WebDesign Bureau of Mauritius

Digging the Sketchetika font.

Web Design Mauritius — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:46:58 +0000

The new Rising Stars issue from Myfonts is now available online and I’m completely digging the new Sketchetika font.

What’s great with this font is that you can try the “light” version for free. Download it on MyFonts.

Facebook login issue: how Facebook shows that the web will never be conquered.

Web Design Mauritius — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:30:20 +0000

Some weeks back, Read Write Web published an article on how Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login. So far, no problem. The author, Mike Melanson, did not however cater for the possibility of indexation of the post on Google based on the “Facebook Login” keyword.

The Google trap.

What happened is that the post made it to the top of the search engine’s results page on the “Facebook Login” search. Next thing was hundreds of Facebook users flooding on the post and trying to connect to Facebook via the “Facebook connect” plugin in the sidebar. This ended with a hilarious (from a web project manager’s point of view) thread of angry/confused/insulting/[add adjective here] comments from lost users, many complaining about the forthcoming death of their cows on Farmville.

Here’s an excerpt of the comments found over there.

User interaction with search results.

This sheds some light on how the average Internet user deals with websites. Let’s get back to how these users got to the Read Write Web website: most of them typed “Facebook login” in Google and clicked on the first result. This means that the use of Google as navigation tool is now one of the trendy uses of the search engine and that people click with confidence on the first result even without reading the result! Blind usage, that would be it. This also stresses on the importance of being in the first, if not being the first, on a given keyword.

User interaction with a website.

Now things become serious. The Read Write Web interface is red and white and has nothing at all in common with the Facebook login page. Nothing here reminds of Facebook except for the article title and the logo copied off Facebook.

This however did not give the information to the people getting on the website that this was not Facebook or Facebook’s login page. Does this mean that colour branding fails? Does this mean that people not only DO NOT READ urls nor TITLES or other elements NEITHER? Does this mean that if you deliver a specific content to people when they are here to do just one specific thing, they will not read the content. So, if Facebook sets up an info saying that all accounts will be linked to the users’ bank accounts on the Facebook Login page, all these persons will automatically click “OK” and get in?

Pushing the observation further.

After a whole lot of thinking and working in the web design field, this Facebook Login issue shows that we will never really understand the web user. The latter is an entity whose usage of our tools will never really succeed in giving out the best service to all users because they will always do what they want. Another thing is that the web user is emotional. It will be browsing the web with passion and just as something unexpected crops up, the mood takes over and confusion leads to anger.

Let’s talk about this…

If you are not a web professional, do you browse websites in the way the people on Read Write Web did? Do you think that web users are credule and their frame of mind will never be understood? Do you think that enhanced usability and site building can help in such situations? Do you agree with the statement that this shows that a user comes to a website for one thing and can only be satisfied by getting that thing?

Google “star” feature to replace Search Wiki.

Web Design Mauritius — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:50:10 +0000

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.

Useful or not?

Now Google is going on a new way of personalising results by replacing Searchwiki with this new feature. As useful as this might seem, I have to admit that I tend to forget about its presence as much as I did not really see any incentive in rearranging Google’s results. So is it still useful to have this “star” feature or not? What’s your idea on this subject? Would you be using such a tool as a regular or power Google user?

MBC’s new website: a corporate failure?

Web Design Mauritius — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:54:59 +0000

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?

22 Fresh and free high quality fonts.

Web Design Mauritius — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:47:59 +0000

Web Design Ledger has published a new list of fresh high quality and FREE fonts issued during the past months. Great resource for all your designs. Make sure you get them all and use them. You can also check out their related lists of great free fonts to use.

Working in one’s dream job.

Web Design Mauritius — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:00:44 +0000

Remember when you were a kid and everybody asked you what you would be when you were a grown person? It was also the same thing when your teacher asked you that question when you were at school. To me it was one of the worst questions I ever had to answer. I remember being in my small kindergarten called “La Belle Aventure” just behind the mosque in Beau-Bassin and being surrounded by kids already seemingly aware of what they wanted to be.

There was a simple explanation to all this. I spent the first years of my life in a small village completely cut from the outside world. The only white people I knew were tourists seen going through the village. I even ended asking a white kid at the kindergarten “to enn touriss toi?”. It was inconceivable for me that there could be a “White Mauritian”!

Other things were inconceivable in my small brain. How could only one human being make a thing like a plane fly? Actually I wouldn’t even have known what a “pilot” was. The word was a discovery for me when kids said that they wanted to be pilots. The same went for doctors or firemen. The worse for me was to hear some of them wanting to become policemen. My deep belief as a kid was that a policeman would put anybody in jail had that person had the slightest cheek of looking at him in the face! How the hell could someone want to become such a person?

The tragedy for me was that I knew nothing but the sugar cane, peanut and tomato fields my grandparents worked in. Everybody had all those great jobs lying there in front of them, at least I believed, and I didn’t even know what they were. Incidentally I burst out crying because I thought that you HAD to have a dream job as a kid! Well this is what the adults made you believe.

At the end of the day I’m still wondering if all those kids knowing what they wanted to become have done those jobs. I think that many must have succeeded in their quests for their dream jobs but how many have shifted, how many have abandoned? In my case, things are different. I did not have a dream job because I’m interested in a too many things. I think that I just needed to experience all types of jobs and gather the experience to find and carve myself a job to my measure.

To tell you the truth, I do have dream jobs now but I don’t think that I’ll ever get into them because of the specificity of my current job which I simply love. Those dream jobs are: high end restaurant cook and wine maker.

Let’s talk about this…

Do you have a dream job? Are you still looking for yours like I did or are you currently working in that dream job? Are you one of those who wanted to get a specific job when you were a kid but never made it? Tell us about your dream jobs!

Best practices and abandoned SEO tricks.

Web Design Mauritius — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 06:00:10 +0000

The web is evolving and the way we market also. Great article on Web Seo Analytics on the best practices as well as abandoned SEO techniques over the past months. Take heed and act!

8 best and free CSS editors.

Web Design Mauritius — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:00:16 +0000

What tool do you use for CSS editing? My personal favourite is PsPad and it is second in Graphic Alert’s list of 8 best and free CSS editors available for web designers.

Google’s changes and your site.

Web Design Mauritius — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:00:13 +0000

Google is changing and it will affect your site. Have an insight on what’s going on at Google’s and how the way people search will change and have an effect on your website. Great guest article by Becky Jones at Boagworld.

Google’s advanced suggest tool and SEO.

Web Design Mauritius — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 06:00:40 +0000

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?

Let’s talk about this…

There are many changes coming on Google in 2010 and these might change the way we search. Do you think that people will be using search engines differently in the coming months/years? Do you think that SEO and website marketing will be affected by such changes? Will you be changing your way of building sites (if it’s your field) because of this?

*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.