Blogs are great, I love them. WordPress is a fabulous tool for a business, no question about it in my mind. I have previously written about how to set your blog up to improve its performance. So what more do I need to give?

You Need Energy

We all need energy

Energy, in a word, energy. The difference between a blog and a static site is that the blog will generally develop and grow, but this won’t happen without some form of input. (my Mac grammar checker told me off for using that term the other day, told me it was jargon).

So what for does this energy take, what do we do to aid the ongoing development?

1. Blog. The first thing to is to actually write some posts, ideally fairly regularly. It’s not rocket science, why would someone visit your site if there is nothing new to read?
2. Keep a Focus. Yes this is a bit ‘do as I say, not as I do’. I have previously commented the eclectic nature of this blog, but… Keep a focus, yes of course embellish, express your human qualities, but make it clear what the boundaries are.

Hold on there, you haven’t done yet, back to the keyboard.
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Let’s start with the disclaimer. I am not in favour of a single company, service, product, whatever, dominating the scene.

Now to the ‘but’.

But Google is a very good search engine. I don’t like the fact that it inflates my rankings if I search whilst logged on to my Google account, but I love the fact that this post will appear on Google almost immediately. I realise that part of that process is due to WordPress and its plugins, but quite simply it suits my needs and my customers’ too.

Sarah Treble’s New Website

Exeter’s Design Credo have recently created a website for Sarah Treble, the renowned wedding dress designer now based in the South West. Whilst Sarah already had a website it wasn’t performing well particularly with search engines,

“I can’t even find myself unless I put my name in.”

Well, we are both extremely pleased with the results. Almost overnight Sarah’s ranking for key search terms improved with key phrases such as “bespoke dresses devon” putting Sarah at position two on the front page of Google. Removing Devon from the search string “bespoke dresses” still delivers a respectable third page Google result.

Somewhat surprisingly (for me anyway) “treble” returns a position two result on the front page of Google.

So how do we know this?

Firstly we make an educated guess about what terms people might use to search. We then reverse search and see how we do.

However Google provides some pretty good free tools help to collect and analyse useful SEO data. These tools not unsurprisingly are known as Webmaster Tools.

What these tools do is to allow us to see what keywords people may be using to search for our site. Sometimes there are some surprises such as ‘treble’. More surprisingly the observant may have noticed that ‘trebble’ appears on the list and searching for ‘trebble’ Google prompts us for a miss-spell.

The webmaster tools goes beyond simple keyword analysis though. It enables us to check the site’s HTML and allows us to see whether the SEO aids such as meta descriptions and page titles are all correctly added.

This is all free, you can do it yourself, but at DesignCredo it is very much all part of the Website Design Package that we offer to our customers

Communication is the word, yes communication. It all goes horribly wrong sometimes.

I am a slow speaker, I know I am but once many years ago this was really brought into focus when I was trying to teach a friend how to ride a drop handlebar bicycle. She fell off at the point that I had said “take your hands off the lower part of the handlebars” and never got to hear me say “slowly, one at a time and move them to the top of the bars”. She survived (we didn’t). The point was that the communication clearly failed.

Why Mining

Frequently I hear people say things like “I need a website” or “I need an A4 brochure”. Rather foolishly some might say, I usually engage in a bit of Why-Mining by asking “why?”

To aid communication the emphasis is on the why not the mining. Why-mining is an effective although slightly annoying tool. Quite simply people frequently tend to already hold many of the answers that they seek, they just need someone to stand in front of them and ask them “why?”

“I need a four page A4 brochure”
“Why?”
“Because my competitor has one”
“Why does it need to be A4?”
“Because thats what they always are?
“Why do you need four pages?”
“Dunno”

Eventually you will get to bedrock and even if this bedrock is “I don’t know”, that will be a good place to start.

The bottom line is that what we at DesignCredo are trying to find out is what is the customer’s story, the unique thing that they are trying to communicate to others.

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OK, in the early days of search engines an understanding of Boolean searches was useful. Nowadays things have moved on greatly and search engines provide increasingly complex ways of refining searches. How useful these are is debatable if people are unaware of them or don’t understand how to use them?

Are We Human?

It constantly amazes me when I am working with people the amount of apparently technologically adept people who use the Google entry field as the browser address bar. Doh…

Some basics,

• Website names such as www.designcredo.com are called URLs. These are like pointers to the website that you are looking for.
• Search engines are tools to help you find suitable URLs
• Search engines are generally used if you don’t know the URL
• If you do know the URL you may as well type it into the address bar at the top of the browser window.
• Most of the time you won’t need to type in the ‘www’ bit or even the ‘http://’ for that matter

Very occasionally you may be trying to access a page that Google (or another search engine) doesn’t actually know about. If you type this page’s address into Google you won’t find it although it actually exists.

But the bottom line is that we are human, we use things in a way that wasn’t intended and being human lots of people do fundamentally similar human things. This then leads me to the advanced search capabilities of search engines.

“UOK” “Yeah GR8″

Most schools use a Proxy Server to protect our little sweethearts from the evils of the interweb and most of the evil little sweethearts know how to get round the Proxy Servers mainly to access mind-numbingly dull games or to engage in fascinatingly tedious little conversations across a classroom.

I have walked into a class full of angels searching in Russian, and why is this you may ask. Well in Somerset the darlings were protected from the evils of Google Image searches but only the UK Google site was blocked, so the students would “Поиск в Google” by entering the search into Google.ru.

However few of these treasures would really know how to do an advanced search in spite of my interventions and to that extent I failed to engage them further.

The Ever Expanding Pit of Possibilities

Recently both Yahoo and Google have added tools to aid searches. Yahoo has a Search Assist box that appears in near-real-time giving you alternative search suggestions to that which you have entered. You may be forgiven for thinking that far from refining your ability to find something you may be tempted into the ever expanding Pit of Possibilities, who am I to comment?

Google on the other hand offer a range of tools that help you to refine your search. This appears on the left hand of the browser window.

Perhaps the first of these options that we should examine in the UK at least is the UK option. If we are looking for a UK based product or service it may worth filtering out the rest of the world.

What about if I had managed to miss Wimbledon altogether and wanted to find out who won the Men’s finals yesterday. Maybe looking for search results in the last 24hrs would help and that is exactly what Google offers here.

You get the idea I am sure.

What Worries Me Is…

Many years ago as a psychology student a friend designed a blindingly simple memory experiment, asking people to say what was on the back of a 50p piece (the side not represented by royalty). Remarkably few people could say what was there, the theory was that (being human) they had habituated to it and filtered it out.

So for me there is an awkward question to be answered. Are these search tools made for run of the mill humans? Are they understood, are they even seen (or do we habituate to them).

I ride motorbikes, my leathers have knee sliders to help me go round corners better. In my dreams the only time I will ‘get me knee down’ is just before ‘getting knicked but the police.

The reality is that the only time I ‘get me knee down’ is just before I ‘fall off me bike’.