It is now official. The Yahoo! Search portal will be switching to the Bing search engine by September 2010 according to the latest thread on Webmasterworld. The portal will be integrating and testing Microsoft’s tool in August and September before going on a full fledged launch.

Long tail keywords.

The Yahoo! and Microsoft partnership has been and is still seen as a battle of dollars to break the “monopoly” held by Google in terms of search marketing. However, there seems to be a reason to the acceleration of this partnership and it is called “Google Caffeine“. Remember the Google Mayday Update? This was the test run for Google’s new algorithm called “Google Caffeine“. The ultimate objective for Google is to be able to understand what a user really means when the it types a specific keyword. This would call for distinct research in language usage. This also explains why the “Google Caffeine” text mainly affected long tail keywords, these being more specific.

A breach?

The big problem of the “Google Caffeine” launch, if this can be qualified as problem, is that it cleared up and re-indexed a lot of pages based on long tail keywords. The “assumed” result has been the throwing out of a large number of huge traffic making pages from big websites. This being said, a lot of professionals have had direct recourse to paid search traffic, increasing ppc sales. Many have seen this as a breach in Google’s monopoly as it resulted in a certain loss of confidence in the search engine. You might look at the comments on my post on the Google Mayday Update and you’ll see that a lot of persons being concerned by the ferocious way Google managed to do this. And here might be Yahoo!’s opportunity to gather all the stray lambs around its search church.

The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius has entered its third year since last week. While several important events are being handled for better delivery of content, the new in-house built theme is currently being tested. This cannot be launched in full blast because we are actually waiting to be transfered to our new upgraded green server with increased space and load times in Geneva. However, you can catch a neat preview of the whole thing.

Pretty much of this theme is hand-coded to reduce the input of plugins and widgets and most of the plugins used are here to maximize the user’s experience of the site. The index has also been cleaned up and there are still some pages to be set up. Please bear with this cranky bit for some time and stay connected for future posts.

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.

Starting this post is quite weird for me in the sense that I don’t really know how to tackle it, what tone to give it or how to deal with it. So I’m setting out to explain that I’m a human being, more than less pacifist and ready to learn and share information and knowledge with people around me. This last statement is the aim of the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius itself even if the targeted audience is really small. I however have a big problem with the Mauritian mentality. People cannot be honest enough and contact you simply asking for an information or a review or whatever can be their needs in terms of project management, SEO or design. So to all who don’t know how to write a mail here’s a template:

Hi,

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris lacinia arcu ac lorem vulputate euismod. Donec tempus ullamcorper facilisis. Phasellus orci augue, malesuada et luctus at, consequat ac odio. Proin et elit sed dui sodales luctus. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus ac felis euismod lacus suscipit commodo. Integer ac augue purus, vel viverra nulla. Ut volutpat ultricies volutpat. Vestibulum commodo imperdiet elit, ac posuere tortor faucibus at.

Best regards
Insert your signature here.

Friendly tip: being polite gives you extra points!

Explaining things to you dear reader.

I know that a lot of my regular readers must be wondering what I’m talking about here. Let’s get to the root of things. Last year I used the DCDM example to illustrate my article on what Mauritian companies were missing on the web. Fair enough, this has had some positive impact (I’m sure) on how this major Mauritian company saw its own online presence. This would explain why, nearly everyday over the past 2 weeks, somebody has been trying to attract my attention to the DCDM issue.

The problem with all this is that (and this meets the first part of my post) the person or persons DID NOT have the humility of sending me a mail or using the contact form available on the Bureau to ask me to do a review of their site (at least that’s what I’m thinking it is) or to write a sequel to the previously published article. No! This person or these persons has/have been spending his/their time making the same query on Google for nearly 13 days. Is that stupid or what? Proof:

Along with that, an in depth analysis of the IP address, strangely from the same C class domain over the whole period, analysis gives more than guilty info from the Google user. Proxies anybody?

Letting time run by.

