DRUMROLL please: a HTML site with a Wordpress Blog in the domain

DRUMROLL please: The Snap2 SEO Blog is finished! Yeah! 
What's so special about that, you might ask? Well, we have a HTML site and we made a matching Wordpress blog in the domain. 
The benefits are:

1. Ease of Blogging. Wordpress is a Blogging platform that makes posting and organising posts so very easy. 
2. The HTML front end benefits from all activity done on the blog because it is a part of the domain. Google sees the activity on the domain and it benefits your rank.
3. HTML is Google preferred, so we didn't want an entire Wordpress site, the HTML Front end provides the advantages that elbow the site into ranking positions fast. 
4. As a model for business sites, HTML is pretty inaccessible to the untrained who want to add content to their sites, but unlike coding, most people can get their heads around Wordpress,  and with a few technical instructions, its very easy to learn 
5.  Adding new content to your site always has the potential to upset the SEO strategy knitted into it. This way means the front end is protected, but benefits from the activity of the backend.
6. Posts to your site can be done from your phone.

Juice for the tech nerds: To achieve a Wordpress Blog on a HTML domain took a bit of problem solving. Wordpress is PHP and CSS files essentially. We started by adapting a WP theme with the Snap2SEO styles. Both the WP editor and Dreamweaver was used for the CSS side and the WP php files were modified in Dreamweaver to hold the html markup of the navigation elements.

So please, come visit and leave a comment on our new blog. Distributing your link through comments adds value to your rank, you know! Perhaps you'd like to discuss a Guest Post swap, please drop us a line.
http://www.snap2seo.com/

A Design Problem : A Design Solution

Last week a plan to migrate Snap2SEO's blog page from Blogger.com to our domain www.snap2seo.com was hatched. Originally, the blog was set up at Blogger while the domain was being developed, now that the site is complete, it's time to forward the vision and establish a blog in the domain.
Snap2seo domain is written in html, which is Google preferred and this translated to achieving a top rank quickly. On release, I see new HTML sites leap over Wordpress and other CMS sites, to establish themselves on 1st page, so the HTML is the best option for the front end, but not the blog.
The aims of the blog were:
1. Attach the blog to the domain to give Google constant activity on the domain
2. The Snap2SEO blog solution will act as a template for client sites, so the working blog can't be dependant on coding knowledge. The client needs to be able to write a text or word file and when they save it into their website file, the code separates it and feeds the pieces into the right areas of the html code to create new posts previews, new post pages, links to older posts in the sidebar and it needs to generate new pages when the post list grows beyond the bounds of a single page. The code needs to handle the placement of images too.

So you can see it was a large task. Brainstorming ensued. Our resolution: The components of a blog are heavily automated and in an HTML environment the automation would be driven by Javascript or JQuery. When a site that is driven by Javascript meets a browser that has turned off its Javascript, it still needs to function. Highly unlikely with so many dependant parts, so a HTML blog wasn't looking like the answer to the blog at the end of our meeting.

A PHP driven design was explored as a better option. We could code the php from scratch, the code integrates with HTML seamlessly and offers us the automation we require, but in the interest of time we'd rather not re-invent the wheel. Wordpress is built on php, it's a blogging platform, so at Snap2 SEO we've decided to integrate a Wordpress blog backend into a HTML frontend and style it so as to be visually seamless. A simple Wordpress theme gives us a readymade layout which can be shaved down to take on the Snap2 SEO HTML navigation system and styles.

Rollout for our project is 4 weeks, so I'll keep you posted until then on Blogger.com.

Weighing more than 100kb? Your website needs to be on a diet.

Remember, usability studies show people don't read on the web. So what am I doing right now, you might ask? What we mean is that users approaching a business website looking for a particular product or service have a different consideration for their time than what they would have if they sat down to their favourite blog. It's about CONTEXT.
"When it comes to copy, short is too long. It must be ultra-short" says the leader of User-Experience, Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group
Lengthy pages don't work on the web and work even less for websites that are called to the phone.

Images read quicker than text. I've suggested you limit images in previous posts to keep the overall website super light, they slow download and if your landing page isn't formed in 3 seconds half your visitors will opt out of your website. The goal of image compression is to achieve a super small size,  in the tens of kbs or less, if quality allows. I see websites from leading developers with each image on their site over 200kb regularly, and consequently their websites weigh in the MBs. Ridiculous! A huge waste of resources, while they look spectacular, half the audience won't wait for these websites to download.

The quality of images sends messages to your visitors about your professionalism, so choose images carefully. Simple, easy to understand forms are needed by scanning readers who have no time for ambiguous messages and complicated detail. Never use images that have been ripped off another site, Google will frown on your site if it includes plagiarised content. Any professional website developer would insist on using licensed photography, either from a stock provider or a professional photographer.

Ban The Ugly Blue Hyperlink!

Links must be easily identified and their look should be consistent throughout the document, but does a hyperlink have to be default blue and underlined? Please, these days readers expect interactivity everywhere. Opponents of the ugly, eye stabbing, flow destroying blue hyperlink say any element given emphasis to stand out on the page is expected to be linked. Let me example what I'm saying right here: hyperlinks don't have to be blue or underlined. Any element can be given emphasis to attract a reader's attention and today's readers test for interactivity, looking for small clues like the hand cursor to indicate the presence of a hyperlinked element. The upside of this user behaviour for web designers is that links can be within the colour scheme of the website and therefore harmonious to their surrounds and the readers flow inside the document.

