Guy Kawasaki likes mantras rather than missions. Jakob Nielsen seems to support a similar position in his latest Alertbox on company About Us web pages.

• Although there is some improvement there is still a way to go. We found a 9% improvement in the usability of About Us information on websites over the past 5 years. But companies and organizations still can’t explain what they do in one paragraph.
• Representing a company or organization on the Internet is one of a website’s most important jobs. Effectively explaining the company’s purpose and what it stands for provides essential support for all other website goals.
• At the top of your content pyramid, a good tagline helps users understand the rest of the site by providing context for the detailed content.

Of course if a company is unfocused, then it may be no surprise that they cannot come up with that tagline.

Post from: BPWrap

The footers we are talking about here are those defined by Google as follows: Text printed in the bottom margin of each page in a word processing document. Although as you will find later, that other foundation definition is worth thinking about. Here in particular, we are talking about the online versions on which by coincidence the knowledgeable Ann Smarty has recently offered the following advice: handle your site footers wisely. In summary she concludes:

• make your website footer relevant and useful;
• don’t add too many elements to the footer - it should be clean and concise;
• focus on people (SEO value of the footer is too insignificant anyway);
• follow the common fashion: people want to see common elements at these common places.

As a general rule, that seems eminently sensible advice. However I noticed that two very successful bloggers, Darren Rowse and John Chow adopted a somewhat different approach. Go to either of their blogs and scroll down to the bottom of the webpage. What do you find? In both cases there is a full screen of footer information. That got me thinking.

So often our approach to online web pages is conditioned by our much longer association with the printed page. That is where the word footer comes from. It suggests minimal content. However consider the way in which many people arrive at a web page. Either they are going there for content since someone gave them a link or they did a keyword search and ended up at that page, again looking for content. Most of them are not interested in any information about the blog owner or the rest of the blog as they arrive.

Of course the blog owner may wish them to look at advertisements which help to monetize the blog and ensure its survival. If those advertisements are from Google, then Google is working very hard to provide advertisements that will be of interest to visitors to the web page. If so there is every incentive to ensure that both content and advertisements appear ‘above the fold’, in other words on the initial screen that is viewed.

If anyone wants more information on other items in the blog or the blog author, they are certainly motivated to wander around a little and find what they are looking for. This suggests such information can be ‘below the fold’ since visitors may naturally scroll down to find such information. In consequence this blog now has an extended footer giving even more information than those of Darren Rowse and John Chow. By clicking on the link to Full Blog Info, your screen will show the footer, which is about a screenful on a 1024 x 768 resolution monitor. I believe it is a very logical approach, even though it seems to go against standard practice.

It may not appeal to everyone since it is somewhat unusual. However I don’t believe it’s foolish and I am most interested in visitors’ reactions. Why not add your thoughts on how this different approach works for you.

Post from: BPWrap

John Brandon asks this morning whether interest in Google Chrome is already waning. He feels that:

People use IE because it comes pre-installed and does mostly what they need it to. Walk into an office and glance around — you will see a lot of IE. Those who know better use Firefox because it is more stable, more secure, and faster. Where does that leave Chrome? I think as a third option for early adopters. But those who just need to get work done, who use Gmail and are too busy to mess around with bugs have probably all switched back to Firefox.

Just after the launch there was an initial flurry of interest. Mark Evans commented that a number of people had checked it out with some like Walter Mossberg liking it and others like Alec Saunders suggesting it was all a shell game. Mark Evans even questioned, What Took Google So Long?

Some experts such as John Andrews even warned that ‘under the hood’ there was a Google Chrome Bait ‘n Switch. That was because of some unfortunate language in the Agreement that all users had to agree to. Google beat a hasty retreat on that one but it still left a negative impression for some.

By now, everything in the garden should be lovely. However like John Brandon, I am still left with the question as to whether this browser really has any natural customers. Clearly the power users find it lacking, yet the novices may well find its apparent simplicity somewhat baffling. I am still trying to get the Omnisearch field to accept searches with other search engines. I should be able to type ‘Yahoo cheeses‘ and get a search on Yahoo for cheeses. Perhaps the problem as PCWorld explains is that I am using Windows XP.

Type ‘google fish sticks’ to search for fish sticks on Google. The same syntax works for Yahoo, Amazon, Live Search, and other sites that are already recognized by Google or that you add. This feature, though nifty and promising, proved inconsistent in the early going: It worked for me most of the time on a Windows Vista PC, but two of my colleagues who were testing Chrome on Windows XP machines had trouble getting the feature to work.

It is all very well to have an ultra-simple browser like this, however a user manual is always obligatory. The only one I could find is the Power User’s Guide to Google Chrome. That title is an oxymoron if ever I heard one.

Post from: BPWrap

Website visitors can be either humans or robots / spiders from the search engines. Although human visitors are what you are seeking, those robots are important since their efforts will result in many other human visitors coming to your website. Many websites find that more than two thirds of the traffic may well come from Google. Luckily what works for humans usually works well for robots too.

The Website Structure

Having appropriate webpages that people may wish to visit is clearly important. The rules to follow are clearly laid out in an article by Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian entitled Navigation - Make it Easy to Get Around.