At first I stayed on my position of not saying anything about this because one of my core convictions is that if people did communicate, a lot of our everyday problems would be solved. As these queries have stopped since this week-end I’ve stepped out to really see why someone would have spent all this energy trying to inform me that I should maybe give a look to the DCDM website. Which I tried to do this evening but…

… and it’s a major BUT.

The most astonishing thing happened. I tried a Google search for DCDM. The idea was to look at their website and also catch up with the previous article’s position in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) to see that it does not do too much harm in DCDM’s rankings. But, as The Beatles put it: “Hey Jude, don’t take it bad…” the DCDM website has gone from being an outrage to the company to a complete ordeal for any user. I don’t know how they coded the thing but Google has blocked it as “This site might harm your computer.” for malware detection.

Don’t try clicking on the “more” results, you’ll get more of the harmful message.

What is going on here is that the whole project is turning into a fiasco having major impact on the Company’s online reputation and, if they’ve got an IT department, they really have to see to it that the people they’re employing do really have the necessary competences. I mean, it is easy and fun to play with Google to leave “Dan Brown” style breadcrumbs to the Bureau but it would be best to spend that time to check the code, the SEO and the compatibility issues of one’s website.

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?

I was hanging about Google making some searches when I got to look for a specific thing involving a “what is” search. Now, everybody knows the game on Google where you use the Google suggest feature to get a good laugh. I however went past the game and found that Google is exploiting this utility more than it has been doing till now.

“What is” v/s “define:”.

As a hardcore Google user I’m used to the tool’s inbuilt utilities such as the “define:” operator to get definitions. This would give these results (the example here is “heavy metal”):

In SEO, one of the first advices we give to clients is to stick to what their target audience usually types in search engines to maximise their visibility. It seems that even Google is now following this advice. With the “what is” game, a new idea must have crept up in the Google engineers’ minds. What if people use more “what is” searches than the “define” operator? This would explain why the automated thesaurus used by Google suggest* is filled with “what is”. This would also mean that the “define” operator is used only by people knowing its existence.

2010, the age of “what is”.

On this basis, Google has made an evolution to the Google suggest feature. If you now type your whole “what is” question, the tool will propose not only the usual “suggest” results but the first available result in its definition list. This would be a full clickable result as below:

I may be wrong but it is the first time that I’m seeing this new option in Google suggest and this is making me wonder about the coming changes on the search engine as well as in search engine results.

The future of search ?

This specific option might itself suggest the future of search engines as Google sees it. The main idea is that the user does not even have to go to the search engine result page (SERP) to get the different proposals or results if the one suggested by Google suggest satisfies him/her. This would mean the fall of organic ranking in SERPS as well as paid inclusion! And what if the visitor is satisfied with the Google suggest answer itself without clicking on it?

In a far-fetched concept, what if Google opens up this suggestion utility to propose the first result of the SERPS on any search keyword and not only in definitions. This would completely change the face of search engine optimisation (SEO) and get people to fight for the first place. This however, will not be the case (at least not now) because it would be a bullet in the foot of Google’s business model based on paid inclusion. But once again… what if?

*Google suggest is a pondered utility that builds and proposes search suggestions based on the popularity of previous searches. E.g: typing “face” would suggest “facebook” as one of the first proposals.

The Mauritian blogosphere has taken the rise. The eldest bloggers have been active for nearly a decade now. Mauritian blogs are listed on the Mauritius Blog List and Island Website and debates are hot on the past, present and future of blogs, be they on independent hosting or on blogging platforms. Some blogs are visitor baits and others are in niches. Yashvin and Ludovic have been interviewed quite often in the Mauritian press.

And then comes this article on L’Express. Huge publicity for Over Blog, a free French blog platform. The objective (improving the knowledge of blogs in Mauritius) is very commendable but the tone and the choice of words is not really that engaging. Even if the author points out the fact that blogging is not new, the whole tone runs like… “go on people, this is the new craze, open up a blog on Over Blog”. Does that author know that there are hundreds of platforms and that with a WordPress MU platform, any site can become a hoster (e.g: Le Monde)?

