Extra! Extra!

The Search Engine Strategies (SES) 2008 was one of the best conferences I have had the opportunity to attend recently. Some of the more interesting “take-aways” I got from the conference included:

• When marketing your brand online always tell a compelling story that will make customers connect with your brand.
• Optimize pages on your website for long tail keywords while keeping the visitors intent in mind. By figuring out what stage of the buying cycle they are in (researcher, comparison shopper, buyer, etc) you have a better chance of offering relevant information to the visitor and getting them to “convert” (eg. make a purchase).
• Always be A/B testing! Test the pay-per-click ads that bring traffic to your website and test the color of the button on your site that converts a visitor.
• Reduce home page bounce rates! How many visitors came to your website and found nothing on the home page that engaged them about the site’s content?
• There are ton of free Firefox plugins that can help you with SEO like: Bit.ly/gadocs, Bit.ly/gagoals, Bit.ly/gatabs, Bit.ly/gaiceberg
• Leveraging social media sites (examples: Twitter, facebook, delicious, digg, propeller, etc) can have a big impact on increasing organic search traffic if done right.
• There is tremendous growth opportunity in the search industry outside the US.
• Understand what your visitor wants to accomplish on your site. They don’t care if your are the company Best Buy they want to purchase the iPhone.
• The “Google Dance” which invited SES attendees to drink, eat and dance was a blast!

With hundreds of Content Management Systems (CMS) on the market, how does a company identify the best one for their website?
Over the last 5 years I have created a cheat sheet that has simplied this process to 3 main steps.

1.  Create a Requirements Checklist
Come up with a CMS requirements checklist.  What do you want the CMS be able to do?  Ask as many people that will be using the CMS system fill out this checklist, ranking each factor on a “must have”, “would like to have”, or “don’t care” scale. Ideally, have at least several employees (who will be using the CMS solution) from several different business departments complete the CMS checklist since requirements tend to verify by departments. 

Some example requirements might include:
• Permissions / Roles – Some users might have the ability to write or modify content while the authority to publish might be limited to only a few.
• Rollback / Versioning – Accidently removed the biography of the CEO?  How important is it to have a CMS system that will let you revert back to an older version of the webpage?
• WYSWIG – The benefit of having a CMS system is so non-technical users can update the website.  Make sure the CMS system has a friendly MS Word-like editor that enables non-technical users to quickly and easily update webpages .

Lastly, compile a master CMS requirement checklist in Excel where you can turn on the auto-filter feature to see any requirements all CMS users identified as “must haves”.

2.  Demo the CMS
Identify several CMS systems (within your budget) that meet a majority of your CMS stakeholder requirements.  Spending an hour on Google searching for phrases like “cms solutions compared” should help narrow down your list of CMS vendors. 

Verify with your IT team that the CMS solutions you have on your list could be implemented and maintained within your current infrastructure.  Example: If no-one at your company knows how to program in Java you might not want to proceed with evaluating any Java based CMS solutions.

Contact over the phone (and screen) several CMS vendors that are willing to come on-site and conduct a demo of their CMS solution.  Ask the vendor to demo basic functionality (authoring, publishing, etc) but make sure they also address all your “must haves” and “would like to have” the requirements that you identified in your companies CMS checklist.

3.  Gain Buy-in
Ask your CMS users (that attended the demos) which CMS they preferred; which CMS would they most be comfortable using?  At this point you should have a pretty good idea which CMS solution your team prefers. Now you just need your boss to write a check for it…

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
~ Henry David Thoreau

In the high tech world of web design, everything moves fast. Projects are on tight deadlines. Technologies change and converge. Our lives are pretty busy too. Moore’s Law seems to affect more than technology. While our future depends on sophisticated technology, it doesn’t mean that it must have a complex outcome. We design and plan use cases and scenarios for experienced users, and end up complicating our designs with fringe cases and feature creep. We may be designing an advanced application, but it can still have a simple user experience.

No wonder users are frustrated by our best intentions. They crave simple experiences, easy to learn applications: a few steps, minimal instructions, obvious designs. “Don’t make me think.” And yet we (as designers) still assume that they (as users) are savvy enough to figure it out. When dealing with a complex project, it’s important to relax, take a step back, look at it from a different perspective, and remember Thoreau’s watchword: Simplicity.