We’ve been talking a lot about the Google Maday update as well as Google Caffeine, the new algorithm. Though this would seem like talking over and over about the same thing, we must take into consideration the huge impact that this new algorithm has on the whole web, search engine optimisation and users ecosystem. The web is an ever changing entity and the “addons” that influential web companies publish always have an effect on the way users will be interacting with websites. This is what Google did by launching Google Caffeine.

Fresh content, the new El Dorado.

Let us jump back to what Google told web professionals on Google Caffeine some two weeks ago. The core elements to take into consideration are:

[Google] Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index. [...] Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

This means that the way the Google index worked before, though not completely removed, is currently pushed aside to favour a new way of indexing. This new way of indexing takes information as it is published, analyses it and sends it directly into the first (freshest) results that the search engine will be delivering to its users. The impact is that fresh information will always have a lead, be it small, on the old system of having capitalising on age for a page indexed on a given theme.

Impact on companies.

This crosses one of my everlasting belief that companies need to produce more fresh content to keep up with the pace at which the whole system is running. A company can have a website and be communicating on it but if the new deal is that the company regularly publishing content on its own field gets the topmost ranks in search engine results pages then the cards are being redistributed.

This also means that everything like tests and sandboxes are being shattered to pieces (though Google Caffeine must have a sort of filter on that). A younger company with a younger website publishing fresher and to the point content will now be able to compete with the old mammoths. Result: increased competition directed by the Big G. Could anyone have thought that Google Caffeine would have had that much influence on business communication models?

Blogs are not crutches but tools.

Right oh! The solution, as anybody would have imagined is to implement professional business blogs on company websites. Blogs have the flexibility of being readily editable and can produce a lot of tools to improve indexation, social media interaction and drive leads. These are the new tools for indexation and traffic and community managers will be the new guardians of web traffic and notoriety.

It will now become a standard if one wants to stay in the race as Google Caffeinee is implementing it. New search habits are bound to crop up and new SEO techniques will show their face. What business need to understand now is that blogs might be the best way to catch up with the others. As things go, many companies will be launching up blogs with a lot of content copied and pasted from other sites or from their “paper material” but here things will be different. Real blogging rules will have to be used, those levers defining the quality of content and the targeting of traffic will become real in business spheres and those who will be using these as tools rather than crutches to their SEO will be those getting something out of Google Caffeine.

EDIT 24-06-2010. To illustrate the words.

This edit comes 18 hours later. I’ve been following the indexation of this article and as shown above, this post has, for example, hit Google’s first search engine results page when searching for “google caffeine” just after publication just because of the freshness of the article.

Most, if not all, web designers know the notoriously popular site Smashing Magazine as well as its newly built network, the Smashing Network. Now, what made Smashing Magazine one of the most popular web design related sites out there is the great use, and even a bit of abuse, of the “listicles”, the list posts concept. They have not been the inventors of this concept but sure turned it into the trend it now is (in the web design world).

Trending and whoring.

Some brief Internet history. Once the Smashing Magazine concept took up and proved to be efficient and overtly performing (in terms of traffic hence in terms of revenue on advertisement), hundreds of clones started sprouting all over the place and, let’s admit it, started performing well too. The trend was on and the trend whores have been running around since then consuming, copying, listing, writing, “yes-manning”, “great listing” the content and the concept.

What goes up…

The major problem in all this ran around two major drawbacks.

First one, the popularity of such posts and the traffic generated has brought round a huge amount of link addicts. These are the people leaving two words to two lines comments on the posts, usually positive “great article” comments, just for the sake of putting a link to their own website either to catch link juice or to drive traffic elsewhere. This stiffled discussion and did not add value to the original article.

The other problem was that, at some given point, the whole thing started getting a bit cranky. Some of the lists posts were really light, no analysis whatsoever, just lists of, say, screenshots. I’m not a lists fan but I do read some of Smashing Magazine’s articles and some were really, really shallow. Worse, the other copying trend whores were publishing even shallower posts (I might even have one around in my own archives when I was testing what type of posts I would be publishing).

Setting the record straight.

