Posted on: November 13th, 2009
Category: Uncategorized
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is vitally important when it comes to building a website. Google drives more traffic through the internet than any other site, so it’s naturally important that a website gets found on Google. But that’s only half the picture.
Very simply, SEO on its own is a waste of effort and money. A site needs to be well optimised for search so that it attracts visitors from Google and other search engines, but it also needs to be well set up for those visitors to find what they need, or to make an enquiry, or the buy a product. Usability is the factor that determines if they can do these things.
SEO is a quick win
SEO gets a lot of attention, especially from website development firms, because it is fairly quantifiable. It has the advantage that by getting a site up in Google’s rankings, the site will enjoy a certain amount more traffic. That is a pretty sure thing.
SEO is anything but a quick win
The flip side is that Google isn’t trying to please the SEO experts, it’s trying to please the people that ask for search results. Factors like the age of the website, incoming links from other websites and blogs and volume and consistency of content play a big part in getting Google to consider a web page as an authority on a subject. Those are factors that can’t be built into a website – they need to be built up through time and effort. To get the pages on your website to feature well in the search results for a broad range of keywords, you need to be creating content on those subjects week in and week out, through News articles, Blog posts and pages on your website. You also need to give it a couple of years of evaluation of the site’s traffic analytics before you can properly measure results.
The Value of a Good User Experience
The majority of traffic to your site will come from places other than Google – most sites that we operate show that less than 40% of traffic comes from people typing a keyword into Google. Because people generally come to the web after they’ve been introduced to a brand or business (through personal contact or advertising), they tend to type in www.yourbusiness.co.za to look for you. If this gives them no joy, they’ll eventually land up on Google, where they’ll type in your company name rather than a keyword related to your company.
No matter how visitors have landed up at your site, the most important thing is to give them good service, which, in the virtual world of the internet equals good usability. If someone has had an easy time getting finding information on your site, they will be more likely to call you or to come back for related information. If someone found you at the top of Google but then had a hard time getting the information they wanted – they’ll never come back, and they’ll never call you.
YouTube is great – its a simple and effective way to store and display dynamic information about your business and services. Barak Obama uses it to chat to America every week. One of our clients uses it to show their work in progress.
Embedding YouTube video
YouTube has a nifty feature which allows you to embed any YouTube video into a blog post or a website. You set the size you want the video, copy the embed code and paste it into your blog post or web page. In a blog editor, you simply place the embed code into the editor. YouTube even has a lady in a nice YouTube T-shirt explaining how its done:
On a website through a CMS it can be a bit trickier:
Embedding video through the CMS
Our CMS has a special editor that allows you to add raw HTML to a page. This is great because you can place code from Google Maps and other 3rd-party online content providers – and you can place YouTube Embed code into this editor. The problem is that the column width of the website isn’t always right for the sizes that YouTube offers, and, because YouTube is Flash based, it sits above the editing controls in the CMS. We’re developing an new CMS editor that sorts this out, allowing you to overwrite the width & height values in the YouTube embed code.
If a business has a number of branches or stores around the country, we’ll often think of using Flash to show the spread of those stores and to link to store details. Now Flash can be good, but it can also irritate website visitors no end, so it’s a good idea to give a quick a run-down of the thinking that goes into using Flash to show store locations – but first let’s get clear what we’re talking about here:
A Flash map is a diagram showing a map of the country or region. It is created in Flash, which is a program for making interactive, animated content on a website. Visitors can click on shapes or labels on the map and the map will transform in some way – either zooming in, or showing some details.
1: Is it making it easier, or more difficult for the user?
This is by far the most important question, because if it takes longer to find what you are looking for using a Flash map than it would using a set of lists, then the Flash must go. If the Flash is allowing users to make less clicks, or it is showing the information more clearly than a list, then the Flash should be used. For Trellidor, we created a map of South Africa, showing the spread of stores. Finding store details using the map takes 1 less click than the drop-down menus (in all cases but Gauteng, Durban and Cape Town).
We were looking at zooming in to each province, to give the dots enough space (especially in Gauteng with is really tiny and always has the most stores or brnaches…) but currently Trellidor has enough stores to fill the national map, but not too many that each province is going to look crowded. They’re also not spreading very rapidly, so this map shouldn’t need to be completely reworked for 3 or 4 years.
2: Making an impression
This is pretty much the point of using a Flash Map. A set of drop-down lists is a simple, clear, universal way of searching by filtering data, so why use Flash? Well, becuase it looks cool.
In Trellidor’s case, we got the dots to spread randomly, giving a quick, simple impression of a good coverage of stores. Aside from that, the Flash doesn’t really do anything special (the map could have been created using Java, or a simple image-map). And that’s kind of OK, because it’s a neat little effect on the page – it makes the site that little bit nicer to visit. It doesn’t take ages to spread the dots, and it doesn’t slow down the page (at 36KB it’s the same size as a static image would be).
Zooming and shifting the map around can also make a big difference to the experience of the site, but point 1 above is far more important, because really, when you’re looking for a store phone number, you’re not looking to have a nice time with an interactive Flash map – you’re just looking for the phone number.
3: People are bad at identifying isolated shapes
Maps get tricky when they need to show a lot of data, because people are bad at recognising shapes when they’re taken out of context. It’s not a big difference, but generally people recognise shapes quicker if they are shown in relation to other recognisable shapes. This makes sense if you think about the ammount of times you have seen the outline of South Africa in compared to the times you’ve seen the outline of KwaZulu-Natal. You instantly recognise South Africa, but the KZN shape isn’t instantaneous – and besides, it’s just really weird-looking.
So we don’t really recommend showing continents, countries or provinces as isloated shapes.
4: What about updating the map?
Well, it can be done, but the general rule is that you can’t place a dot on a map through a content management system (CMS). Adding a new store to the Trellidor map gets done through an XML file – but it’s a quick process, and updating existing store details doesn’t affect the map, so overall it is very manageable from an update point of view.
There are way of getting maps to show data a whole lot more dynamically, although they do require a lot of customisation. Google Maps is a good example:
Google Maps lets you place dots on a map, and then embed the map into your website – I’m not sure how they do it, but its pretty cool that you can drag a dot and drop it onto a map on a website. Google Maps can also be customised to show layers of data, and, using the Trellidor example, you could drop a whole lot of dots onto a Google Map, each with their own store details. The data the Trellidor map has to show just doesn’t warrant that amount of work and customisation.
And the data is definitely the key factor when considering using an interactive map: If an interactive map helps users interact with the data quicker and easier, then its definitely the way to go.
We have launched a new website for ECS – Energy and Combustion Services. We really like the border-less design on this site – if you pay attention to these things, you’ll see that the blocks of content float over a background gradient, rather than sitting as a single block. We needed the site to be clean but hi-tech – without sinking into tech-style backgrounds and so on, so this floating design system keeps the site very light and open.
This site is specifically designed to grow – our client wanted to phase their content in, especially on their services. Our copywriter worked with ECS to set up landing pages for each services, with the plan to expand these in the coming months. Our CMS is great for this kind of content management as it allows web editors (whether its us or our client) to add new pages and then add basic content to those pages very easily. It means that we were able to go live with a smaller amount of content which was a lot quicker for our client to prepare initially.
Posted on: August 13th, 2009
Category: New websites
We’ve just completed a new website for Trellidor.
The page above shows Trellidor’s Standard security gate. We developed this page template to handle their basic products, and it works really well – it has a photo gallery, a highlighted features list, brochure download, further copy and links to their store locator. This is all handled through the CMS, so adding new images or ammending product features is really easy.
Store Locator
We’re also really happy with the Trellidor Store Locator page – it combines a simple set of drop-down searches, and a Flash map showing store distribution around South Africa. Again the details of the page are handled through the CMS, so new stores can be added very quickly. The Flash map is driven through an XML file so the map can be updated along with the database without having to return back to the source files. It makes a simple job of a simple job.