Older UX checklists advise to limit hyperlinks so as not to distract the reader, but the value of hyperlinks to Google's understanding of your website is well known by SEO strategists. Many of the top ranking SEO companies have over 1000 links on their websites. In the past the links have contributed to the authority of the website and it's credibility, but Google warns that things have changed and link farming is frowned upon. So, websites risk being demoted by Google in future if the links are found to be pointless. Still, sites with heaps of links are achieving a higher page authority right now until Google starts to implement the new algorithm, so Snap2's link building schedule looks to steadily add quality links to websites. Both inbound and outbound links are of value, the most 'link juice' coming from inbound links from quality sites.

The SEO Value of a Blogger Blog

Why Blog
Google's last Algorithm released in October puts emphasis on quality content. Rank, they said, would benefit from constant activity on your domain, but the quality of the activity was also important and Google would be looking to reward industry thought leaders making real contributions to the net, not just churning it out for the sake of appearances.

What to Blog With
If you have a Wordpress site your template probably has a blog page set up in the matching styles of your site. If you're in the market for a HTML site, and HTML is Google preferred, request the creation of a blog page from your developers. It needs to be part of the main navigation. It's best for SEO that the blog be a part of your domain, but while your blog is being knocked up you can create an account at Blogger.com and start blogging.  Google is smart enough to work out the blog is a part of your assets and Blogger is a Google product after all, so activity on a Blogger blog will still be of some value and content can be migrated over to your domain blog when its ready.  Snap2 SEO can retrofit existing html sites with blogs in the styles of your site if you don't yet have one.
 To set up a blog in Blogger you'll need a gmail account to use as your login, so if you haven't already, it's time to create an account with Google Plus. Through Google Plus you'll have access to gmail and YouTube, and a host of other useful tools. Then go to Blogger.com and create a new account using your gmail login.
In the set up of your account with Blogger you'll mention your domain link, but for extra punch, try to  create a hyperlink to your domain in the body of your posts. This can be more difficult than you think, because you don't want your content to appear contrived, your goal is quality writing worth reading. When the blog migrates to your domain, this extra hyperlink in your posts won't be necessary.

How Often to Blog
The minimum recommendation for blogging to have an effect on rank is once per week. The more activity you can muster through posts and people liking, sharing and following your posts, the better for rank. The blog page itself will start to rank, so in essence it becomes a landing page for visitors and from your blog they can explore your site easily and make contact with you.

There are challenges ahead, business needs to change tack

Cold Callers come at you from many angles: email, phone calls and texting, door to door, junk mail and in your social media. What can you do about it? It's never going to stop. It's not a sign of the times, it's always been. Telemarketers used to use the phone book to get your phone number, now they have digital avenues for contact too, but I sometimes wonder about the effectiveness of these old methods. Some of them seem so expensive to run for such a little return on investment.
Of course there are cheap methods and expensive methods in Cold Call and any strategy that involves human labour costs in Australia is not cheap, but for the hope of a sale some companies still gamble in door to door cold calls.

The statistics are telling us that online shopping is booming and Australians with Smart phones are researching the product and the company they're buying from online before purchasing and furthermore they are doing the buying on their devices. The marketplace has changed and business needs to change tack to move with their customer. Today, the retail outlet has become a place to inspect the real product, not necessarily the buying point of the product. The buyer comes home to find the fairest price and buys it online.

The digital age gives the customer all the power to make an informed decision and get the best price.

Should I even consider the Cold Call offer?
SEO of your site will get your site visible to more than just new customers. Are you prepared? As soon as you start to show in a Google search you'll be contacted by everybody, take it as a sign that you're becoming visible. It's not just scammers contacting you, it's genuine business too.
I'm receiving phone calls from the Police, the Fire Brigade and a stream of other businesses offering me advertising space in their print media, but I also get suspect SEO deals on a daily basis.

The availability of information on the internet makes weeding out the bad guys pretty easy to do.
If I buy, I buy online after I've thoroughly checked out the product and the supplier. You not only have access to their website, but you have access to their reputation through Google + and Directories which allow customers to leave reviews. To find a company's directories run a search on the company's name. Other than their website, you'll get their Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter links in the search return if they're advertising through social media, but even a non-digital business has a Yellow Pages and a True Local profile these days. Be smart, dig down beyond the first 5 reviews and you'll start to see who the business really is. The reviews may be organised chronologically and a brand new business may have either performed really well at the outset, or the proprietor may have sequestered friends and family to make up entries. Go beyond these.
Lets be fair, I'll forgive one or two bad reviews, but what I look out for is a number of bad reviews all suggesting the same problem. I also look out for a response from the proprietor to the bad review. Is he belligerent and demeaning to those who question his performance or does he explain factors that the customer was unaware of and say he will amend this poor state of affairs in future?

When I buy online I prefer to use Paypal because the purchase is insured against Fraud when both parties are Paypal members. The ease and safety of online shopping coupled with the availability of information about the product and the business means that I don't even have to leave my house.


To wrap up: Online Campaigns offer convenience for the customer and offer a better Return On Investment (ROI) for the advertiser than old fashioned Cold Call. Provide all the information the customer requires to research your product and your business online, give customer support through your social media and reviews, and provide a safe avenue for transaction. With these in place online sales become much more likely.

Free font, or is it? Free Fonts have licensing restrictions if you intend to use them commercially.

The world of the graphic designer in the 1980's was a fast changing place. While the hairstyles were high and remained so for the decade, few other things stayed the same.

A Letraset sheet showing used letters in grey
and black letters still to be transferred to the ad.

