Extra! Extra!

When developing a new website, most companies (or web development agencies if the project is not being done in-house) go through an exhaustive “Test Plan” or “QA Checklist” before the site is launched. This document tends to focus on checking for broken links, spell checking site copy, testing site features like search or online forms, verifying the presence of 301 redirects (on the old website), making sure the site is free of (CSS, JS, etc) errors, ensuring the navigation is consistent, checking cross browser compatibility and so on goes the list.

When of the areas that I believe that is most often overlooked when “QAing” a website before it is launched is verifying that the sites analytic and search engine strategies are in place.

So just because your QA team believes the website is free of errors and ready to be launched don’t forget to verify your analytic strategy has been addressed and you’ve taken the necessary steps to make it easy for search engines to find and understand your new website.

So I used this weekend to make inroads into a growing backlog of online marketing articles, deleting many from notable figures that have surprisingly little to offer but also noting a number that are worth describing and debating in this forum.

One piece in particular caught my attention because in large part it describes the state on online marketing perhaps more effectively than most pieces I’ve seen. It comes to us courtesy of Marketing Profs. Periodically they run surveys where they gauge best practices in the online marketing world, but in this case they surveyed marketing professionals and asked them about their familiarity with and adoption of SEO practices to drive Web traffic. The results were compelling and telling and reveal the rather poor understanding of SEO even within the very industry that ought to be driving it. A few results from the MarketingProfs survey that polled a group of self-described corporate marketers (66%) and consultants (32%):

How long have they been using SEO?
27% don’t bother with SEO
22% have been at it less than a year
24% somewhere between 1-2 years

When asked what would it replace today,
42% of respondents said SEO funding would likely replace online advertising in the way of banners, newsletters and ads.

As for the major challenges they encounter,
48% say they have difficulty demonstrating any results, and
43% are not properly staffed

And although most (83%) cite improvements to their website as their largest Web marketing efforts,
47% of the respondents do not think they use SEO effectively to drive traffic to those very websites.

Lastly, perhaps not surprising given the state of the practice,
44% don’t know whether SEO is having any impact on marketing ROI

It seems puzzling that there is still a fog hanging over SEO, that it’s value is still a mystery to many who ought to understand it well when an increasing percentage of marketing funds are making their way online.

We are proud to announce the launch of our first project with McAfee. We designed a Flash-based product demo with voiceover to market McAfee’s Secure Internet Gateway appliance. The Secure Internet Gateway provides small and medium-sized businesses a strong line of defense against web and email threats, including spam, phishing, viruses, and spyware.

Nice job, team!

The demo is live at: www.mcafee.com/us/smb/products/promos/sig/index.html

Extractable is pleased to annouce the launch of the Schwab MoneyWise web site! Kudos to the Extractable team for a solid inital project, resulting in site launch during Financial Literacy Month. The team is excited to continue enhancing the site with additional activities, tools, content, and a community forum! More information regarding the site’s charter can be found in the official Charles Schwab press release.

The site is live at: http://www.schwabmoneywise.com

Congrats to the Extractable team on the launch of the redesigned Merit Medical website.

The site is live at: http://www.merit.com

Dear Yahoo!

Thank you for refreshing MyYahoo! with a new Ajaxy UI. Your UI team deserves cheers for this polished experience. However, following the trend of your Mail beta, the browser-side experience is unnecessarily clunky and slow. Despite the fact that I’m packing Pentium and a high speed connection, I feel like I’m back in 68040 land on 28.8k surfing a FirstClass BBS. I will be more than happy to download a plugin to speed things up if you make one available.

Safe Credit Union’s web site wins praise in Friday’s netbanker report. There, Jim Bruene compliments Safe Credit Union’s Clever Homepage Comparison tool, citing it as “one of the best rate comparison tactics we’ve ever seen.”

Kudos to the Extractable team who made the Safe CU rate comparison tool and web site come to life!

Need to explain “Web 2.0″ to your friends? There is a short video available that might help. It manages to convey the central idea in fairly non-technical language. The presentation is at a music video pace to keep the viewer interested and walks through a short history of the evolution of the web.

Congratulations to the Extractable team on the launch of the redesigned LBS Financial Credit Union website and another successful credit union project.

The site is live at http://www.lbsfcu.org

Today I stumbled across an article that the US Government is being forced to redesign our currency to better serve the blind community.

“It can no longer be successfully argued that a blind person has ‘meaningful access’ to currency if she cannot accurately identify paper money without assistance,” [Judge] Robertson wrote in a 26-page order.

This seems like an enormous challenge to me. Trying to introduce new US currency that appeals to both the disabled community and to the security community seems to be pretty tough.

We always aims for our website template designs to gracefully degrade for older browsers and for screen readers. Coding to W3C standards and separating presentation from content with heavy CSS use gets us halfway there. Our work on this year’s Visa Europe redesign resulted in numerous write-ups on the success of an accessible site in the European press.

Followup: Todd notes that “Ninety seven percent of websites did not provide even minimum levels of accessibility, a new survey has found.”