Separate your content from its presentation. It is a best practice to keep the code on your website that controls of the appearance of your site separate from the actual content. It’s good for accessibility and it’s good for flexibility, in case you want to go back and change stuff on your site later. I recently read an article by Aaron Gustafson on A List Apart, Understanding Progressive Enhancement, that reinforced this concept from a bit of a different angle.

“Progressive enhancement” dates back to 2003. This article starts with contrasting progressive enhancement with graceful degradation. Whereas graceful degradation focuses on giving the latest browsers the best experience while not completely breaking the experience for older browsers, progressive enhancement takes the opposite perspective: starting with a good experience and making it better depending on what technology you’re using. This is the angle the interesting angle. It’s not just about making sure that a website works for everyone. A highly interactive site can engage users and may increase conversion rates, and progressive enhancement takes the content as the foundation on which you can build a great website.

The heart of progressive enhancement is the content – writing content that is properly marked up so it is versatile and can be displayed in all sorts of different technologies. Gustafson uses the analogy of a peanut M&M to discuss this – the content is the peanut, the chocolate is presentation (CSS), and the hard candy shell is the flashy, snappy interactive features that use the best that browsers have to offer. Although almond M&M’s are obviously superior to the peanut variety, this is a good analogy.

This approach makes sense. Foremost, if people can’t access your content, why bother having a website? Solid and versatile content is good for people who have disabilities. There’s always going to be plenty of users who do not have the very latest browser – plus, you never know who’s going to come out with a brand new browser next. Browsers may not even be the main way customers interact with your content, one day.

This progressive enhancement concept plays well with SEO. You’ve got to ensure that search engines can figure out what your site is all about, so making your content adaptable is going to help. From a user experience perspective, also, this stuff matters. You don’t want to go around cutting off potential customers from reading your site just because they’re on a mobile device or are paranoid about having Javascript turned on.

Funny. I was just talking with some colleagues about locating additional social media visionaries and explorers here in Michigan, and, like magic, I stumbled upon Podcamp Michigan. They found me, following me on Twitter, and then I found Podcamp Michigan on upcoming.org and Facebook.

What is a podcamp you ask? It is a free, unConference focused on new media: podcasters and listeners, bloggers and readers, social media mavens, and anyone interested in new media.

Coordinates:

• Podcamp Michigan Twitter
• Podcamp Michigan Upcoming
• Podcamp Michigan Blog
• Podcamp Michigan Event Details
• Real-world coordinates: 11/8 9AM-4PM at Embassy Suites Hotel, 28100 Franklin Road, Southfield, MI

Aaron Shear wrote an excellent blog post on the expected changes to Google’s ranking algorithm. If I were to paraphrase the story, the essential take-home message is this:

The prevalence of Google Analytics allows them to measure value of a site based on actual user behavior, instead of second degree measures such as linking or traffic. We’re going to use those measures as much as possible to identify relevance and ranking.

There are endless questions about how exactly this will be measured (is it within a sector or across all sites? How about improvements? Do site facelifts get noticed easily? etc.), but at the end of the day Google is challenging websites to embrace the entire constellation of website fundamentals, not just links or words.

This is fine as far as we’re concerned; basically we as a company view internet marketing at a strategic level: we help companies develop internet marketing strategies whose core online face is targeted, visible websites that are useful for visitors. Why? Because sites like that work to grow business.

So we’re glad Google got here. They are basically arguing that a site’s relevance is a combination of market analysis, visibility strategies, and usability (and usability. AND some more usability. Really, usability is IMPORTANT).

What this change does do is change our emphasis. Historically we have recommended Usability as a way to optimize a site that is already getting a pretty healthy head of steam from traditional SEO strategies. Now, we may start at the end-user experience for sites that are already nominally visible in order to grow their traffic through links and user experience statistics.

One challenge here is that many SEO companies, committed to certain strategies, may draw the wrong conclusions. For example, Aaron asserts in this article that this new model means people should focus on Blogs, social bookmarking sites, and Facebook. Maybe. But aggressive link building to a site that doesn’t hold a viewer’s interest will not mean much in this new universe. The question is whether or not content is working for your site. Even Aaron’s recommendation that a site create traffic that is RSS-worthy is just another kind of link-building strategy that is content-agnostic.

Not all sites are going to need to generate daily content, however. Those sites should focus on a useful, usable experience that maximizes the enjoyment and value to the user. This will provide Google with lots of data to measure site “satisfaction”. For those sites that are lucky enough to be properly aligned with daily content, creating blog- or RSS-worthy content is a great strategy as well.

Regardless of what happens next, Pure Visibility’s emphasis on the fundamentals of a positive internet experience will be useful to anyone trying to keep up with the shifting tides of ranking algorithms.

I was intrigued over the weekend by a tweet from timoreilly that “customer service is the new marketing”. The tweet linked to a recent video interview on O’Reilly Radar of Lane Becker, GetSatisfaction’s founder. In case you don’t already know, GetSatisfaction is a company that provides a web-2.0-kind-of-forum for customers to interact with each other and with representatives of companies about their experience with the brand. It provides an open space for folks who are mavens and devotees of a particular company to offer their expertise to resolve other folks’ problems, and a place for the disgruntled to vent and get solutions to   problems that arise.