Although written in 2000, the principles are still the same:

It isn’t difficult if you put yourself in your customer’s position and think about the things you would like best on a site like this. Here are some essential questions to answer:

• Where am I? - an aid to one’s present location on the site
• Where do I go next? - a roadmap or directory of the entire site
• How do I get there? - an intuitive or descriptive system of navigation
• Am I still on this site? - a consistent look-and-feel across different sections of the site

The Scent Of Information

In some cases particularly with larger sites, the human visitor may get slightly confused. He or she may have only a general notion of what they are looking for. Jared Spool has introduced the concept of the Scent Of Information. Just as a tracker dog may follow the scent to find their objective, your human website visitor needs some confirmation that they are heading in the right direction. Spool and his team at User Interface Engineering have refined these notions and a summary of their findings is available in their report summary at Designing for the Scent of Information

Tags

Although search engines such as Google are now very adept in determining the sense of any given web page, they are far from perfect. At one time the keyword meta tag could be used to flag important concepts on a web page. However it was effectively devalued by webmasters including vast arrays of keywords in this meta tag for their web pages. A much better indicator is now available for both regular websites and for blogs. It is known as a tag and is indexed by such services as Technorati.

If a few well-chosen tags are applied to a web page, then a human visitor interested in a topic can rapidly explore those web pages which have been tagged with that topic. More and more websites are using this approach to help human visitors find relevant pages by adding a Tag Cloud Web Page. What is particularly valuable here is that such tags are even more important to those search engine robots. Tagging web pages will bring improved search engine visibility.

Categories

The final signpost applies only to blogs. It allows a human visitor to look only at those blog posts that relate to a particular topic that is covered by the blog. It may be appropriate to have up to a dozen categories in the blog. The disadvantage of this approach is that blog posts are then listed in reverse time order with the most recent first. This is likely to be useful to only a minor fraction of human visitors. Nevertheless it is worth doing, because it again is a way of making blog posts more visible to search engines.

Conclusion

Getting a human visitor to a web page of your website is a challenge. Once they have arrived, you hope that your website will be ’sticky’ enough that they stay around. A big part of that is achieved by ensuring there are highly visible signposts to other web pages they might like to visit. Tags and categories are second lines of defense to ensure they do not click away.

Post from: BPWrap

If you are a Firefox user and have upgraded to Firefox 3.0, then just hit that F11 key to see what he means. If you are working with a 1024 x 768 screen, then the effect is particularly good. The whole screen is taken up with the window content of the webpage you were visiting. If the page is particularly long, then you may have a scrollbar down the right-hand side. The rest is exactly what that website owner was hoping you would see. There are no toolbars along the top or a status bar along the bottom. It is all just visual content.

If you do wish to see which tabs are open, then just move your mouse to the top of the screen and the tab bar will appear. If you were working with the Navigation toolbar visible, then this toolbar will also appear at the top above the tab bar. All the other toolbars you may have had visible still remain hidden in this Full Screen view.

If you are hooked on having these bars permanently visible along the top, then Percy Cabello has some advice for you on how to Tweak Firefox 3 full screen mode. That will make the tabs and navigation toolbar a permanent visible item in your Firefox 3 Full Screen mode.

I very much prefer keeping that clean simple look. Indeed by an approach that I am about to describe, I will suggest to you how you can stay in Full Screen mode probably 95 percent of the time. I work fairly extensively on the Internet. However if I analyze my behavior on any given day, I am probably working within a very restricted list of web pages or URLs. The problem is that from a Full Screen mode webpage, I cannot access my Bookmarks Toolbar.

I raised this problem with my colleagues on the Cre8Asite Forums, in a topic which was titled Maximizing The View Window. There was a suggestion that the Bookmarks or Favorites could be put on a web page. This in turn raised the possibility that such a HTML file could be held on my local computer, which gives the most rapid and reliable access. The following image shows some of the final product. It’s a Demo version of my new computer-resident Home Page.

With what is there, I can work most of the time in the Full Screen version and rarely need to put all those toolbars back. You can download it, if you wish to check the code or modify it to create your own, from this link: Home Page Links Demo.

Some of the features you will note are the clock at the top right, a Google search field and a Quote Of The Day. Below that arranged in a table are some of the links I use for much of the day. When working for a specific client, I often add a few links that are specific to that client.

For those who are novices with HTML, it is a very simple matter to modify the code to remove or add a link. You just open the homepagelinksdemo.htm file in Notepad or something equivalent that can handle text files. The HTML code for a table entry looks like the following:
<td><a href="http://www.mysite.com/">My Site</a></td>
To change the link, put the new URL between the ” ” and add the appropriate name between the > and <.

When using such a Home Page, it really becomes very handy if you arrange that opening a new tab shows that Home Page. This can be achieved by using the New Tab Homepage 0.4 Firefox Add-on.

If you wish to select a link on this Home Page, <control>T opens up a new tab with the Home Page showing. Clicking on a link on that Home Page opens the URL in the same tab. Throughout you are working Full Screen. If you no longer want that web page, <control>W will close that tab.

