Welcome to my first post since December 2007. I missed an entire year of blogging!
Its been a crazy 2008 for me. highly visible went from being a Web Development/SEO blog (which I maintained in my spare time) to the Limited Company that is now the sole provider of my income. I left my full time job at dabs.com in February to see if I could make it on my own. If the first 11 months are anything to go by, it would appear I can. The blog fell by the wayside a little bit as I concentrated on getting the money in and establishing my business – now I’m hoping to dedicate a little time each week to keeping the blog up to date.
Something that happened as a consequence of turning my back on this website was that my WordPress installation went out of date and, sure enough, I was hacked. Every page of this site had spammy links hidden at the bottom and soon I was blacklisted by Google. This is not a great position to be in, particularly when I’m supposed to be good at SEO and my company name is highly visible! I like a challenge though and have recovered my rankings in Google over the last month or so (tip: changing the primary domain that points to your site for a couple of weeks and 301 redirecting the orignal seems to work wonders). I now keep my WP installation more up to date and have in fact upgraded to version 2.7 just today. The new WordPress Dashboard is a joy to use and anyone tasked with developing admin/control panel type web apps could do worse than plagiarise it.
The things I’ve been working on over the last year or so have been a real mix, from web app development for e-commerce websites to css/clientside coding and even some html email building (damn Outlook 2007 to hell).
I have the rest of January and February booked out to myself as I’m doing some much needed admin/company tasks and am starting to look into phase 2 of my business plan.
I’m likely to be on the lookout for work again in mid March so if you’ve got anything you think I can help out with, please get in touch and we can talk rates!
Here’s to 2009 – the year when blogging came back into fashion.
The Email Standards Project has been launched to highlight the need for consistency across email clients. Anyone who’s ever had the misfortune of producing html email campaigns will know the pain involved in getting a consistent look across the many possible clients. I blogged back in January about how bad Microsoft Outlook is at rendering html email and whilst Outlook is probably the worst, it certainly isn’t the only offender.
The standards project features a great lookup chart down the left of the homepage, highlighting all the major email clients and how well they rate for standards compliance – as you can see, Outlook 2007, .Mac, GMail and the nightmare Lotus Notes receive the shameful red “poor” tag.
If you have a blog/site and are into this kind of thing, do a post about these guys, give them a backlink and get involved, the higher a profile they have, the more likely it is that the biggest offenders will do something about their shoddy products.
I’ve been playing around with LINQ quite a lot recently following the release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5.
LINQ is an OR/M (object relational mapper) for C# and VB.NET, these videos by Beth Massi give a good introduction to LINQ and show just how powerful it is.
A lot of LINQ to SQL examples in the videos show how you can set the Log property of a data context to output to the console:
myContext.Log = Console.Out
Doing this allows you to view the SQL code that LINQ generates to interact with the database. This is fine if you are working with WinForms but not so great if you work on websites.
I found this neat class by Kris Vandermotten which outputs the LINQ log data to the Visual Studio Output window – far more useful if you are working with web apps.
I stumbled across MindMiester today, a nifty ajax app for producing MindMaps online which has been created by German company codemart.
I’ve been looking for something like this for a while, I’m a big fan of using MindMaps for scoping out projects of all sizes and have quite a few of Tony Buzans books on the subject.
Whats a MindMap?
For anyone unaware of what a MindMap is, think of a todo list or written plan on steroids, your core topic sits in the middle of the Map and subtopic “trees” branch out in a clockwise direction. A format which is naturally more “in synch” with how your brain works. The trees and branches can be nested to many levels and can (usually) contain more than just words. See The Ultimate Book Of MindMaps for detailed info on how to do mindmaps or just try out MindMeister – its free!.
MindMeister – online and collaborative…
MindMeister is the first attempt I’ve seen to take the process of MindMaps on to the web. It uses an impressive ajax interface that lets you build up the maps in the same way you would in a “desk bound” version of the software but with the obvious Web 2.0 advantage of being accessible from anywhere and collaborative. At the moment it seems that you are limited to using strings of text for the “leaves” of the maps (although there is functionality to link out to Google, del.icio.us and Wikipedia using the text as a search term). It will be interesting to see how this progresses, it would be really nice to see image, audio and video capabilities added.
