Extra! Extra!

The redesigned Safe Credit Union web site is live and looking great. Awesome job Extractable!

I have to admit I’m almost relieved to learn that everything Jason Fried et al. touch does not automatically turn to gold. People love, love, love 37 Signals’ hosted Basecamp project management service (we’ve considered adopting it here at Extractable), but IA guru Christina Wodtke recentply posted her Top Six Pet Peeves with Basecamp.

I was joking with a coworker about how the new hotness is Trashing Web 2.0. But seriously, there’s some interesting stuff out on the web when you go looking for it. Mobile Web 2.0 is all about AJAX for Mobile Devices although TS in engineering points out that the phone we both own (Audiovox SMT5600) already supports AJAX with Mobile Internet Explorer.

Some interesting stuff on the Analytics front as well – Mapsurface is “a web page activity widget that helps you quickly see how people find, navigate and value the pages of your web site.” While CrazyEgg allows you to “easily see where visitors are clicking on a page and where they’re not”.

TechCrunch is the ultimate destination for all things Web 2.0 and in fact, positions itself as “Tracking Web 2.0″. Noteworthy posts include Zooomr which they claim is better than Flickr in several key areas and Skobeee which looks like a healthy alternative to Evite.

Ikarma wins for most interesting innovation of the day – and most transparency. I only wish they had space for more industries.

Lastly, 143 Resources on Online Tools, Generators, and Checkers may indeed prove useful. Wish it was more than just a massive list of links though.. something like the Web Developer’s Handbook perhaps.

Panelists

• Aaron Gustafson: Sr Web Designer/Dev, Easy! Designs LLC
• Ed Shull: CEO, USWeb (Web marketing)
• Eric Meyer: Complex Spiral Consulting, Standards Nazi
• Andy Hagans: works in SEO, blogs at Performancing.com

white hat vs. black hat SEO

Shull:

• cloaking (visible only to search engine)
• linkspamming
• comment spamming
• hiding tables in javascript to make the content show up higher in results (“cheating?”)

Meyer:

• blackhat is anyone who’s cheating
• sneaky techniques… at least grayhatting
• I’m asked too speak at search engine conferences for reasons I don’t understand. At one
• I was spammed in person on the conference floor

Hagans:
As an SEO I make it my business to know all the weapons in the arsenal. Search engines are getting smarter, so the business case for blackhat getting weaker. I don’t like to get into the moral argument… its gets kind of old.

Professional SEO involves regular testing and writing software. In the long run blackhat doesn’t make sense: you’ll get caught and penalized. Accessibility and web standards = whitehat SEO already.

Copywriting and SEO

Gustafson:
Good content for the page, semantic markup all help.

Shull:
We work with a lot of publishers (example: Forbes). Copy is the thing. Every title on their page said “Forbes.com.” They were excited to learn they could change it, but they just wanted “Forbes.com: The capitalist tool.” We got them to put the article names up there.

When the Hummer H3 coming out, we let our clients know about search terms coming up in their space. The Forbes article title was “Baby Hummer” which didn’t help them with “Hummer H3.” Instead of “Martha Stewart Goes to Prison,” “Stewart Goes to Prison” [so we had to get them to use better descriptive titles on the web pages].

Meyer:
The role of copywriting is to get people to like the site and link to it.

Hagans:
I agree: being linkable more important than the code. Re copywriting, you need to understand usability, accessibility, and SEO as well as marketing. Use alt text. Don’t use “click here.”

Meyer:
The alt attribute is important. Title is most often used for snarky comments.

Hagans:
Linking algorithms have killed most of the old tricks. Using common structural elements: h1, good link anchors are the most important things.

Question: Better to use h1 for name of site or page/article title?
Answer: The title.

Descriptive page titles, good navigation, good anchor text

Someone (I forget who):
Personally, I love site maps. another way to make sure every page on your site has a link into it

Google allows you to upload an xml version of your sitemap.

Microformats

Meyer:
Microformats have a whole lot of potential, not yet a lot of payoff. One example, link rel=”license”, Yahoo has a Creative Commons search that looks for that rel attribute/value.