I’m finding this increases my effectiveness and viewing pleasure significantly. Try your own local Home Page and perhaps you will be equally impressed. Unfortunately a similar set-up does not work so smoothly for Internet Explorer. The security features blocking ActiveX controls prevents single click opening of new web pages. Often two clicks are required to remove the blocking feature. The only sensible suggestion for Internet Explorer users is to switch to Firefox.

Post from: BPWrap

Choosing a website design is one of the most difficult decisions for any business owner to make. That’s because the only approval of the decision that counts is that of potential visitors to the website. Will they stay on the site? Will they find what they are looking for? Will they enjoy their visit? Jared M. Spool of UIE (User Interface Engineering) is an expert in Usability, which is involved in trying to make those predictions.

In a slightly technical paper, he surprisingly suggests A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Evaluating Design Alternatives. It may not be the obvious way, but what he proposes makes eminent good sense. The case study he describes is as follows:

The company team is about to redesign their home page and navigation. They have three home page design alternatives and five navigation alternatives, created by an outside firm who didn’t do any evaluations of the designs. To help figure out which design to pick, the team has (finally!) received approval for their first usability testing study. While their site has been around for years, they’ve never watched visitors use it before now.

The obvious way might have involved a large number of users looking at all these different possibilities. The method that Spool proposes is much leaner than that and extremely practical. One critical step is the following:

Recruit from 2 User Groups
We recommended the team recruit both loyal and new users as study participants. The first day of testing should be loyal users of the site and the second day should be new users to the site. The loyal users would help figure out what the important tasks are. The new users will help determine what’s important for people new to the site, such as how they figure out the basics.

He describes much more detailed methodology, but the summary above brings out the essence of choosing between website designs. You must have a clear view of what you would like your visitors to do when they visit you. You must then make sure that your design functions well. Remember that you have the most tenuous of holds on a visitor who has clicked to your website. They can easily click away if they find the experience frustrating.

Post from: BPWrap

The previous two articles in this series have suggested ways to combat the ever-increasing hack attacks that WordPress blogs are receiving. In this final article, we will discuss some real-life examples and what can be learned from them. As a disclaimer, it should be noted that some hackers are very skilled and are continually improving their methods. These are anecdotes from the past and the future will undoubtedly be very different.

Typical Hacking Exploits

For specific details of typical hacking exploits, the following accounts are particularly good:

• Is your Wordpress Installation Compromised? Al Gore’s is - by Stuart McKeown (12. Nov 2007)
• Matt Heaton (Bluehost and Hostmoster CEO) WordPress blog Hacked by Mick Jagger from Moscow - by Noah (3 Dec 2007)
• Blackhat SEO Spammer targeting High PR WordPress Blog - by Noah (14 Feb 2008)

The methods used in these cases are probably all the work of one hacker, by nickname goro, who may well have been one of the commenters on the first of these three posts.

We will not go into the specific details here (since they will undoubtedly evolve), but rather discuss the bigger picture associated with these exploits. In the case of the hacking done on the SMM blogs, there were some clever refinements. The mechanism inserted on the domain generated hundreds of random, unique blog post web pages, which included links to online pharmaceutical web pages. Since the websites were well ranked in Google, many of these hundreds of blog posts were served to the search engine spiders as they made their visits. After a period of hours, the mechanism then stopped. This may have been to avoid a huge spike in traffic, which would have been more easily detected.

How Google May Have Rewarded Their Efforts

During the last two or three months, Google has been giving much more rapid visibility and higher ranking to blog posts in its regular web search. In the latter part of January, blog posts appropriate for particular keyword searches would appear within a small number of hours in the regular web search. The algorithm may well be using the RSS news feeds associated with the blogs. This gave particular prominence to the blog posts generated by the hacking mechanism. They would almost always appear among the top five positions on a search for particular online pharmaceuticals and often in the first position. Presumably this gave a significant economic advantage to the hacker.

Although the hacking mechanism was removed within 36 hours, the false and now non-existent blog posts still persist in the Google index over 3 weeks later. In some cases the cached versions of the false blog posts are still available.

An interesting parallel development during this time is that Google Blogsearch now has a delay of a few days in displaying new blog posts. Until recently such a new blog post might have appeared within an hour or two, since it was triggered by the pinging of the RSS news feed. Whether this is a reaction to a large volume of blog posts generated by hackers one can only surmise.

How To Repair The Damage

Hopefully this series of articles has sensitized you to the dangers of hacking. This should prompt you to maintain a constant vigil so that any hacker intrusions will be spotted rapidly. You should also as Wayne Liew suggests regard Wordpress Upgrades as a Must. The continuing improvement in security may not serve to keep out hackers but at least it may encourage them to attack an easier prey.

If your WordPress blog is hacked, it can be quite a challenge to find out what has been changed. Sometimes the hacker may have modified files deep within folders that are not normally touched in upgrading, such as the images folder or the wp-content folder. Checking the size in bytes of particular files compared with versions in the most recent backup will reveal suspicious differences. Sometimes the .htaccess file may have been modified to create additional and inappropriate mechanisms. In such cases, you’ve got to make sure that you eliminate all such additions to the website. If you have backed-up a clean version of the website recently, it might be better to take down the website and replace it with a clean version.

