Archive

What can I say - after being advertised at by the government so often about so many campaigns, the election, etc, I thought I’d come up with my own community service announcement.

Friends don't let friends use Comic Sans

Wallpaper links in various sizes:

• 1024×768 resolution: ux-wallpaper-comicsans-1024×768.jpg
• 1280×1024 resolution: ux-wallpaper-comicsans-1280×1024.jpg
• 1920×1080 resolution (my favourite): ux-wallpaper-comicsans-1920×1080.jpg

Enjoy!

Sometimes you just need to step away from the wireframes, look up, look out, and remember those for whom you’re designing. I had one of those moments two Fridays ago, so I decided to make this desktop wallpaper:

UX wallpaper - Walk in your client's customers' shoes

You can use it too, if you like. I’ve even even gone to the trouble of doing it in several sizes. Golly I’m nice.

• 1024×768 resolution: ux-wallpaper-shoes-1024×768.jpg
• 1280×1024 resolution: ux-wallpaper-shoes-1280×1024.jpg
• 1920×1080 resolution (my favourite): ux-wallpaper-shoes-1920×1080.jpg

Enjoy!

The user experience camp seems a bit divided about using personas as part of user experience design. There are a couple of charges laid at personas’ feet that I think can be lifted by using profile tables together with the personas themselves.

When I talk about personas, I mean the archetypal constructs of characteristics, drivers, behaviours and goals that are designed to represent the main audiences at which a digital product is aimed. Personas were made popular by Alan Cooper, and given gravitas and discipline by industry minds such as Andrew Hinton and Jared Spool.

Pros and cons of personas

It’s true that personas are very useful for informing and validating user experience design. Here are my favourite advantages and benefits:

• They’re a convenient combination of sensible scenarios and user requirements that are more understandable and accessible to people not familiar with (or prepared to read) copious volumes of technical documentation
• Everyone – designers, project managers, project stakeholders and developers alike – can relate to personas (and if they don’t then the personas probably aren’t authentic enough), so they can act as a great unifier in project vision
• They keep everyone honest and the design true to its purpose; by referring constantly to the personas, design and development is kept focused on what’s important for the target audiences and their tasks and situations
• They are great argument enders; personas can often become the true arbitrator of discussions and debates about whether this feature should be included or not, or whether that phrase is the right tone or not

But personas are not without their criticisms. Some of the charges laid at their feet include:

• They’re too abstract to be of use – Jason Fried describes them as artificial, abstract and fictitious, so they can’t provide authentic responses to designs, and be biased and unpredictable, just like real people
• They’re just another part of the paperwork – many people across the project and client-side get documentation fatigue, and are not likely to absorb and learn from the personas
• They can be seen as a bit of a luxury at best and time-waster at worst, where many people would rather just get on with designing and building

Persona profile tables: measuring significance of requirements against personas

Where personas can be a shorthand version of user requirements, profile tables provide a shorthand version of how significant the business- and functional requirements are to those personas. Profile tables have a list of features, functions and other contextually relevant aspects in the first column, then one column per persona displaying a measure of significance to each persona for each feature/function.

The‘significance’ bit will depend on your project, and profile charts are most effective when you are specific about the nature of this significance; it’s subtle but important. For example, it could be:

• How likely it is that each persona would use that feature
• How important that feature is to each persona
• How often that persona would use that feature

The ‘measure’ bit shouldn’t be binary – like a tick or cross – because personas (just like us) are rarely black and white about these things. Use other measures that include ideally five points along a spectrum, such as:

• Harvey ball notation – an array of circular ideograms, filled in by portions to indicate amount:

Set of Harvey Ball notation images with their corresponding amounts

None

25%

50%

75%

100%

• Colour – shades of one area of the spectrum work well, such as white (none) to yellow (mid) to green (high). Avoid more than two colours, unless you want to include a negative aspect as well, such as red (persona would definitely not use that function) to yellow (ambivalent) to green (would definitely use)

I always use Harvey ball notation, because it’s the clearest to the most number of people, and there are never any colour blindness/colour printing variation/screen display issues.

