Pixel Thread

The importance of images in product description pages has been well documented.

A high quality pic can turn a browser into a customer. As broadband’s become the norm in the western world, online shops have been getting more adventurous with their use of images.

Combined some well written code, product pages are now giving the user the facility to closely inspect an item before buying. Great from the customer and the shop perspective.

Magneto product page has a nice image zoomer and Habitat’s product page has a very tidy mouseover inspection. Probably soon to become the norm across the web. In contrast, the mouseover action on the category home pages of Habitat leave me reeling! (Fail harder?)

The bigger online stores are lagging a bit behind in this respect. The ebay interface is still pretty clunky, Amazon’s product page is hugely cluttered.

I’ve been watching the development of Magento over the past year or so, and so far it ticks all the right boxes.
But the feature that clinches the deal for me is the one page checkout: instead of taking the user through a sequence of pages until they finally reach order confirmation, Magento does it all in one place, through the use of expandable / collapsible page sections. Neat.

Magento

This little orange rectangle with the curved radio wave lines has become ubiquitous on the web. A quick google doesn’t reveal much other than the fact that it was used by Mozilla and adopted by Microsoft in 2005 .

The symbol has made the transition from design concept to becoming part of the web’s lexicon - quite a big move. It’s used in the address bar in Firefox, on the tool bar in IE7 (slightly adapted) and all over the web beside links to RSS feeds.

I’d be interested to know who originally designed it, and what the design process was - were there earlier contenders that got ruled out?

The SEO Playbook, is a long blog post by a guy who goes by the name of Stuntdubl. It’s a useful overview of where SEO is today, breaking down the many different aspects that exist to the practice.

SEO is the thought process of lateral thinking and understanding of website creation and marketing combined.

A lot of companies see SEO as something for the techies to deal with, but it’s about much more than just the code.

If you want to get your head around some of the jargon and some of the tactics that surround Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), check out the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO. It’s a great resource for anyone new to SEO, as well as old hands who might need a quick refresher on some of the basics.

The amount of care and attention author Rand Fishkin puts into the guide is inspiring. He’s great at sharing knowledge and experience and comes across as very altruistic. creating a lot of goodwill for his company, SEOmoz.

It’s a perfect example of good content driving traffic and links (like this post).

L-Mail is a new service that lets anyone send a real letter by email. You send an email to a pre-defined email address, L-Mail prints the letter out and sends it to the supplied physical address.

So just when the World has converted to email, and even your granny has a gmail account, who needs to send printed letters? Well it’s probably a few million people…

When you and everyone you know is online it’s easy to assume that the world is connected but according to Internet World Stats , only 17% of The World’s population use the web. So it’s fair to assume a big proportion of those users must be in communication with people who don’t use the web.

I’ve often wished for this kind of service. It’s all too easy to stop communicating regularly with people / family who don’t use email. Often I’d like to be able to type a few lines to older and non-computer user members of my family, but to write a letter, go and buy stamps and find a post box just makes it too much kufuffle!

For me, as a proud Dad, the crucial missing ingredient from L-Mail is the ability to be able to send photos using this service. Apparently it’s in the pipeline, and if it emerges, I may well sign up.

And another company offering this service I’ve just discovered is a site called Postful promising a full colour one-page letter for just $0.99 …

This is a great piece of script that you can use to include an email address in your web page, but stop spambots picking it up.

“Junk email (a.k.a. spam) is a part of everyone’s life if they ever put their email address on the web. For HTML authors, site admins, and for people who want a little credit on the page that they put online, it is a constant problem. You want to include your email address on the page, but you don’t want your email address to be harvested by spambots.

The best thing you can do is encode your email address so that browsers can see it and spambots can not.”

SEO and usability are generally mutually compatible. Often what’s good for usability is good for SEO and what’s good for SEO is good for usability. But when it comes to the creation of written content, SEO and usability don’t get on.

Firstly here are some examples of SEO and usability being friends:

1. Readable URLs

URLs that are logical and readable are great for SEO and for usability. Users can see what they might expect in a page and search engines can see what a page might contain and rank it accordingly. E.G.

Good: bbctraining.com/televisionCourses is pretty clear as to the what the content of the page will be, but…

Bad: bbctraining.com/courseDetails.asp?tID=1179&cat=2781 is much less obvious.

Search engines have had problems with query strings (starts with a ‘?’ and uses ‘&’ to separate values) in URLs for a long time.