In the works: hresume. Would enable, for example, a search among resumes of people Jeffrey Zeldman regards as friends

Shull:
You can use SEO as a way to sell web standards.

Hagans:
Getting to 508 helps, but after that you don’t get much. Still, it’s important to get the low-hanging fruit.

Question: Clients view SEO as a different project. How do you explain to them that it’s inherent in good web design?
Answer: Educate them.

Mention of Matt Cutts, Google search engineer who outs black hats on his blog.

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

For today’s daily Ajax news I recommend Scot Hacker’s notes from a panel I wasn’t able to attend yesterday.

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

I thought it might be interesting to listen to the panel on how large enterprises ought to choose their design partners. The lineup had changed a bit from what was listed in the SXSW directory.

The moderator was now Maddie Coover of Alamo Design and formely of Omnicom (the owner of Agency.com). The panelists were Jeff Williams of Frog Design in Austin; Christian Barnard, AT&T’s executive director for online experience and user strategy (he oversees the relationship with their design partner, Razorfish, and used to be a director and client partner at Sapient, and before that worked at Scient); and Mike Appel, VP and general manager for the south-central region of of AvenueA/Razorfish, which he says is the “largest independent interactive agency in the world today” and formerly Anderson Consulting in Dallas.

Williams went first and he was excellent. Here are my raw notes from his talk (accompanied by a slide deck):

Frog started as a product company, is strategic/creative. Model is “identify, transform, implement.”

Some of their partners (clients):

• Tmobile – strategic partnership, worked on extranets and flash apps and not just a tactical website redesign
• Sun.com… home page used to be 150 times as long, 1000s of links (when?), also extending web design to brandingpackaging and software
• Disney: digital, product, embedded ui, packaging, etc.
• HP is our largest partnership now. We are their master vendor. HP knows the value of design, doesn’t second-guess a lot of decisions.

Clients sometimes ask you to copy something else out there. Copying the competition gives parity but not innovation.

To clients: don’t ask for work on spec, if necessary for a design competition.

Christian Barnard explained how SBC (not AT&T) ultimately chose AARF to redeisgn their website:

Identified need in June 2004, not until April 1, 2005 for first delivery (from Razorfish).

Sent an RFP to 16 agencies, received responses from 9 agencies, narrowed the field to 5 finalists, brought them in for oral presentations, chose top two finalists, got internal approvals, started vendor negotiations, started with an initial trial quick-hit project with chosen vendor, then jointly developed the plan to redesign SBC.com.

Our decision criteria:

• experience (UE, web tech): 25%
• partnership (plans for organizing the partnership): 15%
• reliability (proven ability to execute against commitments): 15%
• cost: 13%
• capacity for handling overflow UI/IA work: 11%
• financial stability: 10%
• communication / decision making (ability to comm., methods to ensure decisions made in a timely manner): 6%
• logistics (extent to which vendor locations / resources align with SBC): 5%

We developed their online visions and a strategy roadmap with the vendor and internal stakeholders. Goals were to increase sales by 10%, reduce costs, get calls out of call center, and enable self-help online. The roadmap plotted out a five-year strategy, and broke up the redeisgn into meaningful phases (home page/public site, account management, product ordering).

AT&T does their own backend work but the vendor has to know the constraints.

Baptism by fire: the home page redesign was phase one. The old SBC page had 100+ calls to action, lots of content, not very useful. The business objectives: purchasing and account management.

We used an “advanced optimization” tool

The home page had to be done over because of the merger with AT&T, the new brand (worked with InterBrand)

Phase two was MySBC, account mgmt. For this they did rigorous user research, ethnographic research, contextual inquiry to inform the design process. Our partner had to understand the business aspects and how to develop user insight. We went into customer’s homes, to see beyond how they interacted with the existing site: how they work with paper bills, feel about them, interact with them, file them afterward, to meet their needs online.

The current initative: redesigning the shopping & ordering process.