How exciting it was. Letraset was king, but overnight fell to the computer age, giving up a position it had held firm through 60's and 70's Commercial Art.  For those of you who weren't lucky enough to be there, Letraset was a plastic sheet of black type that worked like a kid's transfer: you aligned the dotted lines on the Letraset sheet to a line ruled on your ad and rubbed the type with a pencil to transfer the glyph to your paper. Tricky stuff to align and space type by hand, if you were out by a millimetre or two you had to scrape the letter off with a scalpel and start again.

Letraset was used for every ad and it was $15 for a page in 1983. For $15 you got an A3 page of letters in a fontface at a particular size, so studios needed a library of Letraset sheets in different fonts and sizes to get through any typical day. Production could be held up for an hour because there were no more Os, for example, on the sheet (all used up in the previous days work) but such was life in the commercial art business and we couldn't live without Letraset. However, Letraset's glory days were done and dusted by the end of the decade.

Computers entered the industry and Fonts became available to designers through Quarkxpress( released in 1987) and Adobe Illustrator (released in 1988). With the embrace of graphic software, the process of creating ads became expedient and the name of our business changed seamlessly from commercial art to Graphic Design. The fonts that came with the Adobe software were luxurious in number compared to word processing software, which offered about 4. Adobe Type Libraries became available on CD shortly after and when you bought the CD you purchased the license to use the fonts commercially.

Today, it's so easy to find new Fonts on the net. Font foundries and independent font creators release free fonts for download.

How do I load the fonts into my computer after I've downloaded them?
If you're on a Mac use Font Book to load in the fonts you've downloaded off the net. Double click on the fonts zip file to extract the files first, then in Font Book use the Add Font command under File in the main menu and select the entire font folder. Click Open and your done. You'll find the font available in your software.
In a PC,  open the zip file and copy the contents of the folder. There is usually several files in the folder, you may see .otf(open type fonts) and .ttf(true type fonts) files. Copy these into the fonts folder in the Windows folder in your HD. You may need to restart your computer to have the files kick in, but when you relaunch your design software you should see the new fonts.

Inside the Quicksand file are Quicksand
open type font files(otf) in a number of styles(bold,
italic, etc) and the license agreement bottom.

Does the licensing agreement allow you to use the free font in your print or online publishing? 
With free fonts, beware! The licence of free fonts is usually restricted. You may not have permission to use the font commercially, read the licensing agreement. Commercially means in Print, but can extend to other commercial purposes like online publishing if there is a commercial intent.

Commercial print providers may rebuke your job if it contains unlicensed fonts. To read the license return to the zip file you downloaded from the net, it will be a .txt file there, but if it's been many years and the license is lost, do a search online with the name of the font to find the license. You may find you have to pay the font creator a small fee for a commercial license, consider it fair remuneration for the many hours that go into creating a font, it's pretty technical and tedious work.

If you're after more information you can read: Free fonts, free is not always free or The facts about Font Licensing.

A bullet proof blog or a rod for your back?

Youtility
Youtility is the new bi-word in search marketing. It means telling customers all about YOU through blogging and social media. Creating quality posts on blogs can boost rank and lift your credibility with Google. So what's your beef about blogging?
Is it that you're too busy to take on another marketing task?
Is it that you don't know what you would write about?
Can't write? Grammatically challenged? Well, you're not alone my friend.

This post is for people who desire an easy blogging solution. To create an easy blog solution we have to work 'smarter, not harder', so if you're going to take the task on yourself, make sure you do it right from the get go. The blog needs to be a consistent practice to have maximum effect on your rank and be warned writing something of interest is hard work, the minimum recommendation for blogging is once a week.

#1 mistake to avoid: Don't use your website like a blog.
Your website and the blog are distinctly different vehicles and have distinct purposes. Users of your website come with a different head space than they would to a blog. The website is for the hungry beast searching for answers: Who, What, Where and How to Action needs to be communicating fast on every page. Expect that people come to explore your website only once, if they come back they will target a specific page. The first time they visit your site may in fact be their last, so apart from contacting you, your site's goal should be to have visitors connect with your social network. It's there in the social network and your blog that you get to interact with your Users and explain the values of your industry, your products and services through Youtility posts.


A CMS in the right place
A Content Management System (CMS) or Wordpress site has it's place when prescribed for the right customer, but the constant updates by multiple handlers that these systems allow can shoot your SEO in the foot and wreak havoc on a responsive site built for phones and tablets. Without strict supervision the site quickly gets out of hand with too many pages, heavy photographs too large for most screen sizes, spelling mistakes, plagiarised and duplicated content. Imagine that your website is maintained quarterly or even bi-annually by your SEO consultant or developer who understands your conversion and SEO strategy, they know where to put stuff for maximum effect and which words to use when writing about it. In the meantime, new content, product info and photographs could be handled through Blogs and Social media. The benefits of working this way are numerous and I'll list them now:

• Your content becomes easy to share, like and comment on
• You don't have to learn a new piece of software or pay a web specialist to blog, it's easy
• The main website isn't being tampered with, safeguarding the Conversion and SEO strategy, and the responsive behavior of the site
• In Google's eyes, work on your blog contributes to the main website's activity. That is, Google sees inactivity as a sign of unused space junk, blogging keeps your main site alive
•  Consistent blogging effects page rank
• You don't have to be the sole contributor to the blog 
• A blog is bullet proof. It's easy to bugger up a website, especially a responsive one, but it's near impossible to bugger up a blog.

Share the love.
To be a hive of activity, the blog needs to be opened up for select writers. Consider your blog like a magazine, a place where thought leaders share articles. By doing so, the blog becomes far more interesting to readers and your reach expands. Don't do a blog because you have to, do it for the betterment of humankind.