Query strings imply that the page is dynamically generated, i.e. it’s created from a database when a user visits the page. Dynamic pages are also considered to be less search engine friendly - it’s easier to generate lots of SEO spam dynamically.

The value of the relevant words in the URL will also be diluted because the URL is much longer, so there is less importance attributed to them.

Query strings in URLs are also not very user friendly - they don’t tell you what the URL is about.

2. Semantic Mark-Up

Semantic is code that can be understood by humans as well as machines. It’s great for SEO and for usability.

The code behind RSS feeds is generally semantic, the tag describes the content, eg Bang Your Drum.

More on writing semantic mark up here

3. Valid Code

Code that validates with the W3C Markup Validation Service, makes search engines happy and means that your code is most likely to work for as many users on as many different platforms as possible.

4. Separation of style from content

The separation of content and style, that’s replaced the ubiquitous HTML tables over the past few years has made the code of web pages infinitely more readable. CSS files control page styles and layouts while content sits in the HTML files.

Great for SEO, search engines can easily read the content of a page, and great for usability - pages are quicker to load and are more accessible on a wider range of devices e.g. mobiles, blackberries etc.

5. Logical Information Architecture

Having a broad subject area at the top of a site, moving down into a narrower topics as the user gets deeper into the site will tell search engines that the site is covering a lot of detail. In terms of usability, it’s also a logical way of structuring a site for users to find information.

A site map - a page with links to all other pages on the site - will help search engines index your site and users find content.

6. Small File Sizes

File sizes should always be under 150K, larger files don’t get fully indexed by search engines, and are slower to load. So small files = good for SEO, good for usability.

But when it comes to written content there are SEO and usability incompatibilities

In written content, SEO encourages:

• keyword repetition on a page, making text read less easily and longer than necessary
• content created for search engines rather than users - there are companies that will supply pages and pages of search engine friendly text on any subject imaginable to boost a site’s search rankings
• creation of extra pages in a site, purely for the benefit of search engines
• inclusion of extra detail, where really extra detail often isn’t needed

All this text is cluttering up the web. People are having to wade through unnecessary content to get to what they really want. The battle to rule the search engine results pages is damaging the web.

Of course it is possible to create content that’s valuable, useful and search friendly, but it’s always cheaper and easier for a company to buy in content that they know will boost their ranking.

Sometimes I feel a bit like a broken record, I’m always telling people I meet who have their own businesses and websites that they should be blogging. When you work online all week, you forget that other people are quite rightly far more focussed on their core business rather than how they could be using the internet to promote themselves.

If you have a business, here are ten reasons why I think you should be blogging:

1. At its most basic, a blog can work as a simple content management system for your site, enabling you to update it without running up fees from your web agency
2. A well-written blog will promote your knowledge and / or the quality of your product
3. Blogs can provide instant communication with your customers via RSS, great for notifying people of events or new products, (but don’t ever let your blog become a sales pitch)
4. Posting on a blog is less intrusive than sending a marketing email to your customer list. People will read it if they want to rather than your message being forced into their inbox
5. Blogs create a regular ongoing dialogue with your customers, reminding them of your existence even if they have no intention of buying your product or hiring your services at that moment
6. You can benefit from feedback from your customers via comments on your posts. Even if it’s negative feedback this is useful, as it tells you where you could be doing things better
7. With its commenting system, a blog is more like a one-to-one communication tool rather than mass communication system. A blog can build a more intimate relationship with your readers than a newsletter or marketing email
8. Having a blog on your site will improve your ranking in the search engine results pages. Search engines give more value to a site that has been recently updated. By including a regularly updated blog your site will be continually refreshed
9. Your site will become visible to blog search engines like technorati.com and blogsearch.google.com attracting new people to your site
10. Writing and posting blog entries is easy, it requires no technical expertise and is as simple as filling in an online form

If you want to read more, have a look at: Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers It’s more about big businesses using blogging, but it’s all very relevant.

An older book that also tackles similar themes is The Clue Train Manifesto. It was published in 2000, but a lot of the ideas it explores are still relevant now. As one review on Amazon says: “This is about as far away from a traditional business book as you can get”.

Next time I’ll post links to some of the companies that I think are doing this well.

Link of the day: wikia.com.

Wikia offers free MediaWiki hosting for your community to build a free content wiki-based website.

There’s a huge amount of content in their music wiki…