Writings on web design and higher education from Missoula, MT

I was browsing through YouTube today and ran into this powerful poem about what teachers make. It is an old story with a new twist.

Apparently 20/20 did a segment on graphic design. The whole thing is just over a minute and makes no sense unless you are a graphics designer, I would assume. He even mentions Paul Rand.

Web 2.0, and my industry in general, has been nicely summarized in a single, short, video. If you only watch one video today on the web, let this be it.

The video is a response to the YouTube Web 2.0 video.

It would seem that spammers are getting even more tricky. Today I noticed my first trackback spam.

I guess when I upgrade Wordpress and apply a new theme (long over due) I won’t allow trackbacks to be posted in the comments. Such a shame, spammers are really ruining the internet in every possible way.

Just last Friday I gave a presentation to the admissions staff at my university about search engine optimization, and of course I outlined the ever popular Miserable Failure Google Bomb, only to read this weekend that Google announced that it changed its algorithm to remove the common ones. I had to send out an email of retraction of that information, but I am glad Google has improved its search once more.

As far as I can tell, the extent of the algorithm change is minimal, and only affects true Google Bomb search queries. Linked text keywords are still an important aspect of setting up your site for proper placement in search engines.

I highly recomend going over to Google’s webmaster, Matt Cutts’ website. He has a post on the subject of the algorithm change. Most useful are the comments of the post, specifically Matt’s reply to requests on feedback of rank changes.

I don’t know about you, but when I am testing a website I sometimes find it difficult to find every kind of user that will be using it to test with and get feedback. This is especially true in my field of Higher Education, where the prospective students simply are too young to be in my circle… I usually have to make do with some work study students (whose opinions have helped me greatly).

The types of users I have trouble with are the disabled ones. Not so much the blind users, as I can easily test my designs using a screen reader myself. But the colorblind user isn’t something that I traditionally could test myself, or go back to some theory that I learned back while reading A List Apart. That all changed when I found a great site called the “Colorblind Web Page Filter.” It is truly a resource I can’t be as effective with without.

One thing that I will add as a tip on this is that you can test an image of your design prior to building it (or sending it as a proof too). If only I could find a way to make designing for cognitive disorders so easy.

Tips for a better design review process - Kieth wrote a great article that all designers should read. Nothing ground-breaking, but a great review. I am looking forward to the discussion in the comments.

Microsoft takes email back 5 years - I don’t regularly read this site, but all of us that do web marketing need to be aware of the rendering changes in Outlook. Go figure, as the webmail clients get better, the desktop ones revert. The world is out to get us, I am sure.

Letterpress Squid Cards - Amazing printed cards! My birthday is the 29th of this month, anyone want to get me a package or two? [hat tip]

It’s another year, and another chance to try to reinvigorate this blog. I just thought I would update everyone on what is going on, and what to expect.

Working on new brand

As with many young designers, I am having some difficulty in defining my brand… certainly that includes the sites look and feel, but there are other things to consider as well. Some time in the first quarter of the year, you can expect a better defined northlander.org website, with a clear topical emphasis, and unified look and feel.

Podcasting

I have some new hardware support for podcasting, so at some point in the first half of the year I expect to add podcasting to my lineup. Rather than a single long running podcast, there will be several mini-series podcasts covering specific niche’s.

Topics in the Queue

I also wanted to let you know of some topics in the queue for the blog. I’ll be addressing many topics this year, with specific focus on SEO, Freelancing, CSS, design, and Higher Education web development & marketing. If you want to suggest a topic for a post, leave a comment or contact me via email, or the form on the contact page. I will reward your suggestion with a link in the article to your site.

Also expect a series of focused tutorials, designed for the basic to the advanced users. These take a while to write, so they will be in the distant future, and fairly spread out.

Working on a book

That’s all I am going to say for now.

There are two major things that prospective students are searching for during their college search: a college and money to pay for it. Every college and university out there knows they have to focus their content on prospective students searching for college admission, specific programs and degrees, and the campus life opportunities that come with life at a college or university; this is the status quo of higher ed websites, and it works well. If an institution wants to stand out in the search results for prospective students’ web inquiries, then they have to think creatively and outside of the standard box.

Most institutions offer scholarships, grants and loans; each of which are thoroughly advertised on their websites in the admissions/prospective students’ pages. This is a good start, getting the content out there in the first place, but taking it the next step can potentially deliver a huge boost in new student inquiries.

Drive students to your scholarship pages through links in targeted academic content. Let students know while they are browsing the College of Education that there is a scholarship available through a link in the sidebar. This will help funnel traffic to your scholarship page and increase your conversion rate as well as passing the PageRank from your academic site to your admissions site and vice-versa, all while building a more definitive keyword presence for your site (a good link for our example page may read “Scholarship for teacher education majors.”) This method takes little to no resources or time, and can be a quick addition to any institutional website.

