Grow your own website

Portfolio

2011-02-01T21:07:00.009Z

Sites I've designed

Links: the secret of search optimisation

2010-08-10T11:21:00.000+01:00

Search engines use the fact that a human has chosen to link to your page as a way of evaluating its importance. The more people link to your site, the better it will do.

Google analyses almost the whole web. One of the things it looks for is who is linking to what. You score for the number of links to your page. Google calls this page rank (a mark out of 10). Since every page on the web has a page rank, Google can also see the value of pages linking to you. You score better if sites with a high page rank link to you.

You can check the Page Rank of your site by installing the Google Toolbar or by visiting Google PageRank Checker.

You can see who is linking to your site by typing its address into Google preceded by link:

Unfortunately, Google does not respond instantly when people add new links to your site. It make take several months before changes are reflected in your Page Rank.

Getting people to link to your site is a major element determining your position on a search engine results page. Here are my tips for persuading people to link to you:

Make a good website in the first place
Put the right words in the right places
Update frequently
Make what you have to say as interesting as possible
Create a buzz or a focus
Put stuff up that cannot be found anywhere else
Make it detailed and specific
Make it fun
Make it free
Make it controversial
Be campaigning
Put stuff up that other people cannot easily create for themselves

Good SEO = regular updates

2010-08-09T11:08:00.003+01:00

Constantly changing websites tend to do better with search engines. Best of all, reflect what is going on in the outside world right now.

Regular updates make it easier to respond to search events

If you monitor what people are searching for, it tends to come in surges driven by outside events. The day a celeb finds themselves sentenced to two years in jail is also a day that sees a lot of searching on their name.

There is an exponential decay. If you write about something relevant to your audience a week after it has happened you will get a lesser response than if you write about it the same day.

BUT... search engines don't search the internet (shock news) they search a copy of it on their own servers (the cache). The frequency with which they update their cache for each web page depends on how often it changes. If you typically only update your site once a month, then responding to a new external event may be frustrating -- you may have to wait several days before the search engines re-cache your page.

So the more frequently you update, the more often your page is re-cached,. When you react to external events, your new copy with appear in the search engine listings more quickly and you will maximise the number of people viewing that page.

Things to consider for regular updates:

News
Blogs
News or blog digests
Opinion on what is in the news
Flagging new content elsewhere on the web

SEO: right words in the right places

2010-08-08T10:54:00.004+01:00

The place where words appear within your site determines their significance to a search engine. Words on the left are given greater weight than those on the right.

Remember that search is competitive. The heading Tackling climate change in Norway would be okay on a search for climate change because the key words appear towards the left. Except... climate change is competitive -- there are many sites writing about it. So the page will be beaten in the search engine's rankings by a site with the heading Climate change: how Norway is tackling it

In order of importance:

URL (www.searchterm.com does better than www.somethingelse.com/searchterm)
Title bar (at the top of the browser)
Heads (particularly those coded with the <h1>
tag)
Navigation links (search engines use this to work out the context of your site)
The tops and lefts (of the whole page, each paragraph, even the URL)
Words associated with pictures (alt tags and words near picture, such as captions)

Keyword stuffing is a technique where you work out what search terms you want your site to get a good ranking for and then making sure they appear in those important positions. But you must take care, because the search engines are looking for natural language use and may penalise you if you overuse words or phrases.

I think it is better to do it the other way around. Work out the best language to talk to your audience and that should produce a more natural site which also gets a high ranking.

Only then should you look at certain key positions -- the heading, the picture captions and alt tags, the title text -- and check that the most significant words are appearing as close to the left side as you can manage naturally.

How to make your content interesting

2010-08-05T17:13:00.003+01:00

Make your writing scintillating because otherwise your audience will be reading something else. Web content is a buyers market: there is lots of it and most of it is free. So people are choosy. Very, very choosy. Grabbing their interest is vital.

The very same information can appear boring or interesting. It is all about how you present it. Here are some tips:

Make it about people
Make it about people your reader can identify with, or people like your reader
Make it a story with a past and future as well as a present
Make it so your reader benefits from reading it
Make it new
Use hard facts (345m long) rather than soft facts (big)
Pick out the surprising, the quirky, the unusual
Make it visual (yes, use pictures, but also make the writing conjure up pictures in people's heads)
Evoke and emotional response

Fill your website with *hard* facts: it's what
people come looking for on the web

What good websites look like

2010-08-03T16:59:00.002+01:00

Look around. Learn from other people's triumphs and their mistakes. Steal the good ideas; watch out for the bad.

Before you create a website you should ask yourself what the goods one do. This is my list:

You learn a lot quickly
They are easy to use
Offering something you cannot get elsewhere (taking advantage of the technology)
Clear and obvious
Succinct and immediate
Well organised
Visually appealling
About the user (rather than about the site owner)

NME's site is busy to look at but clever use of language and good
organisation of the information makes it suprisingly easy to use. NME

This site from Shell looks lovely but is confusing and jargon-laiden
Shell Global Solutions

Indicators of a bad site include:

Cluttered
Confusing
Long-winded
Full of jargon
Using lots of proper nouns

Should every website be a blog?

2010-08-01T11:12:00.001+01:00

They started as a hobby for geeks. Then everyone had a satellite blog to help SEO. Now blogs are the core of many sites. So should every site be a blog?

Well no. But many more could be. And obviously it depends on your definition of a blog.

The blog format makes life easier.
At its simplest a blog has a diary format with the most recent post appearing at the top. This is at the heart of their success because the data model is one of the hardest things to get right about a website so why not keep it simple. And most-recent-first works well for any site that deals in information.