What topics you explore will be determined by your industry and can cover areas like standards, quality guidelines you stand by, hot questions most people ask about your industry or product, work related stories or how your product or service has helped people in their lives, your unique selling points. When you run out of ideas the guest post will inspire new directions in your thinking and lead to a more diverse range of writing material generated by your company. Google wants real contribution from you.

Yes, you can charge for a guest post spot on your blog, but you need a pretty high rank to command a price for the pleasure. Charging for guest posts is really not the way to start networking with fellow businesses and will likely leave you doing it on your own. Ask to see examples of the writing. If it's good the readership that the post could bring is of value and by writing for your audience the writer does you a service. Have the post signed off by you before it's published, so content isn't ever a surprise and at the top of each post a delimiter stating : The author's posts are entirely his or her own and may not always reflect the views of our company.

The guest writer will include a link to their site somewhere on the post. In days to come Google will index the link and it will contribute to both your ranks. It will have a direct effect for the writer of the post and an indirect effect on yours, lifting your sites credibility as your sites associations with industry become richer.

So, clasp your hands together and give those rusty old knuckles a crack, we've got some writing to do!
Happy blogging.

Because it's Google who rules our world

I receive spam SEO emails too and I'm sent URLs to shonky SEO websites with deals too good to be true, but if I didn't know what I know about SEO how could I identify a scam? What should I look out for? There are some dead giveaways, practices known to be scammy and you should avoid them because they'll get your site blacklisted by search engines. As a business, you'll want to be highly visible on the net, right? But if website exposure is your latest quest, protect yourself and read this post, it'll help you to identify an SEO scam and steer clear.

Bad practice is talked about in Google circles as Gaming Google or as Black Hat practices, like in the cowboy movies. When checking out your site, much of what Google is looking for comes out of Google's desire to weed out websites that try to game the ranking process. Google tries to foil the plans of guys who cheat their system. I really like this about Google, they continually try to make the playing field fair so quality websites with value to the community get listed too.

Given that there are approximately 3 trillion websites, Google uses a robot to check them out, to catalog them and make sure they aren't spam. Google's robot is called Googlebot, he's also known as a spider or a crawler. While Googlebot is growing more and more sophisticated, it's still a robot and robots don''t think like humans do. When you employ a SEO consultant, their job is to check through your site and remove content that will trigger the robot's suspicions, replacing dicey content with content that convinces Google your site is good, or credible.

Google communicates and is pretty transparent about what they're wanting to find, and not find in a website. Anyone can access Google's good practice documents online, the only criteria for entry is time and an internet connection. It then amazes me when I see a website offering Link Farms and Keyword Stuffing, 2 practices that Google has talked about explicitly as BAD and a sign that should warn you to steer clear.

What are Link Farms?
Link Farms sell hundreds of hyperlinks that point back to your site. The farm is essentially about nothing, its whole purpose is as a hyperlink holder. A quality link, in comparison, is when you link to industry relevant sites, but quality link building takes time. If you want your site to be seen as quality in Google's eyes than you need to either invest your time in link building or pay someone to do it properly. A business like PageOnePower, who are based in Bois, Idaho, specialise in building Quality Links only. That's all they do. Their minimum package takes 40 hours to complete. Page1Power hand pick pages for linking. Small Business on a budget can afford the same quality links, but built over a longer period of time. 

How many keywords can I have?
There is no explicit recommendation as to how many keywords is allowed, but Scammers offer multitudes of keywords planted into your site each month. About 9 years back, Scammers placed transparent keywords into their page that didn't necessarily relate to the website content. It might have fooled Google for a spell, but Google is not having it now. If the offer talks about more than 10 keywords complete, the Shonksters haven't read anything by Google for at least 9 years. I'm not saying 10 is the magic answer, I'm saying that many more than 10 is a sign that Voldermort has just entered the room and you should leave.


Fake Content
Can you imagine that there are bad little robots on the net that crawl websites and 'scrape' them, copying text indiscriminately? The programmers who create such a robot plan to reuse passages copied from other websites to update their fake sites. Rather than generate any quality information themselves, they reuse the stolen text to give the appearance of continual fresh content being added, hoping to fool search engines that they're active. 
It's a dark dark world beyond Kansas, Dorothy, but Google is onto it. 


Spelling Mistakes
Spelling mistakes on a publicly released site really shouldn't happen as a matter of professionalism, but any SEO consultant worth their salt would know that Google sees spelling mistakes and bad grammar as an indication of foul play. Googlebot is on the look out for signs of scraped content stolen from other sites and may see poor grammar as similar to broken sentences smashed back together by a robot. If you see spelling issues everywhere on an SEO offer, get out of there, they haven't read anything by Google in a while.

Blacklisting
Little Googlebot is a very sophisticated piece of software and he'll visit your site in the next 3 weeks and look at words, passages and images and consider whether your material has been duplicated from somewhere else. He'll also be programed to check your links and the links pointing to you and he'll ask whether they look 'normal'. In about 3 months he will have completed his indexing of your site and the results of his visits will start to show in your rank.
If your site is found to have been gaming Google, Google usually notifies the person identified as the owner in their Webmaster Tools, but if that person is the scammer than you probably won't know you've been penalised until your site falls out of a Google search listing. The blacklisting won't be immediate, it may take months, but it's a risk that needs to be considered carefully.

