You have to drive folks to innovate. The tendency in lots of large organizations is to try and find a comfortable place where you think you can get measured rewards for measured work. In other words, they say to themselves, “I know how much I’m going to get if I do this much, and then my life is in balance.” I just don’t think you get a lot of innovation under those circumstances. You want people to figure out how to do things better, to figure out a smarter way. When that’s a constant process, you start seeing things innovate. It’s not because someone comes up with some brand-new idea where you say, “Oh, no one’s ever thought about this before.”
Check out the whole article on Geoffrey Canada.
]]>That got me to thinking: Should more sites be designed around a tl;dr statement?
The term tl;dr means “Too long; don’t read”, you’ll find it in use in some popular forums such as Hacker News and Reddit and is usually followed by a short synopsis of a more lengthy comment that adds color and nuisance, but really the tl;dr says it all.
When thinking about your site, could it be summed up in a short thesis sentence? Will digging deeper only reinforce the thesis? If so why not help your visitors?
My tl;dr statement can be found on the left had side of every page. I’ve played around with different phasing, considering that it was probably going to show up in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) snippet. It’s my name, what I do, and a quote from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
I don’t really encourage a dialogue on my site through social media or comments because at this point it really won’t support my thesis, I mainly get three types of visitors:
1. Someone through search.
2. A recruiter or potential employer
3. My mom
Let’s look at them one by one
Visitors through search: They come, and just like that, they are gone. My tl;dr statement is short enough so they get 2 pieces of information. Who I am and what I do. Hopefully it lends a bit of credibility to whatever they skim through
Recruiter/Potential employer: It’s a little unfair to lump these in together, because they really are two different audiences. However since a recruiter is really only looking for a resume, they should hopefully be able to find it pretty quickly. A potential employer on the other hand may be looking for something to help fill in some blanks inherent in a resume in woefully thin hiring processes. Hopefully by listing my projects and my writing, it fills in some of the gaps.
My mom: She’s been coming since I launched my geocites page. Love you mom.
In other words, most spend very little time on the site, only a potential employer and my mom has probably gotten this far. That’s because anyone can code, but a good personality and cultural fit is much harder to hire for.
In conclusion, think about not only how you want visitors to interact with your site and how they actually do interact with your site, also think about the one or two things that you’d like that person to leave with and make that your tl;dr statement
]]>9. Check what is the norm for you industry. Generally a well optimized web page falls in what is considered normal for like pages. For example, a shopping page might only have 250 words of copy, this is considered ‘natural’. Google does try to consider that when determining Search Engine results, so if you are doing something different, while you may not penalized, it may not help.
8. #1, #2 and #3 are the only positions that matter in a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Google is increasingly adding value to searches by adding maps, images and videos in SERPs, a great thing for the user, but it does take a little more effort for the site that wants to get above the fold. Position 20 might as well be position 10,000.
7. Search results is a games of inches. With millions of results per query, the distance between position 3 and position 2 and position 1 is the width of a hair. It’s about which page is ‘least imperfect’. Put another way SERPs is a game of inches.
6. Focus on the long-tail. When people search they generally try to be specific as possible generally using 3-4 words. If those terms don’t produce the desired results, then the user start searching more broadly
5. Use the tilde ‘~’ when doing keyword research. The tilde is an undocumented way when doing a google search to also return up a result that not only produce your results but also other terms that users have used when searching for the same thing, this is great for long-tail keyword research. An example search term might be “~fashion”, which also brings up ‘style’, ‘accessories’, ‘clothing’ and a slew of fashion related terms
4. Structure you site into silos. If structure is properly done, you can maximize pagerank for internal links. So, that means fewer links per page, linking to landing pages, and being a lot more thoughtful on how you link to other areas of the site and whether you should.
3. Use Google endorsed schema’s. Sitemaps XML files are something we already know about, but a new thing google has endorsed is schemas. This s a spec they intend to probably support in 2012, but it’s a headache to implement, so weight the cost benefit of implementation
2. Result may vary, Factors in SERP can be influence by location and the searches that can before it. For example, if you initially search pushups you’d probably get a lot of results about exercise, but if the search before that one was on bras, you’d get a different set of results. In regards to location, they are starting to be more and more important in result rankings. Think about those things when writing for your sites.
