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.