What if Googlebot mistakes your site as a scam?
This can happen. What if you've accidentally purchased work of a Scammer and your site is blacklisted?
I suggest you type an email with your apology, state how sorry you are for buying something you knew was simply too good to be true, print it out, wait for a cyclone and set it free in the raging wind. It will take less time to get to Google than emailing it. Google is a multinational corporation. Google rules the world, at least the internet world anyway. Don't hold your breathe waiting for word that you've been let off. With the damage done you'd be advised to start again and build a whole new site.
A good SEO maintenance plan will watch over your links carefully, removing broken links and inspecting the quality of hyperlinks you've purchased in days past.

Does Your UX Suck? Principle #10: Accessible on Phones NOW

Google says that it has crawled over 3 trillion websites. So how do you get your 'one in 3 trillion' website noticed by new customers? First, you need to be noticed by Search Engines, that's how new customers are searching for products and services.  Good SEO will move you towards adapting your website for phones and tablets, not only because Google recently stated that they favour responsive sites, but because SEO is about maximising your Exposure: Your Site Everywhere. If you want to be seen, you've got to be ready for all the latest devices that your website will be called to. You've got to adapt your site for mobile devices NOW, because you're already loosing customers on standard sites.

Ever Used Your Site On A Phone?
If a website isn't responsive, it simply shrinks to fit the smaller screen size, rendering buttons and hyperlinks too small to read and impossible to hit accurately. If the site isn't built for touch devices, the buttons usually misbehave and frustrate a user enough to leave.

To be Responsive, a site's components need to shuffle, resize and reconstitute themselves to the varying screen sizes they'll be called to, this is where a responsive site gets it's name, it literally responds to any size of device. With every standard website, there is a style sheet containing a set of styles for each element. The style sheet controls the size, position and colour of elements. With Responsive sites there are up to four or five different sets of styles in the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). The CSS can't possibly hold a set of styles for every device on the market globally, rather the devices are grouped into about four or five sizes and the styles are written for those.
How does a website know what size the device is? Well, allow me to put it very, very simply...Knock, knock, who's there?

Knock Knock, Who's There?
Imagine you're Customers on their computer searching for your services. They see your site in a search return and click on your snippet. A request for the webpage is sent to the Server where your Site is housed. The Server, who's job it is to serve, hears the request, locates the page in it's files and sends it back to the requesting computer.
When the webpage arrives at the door of the computer, it says: Knock, knock.
The computer says: Who's there?
The webpage says: It's me, the one you ask for. What size are you?
Computer says: I'm 800 by 600 (meaning pixels).
The webpage sends a message back to the Server: Mate, we've arrived, send down the CSS file.
CSS file arrives: Right, what do ya need? I've got Small, Extra Small, Medium or Large in Landscape or Portrait. You're a 800 by 600, hey? Here try this, it's not exactly tailored to you, but all my sizes are stretchie. I think you'll like it.

Australian Shoppers Have Moved to Smartphones
If you think Australia is behind when it comes to shopping on their phones, you're mistaken. The Nielsen PayPal Mobile Study initiated in 2012 shows we've jumped in to web shopping with both feet, supported by better security for transactions and smarter phones. The study shows that 77% of the survey group ( 3020 Australians over the age of 18 ) compared prices online, 71% checked online for the nearest location of the product or service before buying and 32% made the transaction on a mobile device.

To Complete the Series on UX
The best UX experts say that the only sure way to know how customers experience your site is to ask them, or watch them. Understanding your audience is the best basis for developing your site, but if you never get the chance to observe them using your site I hope you've distinguished some Usability Suspects from the 10 posts on UX. Controlled user testing is expensive and only the big companies invest in it, for the rest of us we try to read everything that the User Experts issue and tweak our websites to comply with their proven knowledge. Now that you know what to look out for in a user friendly website, you'll be able to give informed ideas for your site to your team.

Thanks for joining me in the last 10 posts, I've enjoyed getting your feedback, it's really helpful to know what areas need to be explored in future posts. The web industry depends on sharing new information, I'm happy to point the way to factual resources should you have burning questions about any of the points I've made in the posts.

Does Your UX Suck? Principle #9: Are you sure your site works on all browsers?

What's a Browser?

Browsers are the programs you use to view pages on the internet and include Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and the much maligned Internet Explorer (IE). Are you aware that top ranking web designers have sites that don't work on all browsers? If your having a website built at the moment then this post will help you to alert your web team of your expectations and hold them accountable to industry standards.

What Browser are you using and how old is it? Do you know? Have you been prompted to update your browser lately, but haven't gotten around to it? Well, you're not alone.
What's making the web community grumble loudly today is old browser versions, released over the years but still being used to view modern websites.

In the early years of the internet, before regulations began to standardise the industry, browsers boomed and busted and coding conventions differed greatly between each browser. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) held their first conference in 1994 and has been the deciding force when aligning the primary browser makers to a standard, but these older browsers are still out there. In order to have your website usable on each older browser developers have to code up another version of your site with code specific to each old version. IE is the most common older browser still in use and developers are reluctantly coding for IE 6, 7, 8, and 9. There are up to 3 screen sizes within each of these older IEs that require specific versions of your code.

Is your new site going to work on ALL browsers?
It's common for website providers to use precoded templates to shave down time and costs to the consumer. The templates are purchased error free and ready for a specified variety of browsers, therefore it's common for teams to assume the template works on all browsers when the site is complete and this may not be the case. Testing on all browsers is either not done or insufficient to reveal problems and sites are launched regardless.

