Make Your Web Content Work For You

I read an article on the A List Apart website today that made me think of that ING Direct commercial for their Orange savings account. You know the one - "put your money to work for you."

The author said how important it is for web writers to "[insist] that every chunk of text on the site is doing something concrete." I agree. But I know that on websites, EVERY word counts. 

Why?

Users don't read website text. They scan it. The great web usability expert Jakob Nielsen explains that today's Internet users are increasingly using search engines to find specific information. When these information foragers visit a webpage they quickly scan it for information - then move on to another website. Concise, scannable text puts that information in front of users, Nielsen says. 

Cutting words can be difficult, but if it isn't a keyword it isn't going to work for you. That should make editing a little easier. 

Is Google So Hard To Find?

How difficult is it to perform a search on Google? Usability expert Jacob Nielsen posed this question in the March 17, 2008 edition of his weekly e-mail newsletter Alertbox.

Apparently the process of getting to the search engine -- not the act of performing the search itself -- was unattainable for 24% of the participants in Nielson's latest round of usability research. That's a big number.

So what happened? Were the users asked to type in the domain? If the testing was done recently this pesky little site may have been an issue. I would highly doubt that the participants had any knowledge about top-level-domains.

Nielson offers little information about how the study was conducted. The one point he did make was that his team was "recruiting above-average users, so the success rate across all Internet users is probably lower than our finding." Says Nielson:

On the one hand, 76% is a high success rate. On the other hand, getting to Google is a very simple task.

A VERY simple task. I recently wrote about Google's redesign of their advanced search page. In that post I said that most users don't fully understand how a search engine works in the first place.

The implications of this study could be huge. What does it mean for Web developers, designers, etc. if we learn that the average user still doesn't know how to use, for instance, the Web browser. If Google is so hard to find, what does it mean for the rest of us?

Google Employee Gives Advice About Best Uses of Flash

We've all been taught that Google is, in essense, a "blind user" and I had heard that it couldn't search for the content contained in Flash, so I have always recommended against using it in page designs. However, I am hearing that Google is making an effort to search Flash content (or at least the content surrounding the flash design), so when I saw Mark Berghausen's post, "The Best Uses of Flash," I was intrigued. He says:

As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn't have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn't currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.


Berghausen recommends:

1. Using Flash only where needed: This is a recommendation the great usability expert Jacob Nielson has been touting for ages (Check out his article "Flash: 99% bad." I can't recommend his work enough.)


2. Using sIFR for to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements. I disagree here. As a strong advocate of usability, I don't think that bells and whistles like flash or their counterparts should be used for textual elements for a variety of reasons. One is because of the critical nature of those textual elements to search, especially the header. If a designer uses flash or sIFR to display a header it is not likely that they will display that element again as text because in most cases it will not be aesthetically appealing. But this is what needs to be done for that element to be properly picked up for search. Another reason is that a flash element slows down the speed that the page loads. Visitors today have high demands when it comes to viewing pages, and when it takes even a couple moments for a page to view, or worse the page has loaded and another element or elements is still loading, visitors exit. Additionally, as more and more visitors "information snack" having content available in those first few seconds is critical because those visitors especially are guaranteed to stay on your site for only a few moments before going on to another domain.


3. Non-Flash Versions: Flash used is as a front page "splash screen" where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. This recommendation seems to make sense for the designer who absolutely insists on using flash and the developer who is assured that their audience has the hardware and the internet connection to load the page speedily enough that they won't depart because the page loads so slowly they leave as a result. And becayse the page links to HTML deeper on the site SEO remains intact.