I was really caught by the title of the piece, because the phrase is true on many levels. Great customer service is the basis for referral marketing. And in this day of public fora like Twitter, GetSatisfaction, and a proliferation of blogs, individual shoppers and potential clients are not only relying on their intimates and colleagues for referrals. They’re getting information about your company from strangers, and perhaps giving it more credence than what the business says about itself.

So, to this end, I was heartened to see in my Google Alerts this week that a client of ours, Cosmetic Dentists Donaldson & Guenther, got a great review from a client of theirs on InsiderPages:

The dental work was by far the best I have had done….It was also done very well, with a really unusual level of care and kindness.

We’re proud to work with clients who have happy customers, and even prouder when we see reviews like that. Lane Becker is absolutely right. Customers and clients have much greater influence over your brand in this world of user-generated content. It is the business’ responsibility to ensure that customers and clients have positive things to share, because share they will!

Color perception is a tricky business – the way a color makes a person feel, the colors we choose to wear and identify with, is about as subjective a topic as you can yet. But studies in perceptual psychology have also shown certain colors to have certain effects across subjects, albeit with sometimes contradictory results. Use of color on websites becomes an interesting area of investigation. How does one strike a balance between the colors the designer prefers, and the associations that color might bring up for users? What facts can we be sure of when it comes to the effects colors produce?

Not too long ago Mike wrote a post discussing a report from the Journal of Usability Studies, originally published here. The take-away is that a study on color combinations on websites showed that both classical and expressive aspects of aesthetics (meaning both formal guidelines, and more subjective ‘feelings’ produced by colors) both affect users. Particular color combinations were shown to be more effective than others – specifically, “the split-complementary color schemes that utilized a cool primary color (blue) for the top or global part of the page and then used either another cool color (medium blue) or a warm color (orange) for the secondary page components provided the color balance that users found most aesthetically pleasing”, in comparison to double warm colors.

This information is incredibly useful to designers, and raises the question of what further conclusions might be drawn. But searching the web for what others have to say about color in web design brings up the expected contradictions and unsupported facts – for instance, did you know that
“white is associated with youth and freshness,”, or that “orange is associated with fun and youth?” What’s funny is that the first site cites the second for information.

So no definitive source exists. While I typically prefer data to back up guidelines, my desire for further guidelines led me to turn to what some of the seminal thinkers on form and color had to say about what colors mean. Wassily Kandinsky, the early abstract modern artist, developed his own theory of color early in the last century, one that has been much referenced by researchers following him in art theory as well as other fields. Why? Even if modern art isn’t your thing, its hard to deny Kandinsky’s talent (skill?) using color to produce effects on a viewer. The experience of viewing a Kandinsky up close, is, (imo), difficult to reproduce.

So what does he have to say? Blue, found to be effective in main navigation on sites, is associated with depth and restfulness; yellow is its opposite, the most aggressive, insistent, and disturbing color. The mid-point of these two “active colors” is green, a color that feels stationary as a result, and is thus even more restful than blue. Black and white, neither of which are “active colors” themselves, represent silence, but one (white) with possibility, while the other (black) brings up connotations of death or impossibility. These two opposites also combine to form an even more motionless, silent color, grey. Red is an intense warm color, but lacks the quality of reaching out to the viewer that makes us perceive yellow as so aggressive. Orange lies between the two in seeming closeness to the viewer. Brown is passive, and violet’s connotations depend on the amount of red/blue creating it.

What I like about Kandinsky’s ideas is that they are a basic guideline that describe the less tangible qualities (degree of seeming “motion”, for example) over focusing on more debatable connotations.

Is a good user experience essential to get your website a high ranking in search engine results? It may well be.

Over time, search engine optimization tactics have changed as the search engines have become more sophisticated. You can’t count on things you did yesterday to have the same results tomorrow. Good title tags? Sure, you have to keep giving your pages good titles, but now you have to make sure people are linking to your site.

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Cone, inc. published a remarkable survey with some striking findings about social media. Many high points are touched on at Search Engine Watch, but the point that struck me as most telling was the high number of men who use Social Media. Specifically, “Men are twice as likely to interact with companies via social media than women. 33% will interact one or more times a week while only 17% of women will.”

There are some questions about how this survey uses “social media”, but if it relates to a company, it probably has to do with forums or blogs. The other question is what it means to “interact”. Is that someone reading a company’s blog? Posting an opinion?

I find these questions fascinating, because Social Media is often described as the “softer” side of online marketing. What might we learn about what Social Media means? Is it just a hyper-personal information tool, which often appeals to men more than women? Do men like the fact that they can dialogue through posted, uninterrupted entries, as in a blog post or a forum? How closely do men observe the activities and opinions of other men in these forums? The survey opens up a whole world of great questions.

My unscientific guess, supported by our local male-geek-expert Jessica, is that men are heavy users of forums and blog comment groups in order to gather information and learn about positions of other posters. The fairly confrontational nature of forums may lend itself to male dialogue patterns.

So. If a company wants to bring women into the fold through social media, what should it do? Are there formats in Social Media that encourage more female participation than male participation?

I’ll ponder these things as I check my ESPN rss feed.