Held an offsite lessons-learned retreat:

Works Well: Program Communications (master list of milestones, deliverables; overall creative brief stating the goals, objectives, and overall direction of the resdesign), Collaboration (strat and tactical, building consensus with stakeholders)

Needs Improvement: Focus on vendor morale (recognition, celebration, empathy, career growth)

Project Guiding Principles: face-to-face meetings, work-life balance (treat vendor like employees.

I found Appel’s presentation disappointing. To be fair, he was probably a late addition to the panel, but instead of general principles or advice or case studies we got a capabilities presentation.

Also, he repeated the AARF is the largest independent agency in the world, but I’m not sure what he means by independent. Independent of what?

Criteria companies should consider: Customer lifecycle (attract, convert, service, extend).

Why choose AARF? Thought leaders in digital channel, proven track record helping major brands improve performance (increased Adidas online sales 500%), deep technology experience, data-driven business optimization (tools to measure performance).

My only other note was “this feels like an ad for the ‘fish.”

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

I’ve been posting raw notes from panels all morning. I blogged about Beyond Folksonomies over at the blog for my book, The Power of Many and I blogged a presentation by a Harvard psychology professor about why people make poor decisions, How to Do Precisely the Right Thing… on my personal blog.

I’ve just been taking notes at the keynote conversation and it’s the first topic of the day that I thought was appropriate for Extra! Extra!

Both Coudal and Fried were witty speakers. Coudal led off and made excellent points about the importance of curiosity and a willingness to learn with each new project and then Jason took over with his familiar rants about not overengineering things and how functional specs are the devil.

Here are my raw notes from the discussion, printed as is in the spirit of launching a 1.0 version with limited time and effort and then revisting later (maybe) to improve it:

Jim Coudal

Imagine “Chris” – your friend who’s hipper to you than everything, used to have a band, then was making indie films, now building a tagging web 2.0 social web app

Noticed a trend in SXSW panels: used to be about making tools, now about making real businesses with those tools

37 signals (Jason’s company) used to do client work, now they do: ruby on rails, econferences, books, backpack / basecamp / campfire / ta-da lists

Coudal partners still does some partner work, mostly naming and identity work but also has some business: jewelboxing, the show (on tour with bands , record / mix / master / design / manufacture / fulfill limited edition concert dvds), the deck – targeted ad network (includes only signal vs. noise, the mighty, a list apart, waxy.org, and coudal.com).

When someone says they work in-house as a creative at product company, Jim smiles nad nods, thinking: awful newsletters, Comic Sans, sales videos based on the reality show of the moment, cubicles full of toys.

Running the whole show is better than being an employee. It’s better to be the boSs than to work for the boss. But there are always problems. Example, with products: fulfillment, for example, a minefield, though: international shipping / customers regulations, etc. Part of craft is to be able to learn quickly

Questions Coudal asks before taking work:

1. Will we be able to do good work?
2. Will we be able to make money?
3. Will we be able to learn a little something new along the way?

These criteria are not equal. Sometimes we take a project to do good work but get mediocre pay. Sometime the reverse (not proud of this). We won’t do mediocre work for mediocre pay. We won’t do a project where we can’t learn something new along the way

In work-for-hire world you must be flexible, curious, learn quickly. It’s always a new industry with a new problem. You need to be able jump right into the deep end of the school and start swimming, and we’ve got to like doing it.

The meek won’t inherit the earth; the curious will.

Jason Fried

on “the how”

How to take skills and turn them into a business. Now we all know css, blogs, semantic web, web standards. Starting something new is intimidating.

One way to start is to quit your day job, business plan, predict the future, get vc, hire, get office, aluminum sign with neon backing on your web page. That way is expensive and stressful, doesn’t put the product and customer first, puts the investor first.

Fried’s advice:

• don’t quit your day job
• don’t get money, hire
• start something on the side

Examples: delicious, basecamp (launched on 10 hrs. a week – “we were a consulting company”), jewelboxing, blinksale (josh williams)

advantages:

1. obscurity
2. less

Obscurity:
You learn more by failing in obscurity without the ego-hits, public criticism – removes fear of failure.

