mediajunk

In primary school, I liked maths. I played chess. But I also liked art. And played football.

In secondary school, my favourite subjects were English and Physics. I still liked art ... but gradually grew weaker at maths, and lost interest. (I eventually lost interest in school generally, and was more concerned about the indie band I had joined, but that's another story.)

I did media studies in college, but I always felt that our subjects were based too much on wishy-washy academic theories, not hard science.

When I started working in a media environments like local radio and magazines, colleagues viewed me as a "tecchie" because I had liked working with computers. When I changed career track and started working with an IT consulting company, I was mocked for being an "artiste".

In truth, my passions have always straddled both worlds -- the creative and the technical. I don't see them as mutually exclusive.

I admire Google for brining science to web design and development. Google Analytics, for example, allows you to do A/B testing -- e.g. you can try out two different versions of a homepage on alternate days, and see which one users best respond to.

Google's Achilles heel, however, is that it doesn't have any sense of creativity. It sees web design purely in engineering terms. But web design is not only engineering; web design is also an art form. A true "web master" is someone who can strike the balance between the science of web design (semantic markup; usable interface design; etc.) and the art of web design (web pages that look and feel beautiful, or in other ways make you fall in love with them).

My suspicion about Google's lack of artistic understanding was confirmed in a revealing blog post by Douglas Bowman, in which he explains why he has quit his position as Visual Design Lead at Google.

I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

As Tim Van Damme comments, Bowman shouldn't be made to justify the width of a border. As a creative designer, when it's right, you know it's right -- you _feel _it's right. All the stats in the world will never give that same gut feeling.

I recently delivered a one-day course on SEO and Google Adwords, which was organised by the IIA. You can still download the slides from the event -- although they will be locked and available only to members in a week or so.

The course went really well. All 30 places were sold out.

I have realised that, in Ireland at least, there is much more interest in SEO now than when I first wrote my e-book "Website Findability".

I'd really love to write an update to that book soon. I've removed it from my website because some (only about 10 or 20 percent) of the information is out of date.

The problem, of course, is finding the time to write the revised version. My business is now five years old, and this year we have been busier than ever. Nevertheless, I hope to devote some time to revising the book within the next 12 months.

What Google (may have) looked like in the 1960s...

One of the things I love about my job is that I'm constantly learning. Everything internet-related seems to continually, rapidly evolve (consider recent changes in design methods, standards and styles; online marketing techniques; web-based software tools; electronic payment options; social uses of the internet; etc.).

That constant change keeps me on my toes, and makes me job challenging. As if that weren't enough learning to be getting on with, I also have to learn about our clients' businesses. I have to learn about their industry and its recent trends; what their business model is; how their internet strategy fits into that model; what their competitors are doing; etc.

Meanwhile, we're faced with another challenge: getting the client to learn what we need them to know. The more open clients are to this "mutual education", the better chance we have of success.

One lesson we try to teach clients is that the homepage is not (necessarily) the most important page on their website.

It's a mistake to assume that users will always, or even most of the time, access your website via its homepage. Consider this: when you search in Google, does it return a list of homepages? Not necessarily: Google returns a list of pages and other documents on the web that best match your search query. This is list is by no means exclusive to homepages, or even weighted towards homepages.

For example, if you've published an provocative article on your website, and a lot of people link to it, that article may tend to get found more in Google than your homepage does. Hence, more people will access your website via this article page than via your homepage.

Similarly, if you have a page on your website that contains a biography of your CEO, many people will access your website via this page, because they Googled your CEO.

Gillian Carson illustrates this point well in an article in Vitamin magazine, entitled Turning Your Visitors Into Users:

Quoting Ryan Singer of 37Signals, the article explains:

I don’t visit YouTube and click around. But I see blog posts with cool videos all the time. I don’t think of YouTube as a site. What draws me in is a blog post, IM or email. Then, when you end up watching a video on YouTube’s site, you realize there are more cool videos there, and might start clicking around. In this way the root of each visit is a permalink, a particular video, a certain experience - not the home page. The video is the epicenter of the permalink, and the permalink is the epicenter of the whole site. Everything revolves around the videos you love, not the farm that feeds them.

The homepage is not the only door to your website. In fact, when you review your analytics data, you will most likely find that less than 50% (probably fewer) of visitors access your site via the homepage.

So what do you need to do?

1. Make sure that the user experience is positive and consistent throughout the website.
2. Design the navigation in such a way that it's clear to the user where they are within the structure of the site (e.g. provide contextual cues like a different colour such for menu items that are currently selected; add a "breadcrumb" style navigation trail).
3. When setting up your Google Adwords or SEO, direct users to the most appropriate landing page for the phrase you're targetting
4. Spread the love: try to make sure you get just as many links to important landing pages as to your homepage. This will help your site's overall Google ranking.

Effective landing pages are crucial if you want to attract significant numbers of visitors to your website. Once you grasp this concept, you'll be well on the way to increasing your traffic.

Have you noticed that a lot of social sites now offer to find your contacts? It's definitely useful -- but do you trust Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter with your email address and password?! What about Fernando, SlugIt and Redface? (Okay, I made those ones up, but you get my point.)

How can I trust these new kids on the block? In short, I can't. But I trust Google. At least, they already have my login details!

So here's my suggestion: Google should offer a "protected contact list transfer service" whereby there's some sort of link or badge I can click in Twitter, Facebook, wherever. The link takes me to a page within Gooogle's domain where I login, and where the contact list transfer takes place. I can then go back to the host page. I envisage this process a bit like PayPal payment integration -- you temporarily leave a site to make a transaction within PayPal, then get redirected back to the site when the transaction is successful.

Better yet, Google should be able to guarantee me that the host site can only access the contact list for this fetch only. Maybe they could make the host site pay for this service? Maybe it could be an API?

Until Google offers such a service, I'm always going to be wary of giving a third party access to my email.