Related:
Blogs Take Center Stage For Marketers And For Google
How to Remove Wordpress.net.in Spam Injection

Previous articles in this series:
Wordpress Blog Hacked
Guarding Your Wordpress Blog

Post from: BPWrap

This is the second in a series of articles on how WordPress blogs may be hacked.

Unfortunately it’s becoming a more and more frequent occurrence, even though some seem unaware it has happened. If you have not yet read the first article, Wordpress Blog Hacked, you may find it useful to do so before reading this follow-on article. However it is not required reading.

You may naturally feel that calamities such as your house burning or your blog being hacked only happen to other people. It’s not true and it’s always wise to take precautions. Just imagine returning to your home one evening and finding it in flames. You close your eyes and cannot imagine it’s happening to you. You open them again and it’s all still flames.

How can you recover from such a tragic event. That is why most of us take out insurance and have security alarm systems to prevent such happenings. The more valuable your house, the more you are willing to invest in the right level of protection.

Getting your website hacked can be an equally unwelcome experience. Just see how Anita Campbell describes it in a recent article, Hacked: It Could Never Happen to My Site (Famous Last Words).

On Christmas morning, I tried to open this site as I normally do first thing in the morning, just to do a quick check. The home page of the site was completely blank! Nothing. Nada. I could not post anything new, either. I realized that a cracker had hacked the site. As I investigated later that day I discovered quite a bit of damage to the site.

Imagine seeing that blank screen. It’s as devastating in its own way as all those flames consuming your house. However if you think that is what happens when a site is hacked, you haven’t come up against the latest generation of skillful hackers. You won’t be aware that they have come in and taken over the attic of your house. They may create thousands of parasite webpages on your server without changing the physical appearance of your blog. That is what happened to the two SMM blogs that were hacked two weeks ago.

Eternal Vigilance

The first part of the security plan for your blog must emphasize vigilance. If you’re Al Gore or Matt Cutts, your blog is valuable real estate. Its traffic represents real economic potential to a hacker. Just as for a palatial home, you should invest in significant security systems. However for reasons we will discuss in the third article in the series, even more modest blogs are attractive to hackers. What you must do is to determine what you believe the risk of hacking to be and then invest an appropriate amount of effort in protecting against that.

If your blog is worth hacking, then likely it will be hacked so as to give the maximum time before you detect the intrusion. As will be explained in the next article in this series, hackers may only need access to your website for a few days to gain full value for their efforts. You will notice that Anita Campbell’s blog was hacked on Christmas Day. The two SMM blogs were hacked one Saturday morning. One important lesson is to never leave the blog unattended for too long.

There are two simple ways of checking whether intruders may be ‘in the house’. The first and easiest step is to check the source code of your blog. Just visit the blog and then use the View choice on your browser menu to examine the Source. With Firefox if you prefer you can use < control > U to see the source code in a different window. It may be this will show some lines of code or hyperlinks that should not be there. If you have followed the steps to be described later, then hopefully the code is as you expect it to be. A very rapid way of checking changes in source code is given in the article, Fast Alarm For Hidden WordPress Hackers.

Another way is to examine the traffic to your website. If there is an unexplained and massive increase in the volume, then this may be a sign of trouble. Similar increases in traffic may be seen in other analytic programs such as Google Analytics or SiteMeter. However depending on what hacking has been done, the increased traffic might be hidden from these tools.

To avoid these intrusions, there are certain recommended steps which are described below. As was mentioned in the previous article in this series, the best you can do is to ensure that your blog is as secure as you can make it. There are a host of other blogs that are insecure, and that may be your biggest protection.

Upgrade to the latest version

The most important recommendation that cannot be emphasized enough is to always upgrade to the most stable recent version of WordPress. The WordPress community is very active and as security holes are spotted, then as quickly as possible they are plugged. This does not guarantee that hackers will be kept out. However they may choose to attack earlier version blogs that have easier access holes.

You should also upgrade to the latest version of any plugins that you are using. A plugin may well be written by a single volunteer author so less attention may have been paid to security considerations. You should do a little research on each plugin you intend to use to make sure that others have not had security concerns about it. It is also recommended that you put an empty index.html in the plugins subfolder. This prevents anyone checking that folder and receiving a full display of all the plugins being used.

Harden Your Administration

In addition to working with the latest version of WordPress, there are a number of steps you can take to make hacker intrusions more difficult. The references below explain in greater detail what is involved. Here we summarize only the more important points.

Having user names and passwords that are not easily cracked for access to the blog administration panel is critical. In addition if you have a highly visible blog then you might wish to use the Login LockDown Plugin. This blocks access to the administration panel for a certain period after a small number of incorrect attempts.

You can also restrict access to the admin folder by having an appropriate .htaccess file there. This would specify the IP addresses for those who have rightful access to the folder. This would take the following form:

order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist home IP address
allow from 20.20.20.20
# whitelist office IP address
allow from 30.30.30.30

The extent to which you go beyond these steps should be based on your assessment of the risk of being hacked. The references spell out the possibilities.

