – talking to somebody can be the best way to firm up a business relationship.

3. Original content. Yeah, this may seem obvious – but believe me, there are enough sites (blogs and non-blogs) which are just scraping content or changing names that it’s not always clear this is important. Regardless of the type of site you run, you need to supply your own unique perspectives and your own thoughts to your pages. Even in a basic product catalog, if you’re using identical product descriptions to every body else in the industry, you’re losing out. Write your own material!

4. Good navigation. Great navigation in a five page brochure site is pretty easy to accomplish. The challenges presented by a three-year-old blog or a large corporate site are much greater – but equally important. Like large corporations have numerous branches, departments, and functions, a blog has a wide variety of topics, types of content, and is spread out over many months of content. Providing access to your valuable information is equally important for both.

What’s unique to a blog?

Is anything really unique to a blog? Perhaps the chronological organization of information; but this is part of how I’ve chosen to define a blog. I’m not sure I believe there is anything completely unique to a blog – instead, I’m looking at features which are, in my opinion, critical to providing unique value to your blog.

1. User contribution. Most websites (wikis excluded) don’t require a great deal of audience participation. This is gradually changing, with the advent of social networking tools, but you could argue that sites such as Digg or MySpace are more web-based applications than they are websites. They don’t serve the same fundamental purpose. Blogs, however, are greatly enriched by the presence of a good commenting system. If you build a good user base, the conversations spawned in comments can be more valuable than the original articles.

2. Personality. A non-blogging website doesn’t necessarily require a unique personality (although it’s helpful). A blog, however, can’t really function without a unique voice and personality behind it. This goes beyond merely informing your audience who you are. It means revealing yourself – a blog is somewhat an exhibitionist activity. Let your readers know something about you. This doesn’t mean talking about why your wife just left you – but your humorous anecdote about your cat could become your most popular article.

I don’t perceive a great difference between blogs and non-blogs. When you come right down to it, a blog is a means to make a personal connection with your site visitors. As such, public communication with those visitors combined with a willingness to expose some piece of your personality to the public are the critical differences between blogging and other website formats.

Thanks to Kim for spawning these thoughts!

I felt the need to respond, but rather than addressing this from an SEO perspective, I thought of it as an accessibility issue, so I’ve posted on this at my Accessible Web Design blog. Since the subject definitely pokes around in the area of search engine optimization, I thought it worth mentioning here, as well.

On the basis of those two points, I was very unimpressed. Recently, Accoona released an interesting new toolbar, as pointed out by Loren Baker. As Loren says, the toolbar, functionally speaking, is fantastic. It’s not perfect; but I was quite impressed with the way it managed to handle numbers.

I tested it with a year incorporated into text, and it successfully expressed that year correctly. It even distinguished between the speaking pattern for a year like 1985 (nineteen-eighty-five) and 2005 (two thousand five). I checked a zip code – also correct. I tried a phone number expressed with dot separators – no problem. It didn’t manage a PO Box number quite right, and had a little trouble with the fraction 1/2 – pronouncing it "one-second". However, fractions which do not deviate from the normal number speaking system were handled more successfully.

On the whole, the voice is pleasant and clear. I would be perfectly willing, if necessary, to listen to a longer text with the tool.

But the marketing strategies that Accoona has demonstrated with this project still leave me frustrated. They have not disclosed everything that I felt necessary in order to install the toolbar – namely, that I would need to install additional software after the toolbar and that I would need to register for a 60 day free trial in order to use the product. It’s a minor issue; but I would have appreciated this information in advance.

For your information, the toolbar costs Euro 21.49 – since that information is also obscured from the Accoona marketing information.

To me, MSN’s Search Macros fall down hard because they completely failed to communicate – I didn’t even bother reviewing the actual search tool, because the user interface was so unintuitive that it seemed a much higher priority to me. This week I’d like to look at a few other well-known products with an eye to user interface issues.

I’m going to start with one of my own pet peeves – Google’s Account interface. (You’ll only get anything out of that link if you have a Google Account.)

Google Account Management

Google lets you use one account to log in to all of their services. They also have an interface which supposedly provides access to your services and to an account summary. But I can only hope they’re working on this, because it simply doesn’t provide anything that I want from an account manager.

The problems are very simple – this user interface gives you the impression that it will provide access to your services. However, under the heading "Edit Services Info", you are only given access to two services – Gmail and Google Alerts. I am subscribed to a number of additional services – Adwords, Adsense, Analytics and Sitemaps, for example. I would love to have a simple link to those interfaces from this panel.

The "New Services" are clearly quite out of date – and I’d like to turn them off, anyhow, since I have no interest in having these things thrown at me.

Quite simply – Google needs an account manager to give users a centralized place to access or edit all of their services. This interface should clearly delineate links to services versus links to edit account information. Instead, Google provides an account manager, but it does not provide any of the access which would make it useful.

Nevertheless, customizable search is becoming de rigueur for the search industry. Customized searching is a great idea, fundamentally. However, I do have some doubts about the universality of the application. Developing a customizable search interface which makes it easy for a search to be refined and saved is not something I’ve seen yet.

MSN has recently announced their fancy new search tool: "Search Macros". This is a fundamentally neat idea with a fundamentally flawed interface.

Search Macros are a feature of Live Search that make results more relevant for a given search topic. This is done by easily using, creating and sharing customized sets of search engine rules.

If these macros were truly easy to share, I’d be thrilled. If they were easy to create, I’d be even more excited. Frankly, if they were easy to USE, I’d be pretty satisfied. But I don’t see that as being the case. Criticism number one: how do I become aware of this service?

I actually learned of this service reading industry news posted at SearchEngineWatch. I’m sure this isn’t how the average user will learn about it – so why don’t I go poking around looking for other options. A great first look? Windows Live. It’s a search option for this engine, so of course this information will be available there, right!