I’ve used persona profile tables in several projects now, and they were really useful for guiding interface design decisions, and finding those sweet spots with works best for both business and user and for the scenarios where the website is being used.

How to draw up a persona profile table

This assumes that you have your personas are ready to go. Profile tables are best done in a workshop situation, either within your team or with client stakeholders. This not only keeps things from being ‘designed by designers’, but gets everyone embracing and using the personas.

1. List the features and functions

Start by making a list of all the features and functions of the product you are designing. As you make this list, you’ll probably find that some functions will need to be broken down into more specific actions, or ways of using that feature. Explore this, and list it all; you can always rationalise the list later depending on the context of your project.

Example: ‘Search for houses to buy’ would break down into‘search by location’,‘search by price range’, ‘search by house feature’ and so on. I bet there would be differences in each of these item’s significance for each persona.

The examples below are taken from work done for livinggreener.gov.au

2. Add the behaviours

Think about the ways that personas would approach and use these features and functions. This may uncover other elements that will have differences in significance for personas, like ‘comfortable with large amounts of detail’, ‘comfortable with entering personal information’.

3. Fold in the personas

Add each persona you have as a column next to the first column of features, functions and behaviours. If there is a certain order that you are already using when referring to your personas, use the same order.

Features/functions
Background information about the environment
Background information about sustainability
How to save money
Specific actions to live greener
Ways to encourage others
Behaviours
Comfortable with technical detail
Comfortable with content detail
Sharing information
Commenting on information
Watching online videos

4. Add the ratings and heat gently

Now comes the fun part. You, your team, and your client stakeholders discuss each appropriate rating in each column for each feature/function/behaviour, according to individuals’ knowledge of personas (and therefore of requirements). This groupthink should minimise subjectivity and invite scrutiny.

Features/functions
Background information about the environment
Background information about sustainability
How to save money
Specific actions to live greener
Ways to encourage others
Behaviours
Comfortable with technical detail
Comfortable with content detail
Sharing information
Commenting on information
Watching online videos

5. Observe and exploit any trends and patterns

As you complete the ratings, you may see some trends and patterns where some personas rate very highly in some areas, low in others, or cluster together in some ways. These patterns may reveal lessons that you can take to your design.

Focus on clarity

As with most things, keep the persona profile tables simple, clear and concise. Once you get into doing profile tables, it’s easy to draw up loads and loads of them, but the intention should always be to summarise what already exists in other documentation, to give others an easy-to-reference asset for the design process, and the decisions that crop up all the time.

So if you decide to include profile tables in your set of design tools, set yourself a goal to keep them to one whiteboard in the case of a workshop, and to one page (or at least one page per functional ‘area’) in a report, so that whoever else you’re working with only needs to refer to one page at a time.

With all the great prototyping tools that are around these days, some people are heralding (or bemoaning?) the demise of the humble wireframe. But if we play to their strengths, I think they can do what fancy prototypes can’t.

My understanding of wireframes is that they are conceptual illustrations displaying the visual structure, priority and arrangement of all the elements needed for each page type in a website or other online product. They also display differences in appearance and behaviour for each state needed (logged in or not, an administrator’s view as opposed to a manager’s view, and so on).

Standard user experience design practice is to produce wireframes before the final visual design for many reasons, not the least being you can solve all (OK, most) interaction design issues at this ‘bare bones’ level before committing to the visual design. And changes to visual design are more fiddly and expensive than to wireframes.

Great for us…not so great for clients

So wireframes suit our processes. But let’s face it: clients are typically underwhelmed by wireframes, and would much rather see the finished result first, with the visual design implemented. Wireframes are typically plain, boxy, and – well – ho-hum. They don’t have the pizzazz that clients are eagerly waiting for. And we haven’t even mentioned clickable prototypes yet, which would be more preferable for clients still.