References:
Hardening WordPress - WordPress Codex
Three tips to protect your WordPress installation - Matt Cutts
5 WordPress Security Essentials - Lee Robertson
How to Protect Your WordPress Site - Anita Campbell
Protecting Your WordPress Blog - Lorelle

The final article in this series is How Wordpress Blogs Are Hacked.

Post from: BPWrap

My friend, Kim Krause Berg, reminded us all that today, November 8, is World Usability Day. As the official website proclaims, “World Usability Day was founded to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.” Looking back over the last two years since I last blogged on this, to be frank I don’t think the message is getting across. Companies still produce products and services that they believe will be right for us, and so often they clearly were never tested by real life prospects before they were released.

That’s perhaps why Kim in the Cre8asite Forums started a thread entitled, Are We Designing For The Human Experience? It was triggered by a post about DUX 2007. This is a conference for designers working on better user experiences. As Bob Jacobson of Total Experience wrote “A great conference, but fundamentally off the mark“. The forum discussion was most interesting but unfortunately seemed to confirm that UX (user experience) is not being handled in a very effective way.

A key concern is whether there is anything going on that will allow us to celebrate significant success by World Usability Day 2008. I’m not optimistic.

Related: World Usability Day 2005 - Making It Easy!

Post from: BPWrap

In public relations, spin is a usually pejorative term signifying a heavily biased portrayal in one’s own favor of an event or situation that is designed to bring about the most positive result possible.

Since Sphinn is a new social media website launched by the very well-respected SEM guru Danny Sullivan, clearly the above is all a bit over-the-top. However my mind did wander that way when reading another post from my friend Kim Krause Berg entitled SEO with Usability: What The People Want. If anything I would go even farther than Kim. Websites are built to achieve certain goals. For commercial websites that usually means making sales. To do that well, websites must be

• suitably visible on the web,
• instinctively attractive when visited,
• easy to navigate and
• persuasive in closing the sale.

SEO plays an important part in that but it’s by no means the most important part.

Kim took issue with Sphinn when it appeared since there was no mention of Usability. That has been corrected but it’s instructive to see how it’s been done. This should not be seen as criticism since each of us has our own perspective on the online world. Sphinn clearly is about search engines and the associated marketing implications.

As illustration, the key navigation menu on the Sphinn Home Page includes the following topics in this order:
Google / Yahoo / Microsoft / Search Marketing / Social Media / Online Marketing / Searching / Other
Up front are the major search engines and Online Marketing is towards the end of the parade.

If you then explore the Online Marketing tab, you find the following subjects in this order:
Web Analytics / Contextual Ads / Affiliate Marketing / Display Advertising / Usability / Domaining / Other Online Marketing
Usability tags along after all the ways of making and spending money through advertising.

Perhaps one shouldn’t read too much into this. However unfortunately it so often reflects how much attention is paid to Usability in the website design process. Perhaps if those of us who care keep mentioning it at every opportunity, eventually more people will smell the coffee.

Related: Bell Canada Website Usability

Post from: BPWrap

The Internet Explorer browser causes dilemmas for many people. Let me count the ways.

Which browser should I use?

The biggest group with an Internet Explorer dilemma are the Internet surfers. They’ve mostly used Internet Explorer but now Microsoft is suggesting that they upgrade to version 7. Some accept Microsoft’s advice with reluctance and in this case some commentators have expressed concerns with version 7. So the take-up rate has been slow.

Often techy friends may be recommending some other browser to avoid security issues with Internet Explorer. Often that other browser is Mozilla Firefox. So it’s not surprising to see a headline such as Firefox now a serious threat to IE in Europe. Anyone in North America will be somewhat surprised to see the figures:

A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe, IE had 66.5%, with other browsers including Safari and Opera making up the remaining 5.7%. The July market share represents a massive 3.7% rise since a similar survey in March.

A particularly worrying sign for Microsoft is that in some key European markets FF is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser. In Slovenia (47.9%) and Finland (45.4%) FF usage has reached parity with IE, while in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia and Ireland, FF has either reached or is nearly at 40% market share.

These figures may well presage the growth that Firefox usage will show in North America.

Which browser should I design for?

More competent web designers have been designing Web pages to give a satisfactory user experience with all the common browsers for some time. Others took the view that since Internet Explorer is by far the majority choice for browser, then this was the only one to check. Within the last 12 months there has been a significant change in website traffic. Although Internet Explorer version 6 is still most often the majority browser used, Internet Explorer version 7 and Firefox taken together will probably deliver more traffic. The dilemma here is that web pages that display well in version 6 may not do so in version 7.

The recommended approach is to design based on Web standards and such web pages will display well in IE version 7 and Firefox. Such a web page may or may not display well in IE version 6. However there is an increasing literature on the ways of getting around the typical problems. One practical problem is that it may be difficult to have two versions of Internet Explorer (version 6 and version 7) running on the same computer. A small help is given by IE NetRenderer. This allows you to check how a web page is rendered by Internet Explorer 7, 6 or 5.5, as seen from a high-speed datacenter located in Germany. (Tip of the hat to Henry.) It only shows the webpage “above the fold” but this will alert the designer to any major problems.

