Lab Report: Fall Cleanup

Our educational website has slowed down where traffic is concerned -- along with all educational websites at this time of year. We've been doing one task a week for FreshPlans to track the results of each step. So we created an e-book to give to subscribers in the first week when traffic fell.

This did less than we expected, actually. We had a little bump in traffic and half a dozen new subscribers, but that was all.

Concluding  that our population is too busy to spend much time with us right now, we decided to put some time into tech stuff. Shan Pesaru of SharpHue, our webmaster, added a caching plug-in to make our site behave better. We added Webmaster Tools. We made some changes in the way we do our videos. We went in and changed our links to open in new windows, added alt tags to images that had gotten skipped over, and did some general cleanup.

As  you can see from the screenshot from our analytics above, this had no significant effect on our traffic, but it all needed to be done. We continue to post good content every day, we continue to get a couple hundred visits a day and to have sales at our affiliate marketing link on most days, and we'll be ready for the increased traffic when we get past our seasonal slump.

If you have seasonal downturns, take advantage of the opportunity to do the things that have been on your to-do list waiting for that chance.

Seeing Eye to Eye

Just this morning I had an email from a client asking to see a draft of the website we're building for her. I had to call her, because I just couldn't decide what she might have meant by "draft." Did she want the content draft -- a document in Microsoft Word? Did she want to see the mock ups? She already had access to the dev site -- the working site live but stored on a server, not live on the internet. She wouldn't have the software to open the design files.

Vocabulary problems often come up when we're working on sites. When a client says he has a certain number of "hits," does he really means hits, or does he mean visits? Or perhaps unique visitors?

Other terms people use in ways that may or may not mean the same thing when different people say them:

• SEO
• image
• content
• traffic
• article

Part of this is because some of the words are jargon. We use "jargon" as though it were a bad thing, but actually it just means language used in a special way  by members of a certain profession. When a designer talks to someone from the marketing department, they both use the word "image" and each means something different. When a manager uses the word "draft" -- well, I'm not sure what it means, but pretty definitely not the same thing a writer means.

The solution, usually, is to do just what I did: ask directly what the other person means. Guesses can create problems.

Do You Know Where Your Content Is?

The latest issue of .net magazine has an article which starts off with a claim that most people don't know what or where the content of their website currently is. I found this implausible at first glance.

Then I remembered some of the old domains I've worked with, and the treasure hunt involved in finding all the pages. The abandoned podcasts, the surprising mini sites unconnected with any other part of the site, the whorls and eddies of navigation added by different people at different times.

The multiple blogs, social media accounts, and other outposts of content created by people long gone from the company, or people still at the company who have forgotten what they started -- or at the very least, the passwords for the accounts they made.

The surprising inlets and peaks of contradictory information that lure travelers away from the homepage and keep them there, unable to find their way back. The ancient maps and press releases and other bits and bobs of related content, now out of date and lurking online to confuse people.

At the college where I teach, the most popular way to find information within the website is to go out to Google and start over.

So, if you have a large site, an old site, or a site that hasn't been taken care of for a while, you might want to explore it. Find what you've got, bring out the content that could be doing good for you and isn't, remove the things that shouldn't be online at all, freshen the whole thing up.

And then make a plan for the future, so it doesn't get into that condition again.

Brochure to Web Site?

Last month, I wrote a brochure for a company that makes a health care tool. This month, they've decided that they need a rewrite at the website.

I'm so glad that they didn't decide just to take the text I wrote for their brochure and tuck it into their website. I've seen people do that before, and it's a mistake.

Here's why:

• People read differently online from the way they read paper. When I pick up a brochure, I can see at a glance what it consists of. If I'm interested in your goods and services, I'll probably read it. Your brochure won't suddenly turn out to contain a video or an interactive tool or to be 200 pages long; I don't need to scope it out before I begin reading. So it makes sense for a brochure to begin with a good story or a telling metaphor. Your website, on the other hand, needs to answer my questions right away and let me know that I'm in the right place. 
• The context is different. Your brochure may come to me in the mail or you may put it into my hands when I visit your showroom, but there almost certainly won't be 5,436,723 other brochures there at the same time. Online, visitors are making a fast decision about whether to stay at your site or to go look at someone else's very similar offerings. A brochure can be a lot more leisurely, and it can be mroe sales-oriented, too. 
• Search engines are irrelevant to brochures. Your brochure gets into people's hands in a lot of different ways, but search engines aren't one of them. Your brochure doesn't need to be written so that robots can understand it. It can be literary, it can rely heavily on pictures, or it can be mysterious. Your website can't do any of those things if you want anyone to find it.

 This is why a company with a good marketing department -- or a marketing company -- may still need a web copywriter. At the very least, remember the moral of the story: don't use brochure copy on your website.

Should Your Company Website Be Left to the IT Department?

Recently, we were asked to take a look at a website for a large corporation based in New York. There was a point during our test of the user journey when we had gone through several different screens, feeling more confused by the moment, and were beginning to dislike the company (from the point of view of a website visitor, of course -- we'd love them as clients).With a sense of excitement we clicked on a button which, we felt, might actually give us the information we sought.

It took us to a screen we had been on about three clicks previously.

As we continued to explore, we found a small number of links, outdated code, missing alt tags, and strange internal linking practices. We were surprised. This is a large company, they're savvy, they have the budget to take good care of their website.

They can't understand why their website has such poor results. Of course, we can easily tell them why it has poor results. We just didn't get why they had such a poor website. It looks good at first glance, but that's just the graphics. Scratch the surface even slightly and you find something that needs a lot of work.

We discovered that the website was in the hands of the IT department. We know their IT department. These are sharp guys. One of the guys there has done some tech work for us in the past. Because we know him, we also know his view of optimizing a site for search engines, the work we do:

"I know what SEO is. You are the ones who sit at home and spam people."

He also feels that people who take care of the GUI (the part that people interact with) are lightweights.

We disagree with him on both these points.

I'm not saying that IT departments never contain people who know about SEO or user experience for their websites.  I'm saying that you can't assume, just because all of us work with computers, that the experts who look after the servers or network the machines or build your database are also experts on websites.

There's a tendency to assume that all computer jobs are about the same. Not so. Don't have the IT department take care of the website unless they happen to be experts on websites.