What to expect when you bring it up with your web team
The topic of different browsers needs to be discussed with your Web Team, you may find that it isn't included in the price quoted. A Web team that doesn't care to meet web standards is likely to say that nobody uses these older browsers anymore, so you don't have to worry about it. If you have an international audience for your website you MUST employ a team who can provide for older browsers, China's use of IE6 is still 3%. For local websites, you may think we don't have to worry, but be aware that updating software on computers in public spaces is restricted to an administrator, just one very busy person who may think updating a browser is not a priority. This means computers in government departments, education environments, hospitals, libraries etc systematically smash websites to pieces because they are running IE 7 or 8, for instance.

But it's not just older browsers causing smashes
If a Web Team isn't worried about older browsers, it's highly likely they aren't testing the finished site on ANY browser. I was surprised to see smashed sites last week when I reviewed the top ranking web providers in my area, I opened their sites in the new Google Chrome. New Google Chrome is a beautiful browser and reads coding errors correctly. If the code is wrong the result shown by Chrome could render the site useless. The award winning website company hadn't tested their site in the latest version of Chrome. Don't think that the issues were simply cosmetic and therefore could be shrugged off, these errors caused the primary navigation buttons to be useless, users were unable to move beyond the first page to access contact information and important text boxes floated half way off the page. Can you afford not to cater for Google Chrome users? Chrome now represent 30% of Australian Browsers. A customer landing on a site like this will not understand what's going on and will bounce straight back to the search results for a site that does work. Users won't open an alternative browser to view the site again or download a browser update and reload the site. Would you?


How many browsers should be tested for and how far back?
Well, the answer to that is easy. If you have an international audience and you want your site available everywhere, your site should be tested on all browsers including IE 6. If you have a specific country that you're marketing into you can check their browser preferences at statCounter. Set the Stat: Browser field to "Browser Version" and select the target country.
Coding for IE 6 is time consuming, you will need to consider the Return On Investment achieved if you decide to go for it.  If you have a local website, IE 6 isn't necessary. Snap2 SEO tests and codes for browsers back to IE 7 for local sites, unless we get a specific request.

The point is Testing
The practice of testing is a web industry standard. Validation is part of the Testing process and indicates all known errors that will cause browsers to balk at your website. If a company isn't testing thoroughly, it's unlikely they're concerned about Validation either.
After I tested the top ranking Website providers in Chrome, I ran their sites through a little piece of validation software. Validation not only checks for coding errors that cause browser issues, it picks up spelling mistakes and missing links too. SEO is interested in eliminating errors in websites because they effect rank. The result of my validation tests on the local web providers was: Best at 44 errors, Worst at over 200 errors. The consumer will pick up the costs of poor standards through loss of customers or when the SEO team needs to recode to eliminate the errors. Google prefers error free sites and is moving towards testing sites for usability issues.

How do you know if your site validates? 
As a website consumer, how will you know your site validates or doesn't?
Spelling mistakes are part and parcel of working with text and eliminating them is a team effort that goes on until the site is released for public viewing, but spelling mistakes are one of the first indicators of insufficient testing if they persist on finished sites. If I saw spelling mistakes on a site released to the public, I'd start looking for broken links. A site with spelling mistakes and missing links hasn't passed validation. 

How do you really know what browsers customers are using?
The browser to country statistics are available on the net, until your site is launched and Analytics show beyond a shadow of a doubt what the majority of your customers are using. Analytics tracks your visitors when they are on your site. From Analytics we can tell which country, which browser and what device. Until you can get your Analytics set up on your site, what you can do as a website consumer is look for signs of Standards when shopping for your website team. Choose to work with companies who advertise their products work on all browsers and meet W3C Standards. Check for spelling mistakes and missing links on their sites. At very least open their sites in Safari, Firefox and Chrome and at work on your office computer before you sign up to them. You may be surprised at what you see.

Does Your UX Suck? Principle #8: URLs Are Meaningful & User-friendly

A URL, or Uniform Resource Locator,  is the address of a website and will start with http://www.

When considering what your URL should be take UX and Google's recommendations to heart, you'll have that URL for a very long time and a bad one can cause you to lose visitors and sales.



URLs need to be User Friendly
Google suggests that URLs be reader friendly, and by this Google means a few things:
Firstly, Google means URLs should be readable by humans.
Humans find the following a little difficult: www.davidcoppermeisterpsychology.com and you see it everywhere on the net. It's an example of conjoined words, joined words. Googlebot, Google's spider that catalogues your website for searches, can't understand conjoined words either.

Keep it simple
Your URL is one of your first opportunities to convey who and what you are to both humans and robots, but an opportunity missed if it can't be read by either.
Sites with complicated spelling may loose visitors too because many, many potential visitors can't spell. Take for example a company with the correct spelling for homoeopathics in their URL, it's easy to imagine that many visitors will struggle with the spelling of homoeopathics. Even if one letter is incorrect when entering a URL, its unlikely that the visitor will find their way to the destination. If you've got a word like this in your URL it would be best to not further complicate matters by conjoining it with other words.
Google and humans would be more comfortable with hyphen separated words like: www.hands-on-homoeopathics.com. Easier to read, right?

No Camels or Underscores
CamelText isn't spider friendly. Camel Text omits the space between two words and uses a capital to indicate the start of a new word. The naming convention is common in web filing systems, but Google doesn't recommend it.
Underscores are unfriendly, too. When the url is underlined which will happen if it's hyperlinked, humans have difficulty seeing the underscores, for example: www.digital_web_group.com, when underlined becomes www.digital_web_group.com

What's a meaningful URL?
UX and Google talk about meaningful URLs in relation to URLs that look like this:

http://www.example.com/welcome/newpage.php?referrerid=789678&threadid=543894 

A URL that ends in a gobbleygook string of meaningless characters can be generated by things like dynamic tracking settings in Content Management Systems( CMS ) and by settings in Wordpress. They aren't human friendly and a real drag to have to manually type into a URL field.