What should we do now?

This of course is the dilemma that faces Microsoft. It has accepted the legacy commitments imposed by websites designed for prior versions of Internet Explorer. The ideal would be to bite the bullet and help the world to move as quickly as possible to IE version 7. However the legacy of all those IE version 6 web pages is an onerous burden. There are no easy answers.

Related:
Trial by Firefox
Standards Lose Their Star Rating

Post from: BPWrap

One word that causes a great deal of problems is Webmaster. Perhaps many will disagree with me, but hear me out. I acknowledge that it will be difficult to bury the word. After all even the mighty Google helps to support the word through its immensely useful Google Webmaster Central. However I believe this word and the function that it implies can create a great deal of organizational dysfunction, particularly in big companies.

Master of the ..

The problem starts with that word master. In this context, it usually means someone who looks after the well-being of some resource. Indeed it’s often applied to someone who looks after something with a cultural content. Just think Concertmaster, Master of the Queen’s Music or Master of the Royal Mint. It’s also often a word that dates back to a former time. How could it possibly have come to be used to apply to such modern innovations as websites?

It is of course a word that is often used in gaming. Perhaps that’s the explanation. Geeks are often heavily into gaming. Just think Gamemaster or Dungeon Master. Since geeks are often also the persons looking after websites, then perhaps webmaster is a very comforting descriptor. It may have been an easy word to accept in the first instant, but it can lead to all sorts of problems.

Big companies

The problems are most often seen in big companies. Websites are complex and can often run into problems, some of them being difficult to correct. Given this, many companies decide that the website is best handled within the IT group. The marketing group, with enough of its own problems, is often happy to leave this potential tar baby to another group. Since the IT group usually does not understand marketing and the marketing group does not understand the working concepts of the IT group, this is a recipe for disaster. Over the years, I have spoken to many situated either side of this divide, who are constantly frustrated by the working difficulties of this arrangement.

Marketing and Sales

The webmaster dysfunction pales into insignificance in some companies, given the dysfunction they have between the marketing and sales groups. Sometimes the two groups have somewhat independent existences. The company operates in a similar way to the way wars used to be waged. The artillery (marketing) shell the territory to be taken. Afterwards the infantry (sales) go in and secure the territory street by street. That is no longer the way wars are waged nor is it the way that marketing and sales should be cooperating. Strong team action is needed between marketing and sales to ensure the most effective sales operation.

The website should not be seen as a fine piece of art that has been created to support the marketing and selling activity. The webmaster concept might support this inappropriate view. A selling effective website is an integral part of the marketing/sales activity. Like any other part of the marketing/selling activity, there should be objectives and metrics to establish performance. Activities should be modified in the light of results. The Google Webmaster Central website can provide some useful data in this approach, but other parts of the marketing/sales group will have their own selling activities and their own metrics to add to the review process.

What’s a better job title?

To emphasize this marketing/selling role for the website, some title such as Internet Marketing Manager is much more appropriate. The exact title will depend on the size of the organization. Whatever the title, the responsibility for a selling-effective website must clearly rest within the marketing group. Some activities may be subcontracted to the IT group. But the buck stops with the marketing group.

Related: What’s in a name - Web mastery?

Post from: BPWrap

Mark Evans takes the opposite tack in proclaiming that Scoble is wrong. However he suggests that circulation figures show that newspapers are growing. He then seems to spike his own argument by mentioning that this is largely explained by the growth of free newspapers. Doc Searl takes a more helpful line in suggesting a number of different ways the newspapers can avoid their untimely fate.

So often this ongoing conflict is represented as the battle of the journalists versus the bloggers. However I believe there are more fundamental reasons why the newspapers are finding it difficult to move with the times. It’s because newspaper publishers have a long tradition spanning centuries of producing printed newspapers. They’re good at it but they, like many others, assume the Internet is merely an alternative communication channel to transport their wares. Developing an effective website on the Internet is fundamentally different. Here are three principal reasons why newspapers are having problems.

1. Graphic Design is fundamentally different from Web Design. A viewer looking at a printed page is going through a very different experience from a reader looking at a web page. Not the least, he or she is probably willing to look at only 25% of the content that might be acceptable on a printed page.
2. Given that most people find things with Google, Yahoo! or one of the other search engines, an effective website must be search engine visible. Online newspapers are often not set up with this intent.
3. Moving around any website must give a pleasing user experience or the visitor will click away to more welcoming websites. This is what is called Usability and it requires special attention. Trying to mimic the printed version on the Internet will be disastrous.

Any newspaper that can accept this different mindset can develop an effective online presence. In turn this can be supportive of the printed version and may even encourage readership. Only a few newspapers are showing they understand this Digital Divide that must be crossed.

Related:
Can Graphic Designers Do Website Design?
Newspapers Are Dead Scrolls
Newspaper Design Awards And Usability

Tags: newspaper, Internet, usability, graphic+design

Post from: BPWrap

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

Once you have a sitemap file on your website then you can register this with the three search engines. In this way, you have an assurance that your website is adequately visible to these search engines.