If you have the resources to go the extra mile, I suggest building additional content in your admissions site about opportunities for scholarship and other methods to pay for college. Prospective students are searching for this content, and right now the private sector is the main cafeteria for what they crave. Even a mid-sized college could challenge giants like FastWeb.com in the search results if they offered keyword rich content that uniquely addressed scholarship programs for each major, ethnic group and income level that the school provides for. Your students will thank you for the resources, and this increase in quality targeted content will bolster web traffic for years to come. Your school probably has all the content written already in the form of flyers, posters and guides placed on the Student Services and Financial Aid department walls.

There are two kinds of users that probably read your blog: those that know what they are looking for, and those who don’t. Sure, this seems like a bit of an oversimplification, but it is probably more important than you know. Today, I would like to discuss how these two kinds of users are different, and how you can serve to cater to them while authoring your blog content.

The first—those who know what they are looking for—visit your blog either from direct traffic, a link from another website, or a search engine. These users probably don’t know who you are, nor do they care… they know what information they need, and have that goal alone in mind. These users are looking for very specific content, and targeting them is a great way to get your traffic up and maybe even convert them to the second group.

This second group is the kind of visitor that already knows they like your work, and are checking back up on you expecting to find more high quality writings. At some point they said, “this one is a keeper” and either bookmarked you, or subscribed to your RSS feed. For a blogger, this traffic is the most important. Keeping this second group of users interested is a great challenge for many bloggers, and here are a few tips to help out:

• Keep comments on. Comments build up a community, and add relevant content to your site for search engines to index. Try ending each post with a question for the readers to debate, or give feedback on to spur commenting.
• Write frequently. Every week is good, and every day is better. Once a month probably won’t be enough to keep people interested unless you are in a very small niche.
• Make it easy to subscribe to RSS. This means making an obvious link to your new post RSS feeds and perhaps your comments RSS feed as well. Everyone uses RSS these days, but many people don’t know it… be sure to tell them what RSS is some place on your site, or link to the wikipedia article on it.
• Clash a little. Everyone likes someone who agrees with them, but they love to get into a debate with someone who doesn’t. You will get all kinds of comments and links by roughing a few edges on your content every once and a while.

I hope these few tips have given you some ideas on how to increase your blog traffic and reader loyalty. Did I miss anything?

An SEO company whose services I have used in the past just underwent a redesign of their site architecture. Now powered entirely by the blogging software Wordpress, Netconcepts has turned their entire corporate website into a blog.

As Stephan Spencer, CEO of Netconcepts, said in his blog, I don’t think anyone has ever done this before for a major corporate site. Personally, I think it is mostly a PR stunt, with many of the advantages they claim being easily obtainable on several mainstream CMS platforms.

Stephan claims that now he can get exposure to more search engines because his site is a blog. Poppycock! Any good quality CMS out there (like what I use, Modx CMS) can output an RSS feed for recent content, sections, or whatever you like; this enables any website to be placed in blog search engines, which should be more aptly named RSS search engines (the non-blog portion of my site is in Technorati, for instance.)

Furthermore, I think Netconcepts is going a bit overboard here about marketing their site to any and every search engine. I would challenge them to produce two clients a year from these blog search engines… I just don’t think that’s where people that need to hire consultants do their looking. Even if they did, the most popular blog search engine, Technorati, is date focused, so their website exposure has already faded from the charts (a search for SEO yields nothing of them, and even a search for the tag Netconcepts produces only one result, in Stephan’s personal blog nonetheless!)

But their move to Wordpress is no joke either; it has some real benefits that many companies should consider:

• Tagging allows them to increase the breadth of their site without writing more content, allowing for more placings in the search engines. They call this the Long Tail of search.
• Being in the RSS search engines puts them in the face of the blogosphere, where bloggers may pick up on some new articles and discuss them.
• If they are smart, they will try to leverage the wordpress forum and become a featured corporate site. The traffic generated from such an announcement would be prime, not only involume, but also in quality (each of the Wordpress users a potential client and new inbound link).

If I was a fly on the Netconcepts wall this week, I would love to pick up on whether they are feeling restricted in their site architecture now that they don’t have a more flexible CMS (I know that is why I moved away from Wordpress as a CMS) and if the traffic they generate from RSS search engines actually lead to sales. If their conversion rate remains high, I am sure we can expect a report out on their site within a few months that will probably be syndicated across the SEO landscape.

What do you think of this new turnaround in CMS structure? Can it provide results?

• YouTube - Windows Vista Speech Recognition
  One of the worst product demos microsoft has given in some time.
  (tags: video vista)

• Windows XP Home Networking: Turn a Desktop Computer into a Server
  This is more of a note to myself, but it could prove interesting to some of you.
  (tags: computers server xp)
• Build a Home Server for a Windows XP Home Network

• evhead: Massive, Tangled Up Tubes!
  This was amazingly funny. Only for the nerd-of-heart.
  (tags: politics humor mp3 music)

Dear Google,

I use Gmail for Your Domain, and since the calendar function has finally been added, I am in love with this service. I do have a small request though, one that I believe many customers would like to utilize.

My suggestion is simple, integrate the calendar and email clients more fully; give me a checkbox when I set up an appointment to activate the email auto-responder during the time that I am scheduled for that event.

Thank you,

Dan Bowling