Web Development Usability Articles

When it comes to breaking through to your customers’ email inbox, it’s getting to be less about what you say and more about how you say it. The spam net that i.merchants must circumvent is getting ever more sophisticated and, dare we say, overzealous. In fact, recent surveys indicate that more than one-third of permission emails that consumers want to receive from trusted sources are being blocked by email filters and corporate firewalls.

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Partially indexed, poorly ranked, penalized and possibly banned: such is the unpleasant fate of a Web site that’s not duly optimized for the search engines.

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Many consider search engine optimization (SEO) - the process of enhancing your Web site’s visibility in the search engines through ways other than paid search ads - a sort of black box. But once the essential features of a search-engine-optimal Web site are laid out in a concise list, SEO is not nearly as mystifying.

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Google and Yahoo! have become much more aggressive in their crawling behavior, going deeper into dynamic, database-driven websites than ever before. A closer look, however, reveals that some bad news is mixed in with the good…

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Seek and ye shall find. But not always.

According to an IDC (International Data Corporation) report from last year, knowledge workers spend 15-30% of their day searching for information. What’s worse, more than half of their online searches fail.

That doesn’t bode well for us, does it? Hopefully, this series has gone a long way to help you make the invisibly rich Internet more visible. We close this series by tapping into the wisdom and experience of two renowned Google experts—Nancy Blachman and Tara Calishain—who share some of their favorite tips, tools, insights, and search strategies for researching with Google.

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Today I had the pleasure to hear web content guru Gerry McGovern speak at a full-day workshop in Wellington, New Zealand. He’s got to be one of the very best speakers I’ve ever heard! His course material, his sense of humor, his thought-provoking insights, and especially his Irish accent — had everyone in the audience mesmerized. Here’s a sampling of the day’s take-aways:

• Action vs. reaction: If a site visitor’s action results in a reaction from your web site that has a wait time exceeding that of the action, the visitor will become frustrated. That frustration will build as more . For example, clicking on the File menu tab only takes a second, so the time it takes for the menubar to appear underneath should take no more than a second.
• 80/20 rule of content: For many sites, less than 20% of the site content accounts for over 80% of the pageviews. With Microsoft.com it was 1% of their content accounted for 99% of the pageviews. In fact, 35% of their pages had never been viewed! That’s well over a million pages of content that people at Microsoft worked hard to write ? for nothing. Focus your efforts on the copy that will be read, not on the copy that won’t.
• Columns: Readers use their peripheral vision to keep track of the beginning of the next line down while they are reading across a line. So with text that has a long linewidth, it becomes difficult to read. Gerry recommends a three column format, with 20% or so of the width going to the first column (use this column for navigation), 60% or so dedicated to the middle column, and another 20% or so for the right hand column.
• Call for action: Always end your pages with a clear action for the reader to take. Never leave the reader hanging, wondering what to do next. The center column at the end of the body copy is a critical piece of real estate for these calls for action.
• Links in copy: According to Gerry, links in the middle of body copy distracts the readers making it difficult for them to read the paragraph, and it connotes “hey, click on me… the rest of this text is really boring!” Instead of embedding links within the body copy, consider using the right hand column for the related links. If there are important links there that take the reader to the “next step,” also repeat them at underneath the body copy in the center column.
• Simplicity: Einstein purportedly was quoted as saying “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Apply this idea to your web copy. Keep your copy as short and simple as possible. People tend not to read long copy on the web. With a 300 word page, 50% will read it to the end; 500 words, 20%; 1000 words, 5%. Gerry recommends headings of 4 to 8 words, summaries of 30 to 50 words, sentences of 15 to 20 words, and paragraphs of 40 to 70 words.
• “Kill your darlings”: William Faulkner once said this. If there’s a particular expression or way of saying something that you’re particularly fond of, delete it from your copy, because you’re probably overusing it.

Gerry covered so much more than this, but it would take a book to cover it all. Oh, wait a minute… there is a book covering it all. Buy Gerry’s book, Content Critical.

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This series is all about surprises and revelations—at least when it comes to using Google. And here’s another: some of Google’s most valuable properties aren’t even search engines. Rather, they are resources or tools such as online research assistants, Web-based email, browser toolbars and social networks. These resources can be extremely valuable to marketers and should be considered one of the sharper tools in your research arsenal.

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Now that you are intimate with the range of Google operators to refine your research searches, it’s time to put the knowledge into practice in the real world. It’s also a good time to delve a little deeper into the essential features of the Google interface.

Here, in part three, we’ll apply the secrets of Google in a search for information about the food industry. Then, I’ll share the 20 essential features of the Google user interface—the virtual place where you spend most of your time interacting with Google—and apply those to our search example as well.

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If you’re like most of us, you use Google almost daily as a search tool. But Google is capable of so much more than simple search. You’d be surprised at what Google can do to make your work life more productive and easier on any number of levels. In the first installment of this article series, you learned several ways to refine your Google searches. Here, in Part 2, I will take you through 20 time-saving search operators. If you incorporate these shortcuts into a Google search session, you’ll both save time and minimize frustration.

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If you’re like me, you use Google every day to find things—news, technical support, events, tips, research documents and more.

Were you to master Google’s powerful search refinement operators and lesser-known features, over a year’s time you could save days scouring over irrelevant results. Perhaps even more enticing is the promise of elusive nuggets of market research and competitive intelligence out there waiting to be discovered. This five-part series will show you how to find what you need quickly and with laser-like accuracy

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