What is more significant is that the three have come together around the same approach. In a sense, they have created a de facto web standard way of cataloguing web sites. We’re all the winners when some of the obvious mechanics of the Internet can be done in a standard way. Perhaps it’s another signal of the new regime’s thinking at Microsoft. Would it have happened so quickly when Bill Gates was directing everything that Microsoft did?

It’s an awesome burden when you’re so big and have so much money that you can require that the game should be played your way. Sometimes it can create enormous legacy problems as the world does not accept your view. Microsoft with Internet Explorer version 7 is now trying to work more with web standards but prior versions have created a huge population of non-conforming web pages. The frustrations caused by this non-standard thinking are widespread.

Another smaller example of Microsoft’s “Do It My Way” thinking is those favicons you may or may not see as you surf the Web. Those are the small icons that appear in Favorites or Bookmark lists or in the address field of your browser. Microsoft invented these icons but has presumably by now forgotten about trying to make them work in a standard way. You can make favicons work in Firefox but not reliably in Internet Explorer. Again it’s an obvious piece of Internet mechanics that suffers by lack of standards.

Using economic power to block basic mechanics from functioning in a common sense way is counter-productive and misguided. Hopefully this action on Sitemaps is just another important signal that we all win when everyone tries to make standards work.

Tags: web standards, Internet, sitemap, favicon

Post from: BPWrap

A previous post, The Favicons Are Coming, provides a short introduction to favicons. It was written in the fond hope that Internet Explorer Version 7, in trying to emulate Mozilla Firefox as it so often does, would perhaps make favicons a robust feature of Internet surfing. In Firefox, you’ll find these small 16 x 16 pixels icon images for a given web page appear in several places, namely the address window, on a tab and also in your Favorites or Bookmarks list. They provide instant recognition of a web site and for the ones I know well are all I display in my Bookmarks toolbar in my default Firefox browser. Here for example are the ones associated with this and related websites:

Well now Internet Explorer Version 7 is officially released. After some thorough testing, the IE v.7 way of handling favicons seems no better than previous versions. You can get the sense of frustration of many others in a forum entry, Keeping The Favicon in IE Favorites, which started in November 2005 and still has not produced an answer. In The Favicons Are Coming, we paid tribute to Microsoft as the inventor of the .ico favicon file and set out the advice accordingly. It was largely correct, but here we re-present the information in a more practical fashion. The first part will detail how to make favicons work in Firefox. The second part (optional and provided only for the really keen) will detail how you can try to make them work somewhat in IE and other browsers.

Making Favicons Work In Mozilla Firefox

1. Make your 16 x 16 pixel icon image as a .png or a .jpg file. For example you might call it myfavicon.jpg Load it into a suitable place on your domain, say http://www.mysite.com/images/myfavicon.jpg
2. Add the following code in the HEAD section of any web page for which you wish the favicon to appear.
<link rel="shortcut icon"
href="http://www.mysite.com/images/myfavicon.jpg" type="image/x-icon">
3. The favicon image will appear correctly in all the places it should.

Trying To Make Favicons Work In Internet Explorer

1. The IE way involves an icon image file with the extension .ico A .ico file is not just a .bmp file renamed with the extension changed to .ico. It is a much more complex file that holds two icon images, a 32 x 32 pixel file and a 16 x 16 pixel file. You can if you wish only include the 16 x 16 pixel image. A somewhat old article, Making a Favicon, describes the process well. You normally can start with a .bmp file or .jpg file and convert it to a .ico file. The AxiomX Pixel Toolbox 1.1 is free software that will handle this conversion, usually without too much trouble.
2. You then load up the .ico image file to the root folder of the website, i.e. at http://www.mysite.com/
3. The favicon image will sometimes appear the very first time you visit a website and sometimes will persist in your Favorites list. More often it disappears after a first appearance and is replaced by the generic IE favicon. Since Firefox will correctly handle such a .ico file, this is a worthwhile thing to do if you have the time. It may also be helpful for other browsers.

How Well Will Your Favicons Work?

However much effort you put into creating and loading favicons, other browsers than Firefox may still handle favicons unreliably. For example, Opera will sometimes display them and sometimes not. It will also use the favicon.ico image in the root file if it exists for some purposes and will use the favicon identified by the HEAD link tag for other purposes. Other websites may also use favicons in an unpredictable way too. Normally Bloglines should show favicons correctly but even when viewed in Firefox will not always do so.

The favicon is such a useful identifier for those who see it that the effort is certainly worthwhile. Hopefully as time goes on, more and more browsers will come in line with the Firefox approach to favicons.

Post from: BPWrap

There is a very visible icon to alert you to the presence of news feeds on any web page. You will already have heard a gentle swish as you arrived at a web page with a news feed. For anyone wanting to get the attention of prospects and customers on news items, what more could you ask for.