Widgets and Browser Extensions
Another nice touch are MacOS and Vista widgets and Firefox and IE browser plugins that let you quickly fire ideas into your “default” mindmap right from your desktop/browser – great for those frantic caffeine infused idea sessions:-)
Pricing
codemart have structured their product with 3 pricing options starting at free and working up to €38.50 per year for the premium service. The free version only allows you to create 6 MindMaps but that’s enough to give you an idea as to whether its worth coughing up for the paid version.
Yahoo! today announced support for a new <meta> tag which allows you to opt out of having Yahoo! directory snippets appearing under your natural search results in Yahoo! search. Up until now site owners had no control over whether the snippet text was taken from the Yahoo! directory or from <meta name=”description” … > tags within their sites pages.
This had become an increasing problem for sites that established their listings in the Yahoo! directory some time ago, leading to (undesired) out of date text appearing with their Yahoo! search results. For an example of this, check out the search results for dabs.com:
The phrase “Sells IT and Technology Products” is from Dabs Yahoo! directory listing and was set up years ago. I’ll be getting the NOYDIR tag in place on the dabs site soon so that it gets the text from the meta description instead.
To make use of this new tag just add one of the following to the <head> area of your pages and wait for Slurp to visit your site:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR">
or
<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOYDIR">
update:
This Search Engine Roundtable post makes a good point about the NOYDIR tag, it will have zero impact on your search rankings. The changes this tag allows are purely cosmetic allowing you more control over snippet text, however nicer snippets means more click throughs which means higher conversion rates – got it?
The Google team have added a great new feature to the Google Webmaster Tools. The Links tab which has been added to the top nav in the GWT console allows you to view internal and external backlinks to your site(s).
Google’ link: command has been unreliable for some time, often returning a very small subset of the backlinks to a page. This new tool not only shows you links to your site by page, but also splits out the internal links (ie; your sites own internal link structure) from external links.
Be warned, as with the link: command, the list includes links that are marked rel=”nofollow” and therefore carry no weight (at least not in the conventional SEO sense). As Matt Cutts stresses in his post on the subject:
Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.
The tool also allows you to download these links as a CSV file so you can do your own thang’ with them.
Login to your Google Webmaster Tools to see this in action or find out more about the Google Webmaster Tools by watching this Matt Cutts vid:
Bill Gates appearance to plug Windows Vista on The Daily Show.
“5 Million people tested the beta version of Vista”
Maybe you should have made that 10 million Bill, that way your product may just have been ready to use.
I ran the final version of Vista Ultimate for about a month before finally giving in and reverting back to XP. Vista is slow, very slow. It has many incompatibilities (including not being able to use iTunes) and many more unnecessary security dialog boxes. The final straw for me was when I could no longer access any of my control panels (Windows explorer went into perpetual restart). It was a relief to get XP back on my machine. Still, I’m sure I must be in the minority here – right?
Last week Read/WriteWeb had a great post on what amazon.com have done so far with Web 2.0. Amazon.com really are the exception to the rule and the big e-tailers seem to be avoiding Web 2.0 like the plague – especially here in the UK (the article above points out that only amazon.com has any Web 2.0 initiatives, its british sibling still lagging way behind). Why aren’t more UK etailers making use of web 2.0 technologies and principles?
Return On Investment
e-commerce businesses (particularly pure play companies) tend to operate on very tight margins. Internet shopping is still perceived primarily as a way of saving money (vs. high street shopping) and as a consequence, purse strings tend to be held that bit more tightly on internet retail sites. The nature of Web 2.0 (and particularly AJAX) is such that it usually requires additional development time, first you build a page that works with javascript and css disabled (the no frills version) and then you bolt on the web 2.0 bits afterwards. Its very difficult to predict what sort of return on investment this additional effort will bring. What percent increase will a business see in sales if rss feeds are implemented on its product range? Or if the product catalogue suddenly becomes AJAX driven? There are no (or few) real test cases out there (in retail at least) and nobody wants to be the first to waste thousands of development hours. Notice the stock chart in the Read/WriteWeb article mentioned above that clearly shows no interest from wall street in amazon.com’s attempts to ‘pimp’ its site up with web 2.0. Compare this to a Web 2.0 startup like SmugMug who are building (or have built) their business from the ground up and where web 2.0 functionality is essential to stay ahead of the game.
