The survey for people who make web sites 2008

A List Apart have published a new survey about our profession. It calls for designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and anyone else who has anything to do with making web sites to have input.

There’s 40-something questions, go to http://www.alistapart.com/articles/survey2008 when you have a few spare minutes.

Be human

When you’re thinking about search engine optimisation for your content, think human. While search engines are essentially programs with elaborate algorithms to traverse web sites on the Internet, I believe they are becoming more human.

Think about it. For the Google search engine to deliver the most relevant search results to you it must try to think like you.

It must determine the difference between a legitimate car sales web site, and a hoax web site filled with hidden key words related to car sales. You would know at a glance that the hoax is a hoax of course.

I suggest when you write your content, design your page, and format and style your headings and tables, be human. Do what is most logical. Make it make sense. And what makes sense to you will make sense to the search engine.

Using the most appropriate HTML elements will benefit your search engine ranking and most importantly your users.

Use the W3schools HTML reference to describe your content in the most meaningful way.

Google Sites

My best friend and I are researching the idea of an investment club, and since we are located in different parts of Queensland I wondered how we could keep in touch and share our documentation, resources, links, etc.

A short investigation of Google Docs and other collaboration tools lead to the discovery of Google Sites. Google Sites has various features for planning club meetings, sharing documents and photos, and allows you to set the site up for viewing by invitation only.

For my friend who is not familiar with the mechanics of a web site, this user-friendly tool appears to be the perfect solution for our new club.

If you have a Google account, you can learn more about Google Sites and view examples at http://sites.google.com.

And if you’re interested in setting up an investment club ASX has helpful resources and information.

User testing in a virtual world

I recently attended a seminar, hosted by an organisation called Hyro, on user-centred design research methods. They touched on your usual techniques: interviews, surveys, focus groups, card-sorts, but presented more on teleconferencing, video conferencing and virtual worlds.

The most popular globally recognised virtual world on the Internet at the moment is Second Life. Users become ‘residents’ of Second Life, represented by an avatar, and interact with each other via their avatar. Residents can carry out activities representative of real-life activities in the virtual world.

Hyro has taken advantage of the user interactivity that comes with Second Life and created a virtual office on a virtual island with interview rooms and group meeting rooms.

Hyro facilitates interviews, focus groups and workshops at their virtual office for their clients requiring user testing. Participants can interact with the virtual facilitator by typing their questions and responses.

You may find you will get more confident, ‘tech-savvy’ users by conducting tests using more modern technology, but that is just something to keep in mind when deciding which methods you wish to use, and it will also depend on your project.

If you’re interested in user-testing for your web site and have any questions feel free to send me an email. I’m happy to advise.

If you’re a resident of Second Life have a look for Hyro’s virtual island. Hyro also recommended we look at Nike’s virtual shoe store, Telstra BigPond’s virtual Australian landmarks, and Nissan’s virtual vending machine which dispenses free Nissan Sentras and allows you to ‘test drive’ on a virtual race track.

Opening PDF files

You can specify the presentation of your PDF document when it opens using commands in the hyperlink that launches it.

Special parameters can be used to display a specific page, set the zoom level, and show or hide the navigation panel.

The following link will open the PDF file at page 5.

http://www.awebsite.com/document.pdf#page=5

The following link will open the PDF file at page 5, and stretch the document to fit the width of the window.

http://www.awebsite.com/document.pdf#page=5&view=Fit

I mostly find this useful for specifying the page, but it is worth knowing it is possible to manipulate your PDFs in other ways in case the need pops up in the future.

Download Adobe’s Parameters for Opening PDF Files document for full details.

File naming convention

I recommend that before uploading files to your web site your PDF and image file names, particularly, should be lowercase, have no spaces and no special characters.

Below is some background to my recommendations.