Related: News Feeds Boost Website Traffic

Tags: Internet Explorer, Version 7.0, news feeds

Post from: BPWrap

For webmasters, favicons represent the biggest bang you can get for your buck. They may only measure 16 pixels x 16 pixels but they represent an important additional way of establishing brand awareness. For Internet surfers, these favicons help to provide instant confirmation of where you are. It should be a win/win situation. Regrettably many are frustrated in trying to make favicons work reliably for them.

It was Microsoft that created the original favicon feature. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser looked for a favicon of a special type named favicon.ico on every website. Unfortunately Microsoft’s supported format for the link tag did not conform to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML recommendations. This problem in standardization slowed down the acceptance of favicons. Eventually an official IANA registered MIME type for ico files was agreed as image/vnd.microsoft.icon. Before this, image/x-icon was the accepted option which complied with the rules of using x- for unregistered tokens. However many web servers do not come configured with a mime type setting for .ico files, and may send their default mime type which might be text/html or text/plain.

An additional problem with Internet Explorer is that it stores the icons in the Temporary Internet Files cache. As soon as you clear the cache (delete temporary files), you lose all of your icons. Even though the link may stay in your Favorites list it is no longer associated with its own icon. It is almost as if it is now hard-wired to the IE icon, that stylized blue ‘e’. The only way to restore a favicon to a link is to delete the link from the Favorites folder and recreate it. That’s hardly user-friendly.

It appears that help may be on the way. We soon will have Internet Explorer version 7 and this may well treat favicons as they should be treated, in other words as Mozilla Firefox treats them. Favicons will appear in Favorites lists and will also appear in the Address field of your web browser. That’s important visibility so you should make sure you have your favicon ready.

If you name your favicon file, favicon.ico, then all you need to do is put it in the root domain of your website. If you want to be absolutely sure or want to call it something different or put it somewhere different then you could put something like the following in the Head section of your web page:
<link rel="shortcut icon"
href=”http://www.mywebsite/image/myfavicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon” />
That’s often what is recommended and it will work. However if you want to be absolutely correct then the following is the way to do it:
<link rel="shortcut icon"
href=”http://www.mywebsite/image/myfavicon.ico” type=”image/vnd.microsoft.icon” />
After all, Microsoft deserves some credit for thinking of this most powerful way of using 256 pixels.

NOTE ADDED LATER: Internet Explorer Version 7 still does not treat favicons as it should. See a later post, Favicons - How To Make Them Work For You, for the best approach currently.

Tags: website design, favicon

Post from: BPWrap

Now we have the latest from the MicrosoftMax Team. This desktop feed aggregator, codename Max, features news displayed in a newspaper layout and a two-pane interface, and it has a bit different approach than many other aggregators on the market.

The blog entry has a worrying caution:

It’s important to note that by upgrading to the latest version of Max, you will lose any lists you might have created or received in previous versions of Max. We apologize for the inconvenience. You can still access the pictures from those lists in your My Pictures folder.

To say the least, the comments show some very mixed reactions among the technogeeks. Some are delighted:

This is my first time installing max. It’s a really cool example of wpf, especially the newsreader. Is there any reason you used a scrollbar rather than standard wpf “next page” model for text display? Also do you intend to release a mini version as xbap?

Many others are less so:

Are you guys kidding me with not having Vista RC1 support? .NET Framework 3.0 RC1 is even installed on Vista RC1 already for you.

One wonders how many will jump in, given that it seems like a decision that’s difficult to reverse. Hopefully we’ll hear more from the brave souls who do so.

Tags: Microsoft

Post from: BPWrap

What are the common things developers all need?

1. They need a freaking fast distribution platform.
2. They need a s***load of storage space. Yes, that’s a technical term. : )
3. They need an API.
4. It needs to be cheap.

Apparently one such developer, Chandu Thota of Feedmap fame, may use Amazon’s S3 service to launch his venture. Scoble feels that the fact that one of its own engineers is feeling an impulse that can’t be satisfied on Microsoft’s own server farms is telling. And should be keeping Microsoft’s executives awake at night.

He then goes on to discuss the alternatives and comes up with the predictable choice. Go read the article to check you’re right.

Tags: Microsoft, developer

Post from: BPWrap

This has meant that web pages have had a whole series of hacks added to make standards-correct web pages appear correctly in Internet Explorer. Microsoft was then in a bind as there has been greater universal acceptance of the W3C standards. It’s the old legacy problem. You can’t change the rules and ‘break’ the websites of all those faithful customers who were living by your old flexible rules. I saw this as a major strategic headache for Microsoft. However I believe they have come up with a workable approach to gradually cleaning up this Augean stable of old websites.

With their new IE 7 Beta2 preview (which by the way is pretty spiffy), Microsoft has adopted a very astute way of handling this thorny issue. If the web page is correctly identified as following a Strict standard then the browser will display it according to that Strict standard. If it is not so identified, then it will be displayed according to the Quirks approach, whereby the hacks will still work. So the old, loosy-goosy websites display correctly and the new Strict standard ones display correctly. I feel that’s brilliant.

If you want to see how others are seeing this, there’s a thread in the Cre8asite Forums discussing exactly this topic.

Tag: Microsoft, W3C Standards

Post from: BPWrap