Does Your UX Suck? Principle #7: Headings are important to creatures other than People

Intro 
Headings are important signposts to people to visually navigate a site and find the information quickly. Headings should operate like flags to the reader, remember searchers are operating like hungry beasts on your site scanning your headings to find a possible answer to their question. The headings should be visually distinct, direct and if possible keep it short, but SEO has added to the importance of headings and they are now of interest to more than just human readers, so I want to talk about the text on a website in general, not just headings now to shed light on all the purposes text has on a website and who's responsible for text in a web relationship. Why? Not many people want the job of writing content for their site and without it the job can't start or finish. If it's taken up by somebody they often put their heart and soul into it to make it just right, so when the time comes to hand over the text to the Developer, it can then be difficult to see the text unravelled, deconstructed and apparently unappreciated. Writers are usually only focused on human audiences for their text, this post sheds light on the demands on the text from the web side, the text not only has to read, it has to WORK. It has a function beyond conveying meanings to humans and no matter how sincere and well written the text is, if it doesn't fulfil it's web functions, it's unlikely to receive a significant human audience anyway.  

Who's responsible for Generating Content?
You are. When building a new website, you'll be called on by your web developer to supply content about your business and products, this is normal. Content means images, graphics and text and this can be a surprise to some clients. When it comes to text, there is nobody better than you, perhaps only your staff, who can come up with relevant subjects for content as you know your industry, your unique selling points and your customer's needs best. Often, there is an expectation that the web developer supplies content and this expectation can extend to logos, video, images, policy documents, everything. This isn't the case: graphic designers do logos, video editors do video, photographers do photography. In the case of text for your website, I assure you your Web Developer probably isn't a qualified copywriter. Copy writing is a distinctly different skill than web development. The Web Developer's area is the structure of your website itself and it's functionality, so the job of generating content is yours unless you are willing to incur the cost of hiring a Copywriter.

Meandering organically in web development is called Disorganisation
One of the first task a web developer will do when starting your job is to understand the content you want on your site and create a navigation system for it. If the Developer is held up waiting for you to supply a overview of the content you want on your site, they can't be assured that the work they're doing is realistic. Meandering organically through web development is costly, so you should expect your web developer to lead the process and request content by certain times. Expect a limit to reworkings and expect a point when new ideas simply can't be included, idea generation is for the early stages of the website planning and once coding gets underway it will be restricted, probably by constraints of the Navigation and especially when developing a responsive site that goes to phone.

Once your text is written, the Developer will allocate it to a page within the navigation and a box within the structure of the page. Days of coding to format the text to the look of your branding will ensue and then the reshaping of the text can begin for the non-human audience. You see, a SEO specialist will be making sure that Spiders find your words and phrases in all the likely hangouts that spiders like to go.

What's a Spiders doing on my site?
As you can imagine, trawling the far corners of the internet for sites to read and catalogue is a huge job for a search engine. Google says they have found 30 trillion URLs on the web and they crawl over 20 billion pages on a typical day. To do the job of reading and cataloguing all this information, Google created a little robot called ‘Googlebot’. Each search engine has one of these little robots and in SEO they’re called Spiders, Crawlers or Bots.

Spiders don't read like humans do. When the text is finished it may not even be what you would consider grammatically correct writing and certainly not what a good creative writing course would tell you to do for human readers. The conventions of good writing are not the same when writing for spiders, for example, the words we really need spider to see will be shown to spiders more than once, so it's not advisable to find an interesting variety of descriptive language as you would for humans, repetition is key when it comes to a spider. Headings, usually signposts to readers, are an opportunity for Spider bait. In some cases the use of grammar may inhibit spider from seeing a series of words we call key phrases, so grammar is ditched for the sake of rank.

Conclusion
So you see, there are demands and pressures on your text from all sides on the web. For text to perform and bring in the readers, it needs to convey something interesting, look attractive, convey which order its to be read, but above all and first text needs to be findable by a spider. It really is a process, the words you generate are fed into the cycle raw and are refined and added to, to come out the other side highly functioning. Now that you know I hope you are able to enjoy the process of your website development a whole lot more and get that text to your Developer quickly, knowing that they are going to change it considerably and really do appreciate your effort. In fact, they couldn't do it without you.

Does Your UX Suck? Principle #6: Links Are Consistent & Easy to Identify

Links must be easily identified and their look should be consistent throughout the document, but does a hyperlink have to be the default of blue and underlined these days for readers to know it's a hyperlink?  No. These days any element given emphasis to stand out from the other components on the page is expected to be linked. Let me example what I'm saying right here: hyperlinks don't have to be blue or underlined. Any element can be given emphasis to attract a reader's attention and today's readers test for interactivity, looking for small clues like the hand cursor to indicate the presence of a hyperlinked element. The upside of this for web designers is that links can be within the colour scheme of the website and therefore harmonious to their surrounds and the readers flow inside the document.

Older UX checklists advise to limit hyperlinks so as not to distract the reader, but the value of hyperlinks to Google's understanding of your website is well known by SEO strategists. Many of the top ranking SEO companies have over 1000 links on their websites. In the past the links have contributed to the authority of the website and it's credibility, but Google warns that things have changed and link farming is frowned upon. Websites risk being demoted by Google in future if the links are found to be pointless. Still, sites with heaps of links are achieving a higher page authority and a higher rank than those without, so Snap2's Local Bizz Refresh steadily adds quality links to websites, both inbound and outbound links, and seeks out links of real value to your audience.