Another thing is that the author qualifies the blog as a way to express oneself without having to wait for a comment publication in the press or online. This gives the idea that a blog is like a blank page where you say one thing and go away. This also shows complete oblivion. No information on the way the web works, the communication levers to use to get a blog running and have visitors. The building processes. Say something on your blog but if you do not know how to promote your content and are not ready to fill up the space nearly everyday, it’s no use.

Worse. Let me quote this part:

Si la communauté des internautes apprécient ces opinions directes et sans complaisance, de nombreux journalistes et éditorialistes ont décrié la manière non professionnelle de donner des éléments d’informations pas toujours contre-vérifiés contrairement à la presse traditionnelle*.

As said earlier, having an article on blogs is commendable but the author should have dug a little more in the blogging world and analysed the life and actions of bloggers, especially Mauritian ones, before publishing such a shallow article on blogs.

*If the community of users appreciate these direct and uncompromising opinions, many journalists and columnists have stated the unprofessional manner of providing information not always cross-checked unlike the traditional press.

In web design, there’s one category of users that is constantly set aside, colour blind persons. We are Colour Blind is a great resource to help you choose the colours and patterns to help you reduce strain for them.

Every web designer had his/her way of writing mark-up. If you usually start out writing your mark-up with all your classes and ids, PrimerCSS is the tool for you. Just drop in your mark-up and it’ll extract a primer stylesheet with all of these to get you up and running in no time.

You sometimes find yourself reading a blog in one go. These are blogs so interesting that you just can’t get enough of them. Ideas are bright, the text is great and the overall tone is just engaging. This is the whole spirit of Mauricianismes. The great cool Mauritian “dipain, diber, fromaz” blog. Above all blogs I follow (and I’m but a lurker on Mauricianismes) I think that this “Martian spoken here” blog is the best Mauritian blog of 2009. Cheers to Siganus K. for this great blog.

An idea?

An idea just popped like this some days ago. It was a simple, somewhat crazy but cool idea which might have some great impact, at least some minor incentive, on the Mauritian Web Design field. This crazy thing is currently called the “2010 project”. A better name might be found later on. Now, the cool thing about this idea is that this project will have a collective aspect. Yes COLLECTIVE in the sense that the Web Design Bureau’s (small handful of) readers will be associated to the project.

Why?

Why associate the Mauritian readership? Because the project concerns them, the project’s subject is some kind of representation of Mauritians all over the world. Yes you are right! You’re getting the idea of this project and what it will consist of. And you will participate!

What?

As said earlier, your representation on the web: the Mauritian government thing (yes, you can’t call that a website). The idea is that, as time goes by, more and more information is being added to this site. It is currently impossible to know how many pages there are in that site, how it is really organised and what SEO/SEM strategies are applied to it. I tried a spider simulator on it and ended with an #epic #fail (hello Twitter world) with a lot of 404 errors and a whopping 69 links in only one page while getting you lost in there.

So here is the project. It’s not said that it’ll be a killer success but it at least is an attempt to provide and alternative. The project is therefore a redux of the site.

How?

I have no idea yet but the concerned persons are Mauritians first. So we need to address the Mauritian public, well the site needs to address the Mauritian public. This is why major decisions on the design will be set as polls open to the readers. All ideas will be welcome and active participation will get interesting. No code will be generated, it is only a graphic design redux of the site just to imagine how it would have been if the right questions had been answered when necessary.

Let’s do this!

Ok, this project can be a huge flop but it has the advantage of budding (at least). The idea is not to take the place of anybody nor steal the job off anybody either. Just the fun of trying a real project management challenge on an equally challenging subject along with the web friends.