Well, it’s not right there on the front page. OK, I’ll do a search and see if it’s presented as an option to refine my search. No. I don’t see any links here on the page that say anything like "refine search" or "advanced options" – I wonder what this little blue arrow does in the tool bar? Oh! There it is! It opens up a menu giving the option to create or find macros.

Well, the tool is definitely losing on ease to find – and, thinking as a member of the general public, I might be wondering at this point what a "macro" might be. But, fortunately, I’m a firm believer in the "click first, ask questions later" philosophy, so I’m going to go ahead and find a macro, whatever it may be. I’ve now learned about the service! On to complaint number two: how do I use this?

Well, I’m now on a completely separate site. I wonder why I need to deal with a completely different look for this tool? Does it also apply to other services? Well, it’s pretty easy to figure out. All these graphics with gear-like doohickeys must take me to macros. Not much information here – I wonder what "saltbaby.nadasurf" will help me find?

This is the place where you can view and install shared search macros from Live.com.

Complete first page explanation of the Live.com Macro Gallery

Ah! Well, now that I’ve clicked on that, I can see it’ll help me find info about the band Nada Surf. Well, I don’t care about that, I’ll go back. "Research.scholar" is probably more up my alley. This looks good! I don’t really understand that gobbledy gook down at the bottom, but I bet this’ll help me find great web pages…wait – no, no it won’t. This is searching for PDF formats and other local documents. Well, back to the drawing board.

Essentially, although it’s easy to figure out how to find and install these tools – it’s pretty difficult to see whether something is actually useful. What does this term.term labeling notation mean? Why can’t I narrow to search macros which are topical or document type specific? Well, just to test it, I’ll go ahead and install "beta.wikipedia".

The installation procedure is thankfully pretty easy. Not perfect, but pretty easy. You click on the button labeled "+Live.com" and up pops a new window of Live.com. You still have to notice the little yellow banner which says "Click to Install", and if you do, you’ve now got a macro installed. I now close this new Live.com window and return to my search in progress. And thus on to complaint number three: where’s my macro?

Wait a second – where’s my macro? How do I use this? There’s nothing listed in that drop down list with the blue arrow. Whoops! Looks like these Macros are session specific. Maybe if you’re logged in it’ll remember your details, but if not? Tough luck.

OK, enough criticism of the so-called "ease of use" for Microsoft’s search macro. Now I’ll be moving on to the creation process.

Creating a Search Macro on MSN Live Search

If you’re searching on the main page of MSN Live, that little blue arrow drop down also contains an option to "Create a Macro." I’ve had two different behaviors from this feature: the first and second time I clicked on it it gave me the option to log in to Windows Live using my Microsoft Passport Network login. I passed up this opportunity on both occasions – I’m not interested in creating a Passport account for this. Thankfully, Windows Live must have figured this out, because the third time it took me straight to the "Create Macros" interface. (I’ll be fair: this IS beta software, and I shouldn’t be expecting perfection.)

What I’m told about creating a search macro is this:

Create a namespace for your macros:
(This namespace is unique and will be associated with your Macros. Your macros can be used by others, but they will not be able to associate those macros with you..)

Ah. I see. OK. Hmmm… So, what’s a namespace then? Is this visible? If I decide to be funny and call my Macro something dirty, will people see it? What’s this used for? Clearly, this instruction could use a bit more explanation. There’s lots of space on this screen, and I think they could spare the space for an instruction.

The first thing I tried was to create a namespace using my own first name – Joe. I believe that Windows Live didn’t like that – although I didn’t actually get any kind of error message. The text box was cleared, and that was that.
My second try will be something more complex: joemacro. Same story. Huh. Let me do some research.

To create a macro click "Create Macros" in the dropdown menu on the far right side of the scope bar. (You’ll need to be signed in with your Passport. You’ll automatically be asked to sign in if you aren’t already.)

The first time you create a macro you will see the namespace creation screen. You only get one macro namespace and it will be tied to your Passport. Your namespace will be in the name of all macros you create.

Wait – so I do have to be logged in? Why did it let me do this, then? Why doesn’t it warn me? I’m afraid I’m losing interest!

Conclusions

The fundamental flaw with Search Macros is a lack of communication – the site doesn’t make it clear how to use the tool or what is required to use the tool. Windows Live doesn’t consistently track sessions, it doesn’t pass data back and forth, and changes interfaces halfway through the process. Is it a neat idea? Yep. Is it user friendly? Nope. Could it be user-friendly? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see!

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.

In this day and age, the web designers mantra should be about accessibility. In my other blog, I’ve recently posted about design for the deaf, accessibility for the learning disabled, and designing for mobile devices. I considered design for alternate browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox or Opera to be so fundamental that it’s incorporated into my core design philosophy. Yet Microsoft considers that 10% of the marketplace to be so insignificant that they will not even allow them to sign up for the system. In fact, that 10% may not even function with the system! Your ads may never be seen by individuals using alternate browsers.

And to add insult to injury, MSN’s official solution was to advise customer service reps and customers to switch to IE6, posts Danny Sullivan, at Search Engine Watch. It’s well worth noting that, according to Tyson Kirksey, IE7 doesn’t function with adCenter either. So, clearly, if you’ve committed the sin of wanting to test IE7, you’ll need to revert to IE6 to use this Microsoft product.

It’s a well known opinion that the majority of tech professionals are inclined to use alternate browsers. Thus, it should have occurred to Microsoft that their disinclination to support these browsers could have a rapid backlash in the tech community. When so many people in the higher-regions of SEO industry discussion immediately notice these problems, the word that gets out is not good.

I think that my opinions are apparent in this article – but Microsoft probably won’t notice.