April, 2008

While your home page may not be from where most of your traffic comes it’s still important to direct users to the content that they want as efficiently as possible. After all, your web site has a purpose, and regardless of whether that purpose is to propagate information, encourage people to sign up for your newsletter, or to sell widgets, the content on your site can help to focus people’s attention toward solving their goals (and yours).

A great example of focused attention is the home page for SimpleTest, a PHP unit testing framework (tool for web application developers):

It’s easy to tell what you can do with this site by scanning down the large graphics on the left hand side of the page. You can download the code, get started writing tests (although maybe this should have been called “Tutorial” or “Documentation”), get support, or contribute to the project.

The upper right of the site even contains a callout summary about the latest version and what is important about it:

By offering these highlights, you’re giving your visitors options even if your site serves different audiences simultaneously.

Illinois officials, a Chicago alderman, a local school council representative, a radio personality, an Olympic medal winner and top Chicago school officials descended on Chicago neighborhood school, Bateman Elementary School, to demonstrate how to strategically use a website launch in pursuit of a greater mission.

The Chicago Public School Alumni website publicly launched today not only with the support of leading public figures - many of whom are CPS alums, but with prominent print and media coverage from most local media. As my colleague, Kelly, and I joined with other guests at the public roll out and watched a short video highlighting the major benefits of the site, it dawned on me (duh!) that I was in the presence of a major and strategic campaign rollout of a significant initiative by the Chicago Public Schools to build community among over 3 million living alumni. And the website Duo had just built and launched was the catalyst for this initiative. Woo Hoo.

Although Duo’s mantra – or one of them, anyway – is that a website should have a job description, it is still a real treat when we get to develop a tool – a website - that is so core to meeting an organization’s business objectives – especially one with such great public purpose. But the real prize today was to witness how the professionals with the Chicago Public Schools have taken the steps necessary to build an ongoing campaign around the roll out of the site.

Tonight I looked at the website analytics and the tangible impact of this first day of the public rollout. It was very exciting. I am confident that the site is in great hands and on its way toward building community and increasing alumni participation for the benefit of all.

Here at Duo, we’re constantly preaching the virtues of using a Content Management System — you get to control and manage your own content whenever and however you’d like.

I think, though, that we often forget how much fun that can be. The CPSAlumni.org site has just officially launched, and as part of that launch process, they’ve decided to create Festival pages and activities to get people involved.

It’s a pretty nifty idea that merges home-grown marketing with content management and a sense of whimsy — and that’s a Good Thing.

OK, I hate PDF’s on websites. Don’t you just say “Argh!” when you unsuspectingly click a link only to realize that you’ve started to open your Adobe Reader application and download a PDF file the size of Alaska? And you’re working at Starbucks sharing the already-modest bandwidth with 38 other hyper-caffeinated transient workers so the download puts you into a time/space continuum?

But PDF’s have an important role on the web. And many organizations have valuable content assets that reside in their PDF documents. So not only should you use PDF’s correctly, but you also want to insure their content is indexed by search engines to help drive traffic to your site.

So, in spite of my antipathy to PDF’s, I was disturbed to read this instruction issued to several thousand professional services marketers on a recent listserv post (OMG!):

“The other important thing is to include no robots TXT on PDF’s so the engine doesn’t index the PDF as a stand alone page which is a dead end.”

Huh? Sorry. Not dead end. Dead wrong. If you use PDF documents on your website:

• Complete the document’s properties (especially the title)
• Add links to PDF documents, so that readers arriving at your PDF can always be redirected back to your website (no dead ends)
• Save files at the lowest possible Acrobat version, so that readers can easily open them, and search engines can find them
• File sizes should be kept as small as possible to avoid users abandoning the download

And, please, alert website visitors the link they are about to click is a PDF. No more “Argh!”

There it was again, the 250-word-RULE. It popped up as gospel at an industry conference seminar and espoused by a professional search marketer to the trusting throngs. So let’s debunk it again and right now:

There is no magic number of words on a web page that will help spirit your web page to the top of the search engine results. It is not 250 words or 25 words or any specific or even general number in between. The length of the text on the page does not prevent or encourage the search engines from including the page in their indexes.
 
Where’d this 250-word-rule rumor start? Perhaps many sources. But only noted search marketer Danny Sullivan is willing to take credit for making this claim last century, about 10 billion search engine algorithmic revisions ago.  And today even Danny calls this a myth.
 
Want further proof? My colleague, Fred, just posted on this blog a short diddy about some guy named Gordon Dioxide. His post is 43 words. He posted it 2 days ago. When I did a search on this name, Fred’s post was not only indexed but was the third result on the first page. So much for 250 words.

So what is the truth about word count on a page and SEO? The truth, of course, is much more complicated than the rumor. That’s why the rumor prevails; it’s simplistic, formulaic and easy to remember. But inaccurate. Or at least incomplete. The truth is messy and complicated. But here’s a practical tip. Write with your reader in mind. If a page of text is about a single idea, e.g. the phony 250-word-rule, and if you develop your idea with rich text that includes the key phrases for which you want to be found, perhaps you will be.