I can’t say that it started out from there but Paul Scrivens at Drawar went back on how he launched Whitespace and how the concept caught up to be eventually made popular by Smashing Magazine. In this article, Smashing Magazine Killed The Community (Or Maybe It Was Me), Paul explains how this concept slowly started breaking up the web design community. What I found great in it is the mature response of Vitaly Friedman, Smashing Magazine’s CEO, who stated that there were changes coming on the site.

Last month, in the opinion section of Smashing Magazine, Kari Patila restressed the point on the trends that are driving web design today, trends that seem to be depreciating the community.

Changes at Smashing Magazine.

Great changes are those that are not those that jump out at first sight but do great things. Has anyone noticed that the number of comments on the latest Smashing Magazine articles have suddenly fell from the usual 300+ comments (mostly “great posts” ones) to under a 100 mostly well discussed ones? Yes there are changes there.

The team at Smashing Magazine must have analysed of what was polluting the articles and have made 2 major changes. They have been promoting more content oriented articles while keeping some great well-written list posts but the best move I think is the pure and simple removal of comment authors’ website link in the comments. This gave no more incentive to link addicts.

The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius seems to have reached a new level in terms of web presence and traffic over the past month. This is why I have decided to make an overview of the most viewed posts each month. What might be somewhat disturbing is that some of the most viewed posts might have not been published over the past month.

Here is your chance to catch up with them if ou missed something. Below are the 5 posts that have caught the most attention over the past month.

You should be (over-) using the H (heading) tags.

A post on how some major standards tags are overlooked and how they would be a sure bet to be included in any web site design.

Speeding your page load time will improve your Google ranking.

Google threw it over the web and everybody started talking about it: page loading time will be a new ranking factor in its algorithm. Find out ways to do it.

Failure of the web design community in Mauritius?

I was a dreamer hoping that there might be a budding web design community in the country but I was wrong. It depends on the people and the way our society works. The 2 commenters here made some great points!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for “coming soon” pages.

This is an exclusive article off the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius. “Coming Soon” pages can do a great deal of SEO work for a website that’s not live yet. Tested and approved tutorial on why and how “Coming Soon” pages are SEOable.

“Facebook login” draws heaps of angry Facebook users!

Is it only usability or understanding the human mind with its different levels of web usage. Find out how the Read Write Web Facebook Login issue tells us some bitter truth on the difficulty of designing websites.

Optimising your site to get Google sitelinks.

Want to get Google sitelinks? Google published a report on the fact that it uses SEO to have its own products listed and ranked in its own search engine. One specific part of the report concentrates on Google Sitelinks and how a site must be set up to get these. Find out how to improve yours to get those great features.

Google has been doing a lot of changes and enhancement on its major tools since the beginning of 2010. The most obvious aim of Google’s changes is that it is trying to get things personal. In the same way it has been doing behavioural marketing over the years (Google ads aimed to Gmail users according to the content of the email they’re reading), the urge to get the user to get more and more intimate with the web applications are growing. This is what drove Google to launch its new personalisation tool, the “star feature”, last week.

The “star” feature.

This might look self evident when we see it in action, the “star” feature stars a specific result in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and are available as “first” search results next time you search for the same keywords. This looks like a feature that seems to have been here all the time but never seen in Google. It calls to our common culture in software use to “star” elements and Google is launching it just now for its SERPs.

Why so late?

As weird as this might seem, there was a “star” feature type of tool available for Google account owners. It was called Google Searchwiki and had an extensive (for what it did) palette of features such as commenting and results re-organisation. This, along with the nightmare it suddenly became for SEO Experts, was a huge leap in personalising searches but… it never really caught user’s attention. Mind you, it might have had millions of users but Google calculates in terms of billions and this was the problem.

A whole lot of talking is going on around the new Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) TV/Radio website. It always is a major event when a major Mauritian company sets sails out for a new web venture and people can question and appreciate the job. Here, the great thing is that the tool used is WordPress which has now gone past the “blog” platform and has matured into a full grown Content Management System and even been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS award in 2009. That’s one good point but there’s a major “but” when it comes to the way the MBC managing board seems to have directed this project!

Corporate you said?

The said website is a corporate one, at least, it’s what is said on the main page title. I will not be going into an indepth analysis of the design and the website as well as its functionalities. The discussion between the webdesigner and the public is nearing trench warfare more than anything on Yashvin’s Blog with all the contradictions and accusations that go with such situations. I will not be adding to this!