Amazing tools
The real driver has been the range of tools developed for blogs, notably WordPress and Blogger. The large number of users for these systems makes it worth people's while developing gadgets and templates. This means that an idea that might take a large company IT department six months to develop can often be matched by a blogger in two or three clicks of their mouse.

Looks like a business site; runs like a blog

People friendly
Currently blogs are easier to use than even the best of other content management systems. They have been developed with ordinary people in mind and guess what ... we are all ordinary people.

Blogs can spread their wings
The diary format makes it easy to get started with a blog, but it is possible to develop from there to create almost any type of site. Take a look at Les-Fous.com Its structure seems similar to many other small business sites but in fact it runs on Blogger. The owners haven't had to compromise on how their site looks, but it is easy for them to update themselves.

A blog in wolf's clothing
The big secret of blogs is how easy they make it to change or modify your template. This means that a blog doesn't have to look like a blog. You can buy a template or have a custom one designed. The template designer in Blogger is brilliant for creating templates quickly. And you don't need to know CSS.

Context is king

2010-07-25T18:59:00.001+01:00

This page tells web writers to explain to their readers the benefit of reading on. By including context, writers can do their jobs better and so become extremely rich.

I used to tell people that web design was more like setting up a museum than publishing a magazine. Clear simple navigation was vital so that you could find your way around the exhibits.

Today, it's different. A website is still a bit like a museum but one where, rather than coming through the front door, people arrive and depart at random points via particle-matter transporter. Search has changed the way we communicate for ever. Web developers have to contend with people beaming in and out of their content at a whim.

The matter-transport-museum analogy is a strange way of looking at things but it sort of works. Your audience arrives dazed and confused, their molecules having reassembled only nanoseconds before and they look around blinking, trying to figure out where in the world they are. They may have arrived in a back bedroom in Cincinnati where a Jim Pigeon wants to show them his collection of late twentieth century spoons. They may have arrived at the plush offices of an intergallactic technology consortium which wants to dazzle them with binary gadgets. They may have arrived literally at a museum (well virtually literally).

This means two things:

Every bejewelled trinket box we put on display must speak for itself. We can no longer assume people are following the audio tour. Almost no-one is any more. Most visit for that one arcane exhibit and then leave immediately.
If our visitor arrives and is baffled about where they are in the universe, they don't spend long trying to work it out. Why would they? The matter-transporter can take them to infinitely more places at the click of a button than they will ever have time to visit. The world of Google is too exciting to pause long in a dull backwater.

It is not obvious who some websites are intended for or
how anyone would benefit from visiting.
Try the FSA for example.

It also means that good websites are no longer designed from the top down -- they are grown from the ground up. Each page one creates has to answer the following questions:

Who do I want to be reading this?
If they read it, what do they get out of it? How do they benefit? Why should they bother?
What am I trying to achieve? What do I want my reader to do differently as a result of the thing I have created?
How can I let my reader know quickly that this is for them and that they will find it valuable? By quickly, I mean the time it takes their molecules to reassemble (15 nanoseconds maybe).

I have been asked to review a number of websites for people recently. Easily the commonest problem is lack of context. As a visitor, the creators expect me to put in too much effort working out what they are about. Individual pages don't explain themselves and so the effect is that the whole site becomes a confusing place to be.

BBC news redesign: 5 cool things

2010-07-19T18:56:00.003+01:00

The BBC news web site is the ultimate in grow your own. Last week saw its fourth redesign, reflecting the way people use the content.

1. Mostly, we don't find our way around using sections. We use search. We use most popular. We use links from one story to another. The sections still help us understand what the site is about and what we might find there but they do not need to be so prominent. Moving the sections to the top gives more space to do other things too.

2. The new design uses a clever magazine grid system. This keeps the content consistent but allows editors to make the most of each story. The strip of white space in the middle is a classy piece of design. It allows for pull-quotes or links without disrupting the flow of the main piece. If a story has a great pic, it can be size to fit almost the whole screen.

A clever grid system keeps the site consistent while

allowing editors to make the most of each story

3. Top stories and most popular are easier to find because these are how people are actually finding their way around the BBC site. Related stories have been demoted in the new scheme but that's fine. By the time people care about the context of a story they are already committed to reading in detail and will spend the few extra seconds it takes to find the related links.

How the BBC news site used to look

4. Headlines for humans and machines. The BBC used to limit itself to 32 characters for headlines which works well if you are reading them in a news feed or in the most popular list. But they can be a little terse. As part of the redesign, the BBC has a new production system which allows them to have different heads on the story and in feeds. Vince Cable: Banks continue to rip customers off for the story, Cable: banks are ripping us off for the feeds.

5. Look how much is the same. It is very important not to confuse readers in a redesign. So the BBC has kept the colour scheme, the main site header graphic, the section names (more or less), the bold intros, the cross-heads at the bottom of the first screen. I could go on. These bits all work great. Why change them?

Links

Growing a website from seed

2010-07-15T17:40:00.002+01:00

Growing anything from seed is daunting. It takes care, attention, a little love. Sometimes your are caught talking to things that cannot talk back.

Growing a website seems particularly crazy but it is how the best websites are made.

People don't come to your website for the graphic design or the navigation, you see. They don't come because of the data architecture you've selected.

They come for the content.

And yet, in how many sites does the content seem like an afterthought? Time and money is spent on IT and on design and only then, if there is any budget left, we fill some of the holes where the text should be.

It shouldn't be this way. Hadn't you heard. Content is king. This is what the grow a website from seed project is all about. Start with the content. If it is good enough, maybe the site will grow on its own.

Once we have some good content, maybe (just maybe) we will understand what our website is about and a better design will present itself.

Because don't you think people prefer a kitchen garden full of wild flowers to a carefully managed arboretum of plastic plants?

Join the grow your own website movement today and plant a seed to see your content grow:

Good places to get your grow-your-own kit: