Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

What makes a website inherently “findable” these days? Is it information architecture, web design principles, an understanding of search engines, usable interfaces, or a combination of all of these?

It’s a combination. Findability requires a holistic perspective that balances engineering, marketing, and design. I often invite web managers to ask the following three questions. Can people find your site? Can people find their way around your site? And, can people find your content and services despite your site? Success in all three areas is important and can’t be achieved without paying attention to the ways that code, content and structure work together to influence usability and findability.

Either using the items listed above, or adding your own, what is the most important aspect to think of when designing a website to ensure it is easy to use and understand?

Empathy for the user is the key to good design. Only by understanding user behavior and psychology within a particular context of use can we create products, services, and experiences that help users achieve goals, complete tasks, and find what they need. That’s why user research methods such as design ethnography and usability testing are so important. Of course, we must also know enough about the technology to see what’s possible. Often, it’s not enough to optimize for ease and efficiency. We must also strive for desirability and aim for innovation.

Do you feel like Flash, AJAX, and other highly visual, but non-text based interfaces, are making the web more or less usable or findable?

It depends. Great teams employ visual interfaces and rich interaction to create engaging user experiences without sacrificing usability and findability. Unfortunately, most teams aren’t great and quickly get in over their heads.

Are there any companies who you think really exemplify “findability” in the way they create online or offline experiences?

Other than Google, which is too obvious to mention, there’s no single company that comes to mind. What’s exciting right now is the proliferation of ideas and inventions across platforms and media. On the iPhone, for instance, there are some great niche applications like SitOrSquat (for finding public toilets when you’ve gotta go) and Nearest Tube (for finding the London Underground when you’re aboveground). Location-based services and augmented reality are particularly intriguing at the moment.

Where do you see search engines and other meta data engines in the next five years?

A key point we make in our new book, Search Patterns (available from O’Reilly Media in January 2010), is the need to think outside the box. We must continue to make incremental improvements (e.g., better interfaces and algorithms) while simultaneously pursuing radical innovation. This requires thinking more expansively about goals and strategy. Twitter and the Wikipedia were not conceived as search solutions, but as knowledge management innovations they have both transformed the search landscape. Often, the biggest changes emerge not from the center but from outside the category entirely. We all need to work on our peripheral vision.

If there’s one thing you hope people walk away with after listening to your keynote address at SES Chicago, what do you hope it will be?

I hope folks leave with a sense of urgency and enthusiasm. My goal is to inspire people to make search better.

Disclosure: I have not been financially compensated for this post, although I have received a free press pass to cover SES Chicago.

I just found out today that a project I worked on about a year and a half ago was selected as an example of “B2B excellence” for the way it was developed. You can see the full post here or see the live site here. Go Me!

In case you haven’t heard of it, Crowd Sourcing is the idea that you take a project or problem and distribute it amongst “the crowd”. The crowd then becomes a partner to help solve your problem or complete your project. In many cases, using the crowd is beneficial as they don’t have as much overhead as internal employees (job security, suggesting ideas which are too risky, wanting to save face, etc.), but they may not fully understand the business problem or issues at hand, so you might not always get exactly what you want, or expect.

In the creative community, crowd sourcing is often celebrated and chastised in the same breath. On one hand, it opens up a realm of new possibilities that would have been otherwise kept within the walled gardens of agencies or large and small businesses. It also allows for agencies and businesses to tap into a much larger community above and beyond their in-house creatives. Inherent in this is the fact that there are no guarantees for the work you receive.

On the other hand, at least until the marketplace learns the value of what they’re getting, it drives down the cost of creative a bit. This is mostly due to buyers being cautious of the new marketplace and evaluating risk versus reward.

In my opinion, the net-net is a positive impact on the creative scene as a whole. As such, I’ve decided to showcase some of the creative marketplaces available and I’ll leave it to you to make the decision as to whether they provide a fair value for the work being done on a case by case basis.

Threadless (Medium of choice: T-shirts)
If you live in Chicago, you know about Threadless. Although personally I think the best shirts I have from them are printed on American Apparel tees and not their house brand, I’d still recommend that creatives looking to expand into t-shirt designs definitely submit them to Threadless. They have a rabid fan base and provide tons of valuable feedback on each design.

CrowdSpring (Medium of choice: Logos, stationary, websites, and more)
CrowdSpring is meant as a creative hub for all digital media creation. If you need a business card, CrowdSpring can do it. If you need a logo, CrowdSpring. If you need a website designed (just the layout), CrowdSpring. They have tons of projects that are constantly being created and plenty of opportunities for testing new creative ideas.

Denook (Medium of choice: Logos, stationary, websites, and more)
Although similar in function to Crowd Spring, Denook doesn’t have the coolest community manager around.

Genius Rocket (Medium of choice: Videos)
Genius Rocket is a crowd sourced community around video creation; ads specifically. A client creates a creative brief, a prize is assigned, and voila, the creative community gets to work. Churning out ads as fast as they can be reviewed. If you’re trying to get your foot in the door doing video work, why not try your hand at creating videos with a real purpose and win some cash in the meantime?