We’re developing a great new site for a client. The design and code are working really well (as always…), but on this project, the copy has really shone through, both in terms of providing users good information, and providing good keywords & structure for search optimisation.
This client has seen the light in terms of copy writing – they employ a copywriter part-time to work on all of their marketing material. This means that when we started collecting content together for the site, there was a large body of good copy already existing, and an easy way to get more copy written, from short intro snippets for the Home page to full blocks of copy for the main landing pages.
Our client is in the security products industry, and, more than just selling top of the range security products, they want to enter into the debate on the security situation for home and business owners here in South Africa. On the website, we’re doing this through a monthly discussion topic and other customer feedback components, and through a series of articles on security in South Africa. In this 1st phase of the site, there are 9 really good articles on topics ranging from Securing your home for the Holidays, to Security in a Complex or Cluster Home development. These articles are providing us with a huge amount of content with which to create a really good linking structure – Google is going to love the site! What this means is that because of the articles, which discuss the broader issues, but relate directly to our client’s products, the hero pages – which promote the products and have buttons that say “BUY NOW” – are really well supported and (hopefully) Google will rank them well.
We have a new project in the pipeline – for a wedding photographer – and we’re going to be using a series of articles on that site to achieve the same end. We discussed setting up a blog with the wedding photographer, but a blog isn’t right for his business, so articles will give him a more formal way of discussing broader topics.
It really does pay to have a copywriter working on a website project, and articles seem to work really hard on a site, providing content and search-friendly structure.
We’ve been looking around the web for Usability Testing software. In South Africa, most web development companies just plain don’t do usability testing – which would be fine except that most web development companies in South Africa aren’t that clued up about basic usability and user-centred design practices either. We’re also guilty – at best we do ad hoc testing using the client, friends and colleagues, backed up by a fairly in-depth understanding of basic usability practices.
The general opinion on Usability Testing in South Africa is that clients aren’t interested in it – that it’s impossible to justify the cost. This past week I’ve met with 3 clients, all of whom have easily understood and recognised that their website must give their business some return – either directly by making sales or indirectly by resulting in enquiries, and that to do that they need to think about their users first. They all understood that they didn’t need a website design – they need an online strategy to engage with their customers. And that means understanding user-centred design and information structures, and doing usability testing.
So we’re looking to do more, and so we’re looking for Usability Testing software.
Usability Software captures video of the user being tested, and the site that the user is testing, and places that in a picture-in-picture video. The plan being that this allows you to see how users use the website through both their verbal and facial comments, and through the clicks that they make.
We found Silverback from Clearleft, which is both not insanely expensive and is fully featured. Only problem is its only available on Mac. Most users in South Africa – and I mean up around 90% - are sitting with a 19-inch flat screen, set at 1024 x 768 or 800 x 600, running IE 6 or 7. If I place them in front of Safari on a Mac, they’re going to be completely distracted: “Where’s the close button?”. We’ve even considered asking users to bring their own mouse – the most disconcerting thing about a new computer? You are not fluent with your new mouse.
We found Morae from TechSmith, and that costs $2000, which in South Africa today translates to R19000. That’s just way too much, especially for the basic testing that we need – we’re just not doing projects that warrant extensive testing of new ways of interacting with data.
So we looked at TechSmith’s other products and found Camtasia. This is the basic picture-in-picture bundle, without the huge amount of extra features that Morae offers. We’ll see how this goes.
So: Welcome to the Black Square Blog. Watch us start our website development business:
Office – check (+ air-conditioning)
Phone – check
Computers – 3 out of 4
Desks, chairs, multiplugs etc… – check
Folders for client info – check
Clients – check
Website – www.blacksquare.co.za (in progress – see Logo note below)
Business Cards – no (in progress – see Logo note below)
Logo – no/check (it’s done, but we haven’t put it anywhere yet)
Blog – check
Currently we’re squeezing new websites, fixes on old websites and setting up the business into our schedule. This last bit includes reworking the blog from the standard WordPress template into something fantastic and unique.
