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Web Marketing Tip: Where to find out the latest Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Gossip

Added on Tuesday 12 Feb 2008

Interested in finding out what other people are bookmarking and talking about in the area of search engine optimization and website marketing? If so, you need to check out the new website called Sphinn.com. Sphinn is,

"a social site for search and interactive marketers. It's designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others."

It's another one of those darned Web 2 social networking, sharing and caring, while at the same time shamelessly publicising yourself, type websites. It's just occurred to me that social networking on the web is Adam Smith for the online age, i.e., self-interest leading to the greater good - sort of thing.

What I'm reading

At the moment I'm reading 'Web Standards Creativity, Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS and DOM Scripting', and learning lots from it. This isn't 'yet another book teaching web standards'. On the contrary, it's about how to use those standards in the service of your every day design practice. By 'learning from the masters', we get the latest tips, tricks and techniques to apply to our own designs.

It's a timely tome. As standards based web design becomes mainstream the focus is moving away from the standards themselves towards front-end design issues, including creating beautiful layouts, effective print techniques and improving the user experience by use of accessible scripting.

The 'masters' in question include Andy Clarke, Derek Featherstone, Ian Lloyd, Dan Ruben and others.

It is packed with techniques and ideas and I would recommend it for that alone. However it is not a book for the beginner as it assumes that you are already have a firm grasp of CSS for layout and presentation.

A better book for the beginner/intermediate developer is CSS Mastery by Andy Budd with Cameron Moll and Simon Collison. Also the classic, 'Designing with Web Standards' by Jeffrey Zeldman is a 'must have' book for understanding the bigger picture.

What has Jim Byrne & Associates been working on lately?

Recently completed work includes:

The Scottish Churches House Website

Scottish Churches House is an ecumenical conference centre offering accommodation for conferences, meetings and celebrations. The centre is based in Dunblane, has a range of facilities for groups and individuals.

The website was developed in partnership with Richard Nicodeme of Context Design.

Features of the new site include:

• A colourful and attractive design, with lots of photographs and graphics to provide visitors with a good impression of what they can expect from the centre if they decide to make a booking.
• The use of the accessible content management system (QnECMS) to allow staff to update the site themselves (http://www.qnecms.co.uk).
• The website uses XHTML to markup the pages and CSS (cascading style sheets) for layout and styling. This ensures the website will work on many different platforms and browsers and makes it easy to update the design in the future.

Web Design Training for Fife Council web developer

I delivered a one day training course for the developer of Fife Councils public transport websites. This was an unusual course because I was training only one person. I wasn't sure how that would work - but in practice - I have to say - I worked really well.

The final part of the day involved doing a 'live audit' of the websites, i.e., I did an audit of the sites, measuring them against the WCAG Priority 1 and 2 guidelines. The unique aspect of this type of audit is that the developer is completely involved in the process - and they can see the application of the techniques and lessons learned throughout the day on their own site.

I developed the idea of doing an on-site audit because I was fed up doing web accessibility audits which ended up with a report sitting on a shelf, and never getting acted upon.

I've carried out live audits on a quite a few occasions now and I'm a big fan of doing it this way. What you end up with is motivated and knowledgable developers raring to get to work on updating their sites in line with the lessons learned on the day.

The problem with most web accessibility audits is that they are not commissioned by the developers themselves (nor are they involved in the audit process) and when they are given a report done by an 'outsider' they aren't always terribly motivated to make the recommended changes.