PopTent (Medium of choice: Videos)
PopTent is much the same as genius rocket, but they have a slightly different videographer audience. Whereas genius rocket is open to anyone to submit a video, PopTent only allows for select video creators to compete for the projects created. Contact PopTent to see if you can be added to their list of select vendors.

YouTube Contests (Medium of choice: Videos)
And last, but not least, we have YouTube contests. Again, what better way to get your feet wet than to say “I won the Home Depot green video contest“.

Did I forget any other sites? Am I completely missing some aspect of this controversial creative medium? Let me know in the comments.

If you need to build a website and you’re in a hurry, there are lots of tools that can help you get going quickly. Let’s go through the 5 D development process and I’ll point out tools to help at each stage.

1. Discovery
2. Design
3. Develop
4. Deploy
5. Deliver

1. Discovery
The discovery stage is where you are looking to learn about the target audience and how they’ll be using the site. You need to learn about your audience quickly and efficiently. You need an online survey tool. I’d recommend SurveyMonkey. It’s quick, easy to setup, and cheap. The basic account is FREE. If you need to do surveys over a longer period (a month) or need to survey lots of people, you can upgrade for $20/month. Really nice! If you want to get down to just the facts, try 4Q (4 Questions) by Avinash Kaushik. It only allows you to ask and have answered, 4 questions. That’s it. So you get to the heart of the matter quickly and completly for free.

2. Design
Need a sweet design, but don’t have a huge budget or the time to go look for a bunch of designers? Try crowdsourcing. Specifically a site called CrowdSpring can give you a hand with this. You submit a project with a creative brief, designers submit their ideas, and everyone gets to vote on what they like, both you and the creative community of CrowdSpring. If you don’t get 25 artist submissions, you don’t pay. So the risk is fairly low. Plus the creative designs coming out of CrowdSpring are very hip and vibrant, so don’t worry about something you can’t use. Once you have a design, run it past your users before you start developing. You can use Five Second Test for this. Five Second Test allows for you to show an image to a user for five seconds. The user then submits the five items they recall along with their name. It’s a great way to see if your website objectives are coming across in the first five seconds of a user visit.

3. Develop
Don’t have a lot of time to build your website? Use a content management system. I’ve written on this before here and here. It provides for an out of the box framework that allows you to get a site up and running with little knowledge of HTML. If you have an extensive knowledge of HTML, there are numerous options that you can use such as CushyCMS, Wordpress, DotNetNuke, all the way up to enterprise solutions such as Sharepoint and Microsoft Content Management Server.  However, unless you have these enterprise infrastructures in place, this is neither quick nor cheap. Here’s a list of 50 other content management systems to get your website off the ground quickly.

4. Deploy
The best way to get your site off the ground quickly is via social media and search engines. Depending on the market segment and audiences you are targeting, social media may be a perfect way to reach them. To check, you should hop on Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, Facebook, etc. etc. etc. and see if your audiences are there already. Quickly doing a search on Twitter, you’ll be able to find:

• Blogging Moms
• Industrial Suppliers
• HR Consultants
• CEO’s

And obviously, the 16 year old high school girls often associated with many social media outlets.

In terms of search engines, using tools such as Google’s webmaster tools and Google Analytics give Google a better idea of what content you want indexed and how. Granted, you are not going to be #1 in Google overnight, but this will get you on your way and provide you with insights into what users are doing on your site and what Google does or does not understand about your site. With that information, you can optimize accordingly over time.

5. Deliver
Delivery of files can sometimes be a hassle, and who needs a hassle when you’re in a hurry? Once you’ve got your final site developed and need to send it to the client, a friend, etc. you can use various websites to deliver any file format you want. For general file delivery there’s:

• Drop.io
• YouSendIt
• TransferBigFiles
• A whole host of other options

For specific file types, why not try Flickr or Vimeo. With Flickr you can upload your photos and short videos and send them along. Your recipient can then view the photos online and download them if they want. Best of all, Flickr is free for basic accounts (I think it’s up to 100 Megs a month in uploads). Vimeo is entirely free and allows you to upload extremely high quality videos, which you can then send along. Again, the recipient can view the entire video online and download the source files, if you so choose.

Many of these tools can be used across stages, so please don’t think that because you are in design you can only use Five Second Test. By all means, feel free to use any of these tools at any point along the development cycle. I just pointed out their most typical uses.

Hope that helps. Did I forget anything along the way? Know of other tools that would be beneficial to any of these steps? Post them in the comments.

image courtesy of Chrys Omori.

I’ve been seeing a number of these being released recently and as I am constantly trying to make my life easier, as well as my clients, I thought I’d put together a few of these for others to use as they see fit. I’m going to give CushyCMS a shot with a small client of mine and I’ll post some feedback after I’ve implemented that. The others I’ve yet to try Sitemasher, but the rest of them I have either some direct experience or anecdotal.