Spaces are ignored by some browsers

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer can be very forgiving of our mistakes, however not all visitors to your web site use Internet Explorer, and therefore any links on your web site with spaces will not work for your other visitors. For example,

http://www.amazingwebsite.com.au/interesting document.pdf

An Internet Explorer browser will recognise the illegal link and change it to:

http://www.amazingwebsite.com.au/interesting%20document.pdf

All other browsers will not recognise the full link, stop at the space, and begin requesting the following:

http://www.amazingwebsite.com.au/interesting

Underscores are acceptable, but not recommended

All browsers will accept the underscore character, however it is not easily identifiable when quoted in text on a page or an email. For example,

http://www.amazingwebsite.com/interesting_document.pdf

Depending on the font, users may not be able to distinguish visually if there is a space or an underscore, due to the underline.

Special characters are special for a reason

‘, “, \, #, &, $, ., just to name a few, all have special meaning in different programming languages and must be avoided.

Lowercase only

Using capitals in a file name can be a risk if you are not consistent, and potentially become a problem to your web site if it is hosted on a Unix server. Unix servers are case sensitive. Therefore, “Adocument.pdf” is seen as a different file to “adocument.pdf”. Avoid this potential problem by only using lowercase characters. If you must improve the readability of your file names by using capitals ensure you are consistent.

One last tip

Use 2 - 3 words, descriptive and meaningful, that will match the hyperlinked text in some way.

Lorem ipsum

When finalising a web site design or a newsletter mock up you might find that filling in the space left for content with “placeholder text” allows you to more clearly visualise the finished product.

So some Internet searching revealed a Lorem ipsum generator. It not only generates all the placeholder text you could ever ask for, the web site actually gives an explanation of where Lorem ipsum text originated from.

“Lorem ipsum is latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage from Cicero’s ‘de Finibus’ 1.10.32, which begins ‘Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit …’ [There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]. [de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, is a treatise on the theory of ethics very popular in the Renaisance.]”

The web site provides the original text in Latin and English. Even in English it’s still confusing.

Image thumbnail generator

If you are without image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, Fireworks, Jasc Paintshop Pro, etc. then to resize your images you can use a free tool provided on the web called QuickThumbnail.

QuickThumbnail will resize the image you upload from your computer by percentages, fixed pixels or preset sizes.

http://quickthumbnail.com/

For your privacy, your image is deleted from QuickThumbnail’s systems 10 minutes after you upload it. Then no-one else can view or copy your image.

Writing for the web (article from Council Leader magazine)

The following article is from a recent edition of Council Leader magazine. I wanted to share because it sums up basic points to remember when writing for the web.

Writing for the web is different from writing for print because people use web pages differently.

Miriam Airey from Ellipsis Writing and Editing says that many organisations disappoint customers by making their websites arduous to read.

“People flit around a website. They scan, they scroll, they click, and they lose patience quickly when they can’t find what they want,” she says.

“Web users have no interest in reading through introductions and background information when all they want is an answer to a specific question.”

Miriam explains that only around 15 per cent of web users actually read word by word. Why? “Because reading a screen is slower and less comfortable than reading a paper page.”

Miriam points out that using lists, highlighted words, concise paragraphs and, most importantly, reducing the word count by half, can increase online readability by up to 120 per cent. She also explains that choosing shorter words and writing shorter sentences will help readers to get your message clearly and quickly.

Easy really! Miriam is from Ellipsis Writing and Editing, based in Brisbane, Australia.

Fun and educational interactive Flash games

I’m looking for some inspiration for some interactive Flash games. The easy part is creating the game. The hard part is putting an educational spin on it for the target audience, school aged children, and keeping it fun.

Feedback so far is that anything with shooting, flying and adventure is fun, crosswords and findawords are not. So far I’ve created a catching game where an item is falling and points are awarded for each catch. The more you catch, the faster the items will fall. I’ve also created a crossword. I’ll be interested to see the hit statistics on my crossword, because while some children won’t enjoy the crossword, there’s got to be some young kids who will enjoy the challenge. I know this because a survey of my work colleagues and I revealed that we all enjoyed crosswords and findawords at school.

So my challenge is to create fun interactive Flash games with some educational value, somewhere in between the two I’ve created above.

Just for fun, there is an incredible collection of Flash games, with no education value, by Ferry Halim at http://www.orisinal.com.