Content Management: Keeping Things Fresh

So you have a bright and shiny new website, the launch went well, people have complimented you, and everyone is excited. What happens next? Do you just let it sit there for the next couple of years? In that case, you shouldn't wonder if your visitor statistics are disappointing, the search engine ranking goes from poor to non existing, and the site generally doesn't do much for you.

The importance of regular updates cannot be stressed enough. There are the obvious reasons: Information, prices, services, timetables will go out of date. It is frustrating for a client to look up information on the site, then find, when they call you or visit your store, that the model they are after has gone out of production last year, or the class or event they were coming for isn't actually taking place. Do you think it promotes trust in your business if it presents information which has not been updated for the last three years?

The other good reason is that search engines favour fresh content. The principle behind search rankings is, simply put, that the engine tries to find the content which is most likely to be relevant to the person doing the search. The four main factors which play into this are: keyword match, popularity of the page (i.e. the number of previous visitors), number (and reputation) of sites linking to the page, and how recent the content is. So updating your pages regularly already takes care of one quarter of your search engine optimization!

This is one reason for the popularity of blogs: blogging sites allow users to input text and other content themselves, with no need for any web design or programming knowledge. Blogs are, by definition, frequently updated - and it turned out that search engines really liked this! Many people even choose to only set up a blog, not an entire website with their own domain. For some businesses this makes perfect sense - especially if you're only just putting your feelers out in the online realm. Most blogging sites are free to use: some of the most well known are Blogspot (which is hosting this blog), LiveJournal, and more recently, WordPress.

Wordpress even offers the ability to sign up for your own domain name, and a few other features which allow you to set up an easy to manage site yourself. These services are available for a monthly fee. Again, this can be a good solution for a first web site - but as with all out-of-the-box solutions, there are limitations to how well you can adapt this system to your own requirements.

Easy to use online content management systems are quickly becoming the standard for personal websites. They are often built using one of the available content management packages as a backbone - Drupal is one such package, which is popular with website developers. These packages offer a wide range of advanced interactive features: blogs, forums, image galleries, shopping cart solutions, password protected areas, you name them. The capabilities and adaptability of such a system go well beyond a humble Wordpress site - but it still is limited in some ways, particularly in the ways you can lay out and structure your site.

My personal preference is to create my own content management systems for my sites. The last two sites I have built - www.margarethiley.com and www.wellingtonyogacentre.co.nz - are both fairly small sites, and using a massive online content management system requiring hours and hours of setup or programming, seemed like overkill. Instead, I choose to work with text files, which can be updated by the user in one of the common word processing programmes, without the need for special web authoring software, or being fluent in html. This does require a certain level of feeling comfortable with computers, and a willingness to familiarize yourself with setting up an FTP connection, folder structures, and a minimal amount of html tags. But it helps to keep the cost down - in both cases, adding an online administration area would have doubled the work, and hence the price.

The site I am currently working on is a gallery site for a photographer. Here, one of the main requirements is that the client can easily add new images, and the associated information. This site will have a full featured online content management system - fully flexible, and adapted to this specific client's needs.

Asni: Multimedia Art & Design:: http://webdesign.asni.net :: http://www.asni.net

HTML Basics: The Head Tag

A couple of blogs ago, I introduced the most basic HTML tags to build your own web page. As I mentioned then, each HTML document consists of two main sections: the <head> </head>, and the <body> </body>. The <body> contains most of the things that are actually displayed on your screen when you view a web page. Today, however, I'd like to take a closer look at the <head>.

Most of the information inside the <head> tag is not directly visible to anyone viewing the web page. That does not mean that the contents of this section of the page are unimportant. Quite on the contrary! The head contains information that is vital for the functionality of the website - such as <style> tags that ensure the page is displayed the way it was set up by the designer, and <script> tags that specify any scripts running on your computer while you are viewing the page - for instance the popular Javascript, which enables a lot of the enhanced functionality you can admire on a professionally designed site. These can either be included in each individual page's <head>, or they can reside in an external file - a CSS style sheet or a script file - in which case the <head> tag would include a link to the external files which are needed to display the page correctly.

The <head> tag also contains information that is very important for search engines - if you are keen on improving your site ranking and get your pages found by more people, don't neglect paying attention to the tags in your <head>.