Does Your UX Suck? Principle #5:The number of buttons needs to be reasonable.

The number of buttons needs to be reasonable, but what is a reasonable number of buttons?
The buttons of your navigation are generated by your content. It's essential that the content be well  organised into pages and the full Navigation system be well planned and easily distinguished. It is likely that you will end up with 2 or 3 navigation systems leading visitors around your site. The Primary Navigation needs to be visible above the fold. Standard names of primary navigation buttons are Home, About, Contact, Services, perhaps FAQs, Portfolio and a variety of others depending on the industry behind the website and shouldn't comprise any more than 7 buttons in total.

Why only 7?
Too many buttons never really was an issue for websites until the proliferation of mobile devices. The Nav systems you create on a standard website will need to adjust to work on a small screen device too, as your site will at some point become responsive. The primary Nav menu needs to be accessible from anywhere on the page. For touch devices, nav buttons become more and more problematic as the screen gets smaller, because there simply isn't the room for buttons as well as viewing area.

If you're committed to the idea of super light sites, an unreasonable number of pages isn't to your advantage either. Complex sites are heavier in MB and Google prefers super light sites. When the site components shuffle for the phone screen size, unreasonable amounts of information will need to be weeded out anyway.

Does Your UX Suck? Principle #4: Company Logo Is Prominent and Company Information available.

The position of the Logo
Below the fold is the area below the view area. To get "below the fold" means scrolling down after the page has finished loading. A few years ago designers were making page heights specific to monitors sizes and it was not good form to make people scroll, left, right or down, but responsivity (websites that go to phones and tablets) and the many various screen sizes that websites must now perform on, have changed all that. The latest websites are built to scroll in every direction.

So the conversation about what is appropriate for positioning 'below the fold'  has become an important feature of UX. It is agreed that below the fold is NOT considered a prominent area, which seems an obvious thing to say, but I have had clients want to move their company logo from top-right to below the fold. The company logo should be placed in the prime real estate of a webpage, that's the top. Keep in mind that Google can't read image Banners, so you'll see less and less of them on the net now. With the release of HTML 5, which is the standard about to be released by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the structure of the page is being given specific tag names that Google is geared to watch out for. If your logo is an image it should be named in a SEO friendly manner and be siting where Google expects to find it, top. The logo image will not be a banner, the image length will only span the width of the logo and the extra space will allow other important company text.

Webfonts are a very exciting development for future websites. Websfonts are a library of funky fonts which allow designers to build text based logos on a webpage, rather than image based ones. This will be great for SEO as Googlebot will be able to read a logos content, but Webfonts aren't stable yet and can drop back to a plain old default. Logos should look the same where ever they show up and most companies would not like the idea of their logo changing it's style on an older browser. If you would like to see a webfont in action visit Snap2 SEO, our major headings and our logo is webfont, 'Matiz'. I allow webfont in my logo because I am more interested in Google's ability to read my business name. It's ok with me if it drops back to the default font of Arial on some older browsers.

UX gurus agree the Main Navigation needs to be above the fold also. The main Navigation buttons are the primary access points to the rest of your site, there may also be Secondary Navigation. The Primary Navigation needs to be obvious from the get go and that's above the fold. The Secondary Navigation is ok to put below the fold.

What should be 'Below the Fold'?
I've seen sites with so much top real-estate given to paid advertising that you couldn't distinguish the company logo, it was swamped by other company's advertising. For your logo to have Prominence your logo has to stand out from the surrounds. Google will wonder about your Credibility if he sees paid advertising above the fold, so advertising definitely should go below the fold and should never be near your own logo.

Company Information can go 'Below the Fold' The Company Info which includes the address or contact details can go below the fold, in fact, usability experts suggest that it helpful to have it on the bottom of every page. More lengthy company information can go on the About page and usually gives a visitor the complete story of the company, all they need to know about the company, the staff and even their commitment to quality.

Does Your UX Suck? Principle #2: Legibility of Text for All your visitors

Colour of Text
“Dark-gray on light-gray may seem stylish” says Dr. Peter J. Meyers1 , but due to browsers rendering colour unreliably, websites with poor contrast between text and background may be risky for legibility of your site. Dr. Meyers also suggests that font sizes should err on the side of too big and the recommended starting point is 16pts.
You know at least 1 in 10 men are colour blind and poor contrast is an issue for sufferers of colour blindness, so your choice for text colour and backgrounds needs to be made carefully. For visitors to your site, clicking on buttons you can't read can be a frightening experience.

Access
Be aware that sight-impaired visitors use ALT tags to read your site, it's an industry standard and law that sites be accessible to vision impaired folk, so Alt tags need to be included on your site. An Alt tag is visible to sighted readers, you've all seen a yellow tool tip like label appear with the name of the image when you place you cursor over the image on your site. Vision Impaired can set their computer to speak the Alt tag label.
 Insist your designers follow standard and insist on Alt tags.

Standards
More interestingly though, missing Alt tags indicate that your site probably isn't being "validated", either. Validation is a process used to eradicate errors in the code of your site. When you test a website for validation, you eradicate known issues that cause browsers to mess up your site. If your site was "validated" before release, missing Alt tags would set off alerts throughout, and many other more important errors would be highlighted and fixed before release. Expect that your site should be Validated and a company who doesn't care about Validation isn't providing you with a professional product.

1. Dr. Meyers, P.J. 2012. Usereffect, Strategic
Web Usability: 25-point Website Usability Checklist.
Retrieved 23-9-12. http://www.usereffect.com/
topic/25-point-website-usability-checklist