My firm belief is that Mauritian companies need to mature in their use of the Internet and start working on online presence. They have to invest in development and user experience with indepth audits of user demands and conversion rates. This calls for a good deal of methodology, vision and professionalism. So my concern here is how can a huge thing like the MBC get involved in an amateur construction of its website.

Templating and project management.

To build a new website, objectives must be laid out, budgets (if any) calculated, but more important, the whole project must be managed with validation procedures, content improvement, calls to action and lead analysis. But what do we have here? A webdesigner who claims to have done the job for free by buying a template (Hello MBC managing board, don’t you even have some money to even pay for a template?) and modifying it to suit the MBC’s needs. And what does the poor chap get even with investing his own money into the project? Just a poor link to his website! This is pure slavery! The MBC might even be de-localising some of its own work to China.

So what’s the problem here? Having a webdesigner claiming high to having made just a template modification for such a big company means that all the steps required to make a real, good, managing board driving, visionary and high level website have been flushed down the toilet. All this has been boiled down to a template available to anyone and just modified. Do they care for their image? Do they have a communication & advertising department?

Amateurish and cheap.

The MBC is not the structure that bears the shiniest image in Mauritius and it would somehow have been logical that the directory board would have had the idea of making use of this occasion to buff it up but once again, the amateurs have hit home. The MBC is a leading Mauritian body and one would expect a site to its grandeur with a huge input in quality content. The whole system is heavy and loaded with glitches. Just one example, how many of you readers will ever read every word in this “About us” page. This is where the group should have had clear specifications in terms of content, design and wireframing. But none of all these are here.

An example of what “not to do”.

Overall, this whole project is a great example of how a major company should not be leading a web project. Specifications should be minute and written clearly. Each element should be made to maximise conversion and user experience. All this is done through thorough statistical analysis and user interview. Usability tests should be made to test each page, each way of delivering content and of the service and not just impose a template to any web designer. As sad as it might sound, the MBC managing committee has failed to make use of a great tool just to save money or maybe for some really obscure reason… who knows?

What are Saas?

Saas means Software As A Service. It might seem obscure and you but you might also be using saas equivalents without noticing it. The other question is also, why Saas on a web design site? Simply because it might trigger ideas and change your way of seeing the services or solutions you are building for each client. As far as I know, Saas solutions are not actually offered by Mauritian companies.

Saas concept.

The idea behind Saas is simple. It is a full blown application that is hosted on a remote server and which is accessed through the Internet meaning that the user has access to the service only and is not hindered by the issues of upgrades, server versioning, OS compatibility or all the minor glitches that might crop up when dealing with a desktop software.

Saas example.

A simple real life example of Saas is “free” web based email offered on the Internet such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Microsoft Hotmail/Live. Each system follows a same scheme, the application is developed, maintained, managed and hosted by the vendor and the user subscribes to the service via the Internet. The software is thus maintained by the vendor and the service it offers is the only thing the user has access to.

On a much much simpler basis, an extranet can be considered as a Saas. Thus Saas can be used either by end users such as free web based email users, facebook users or blog platform (blogger or wordpress for example) users in the same way as companies can do it. For example, Campaign Monitor is an email marketing service built on the Saas concept.

How does it work and the advantages?

Contrary to traditional softwares, the Saas work on a subscription basis (free or paid, free being supported by advertising) compared to the one-time fee offered. The software is not the property of the user and s/he does bit have to download and install a software. This results in:

• Lower costs for the user.
• Smaller storage requirements.
• Fewer personnel to handle and maintain.

The vendor also gains from this as it can rely on a continous stream of income which might be more than traditional licensing. Piracy and unlicensed use of the software are also reduced and, in some cases, cleared resulting in the reduction in losses associated to these.

Interested?

Saas is getting important and more companies are adhering to it. It seems to be the future of web based services and softwares. Below are 3 articles that might help you see how Saas works in real life and what are the pros and cons of such solutions.

• Is Saas right for your practice?
• Are Saas and recession killing perpetual software licenses ?
• L’usage des Saas va progresser en entreprise.
• Saas: Reste à convaincre les late adopters.