In my last blog on this topic, I already briefly covered the <title> tag. The line of text inside the <title></title> is what is displayed on top of your browser window. It is not to be confused with the main page headline inside your <body></body> tag, though it may well be the same line of text.

Next to your domain name, the <title> </title> is the single most important part of the site that determines how a search engine ranks your page's relevance for a certain keyword. Say you have a site about biking equipment. If you are lucky, you might have secured the domain "bikingequipment.com" which ensures that if someone enters the search term "biking equipment", your site is likely to be ranked quite high - if your domain name is equal to the search term entered, the search engine will assume that your site will be a good match.

These days, however, really obvious domain names are getting quite rare, and it is likely that if you are starting a new business and building a new website, someone else will have secured the domain "bikingequipment.com" already, and even alternatives like "bikingequipment.biz" or "bikingequipment.net" or "bikingequipment.co.nz" may already be taken (if the first business is smart, they will have registered all those variations themselves, to avoid having a competitor with a very similar domain name in the future).

Even if your domain has to be called something else - like "Petesstylishbikes.com" perhaps - no one can keep you from having the keyword "biking equipment" in your page title. If you are a biking equipment business located in Featherston, it would also be a good idea to include this geographical indicator in your page title - so your page might be called something like "Biking equipment Featherston Wairarapa". But beware of the temptation of making the title too long - keyword stuffing is not something that search engines appreciate. In the case of the title tag, most search engines only consider them up to a certain length - about 35 characters would be good measure.

Another tag that has some relevance for search engines is the <meta> tag. There is some dispute about just how much value search engines place on <meta> tags, and some search engines ignore them completely. Since they are not visible to the viewer, this is a place where much keyword stuffing and attempts at manipulating search engine results have occurred in the past, which has given the tag a somewhat dubious name. However, some search engines - Google included - definitely take them into consideration, so it is worth paying them some attention.

There are several kinds of <meta> tags, and they don't all have to do with content - some of them specify which language or character set is used, and if the content is mainly text, or some other media type. The meta tags relevant for your search engine optimization are the "keywords" and "description" meta tags. As the name implies, "keywords" contains a list of keywords relevant to your page, and "description" contains a short line of text that describes your page. This is often the line of text that appears in your Google search results under the link to your page.

The format of those tags is somewhat different from what we have encountered so far. Say you want to include this short page description: "Pete sells the most stylish biking gear in all of the Wairarapa". The tag would then read as follows: <meta name="description" content="Pete sells the most stylish biking gear in all of the Wairarapa" />. If you wanted to break it up into keywords, write: <meta name="keywords" content="stylish biking gear Wairarapa" />.

Asni: Multimedia Art & Design:: webdesign.asni.net :: www.asni.net

Site Maps, or the Importance of Planning

A client recently asked me what a site map was. An excellent topic for my blog, I thought ! One can hardly overestimate the importance of planning, when it comes to web design.

One way to look at a site map is as a blue print, or the building drafts for your house. It is a graphic representation of how the website will be structured, and how the individual pages that make up the site will relate to each other: which pages visitors will see first, and where do they lead them? What are the main sections of the site? Which page links to what other pages? This will also determine how the main and secondary navigation menus are built and structured.

As a design document, the site map should also indicate any features that are needed: will there be a database, a login system, a search function? Any content that is dynamically generated? If so, what will be the sorting criteria available to the user? Will there be media files that require special treatment? Will parts of the site be built in Flash? Will there be feedback or enquiry forms, or will the users be able to leave comments and feedback? All these things should be at least considered, and hopefully decided, before work on the actual site design even starts.

The more thoroughly a site is planned out beforehand, the less risk there is of wasting time and money walking down a blind alley somewhere. The site map will also help the designer to give a more accurate estimate of the cost, and of the timeframes involved - particularly if it is a complex site with many sections and/or rich media and interactive content.

It is not only in at the planning stage that a site map is of use, though. It is a document that should be kept up to date as the design process develops - there are bound to be changes or additions at some stage, or things that seemed desirable initially, but may turn out a bit superfluous. A clear structure is user friendly, and keeping track of the site map ensures that this goal will be achieved. It will be extremely helpful when new sections need to be added to the site at some later stage!

