Why don’t we talk about Findability?

We’re big fans of A List Apart. They’re on our list of resource links for a reason, after all. We admire the goal of touching on as many aspects of the web as possible. This means that pretty much every issue will have something for us. A feature in particular that I like about the site is “Editor’s Choice”, a selected article from a past issue that is insightful as always, and usually very relevant, no matter how long ago it was originally published.

This article about Findability in particular drew my attention, as it represents an aspect of modern web project development so important, the fact that it’s still so overlooked boggles the mind. Findability bridges the divide between web design and SEO, something we’re pushing for ourselves with Smart Spark, and something that shouldn’t even exist in the first place. But it seemingly still does.

As the article indicates, there are many facets to a quality web project. It talks about steadfast elements like Project Management and Architecture, which are universal and permeate through any kind of project. It touches on elements that are often used to pitch ambitious web projects, such as Usability, Accessibility, Design, and even User Experience (often abbreviated as UX), the kind of sexy buzzwords that few may fully understand, but all “just have to have” in their corporate web presence. Just like Search Engine Optimization. And while Findability seems to be that perfect blend of web design and web marketing, it still gets lost in the shuffle.

Is it be cause the majority of the SEO realm is populated by professionals who are marketers first, and web professionals second, and they thus shy away from any aspect of a web project involving delving into the source code? And on the other side of the coin, is Findability shunned by the pure web professional because Optimization experts are viewed as virtual pitchmen or carnival barkers, sullying their pristine trade, and therefore dabbling in SEO is like sharing a pint with the devil? Either line of thinking is ironic at best, and destructive at worst. For the web to continue its evolution as a medium for information, interaction, and yes, profitability, the individual facets of any web presence need to become more intertwined, not more discrete.

Confession: I’ve been a bit enamored with the term Findability ever since I read it in Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards. Search Engine Optimization felt a little like a flaky marketing term, meant more to sell the service than to describe it. Findability always seemed more practical and robust. Optimizing a site involves constantly adjusting your aim, attempting to hit a moving target. Building Findability into a site brings that target in closer, making it easier to hit on a regular basis and with success.

Bring on Bing!

There’s a good chance that by now you’ve heard of bing, Microsoft’s new search engine. The optimistic will say that it’s a distillation of many existing search engines, honing what works, culling what doesn’t, adding what was missing, and subtracting what was extraneous. The cynical will admonish the Redmond juggernaut for yet again forcing its way into a market of which is just can’t bear not having a significant share. While the negative have precedent to cite (such as Exhibit A and Exhibit B), the positive arguably have some evidence in their favour. bing does have a number of features that could make it a useful little engine, after all.

Opinions aside, many will wonder whether it will make a big enough splash to warrant attention from web professionals, particularly SEO professionals. Well it wouldn’t be like Microsoft to just throw a new technology out into the wild to die. They’ve clearly put a ton of marketing into it already. I’ve already seen ads on sites like msnbc (unsurprising) and facebook (more surprising). It will most certainly see a push from the company’s more ubiquitous software offerings, perhaps with the next IE as well as Windows 7. It may catch on pretty quickly, grabbing a significant market share in short order. If it doesn’t, expect Microsoft to keep pushing it until it does.

So in short, it would be wise to keep bing in mind while optimizing from this point on. Then again, that question may have been a non-question; it’s a search engine, so optimize for it.

Now, what kind of special needs does bing have? Two elements in particular jump right out of the SERP: the Quick Tabs and the Document Preview.

bing SERP - Quick Tabs

The panel to the left of the search results is a little reminiscent of  a categories menu in an e-commerce website. It gives you popular variations of a given search. clicking on any of the tabs will quickly requery bing with the additional keyword appended to your search.

This makes those all-important long tail keywords even more critical to search engine success. Imagine if a user were to click through those tabs and spot the same site at or near the top of each result. It’s an incredibly powerful means for exposure. Chances are, the Quick Tabs will also provide a little direction when doing keyword research.

The other feature of bing that really got me curious about working with it is the Document Preview. Point your mouse over the right edge of a result, and a tooltip-style window will pop up giving you more information about the page, beyond the META description. the Document Preview displays extra page content, including a list of key links found within the document.

bing SERP - Document Preview

This one appears to be a bit of a moving target. It doesn’t look to simply be the first x number of  words found in the body of a page, nor does it directly relate to anything within the META tags. But if it can be controlled, it’d be a golden opportunity to feed a user that much more information in order to draw them from that perceived safe zone of the search engine, down into the website proper. Then again, perhaps Microsoft’s algorithm for gleaning Document Preview content is intentionally oblique; as we all know, if it can be manipulated, it can and will be abused. Even so, though, it stands to reason that the best strategy will be to be even more vigilant about putting the best content possible at the forefront of the page. Having a good number of internal links handy seems to be wise as well, in order to take advantage of that “Also on this page” subsection.

Additionally, Microsoft has seen fit to provide webmasters with the capability to disable the Document Preview tab for any or all of ther pages in their sites. In my humble opinion, though, doing this for any site that is also being actively optimzed would be lunacy.

There are certainly more attributes to bing than these that make it an apt competitor in the search engine world. It also marks what appears to be a far more concerted effort than MSN or live.com in assessing user behaviours and addressing their needs.  The one realm it certainly has room to grow, however, is in webmaster/developer support, as their resources are easily dwarfed by those put out by the likes of Google and Yahoo!. Bing will most certainly evolve in this department, however, and as a result, more SEO tricks and opportunities are sure to trickle out.