Less:
Less comes for free, is a plus not a minus, underdo: simplicity, clarity, work well, not too clever (one-down, not one-up) – less time is good, avoid overwork (functional specs, abstract things, wasted time, procrastinate… then rush), don’t try to be big, less red tape; less money is also good… you don’t need a lot of the stuff you think you need — 6 yrs. ago companies were spend millions on oracle, windows servers they didn’t need, insane scaleability (“ridiculous bullshit”).

Now, infrastructure software is fee, hardware is cheap (basecamp had one app server for one year, $150/month – don’t need all this redundancy, terabytes of tape backup), you need money for salaries, but if it’s on the side it’s just you or your partners also donating time

Seeing the 90s mentality again: Get $2 million bucks…. let’s get some nice desks, aluminum sign, etc.

Polish 10 features instead of 50 mediocre features. Get a few things right. There’s an endless amount of time to add stuff later. You can’t take things away.

If you make a big huge thing, tech support will kick your ass.

Build simple software that does a few things very well, not clever (like software we all hate: the kind that capitalizes for you). Software is not the solution to everything. Don’t build software that gets in people’s way. Build less software. That clever stuff takes a lot of time.

One “more” thing: more constraints

Bootstrapping model. Jason is anti functional spec. Just use it as you build it and you’ll learn what it needs to do.

Question and Answers

Coudal on web design: Use a subtractive process, take away what you don’t need (like Hemingway’s comment about writing).

Fried on venture capital: With vc money, you keep needing more of it, series a, b, c; those who don’t take it always seem to have enough.

Fried on hiring: Don’t hire with a long bullet list of expertise requirements. you want passionate, curious people who can learn what you need to do. are you good at what you do, motivated, passionate, curious

Fried on making money: How do make money? charge for your work. Charge a monthly fee. Everything doesn’t have to be free. It’s hard to make money from advertising. Also, lower-paying customers complain more. When you make a change for the better, people still bitch. Resist the urge to change it back just to please them. Wait them out.

Fried on functional specs: Why do I hate functional specs? They are political documents. They are about covering your ass. “We all signed off on it and we all agreed on it.” Mostly they’re illusions of agreement. (It’s usualy a matter of interpretation.) We build the interface first… we build it in HTML… you can all touch it, agree on real stuff.

Very little cost is involved in adding in a new feature to a functional spec…. In the real world there are real costs involved

Coudal on RFPs: “The RFP” rule. If the RFP is more than two pages, we won’t do it. If they spent all that time, imagine what a pain they’re going to be on the project.

Coudal on a possible motto: we’re making it up as we go along

Question: I work for Yahoo and we write functional specs. Eliminate them and a few people will lose their jobs. How to migrate to a better way? Isn’t it utopian to eliminate specs?

Fried’s reply: What’s utopian is thinking you know everything about how the app should work. We don’t know anything. What we do is write stories… we keep them to one paragraph. The story is a scenario, not technical or confusing. If necessary, we’ll mock it up to show how it works

Fried on specialization: When you’re small, you want to be generalists… don’t be just an information architect.

Fried on scope creep: We fix budget and time frame… whatever fits is version 1… adding more time and money will add scope.

Update: Scot Hacker took notes on this panel too.

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

Mark sent around a link to a collection of articles of web design and development, saying, “Scan down the page past the HTML tools and there are some great articles on this page.”

I use Mindjet’s MindManager program for brainstorming and notetaking, and for building sitemaps. Up to now it’s been a Windows-only application. Now, it appears that Mindjet is about to start beta testing a version for the Mac.

At O’Reilly’s ETech conference, groupware guru Ray Ozzie (of Lotus and Groove and now Microsoft) demonstrated a proof of concept of a “smart” cut-and-paste feature for the web (using RSS as the transport mechanism).

According to Scott Rosenberg, he demonstrated the clipboard using Firefox.

He also posted links to live screencasts and a web-based demo.