CushyCMS
I heard about CushyCMS a long time ago via TechCrunch. This is a really easy to implement CMS in that you just have to provide FTP access and add some CSS information into your website and CushyCMS provides a front end for you to manage your website. It also allows for the creation of roles so that you can give a login to your client and they can only change the appropriate areas of the website – not the backend code. Like I said, I’m going to try this out pretty soon and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Sitemasher
Sitemasher is way more robust than CushyCMS in that it provides a more in terms of user interface, version control, database integration, and search analytics. It’s not as free as Cushy either. It’s $99/month on the cheap end, but if you are in the market for a piece of software that provides some online functionality where you can manage your content from anywhere, as well as all the functionality I listed above, check this one out.

Wordpress.com
A lot of people know they can use Wordpress as a blogging platform, but really it’s just as easily transformed into a content management system. There’s already a number of people that are doing this. If you’re not that technically savvy, I’d suggest sticking with Wordpress.com as they update the software whenever a new release occurs. if you’re a little more tech savvy or want to keep things under your own control, you can go to Wordpress.org and download the latest version. Keep in mind though that this means you have to manage the database, software installation, and future upgrades yourself, but really it’s not THAT daunting – I promise.

There’s tons of other CMS platforms out there: Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke, Sava (if you’re into Coldfusion) and so many more. What I’d recommend when selecting one is decide what your technical expertise level is and how much time you have to devote to learning a new piece of software. If you need something quick and easy and don’t have a lot of technical expertise, choose one of the online versions I mentioned above. If you do have some time to learn new software and how to integrate them with database backends, choose one of the CMS’s I mentioned at the end of this article, or talk with your friends or colleagues and see what experiences they’ve had with any of these and what they like and dislike about each.

Shoot me an email if you have any other questions, or drop a comment below and I’ll get back to you.

I’ve read a few articles recently about “optimizing your website for mobile SEO”. I know it’s the big focus of many conferences in 2008, but frankly, I think this is kind of a waste of time. Mobile SEO – SEO – it will all be the same very soon. As more and more mobile devices become more of an internet gateway than just a mobile device, search engines are going to have to catch up. People will no longer think “I’m on a mobile device, I want mobile results”. They will move to think more along the lines of, I know I get these results on my laptop, so I would expect a similar result set on my mobile device. Just because I’m on a mobile device should not change the results.

PPC/SEM
I think for the short term, at least until search engines combine results, running mobile search campaigns is still worthwhile. However, for the longer term, PPC/SEM will follow suit soon after people begin to expect more from their mobile results.

Design
I do however think designing and thinking about mobile is still a key issue when designing for mobile devices and something that should be kept in mind. Just because you are designing for the web, doesn’t mean that users will not access the site using a mobile device. There are a number of websites which can address the minor technical issues associated with developing a mobile stylesheet. Here are just a few:

• Mobile CSS First Steps
• Mobile CSS is a reality
• Make your site mobile friendly

Now as for local search optimization, I think this is one of the key segments where search optimization can make a big difference, but that’s for a later post. What do you think? Is mobile seo worth your time, or just another piece of hype to keep many SEO’ers busy for 2008/09?

Man, I’ve been dreading this for a while, but it’s finally done. It only took me a couple of hours, but that’s mostly my fault. I had to get together some usernames, passwords, backups, and some other stuff, but it’s all done now.

I’ve upgraded from 2.0.4 to 2.5.1 using this absolutely fantastic upgrade guide. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you Alex! It was really easy, although definitely filled with a few “man I hope this works” moments.

I’m digging the new dashboard interface. Really snazzy!

So I was doing some research today for a client project and I found this link below listed in Yahoo’s search index.

Any idea why they would continue to publish this result, even after identifying “Dangerous downloads”? I mean, don’t you want to provide the best customer experience possible to your users?

Does anyone have any insight into why they are doing this?

Just a few links I found from around the ‘net this week:

• Social thing – organize all your social media websites into one lifestream. Signed up for private beta, looking forward to an account so I can explore this a little further.
• Google Trends for Websites – Now you can view Google Trends for websites. Really nice information, but I’m not sure competitors are going to appreciate this. I’ll have to see what I was doing last June – take that Sempo
  
• Google continues it’s uptick in search market share – Not surprising, but Yahoo also increased. I’m assuming this is due to their recent press associated with the Microsoft (non)deal. Microsoft dropped, which is again, not surprising.
• MySpace underwent a redesign – Not sure if it will stop the slide in global traffic, but once these things start in the world of online, users are usually quick to jump ship for “the new hot thing”.

I saw an interesting video from Lifehacker and TechCrunch today about a possible Mozilla/Firefox interface. Overall, it’s a really interesting concept. It’s hard to evaluate as the touchscreen phone market is in its infancy right now and everything these days starts with whomever is first to market. So if most users become familiar with an iPhone interface, they are going to expect that other browsers behave this way. That is until another platform can come along and do it faster, easier, cheaper, or just make the whole experience better for the user. Regardless, I think it’s definitely a viable option for mobile browsing and applaud Aza Raskin for his efforts so far. Full video is below.

Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.