how to get google to be totally in love with you... ;-)

What we were talking about just before the class broke up today, made into a little blog post for you:

1) Good, focused, (and if at all possible) original content. This is the one and only and penultimate thing that counts! Without good content, forget it, it just won't happen. What you have on your site simply has to be of interest to others - either specialist groups or general entertainment, but it has to be really good stuff! And my general hunch with this is that specialty sites are far more likely targets to get hits, since there is bound to be more search engine activity related to a specific topic, than there will be to general chit chat.

2) A large site will have more material for the search engine to find. Very simple logic really. If you have 100 posts it is far more likely that you wrote about something that somebody out there is searching for than if you have only 10. The larger the easypeasy site gets the more search engine results we get, no doubt about it. When we had only 10 posts, we had none. Nowadays with over 100 posts under our belts we have at least 5 or 6 a day and very often many more, sometimes as many as 20 even...

3) Make sure your site is structured well in terms of navigation. Even the best content in the world is useless if folk have to work too hard to get to it, they will simply not bother and leave and never come back. And needless to say, forget about them recommending it to anyone else... Read Selim's excellent post on navigation to get more insight on the matter here >>>

4) Post often and consistently. In other words, not silence for a whole month and then 10 posts all at once, but more like 3 posts a week, and every week. Remember that you can also write a whole batch and then pre-date them. I am not exactly sure how or why this makes a difference but a site which is consistently active seems to draw more traffic, a thing which I can tell very easily from the site stats of my own blogs. 

5) Make sure your meta tags are in perfect order. More on this here >>>

6) Make sure your post title comes before your blog title. More on this here >>>

7) Make sure you have a lot of links to other sites, either inside the posts or as sidebar elements: Your courtesy to others is likely to generate courtesy in return by them linking back to you - after all, this is how the internet works...

8) Use social networks efficiently. Tweet your blog and also post it on facebook, linkedin etc. Also if your site's content is at all relevant, start creative network accounts such as on youtube, Flickr, deviantart, vimeo etc. Use the groups within these domains to put out videos and photos and link these back to your site. 

9) Finally, be patient! It will take some time for people to find you - anything up to 6 months to even a year, depending on how fast your site is growing and on how good your content is. Usually you will hit the really big visitor numbers only after one of the major portals or blogs, one that covers the same area of interest on which you are focused, spots you and blogs you. This will take time. Just keep on posting and once you have enough good stuff it will happen - count on it.

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image tracking

Here it is folks:

http://www.picscout.com/

This site lets the owner of an image find out where and how their images are being used. It also lets web designers locate the owner of a photograph to contact them about licensing. 

If you link back to an image by right clicking and copying the URL (inline linking), then you are OK, since the software would only track the image back to the original website. And in any case, there seems to be no plagiarism involved when you do inline linking as this article on wikipedia tells us.

However, if you download an image into your computer, play around with it a bit (resize, crop etc) and put it back online - then you are toast! Or could very easily be if the owner of the image were to set their mind on checking on things.

I am not sure if this would also work with highly processed and manipulated images, however I would err on the side of caution and stay away from such practices altogether. For one thing, regardless of whether you get caught or not, it is not the right thing to do. Second, why take the risk when there are literally millions of images online, which you can use under the proper creative commons licenses? Read more on where to find them here.

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content = design: fireworks!

One of your classmates just sent me the link to her blog: From what I could gather from her mindmap she is thinking about designing a site on all the things that inspire her in life. Fair enough, I guess... But then in her very next post she is talking about a specific thing which inspires her - fireworks!

So, here is the thing: If you don't know her at all (which, obviously most of her readers will not), what would you rather read about? Fireworks in particular, or a medley of all the things which inspire her? My choice would be fireworks. A fascinating subject where she can go in-depth - and that is what makes the big difference here:

"Fireworks at Swindon", courtesy of Stephen Gunby

As she is building the site she will also be learning - which is at least half the fun when creating a website. There is a whole history there for one thing. Local customs which I am sure must have developed around fireworks all around the world, fairy tales and myths which they have probably brought about. There would have to be writers and artists and musicians who featured them in their work. Not to even mention the whole technological aspect. Huge big industry, after all. Must some active technologically there.

So, she has a subject there which would allow her to develop a specialized site, which people who have a specific interest in this subject would bookmark and put on their RSS feeds in a nano-second. She would get re-blogged by them and even more people would come to read and see what she has to say. It is a subject which she can take as far as she wishes, there is certainly enough material there for that. It will also involve doing research and rooting out information online, all the good stuff which I think of as good web design to begin with: In other words, she will be able to focus.

And the importance of focus in terms of design is that if you have a focused subject - such as fireworks - then you also have a great opportunity to focus your visual elements. Good design is about visual continuity. It is about creating a visual language where every component of your structure goes with everything else. Focused content will bring this about almost naturally. Images of fireworks, videos of fireworks, background and typography which complements them...

So, in many ways (if not in fact all-ways!), content = design. Brings about design...

YAYYY! Fireworks! Go go go!

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content issues: blog vs. website

As you are working on your content and your mind map one important decision to be made is whether you will have a blog or a regular website. While a standalone website is good for certain kinds of content (say, product sites or artists portfolios), when it comes to most web content my personal bias is in favor of blogs. I have this idea that blogs get a far better viewing response since they are open to social interaction. Yet another thing which makes blogs very attractive is that in their very nature blogs are updated very frequently through new posts. These posts see to it that a blog is structured quite differently from a regular website in that the home page of a blog consists of a post roll in which the latest post is displayed at the very top and things progress in counter-chronological order as you move downwards. 