Eventually, a site map also will be relevant to your search engine optimisation (SEO). Once the site is live, there should be a page that contains links to every page within the website. This will make sure that the robots which crawl the internet on a regular basis for Google and other search engines, will find and index every page that is part of your site. As you will probably have noticed when browsing on the internet, search engine results always return individual pages, rather than web domains - the page a potential visitor finds in Google may well not be your home page at all. So making sure that *every* page that makes your website is accessed by the search robots, and indexed, increases your chances of being found on the net.

Asni: Multimedia Art & Design:: webdesign.asni.net :: www.asni.net

Devious fun with online promotion :: part 1

Those who know me well will know that I am a *little* bit obsessed with web statistics. And that's not meaning just my Google or Alexa stats or my page hits and visitor count - ranking systems of all sorts of shapes hold a weird fascination for me. I want to understand them. And yes, occasionally I would quite like to be able to trick them, mostly when I see what kind of dross sometimes washes up to the top of the rankings, evidently just because someone is doing a particularly good job at promoting their stuff.

Tricking, let me say it, does not work, in the long run. But there are few things that do work if paid proper attention to, and these tend to be the same, regardless if it's a major search engine you are dealing with, or if you just want to have your holiday photos on some social networking site seen by more people.

This past year, I have been quite active on Deviantart.com, where I've had my own online gallery for the past five years. As I got more involved with the wider community there, it occurred to me that in a lot of ways, Deviantart mirrors the workings of the whole of the internet, on a more contained scale.

The site gives everyone the opportunity to post their artwork, photos, designs, craft objects, or literary works online in their own customizable online gallery. With every gallery also comes a blog or "journal", and a message centre for communicating with other Deviants. Basic service is free, more features can be accessed by paying a moderate annual fee. There is no selection process as to who can open a gallery - but there is what I would like to call a democratic selection process in how much attention your gallery attracts.

"Attention", in DeviantArt terms, can be of several kinds: Gallery views, "Deviation" views, gallery "Watches", Comments and "Favourites" are the main flavours, and as a paid subscriber, I have access to a set of fairly detailed statistics regarding how well my own "Deviations" are doing. (I do, btw, love the choice of word. A "Deviation is any submission to a DeviantArt gallery -- and those of us who practise art in any form know all too well how the rest of the race regards these activities - unless we manage to attain "genius" status, but that is usually only obtainable by dying. But I digress. --)

Like any good Web 2.0 site, DeviantArt is not just about putting your work out there and getting it seen, it is very much also about interacting with other fellow artists. When I joined DeviantArt I was fortunate to have a head start because I already knew a small group of fellow illustrators from another online community, so I started out with a few people watching my gallery.

For the first few years, I mostly limited myself to uploading artwork, and posting the occasional journal entry. Every work submitted floats up in a "channel" of most recent works, which can be drilled down by medium and genre (e.g. "Traditional Art" - "Painting" - "Fantasy"), or limited by topic through a search function (e.g. "dragon", or "eiffel tower"). People do browse those channels, and work that stands out will thus immediately attract more views than work which is a bit humdrum.

Each new Deviation is also posted to your Watcher's message centre, where they can decide to view it or not.

At this leisurely pace, my gallery was slow to gain momentum, and there was a very clear relation between the frequency of posting new work, and the number of pageviews I achieved. A couple of years ago I decided to upgrade to a paid subscription, and one of the tendencies that became immediately evident was that certain images - not, in my own opinion, necessarily my best or most interesting, or even most recent ones - were attracting a disproportionate amount of views.

This, I deduced, must have to do with the option to search images by topic - my single most viewed Deviation, to date, is an illustration for Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre", which, appart from being compulsory school reading, also seems to enjoy undiminished popularity among teenagers in English speaking countries. Another popular image was a decidedly shoddy early attempt at Photomanipulation, depicting a scene from the Narnia books.

At the end of last year, my gallery was sitting at about 5700 gallery views (counted over the whole of its four year existence) - with a noticeable increase in views over the second half of 2008, which I attributed to a combination of posting more and better works, more regular journal entries, and a natural gathering of momentum as my gallery acquired more "Watchers".

At the beginning of this year, I set myself a deliberate goal of bringing my gallery up to 10 000 views. At the time, I thought that would be a tough goal to reach. I achieved that goal by mid October, and at the end of the year, I was just short of 12 000 pageviews - which means I have more than doubled my page view count this year.

How did I achieve this? I'll tell you about that in my next blog! :)

Asni: Multimedia Art & Design:: webdesign.asni.net :: www.asni.net