Winner of the first ever Salchli Annual Award for best short stories for adults and children. Read them aloud and enjoy! He has an absurd blog of sorts … email him and encourage him to write more if you like what you see.

Everybody wants to drive more traffic to their site, but few are willing to execute the basic strategy to make it happen. The Chicago Tribune in an article titled “Grabbing the search spotlight” clarified once again that it is all about content.

Matt Moog from Viewpoints.com couldn’t have said it clearer when he said that “70 percent of all Internet sessions start at Google.” To attract these surfers to your site you’ve got to begin with understanding the keyword phrases people use that you want to attract. At Duo we call this step Keyword Ideation. Next, use these targeted phrases within relevant content on your site, and update that content often. It’s really that simple, but hard to do because it takes discipline to focus on the basics.

At Duo we create websites that make it easy for you to integrate and update significant amounts of site content. We do this because it is content that acts as a magnet to attract relevant users to your site, and our mission is to improve lives by connecting people with the information they seek through technology. Learn more by attending our WebContent 2008 Conference in Chicago June 17 & 18.

We felt aftershocks in the office at around 10:15 this morning. The search term “chicago earthquake” is “spicy hot” right now according to Google Trends. Search activity peaked about 6 hours ago … what’s interesting (and note that the timescale is P.S.T. and we are in C.S.T.) is that search activity picks up immediately after the earthquake occurred. I experienced an earthquake in 1988 while living in upstate NY and we had to wait an hour, glued to the radio, to learn whether or not I was hallucinating. I’m not sure how quickly official news of the quake was posted, but many turned to Google for information as soon as the event occurred.

Surfing around I found this great USGS user contributed data earthquake experience map. If you felt the quake post your experience.

Robert Cringely has a great post this week, “The Truth About IT Consultants”.  He talks about the general state of IT consulting, but I think it applies nicely to the web content management system world.  As I read the article I grew concerned that this was just another trash the IT consultants rant until I came to this paragraph:

“The best consultants are the ones who come with a portfolio of products and tools. Their trick is to have a really good portfolio of stuff that really works, is really good, and can be sold and implemented quickly in a very cost-effective way. So it isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all when a consultant offers to sell you tools, as long as they are the right tools and the consultant really knows how to use them.”

Exactly what we are all about!

The CPS Alumni wanted to build not only a web site to provide information to former students of Chicago public schools, but also to build a community wherein the alumni themselves could contribute content and participate more fully than they would on a standard informational site. While we were working with the Chicago Public Schools Alumni Association to build their new site, CPSalumni.org, we were also putting Drupal, a community-driven CMS through its paces.

Drupal seemed to be a good fit for their needs since it supported modules for blogs, RSS feeds, comments, file uploads, member-to-member messaging, and many (many) more community-focused features right out of the figurative box, with a robust and well-documented API that allowed us to add additional functionality and customize existing modules to better suit the needs of the client.

For example, Drupal provides a means for users to register for a site membership, but the CPS Alumni registration required some additional fields, such as the ability to sign up as an alumnus of a particular school. The capacity to add such fields in Drupal is built-in, allows for a high degree of flexibility, and provides mechanisms for performing AJAX queries for autocompleting the field as a registrant types each letter of their school’s name, as well as other functions for adding custom Javascript to a page to change the form’s behavior.

One of the biggest draws for new CPS alumni signing up to the site is the ability to download a PDF file containing the names of everyone who graduated from a particular school. We were able to write a custom module to send an authenticated request to Amazon S3 and enable an alumnus to download the file directly from the Amazon storage service using a special key that only let registered CPS alumni have access to the files. It’s completely transparent to someone using the web site but keeps CPSalumni.org files secure yet easily available to the people who should have access.

Working with an Open Source CMS is not without its challenges. The price is of course right. Everyone likes free. However, without a corporate entity providing support you have to rely on the community to help whenever something doesn’t work properly, or dig into the source code and architect your own solution. Some of the more active modules have excellent support from a dedicated working group who fully manages their code, while others tend to write the module to solve their current problem, release it to the community, and then disappear. Duo ended up employing a bit of both, as well as finding that there are some things for which no one has written a module (such as authenticating through Amazon S3) and building the functionality ourselves. It’s one of the hidden costs of free software.

The Drupal Way of doing things also has a modest learning curve. For instance, when looking at their hooks API one may at first think “My, that’s a lot of hooks!” until you need to do something for which Drupal doesn’t provide a hook, and then you think “I wish there were more hooks.” These limitations are minor and through this and subsequent projects we’ve worked out how to code within the Drupal system to achieve any functional goal, but the system is daunting at first.

The biggest benefit of Drupal is that it’s a platform as well as a CMS. New features can be added incrementally, and the alumni of Chicago public schools will be able to contribute and share content that can be reused in ways heretofore unimagined well into the future.