1. Content is still king. We all know this, but the definition is expanding to video (with transcribing), PDFs and images, (which google is starting to learn to read), and of course social media
]]>Additionally, they say that the best time to be on social networks is when you are alone but the gulf of being in two places at once (reality and virtual) will continue to close, on one end technology will be get better and phones (or whatever they will be called) as a distribution and consumption platform will have evolved in to something less intrusive and natural. On the other hand talking with someone face-to-face and doing whatever else will become accepted and even expected by the mainstream.
Will we all still be on Facebook? Google+? Something else? Maybe, whatever is invisible, I don’t want the platform to be awesome, I want to be awesome. People tend to gravitate to what is easy, cheap and gives it to them how they want it, where they want it.
]]>It’s simple, a website with our set -up running a popular content management system on a public facing website might be compromised. It could happen for a variety reasons both in and out of our control. The important thing then is getting the site back to a point where it is safe as soon as possible while being 99% sure that whatever compromised the site in the first place has been removed.
Enter SVN and versioning
Versioning is not the first think I think of as being essential to a content site, benefits aside, there are somethings that can only add more work that do not equal the benefits. Simply Good Media is by any definition is a small shop with just a couple of developers, there are very few conflicts and if there are, a quick IM, clears everything up and one of us backs off for a while.
Also, in tech circles, versioning is for software teams, not a blog. The Budget Fashionista is not just a blog or a website and more than a few people make a living off the site and many more thousands enjoy it on a daily basis. Additionally years and years of goodwill that could be wiped out in the blink of an eye if our site is distribute malware installed by a hacker. It is our responsibility to keep things up and running.
The new workflow
So with that in mind, I set out for TBF to fail. The first thing I looked for was a hosted versioning system. After trying a couple out on personal projects, I settled on beanstalk. No only did I like the design(sorry, the graphic designer in me is alive and kicking) It was defacto endorsed by 37signals and integration with basecamp, which we use.
I also set up a staging server, and refrained from making any changes to the files on the website. The new workflow consisted of the repository where I would make local changes, upload the file to staging to make sure it’s right and them commit to Beanstalk.
With Beanstalk I update the site with a push of a button, or can roll it back to a safe copy if necessary. I also did some testing to make sure when we fail we can get back up. So something that use to take hours or days could now can be done from anywhere from any computer in minutes. We’ve cut down on mistakes making it to the live site and can push several changes at once without the fear of a conflict.
Conclusion
All in all it’s been a good exercise and turning something that has brought the site to a grinding halt and destroying our goodwill as a site to an opportunity to normalize the site and to make it that much more stable by using versioning and installing a few other safe guards to help mitigate the effects of the inevitable.
via BoingBoing
]]>2. Learning context. I once asked an instructor how she could grade art. She gave a good, if rote answer. Art can be graded based on what has come before and the rules that have already been established. The same can be said with design. Of course another rote idiom applies here: You have to know the rules to break the rules.
3. Experience. Not real world experience, but experiences in different aspects of communication, whether its printmaking, bookkeeping, or painting. These experiences I think help round out a designers work and voice, and expose the designer to things they may not necessarily be exposed to if they are self-taught. There is something to be said for a well rounded education.
]]>don’t take action if you have only enough information to give you less than a 40 percent chance of being right, but don’t wait until you have enough facts to be 100 percent sure, because by then it is almost always too late
My task is 1. Making sure information and resources get to where they need to be and 2. Determining how much information needs to get there.
For example, some people only need to know the what, others the how and others the when. As we shift to a knowledge based society, where information is fueling the how people think, what people do and what is considered important, distribution is gold.
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It all comes down to expectations. I think part of the issue is too much information. On the web, every action is measurable, and I sometime feel like networks and such rely way too heavily on them. Depite some of the wonderful branding and engagement opportunties, we often find ourselves in the condrumum of being sold on the brand value but being assessed on the ROI. Additionally, these are for ads that do not appeal to our customers and dismal click through rates, not because we have users that won’t engage but because that’s not what is being measured.
That is changing as the digital landscapes become more mature. As advertisers and retailers start to shunt more resources to direct marketing on the web (and figuring out how to move people to act). I think we’ll start to see a shift in the questions being asked by retailers and the digital buying/selling industrial complex and the answers by publishers being more in sync.
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