Here we are then. The 15 Google Wave invite winners have been selected by automatic randomising on Random.org. So here is the list of winners:

1. lee.albert followed by the email host.
2. sapnaisram_69 followed by the email host.
3. edhofmann followed by the email host.
4. grissom.egg followed by the email host.
5. lordlupe followed by the email host.
6. jacharakis followed by the email host.
7. kim followed by the email host.
8. anomolea1223 followed by the email host.
9. ppratik96 followed by the email host.
10. ornitorinco followed by the email host.
11. guilhermebuenovaz followed by the email host.
12. jackwooffindin followed by the email host.
13. webmastergyk followed by the email host.
14. icarly followed by the email host.
15. cdmike followed by the email host.

I’ve listed these just like this to be sure these are the unique winners. Thanks to all those who participated. For those winners who do not want the invite anymore, please check back in the list of comments and tell me to whom you want the invite sent to.

Cheers to you all and congratulations to the winners.

As a web designer, a lot of responsibilities lie on your shoulders. The present article stresses on the fact that a web designer should also delve into a lot of other web related skills to improve his/herself. Well I’ve always stressed on this point in any case. The reason is simple: make a site’s web design work for it, helping it converting visitors into customers. One of the usually overlooked aspects is “images”.

The usage.

Custom has it that the web designer chooses some attractive images that go in the line of the client’s message or the client simply gives a CD with a number of stock images or images it has collected. Many a time the client’s desired images are not the best ones but the worse can be the fact that they don’t carry the message that benefits the client himself. It is the web designer’s job to get as close to ‘image marketing’ and explain things. A pretty face can push visitors away as clearly illustrated in this article.

Choose.

After explaining the concepts and alternatives to the client, choose the images for it as per your wireframe. But here again do not fall in the same trap as the client. You might want a “CV” image but make sure that it carries the right message. Below is a part screenshot of a big Mauritian company’s website offering career opportunities and showing a resumé:

Where it goes wrong.

You’d tell me that its ok, they’ve put a “resumé” image illustrating the main idea of the page. There still is a problem around here. Yes, the resumé as it is, in this image is crumpled. You might be offering career opportunities but you are also supposed to respect your future and current employees. The crumpled resumé is currently sending the wrong message while in the same page it is stated:

[The group's] regional presence and culture of excellence can help you build an exciting and gratifying career.

You might be on the job market but you sure want to be respected for your skills. The same applies to business partners. For some, the value you give to your workforce is your value.

Your job as a web designer.

As a matter of fact this stresses on the essential information that, your implication in a web site is not only to get the best gradient colours and pixel popping but showing your added value by understanding each page’s content and concept before choosing the best image to illustrate it. This also adds value to the site you sell as you are able to maximize conversions.

Google Wave is the new craze over the Web. The new communication tool is as interesting as promised and many a company are thinking about switching from their own internal collaboration tool to Google Wave even if the latter is still in Beta/Preview. So people are all running after the wave which is currently looking more like a tsunami than the simple caressing ripples we usually get on our Mauritian shores. Why? @webmastergeek showed me that the Google wave invites were even on sale for nearly $50 on ebay.

As usual the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius will not be doing things like everybody else does! Here things are free and offered. Just ask all the winners we’ve had over the past months, everybody’s happy. Now, let’s wave together.

15 Google Wave invites to be won!

Now, this one will be short and quick. You want a free Google Wave invite? Just enter the contest here on the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius. The terms first. The contest will last 10 days as from today the 26th of October 2009. Thus ending on Wednesday 4th of November 2009 at midnight. 15 (fifteen) wave invites will be immediately sent to the winners after random listing. The contest is open to EVERYBODY. Here are the different options you have to enter the contest, just do one or both of these:

1. Write a post on your blog talking about this contest (it does not have to be a long one) linking back to the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius and then put a link to that post in the comments here.
2. Tweet about this contest on your Twitter profile with a link to the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius and then put a link to that Tweet in the comments here.

Really easy huh. Just for precision, only those comments abiding by the above rules will be entering the competition. Up to you now.

And another word, check out Zack’s superb article on the new Google Wave Haters… a real must!