Competitor Intelligence and walled garden syndrome
Many etailers are still very protective over their intellectual property whether this be pricing info or content and will often go to great lengths to stop scrapers and other CI tools from operating on their sites. The whole web 2.0 paradigm of social interaction and the free flow of information is often in direct opposition to the core beliefs of the business. Adding rss feeds that contain lists of the latest products with pricing info or customer reviews, gives that information to competitors on a plate – no elaborate scraping tools required.
Time lag
etailers rarely have the flexibility and (spare) resource required to respond quickly to new principals and technologies. Many are fairly bureaucratic, making the pace of change a lot slower than it would be for a startup company with < 20 employees.
Fear of a passing fad
Many internet retailers have famously been burnt in the past by throwing large amounts of money at projects involving DHTML, Flash or other proprietary technologies (think Boo.com, habitats current site etc.) – a lot of these projects don’t even see the light of day and the ones that do, tend to be axed within months as the fad turns out to be a false dawn. Whether you think web 2.0 is a passing fad or not is irrelevant – it is still eyed with an air of suspicion by most online retail businesses who will be waiting for hard evidence before proceeding. Again, see the stock chart in the Read/WriteWeb article that seems to show Wall Streets lack of interest in Web 2.0.
The minimum to get the job done.
E-commerce businesses have always been about getting the customer to convert with a minimum of fuss. Anything you put in the customers way is another reason for them to give up and go elsewhere. In the late 90′s when DHTML was rife, amazon kept it real by using nothing more than cold hard html markup that worked on any browser. I think this “bare minimum” philosophy is still at the heart of a lot of etail businesses and prevents them from venturing in to the worlds of web 2.0 and AJAX.
In summary, I think that a lot of e-commerce businesses will slowly start to integrate web 2.0 elements into their sites but its going to be a long slow process and it will take a big player (probably amazon) to take all the risks before anyone else jumps in with both feet.
Jakob Nielsen has updated his Top ten mistakes in web design document for 2007 an its well worth a read. Nielsen is quite often seen as too “hard line” and his ideas are often seen as too restrictive to work in practice but I think this list of ideas and suggestions is something that every web developer would do well to read and understand.
Points that I particularly agree with are:
2. PDF files for online reading
3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links
5. Fixed Font Size
6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility
9. Opening New Browser Windows
All of these are bugbears of mine and are so common in many high profile websites that “ought to know better”.
Check it out at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html
New version of MS Outlook uses Word to render HTML!
Creating HTML emails that work across the board has always been a black art. Producing HTML pages that work consistently across multiple browsers is challenging enough but when it comes to generating markup that works with most email clients, you’re in a whole new league.
Microsoft have just made this task 10 times harder with the release of their new office suite, Microsoft Office 2007. I ran the beta of this suite for a few weeks and then removed it because I think its incredibly confusing and difficult to use – this however is besides the point. Whilst using the beta, I noticed poor rendering of HTML emails in Outlook and just assumed it would be fixed for the final release. The final release is now out for business users and will soon be unleashed on consumers – all the awful glitches that were present in the beta version of Outlook are still there.
The reason for this is that Microsoft decided to use Word instead of Internet Explorer to render the HTML. Anyone who has ever tried to do anything HTML related in any version of Word will know that this is a recipe for disaster. Word and HTML (and by this I mean proper HTML) have never got on and probably never will. In real terms what this means for developers is that we have another “Lotus notes” to deal with. Anything beyond the most basic “table and spacer gif soup” will screw up in Outlook – a platform which is likely to make up a large proportion of our audience. Ultimately it will be the developers that take the wrap for producing “bad code” that “doesn’t work properly”. Its not likely that business owners/clients/customers will appreciate or care that Microsoft is at fault.
Why on earth Microsoft decided to do this when they have just produced a half decent browser that could do the job far better is beyond me. I can only assume that concurrent development timelines prevented the office team from using IE in Outlook. Surely nobody at Redmond would have chosen the Word route openly and knowingly?
Web standards in HTML emails have been set back a long way because of this and any good work the Internet Explorer team did in producing a more standards friendly browser have now been overshadowed by this latest move. If you’re responsible for producing HTML emails, I suggest you get a copy of Outlook 2007 and test your templates as soon as you can – they are likely to be broken.
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