There’s a lot of talk over the advent of the Internet in Mauritius and l’Express even had an article on the new practices over the Internet especially concerning on line purchases, Internet banking or job seeking (though I doubt that it is a good thing to compare online shops in Mauritius with business models such as amazon or ebay). Internet is slowly getting into people’s lives and is getting importance in terms of transactions. More and more of them are secured online.

Most of the sites presented have good motives to be online and try to get things going but some important concepts have been ditched. Web standards, usability and content. This might explain the difficulties some of them have to be profit making sites. In this series of articles, a thorough analysis of standards and usability will be done trying to explain where the cogwheel gets stuck. Please bear in mind that the analysis isn’t here to bring down the site but to show that “professional” companies are not following standards and are selling low-end applications to customers. Let’s not forget that Mauritius is budding in the Internet field and that bandwidth still has to be enhanced. People need fast and usable solutions!

Why standards?

First things first. I am a stickler to standards. They are good practices to keep your site running and allow it to survive all major browser changes. This also ensures that the website looks the same (thus, ensures return on investment) in all browsers and you don’t have to give instructions to your visitors to have them changing their resolutions or browsers. One of the worse examples on the concept is the Government of Mauritius website’s disclaimer

This site is best viewed at 800 x 600 resolution with Internet Explorer 5.5 (SP2)

What do standards bring you then? And why code a site according to these?

Page Weight

Using CSS in a separate and XHTML allow the distinction of markup from the presentational layers of the pages. This reduces the page weight of the document. Using CSS in a separate file which will only be imported when necessary reduces the number of times the presentational layers will be copied yielding into a general lightweight site. The CSS file being cached just on the first page, it is not downloaded again when a new page is loaded thus calling only the light page. Major websites save quite a lot of bandwidth through this as smaller ones have faster loading pages? Once again, the Mauritian Government website shows the discrepancies of not using standards and the impact on page load time.

Ease of maintenance

Let me tell you a secret word: semantic. A semantically correct code is self documented and is easily understood when it comes to maintenance. A div is a division block, a h2 a heading and a ul an unordered list. Building web pages on this good assumption makes that the code is meaningful. Thus, any developer can jump into the code and correctly and easily do the necessary maintenance.

SEO and Accessibility

Using semantic code is also beneficial for your online reputation. Search engine robots are standards compliant machines. Using a h for a heading or a title gives them the information that the content in this particular tag is important (hence keywords in there will have more weight). With reduced page weight, hence code waddling, the robot will not have to choke on your in-line styling and try to differentiate what is code and what is content. It will just gather the information and index it.

In the same way as robots have to analyse clean code, visually impaired persons navigating do not need presentational layers and just need clean semantic code. Many of you will tell me, Internet is not enough into people’s lives in Mauritius for this. Answer: so what? The country will be evolving and Internet services also. Let’s just imagine that a visually impaired person gets the Internet and uses the Lynx browser to buy his vegetables online at tantebazar.com will end up seeing a nonsense page like this one. While this site might be offering useful services and might also get a niche market by proposing to visually impaired persons to have their goods delivered at home, its coding is hindering it. Ok, let’s admit it, Compnet, the webdesign company which built the site doesn’t state the use of standards in its TOS.

Extensibility

Need to redesign, to add up new content, to make a printable version of your web page? A well structured and semantic website is optimised for this. You can do amazing things with such usage. CSS Zen Garden shows how you can change the whole design of a website without ever having to modify its markup.

Can’t do it?

Now, if you’re a Web Design company coming round and your client asks you for a great standards driven and accessible website and your answer is “can’t do it”, you just have to leave the business. Moreover, if you are thinking about telling your client that you can’t have great looks and good markup you’re wrong once again. Here view source for an inspiring glimpse of how semantic and accessible even a grid-based, image-intensive, pixel-perfect site can be. The only limit must be your inspiration and not your web designing and coding skills.

Conclusion

Not only do web standards help you as the developer, they also help your clients, and their audience. By conforming to today’s standards and accessibility guidelines, you can ensure that the content is available to all users, regardless of the device they use to access it. Combine this with bandwidth savings, ease of maintenance, and extensibility. In this time of evolution of the web in Mauritius, the designers taking the step towards standards will be those getting ahead of the others. When clients will start requiring standards, you’ll be prepared for this.