The good news is that most blogging domains let you have the best of both worlds in that you can add pages to your blog which then make it work in a fashion very similar to a regular website with a home page and sub pages that can be reached from it either through a top bar or a page widget. While wordpress lets you have an unlimited number of pages and even lets you nest pages within pages (thus giving you the full hierarchy of a web architecture), blogspot is somewhat stingier in this regard and lets you have only 10 pages and no nested pages.

 (Tip:  What you can do however is create a secondary site at blogspot which has the exact same layout and design as the primary one. This is done very easily by exporting and then re-importing the blog once the structure of it is somewhat established. The secondary site you can then link to the main site and use custom created posts that you put on it as the sub-pages of your primary blog. ) 

Another type of combo which you can also consider is to attach a blog and a regular website. To give an example: At some point I intend to start a gallery on this site. For this I intend to do a perfectly straightforward thumbnail layout using Photoshop and Dreamweaver since it would be kind of silly to try to get that style to work within a blog format. This gallery I will then link to the blog with a separate link category or maybe even under a separate page where I have a bit of an explanatory text or something. Needless to say, the design of the gallery site (which is put together with Dreamweaver) and the actual blog will have to be consistent and this may end up being a bit of a design challenge to solve (but more on this type of stuff later...). And then the other thing to be aware of is that in terms of logistics, you need to either have your site externally hosted or run your own server so that you can access ftp, etc.

In terms of blogging domains, my favorite these days is blogspot. I used to be a die-hard wordpress person but the fully customizable template editor (wow - they even give you the code!) at blogspot has made me a convert. Of course, you are not bound by the user friendly services of public blogging domains - if you want to suffer you can also create your own blog from scratch or bust your chops by using wordpress technology embedded into your site and then spend long blissful hours configuring the CSS. ;-) :-)...

But one way or another, user friendly solutions or hard graft, in terms of the big decision - blog or website or combo platter - make your mind up pretty much now, I would say.

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the mindmap/preliminary site plan

Once you decide upon the content of your site it is time to become more specific and also to start putting your material in some sort of a hierarchical order. A very good way of doing this is through mindmaps.

Now, you can conceivably draw a mindmap on a piece of paper or a whiteboard. The thing with analog means is that they do not allow for too many changes of mind - every time you want to make a change you have to painstakingly erase things and start all over since obviously there is no such thing as copy paste in the physical world. A website is a living, dynamic thing, subject to many changes as you progress, and so it is a good idea to use a software for this. Freemind is opensourced and fantastic.

The screenshot above is a preliminary site plan for this site and I have put it here to show you how Freemind basically works. Insert gives you a child node and enter gives you a sibling node. You can write as much or as little explanatory text into the nodes. You can link nodes up with arrows and also cluster nodes through clouds. And there is even more that you can do with this, such as that you can add images and hyperlinks also.

So, next step: Download Freemind now and start putting together a preliminary site plan for your site.

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first things first: creating content!

Good content is something others (people who do not personally know you!) will be motivated to read/see, to benefit from to the extent where they will wish to pass on your URL to others. Certainly, good design helps, and that is what this place is all about in the end. However, not even the best design, with perfect visuals, great typography, fabulous coding, and so forth is going to make up for the absence of really good content.

And this does not have to be highfalutin, serious, earthshakinlgy important stuff either. One of the greatest sites that I know of, that I always go back to check on, is Monty Chan, which tells the story of Monty the cat through snapshots, often festooned with doodles and hand written notes by his owner. No fanfare, no major statements, no 'agenda' and yet a delight of a site which, just like me, many many people have bookmarked and keep checking on every so often.

So, you all have hobbies, right? Take a close look at them, see if they may not be really good material for a website that will interest others as well. Some of us love soccer, others love cats. Some of us collect stuff, while some are computer game freaks. Some of us are geeks, some are fashionistas. (And hey - some of us are both: Again an amazing site (contentwise) is Geekthreads. And a perfect example of what I mean by the fact that 'content' always overrides 'design' when it comes to really good websites. Geekthreads has its share of design problems (which I think I will actually discuss later, in a separate post). But, who really cares? Not even me - and I am a designer! ;-). The content is so captivating, there is so much humor in there, that I am more than willing to overlook a few alignment and hierarchy issues. Geekthreads makes me have a great time every time I go there - and at the end of the day, that is the only thing that really counts.

The thing to bear in mind is that you are creating content for people who do not know you. Which means that you have to be able to hold their attention through your content alone.Which means that you should be warm, sincere, open, funny and daring.Charismatic! Cheeky even! Or that you have content which is really useful to people (such as a specialized subject site, say in some research domain or a particular hobby or craft). Or... Or... In any case, in order to be able to pull this off you need to feel strongly and warmly about what it is that you want the site to be about. Which is why I am suggesting that you start out by looking at your own hobbies and little obsessions - be they your shoe collection or sharing your favorite junk food recipes...

A few ideas that I heard of in class are great by the way: As an example, Melis told me that she wants to create a "Usage Instruction Manual" on herself. Great! Now, the trick there of course is to make this thing so funny that someone coming by from Kenya or Indonesia or Canada - and who does not know Melis at all obviously - would still be ROTFL. Another really good one was the idea about putting together a food guide for Istanbul. In this case - why not with a twist? There are already quite a few "serious ones" out there, so how about a junk food guide for Istanbul? Then another good one that I heard is the frogman site. Well, if you have a hobby like that to talk about- you're half way there already, I would say...

So, really folks - this is the most important part of the job: Find some good content!

Go go go! ;-)

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