Code vs. Content: Where to Optimize?

A web design trick I learned very early on in my career is “peeking under the hood”: glancing at another site’s source code to see how they pulled off some visual trick or another. I taught myself a good number of JavaScript techniques that way; granted, this was when the technology was being used solely for mouseover effects, pop-up windows, and the like. Anyway, I’ve come to discover that peering at another site’s source is not so much a trick as it is common design practice. Just as long as you’re not brazenly plagiarizing the source in the process.

So when we began to get our feet wet with SEO, I took the same approach. Checking out high-ranking sites to see how they do it. As we all know, though, there’s far more to optimizing a site than what one can find in the source code. But it still makes for a good starting point. And in the process I did discover something rather interesting, something that happens to be the exact opposite of what I was looking for. Many of these sites were actually succeeding in spite of their code, rather than because of it!

There seems to be a few levels of this transgression. The most glaring is where some sites are lacking the pure fundamentals. The stuff that can be considered best practices for both SEO and design. Images that were missing ALT attributes. Headings or important segments of text placed as graphics on the page. The complete absence of heading tags of any level (i.e. <H1>, <H2>, and on down). Pages without titles, or – almost as bad – with misspelled titles. These are the things that neither a designer nor an optimizer should be letting slip.

Then there’s the faults that may be a little more “high-concept”, and may boil down to design techniques and philosophies. But they’re still things I’d never expect to find in a high-ranking site. Bulky tables-based layouts, or CSS and JavaScript that ought to be kept in a separate file are all just things to get between the spiders and the meaty optimized content. And while I do know that W3C validation is not an outright requirement, I did come across sites that boasted valid markup, yet failed validation!

The realms of both search engine optimization and web site design are so vast, few companies are equipped to handle a significant portion of either, let alone both.  All the same, both industries will continue to coexist on many a project. In order to do so harmoniously, designers will need to learn how to gear their code toward quality optimization techniques, and SEO experts will need to learn what HTML formatting helps their cause, and in what ways. And if, heaven forbid, you find yourself wearing both the hat of web coder and search engine optimizer, the need to be well versed in both fields is that much more important, lest you wish to become your own worst enemy!

Does Your Web Site Do The Job?

Having been in the web design business for a little over 10 years, we’ve had occasion to look at hundreds and hundreds of web sites when doing research for our clients in order to “scope out the competition”, and try to do something just a little bit better and a little bit different. While doing this research, a couple of things quickly become apparent. Sites that appear high in search engine ranking show a lot of forethought, planning and effort in presenting a site that is truly representative of the business. It’s also apparent that a lot of money has been invested in a professionally created site. We’ve also seen the other end of the spectrum where businesses in a effort to “doing things on the cheap” have cobbled together a do-it-yourself site just for the sake of having a presence in the Internet. I won’t ruin anybody’s breakfast with details, but we’ve all seen them, haven’t we?

At first glance, developing a web site and publishing it to the Internet may appear to be fairly easy. So easy in fact, that many download a template offered by any number of ISP’s and others, slap together some words on a page, add a few images (usually poor quality), and put the creation on the Internet for the world to see. Unfortunately, many do-it-yourself authors have taken this approach by constructing documents that show very little consideration for the reader as well as poorly showcasing their products and services. When visitors come to a site, it’s important to have a look and feel that will carry throughout the pages to make the visitor interested and comfortable. We don’t want our senses assaulted.

Don’t get me wrong here, there are any number of well laid out, well planned, highly functional templates available on the web that can be used when budget is a factor. There’s a big difference between fiscally responsible and flat out cheap. If the template option is to be used, then as with every other aspect of creating a web presence, research the many templates that are available and choose the one that best allows you to incorporate the look and feel of your business and the message you want to convey to new and returning clients. Quite often, due to requirements involving advanced functionality, interactivity and complex visuals, your only option is to employ the services of a professional designer. Here again, research is key in choosing the right designer.

Your ultimate decision whether to do it yourself or to hire a professional designer rests in how honest you can be with yourself about your abilities and talents. Economic factors aside, there are literally thousands of small business web sites on the Internet that are actually losing business because of a poorly planned and designed site. By the same token, there are also a large number of do-it-yourself sites that demonstrate a high degree of planning, creativity, and marketing sense. To develop a truly effective web site, this last point is key. A commitment to do whatever it takes to properly develop an effective site must be made from the start, and that commitment must be carried to the end.

Regardless of whether you choose a template drive site or hire a professional designer, the old adage of “you get what you pay for” couldn’t be more fitting.

The Obligatory “Welcome” Post

This is the first true post of the Wenex Blog. So it should be somewhat introductory in nature.

The closest thing we’ve ever done to this is our Knowledge base in prior iterations of wenex.com. Writing articles for it were a lot of fun, but recently, I wanted to do more with it. In particular:

1. Create some more “editorial” or off-the-cuff contributions to the Knowledge Base.
2. Allow for reader interaction (partly to see if anyone was actually reading some of these articles!)
3. Make it easier to search, cross-reference, and just plain find these articles.

And as the tired cliche goes, why reinvent the wheel? This wish list describes a weblog to the letter. So a weblog is clearly the way to go.

So please link us! Add us to your blogroll! We’ll be discussing the web, technology as it pertains to the web, business as it pertains to the web, and life, as it pertains to-well, you get the idea.

Best of all, if you would like to comment, we may take requests for future issues to address, as well as solicit additional contributors. This will be far more organic, more involved, and more dynamic than the Wenex Knowledge Base ever was, making it ever more exciting to work on as well.