If we try to dress them up, we run the risk of confusing clients, making them think that they are looking at the visual design, rather than the conceptual design.

The strengths of wireframes

There are several ways out there to approach this dilemma, and most of them involve trying to leap-frog the static wireframe stage. But I think there’s merit in not only retaining this as a vital step in the design process, but levering off the strengths that wireframes actually provide:

• Wireframes are great for encourage ideas-capture – firstly, wireframes are fast; you can pump out a lot of wireframes illustrating your ideas and solutions quickly. This means you can communicate ideas to clients early and often. Internally, it also means you can bin the ideas that don’t work and bullet-proof the ideas that do work efficiently.
• Wireframes encourage collaboration – wireframes are conceptual, so they should actually encourage client collaboration and a sense of co-ownership in the design process. Presenting clients with something too polished can run the risk of leaving them feeling left out of what is probably the ‘fun part’ of their job in engaging with designers.

One solution: treat ‘em rough

The key, then, is to keep wireframes quick, sketchy and informal. I’m a big fan of Dan Roam’s book The back of the napkin, and one of the key take-aways for me is the power of a simple sketch to communicate a lot of information.

So for wireframes, here are a few ideas that have helped me in my projects:

• Sketch and scan hand-drawn wireframes and show to client project teams as early as possible, to discuss solutions and ideas with them
• Sketch up figures representing different personas next to wireframe sketches, showing the link(s) between persona tasks and scenarios, and how that particular wireframe design achieves the tasks
• Try to have a whiteboard handy when discussing interaction design ideas with clients, so that you can instantly sketch up what you’re talking about (and try not to stage it… or if you do make it look spontaneous, not contrived)
• If you’ve been brainstorming using whiteboards and sketches, take photos as you go, and share these photos with clients (in emails, reports, etc) if it helps to communicate your design thinking

A couple of examples

Here are two of the rough wireframes I did for livinggreener.gov.au. The purpose of the sketched set of wireframes was really to quickly ensure that we and the client meant the same thing when we talked about ‘hero areas’, page zoning, and so on. Turns out they really liked the sketched approach.

Sketched example of the home page	Sketched example of a process ‘how to’ page

I could expand on those points, but I’ll leave that for another time.

The Government 2.0 Taskforce has just released its final report - Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0. I’ve been eager to see the release of this report, not only because of its generous attribution to me for the Government 2.0 Taskforce logo and cover design  , but also because it’ll hopefully provide the concise authoritative foundation that the public sector needs - and something I can have under my arm in client meetings.

The main points from the report include:

• Emphasising the opportunities afforded by Web 2.0 ideas and functionality
• Showing how Web 2.0 can help the overall government aims of information availability, transparency, accountability, responsiveness and efficiency, as well as public service delivery
• Defining Government 2.0 as an approach, rather than a technology
• Highlighting the leadership, culture, policy and governance changes that would have to happen for Government 2.0 to be embraced

There’s loads more, of course, but it seems to stress Government 2.0 as a destination and philosophy. This is important, because it needs to separate itself from the hoopla and hyperbole that mostly gets our attention – and my clients’ attention.

I’ve been involved in several client projects, especially with public sector clients, where there’s been a lot of interest in what Web 2.0/Government 2.0 can deliver for them. I’ve seen some excellent innovative ideas go by the wayside because they’re obfuscated, derailed, or basically dismissed, because the knowledge and experience that business decisions are based on is not authentic or accurate.

Hopefully the Engage report can help with these knowledge and experience gaps, and come to be an authoritative foundation that folks like my clients will be able to refer to.

Read about it at the Department of Finance and Deregulation website, or download the PDF.

This is the second talk I gave at the recent Create Conference (November 2009), which is all about more effective writing for websites. I thought I’d reproduce it here for those who were asking me about it afterwards, and for anyone else for whom this might be useful. You can also view the slides (below) and on Slideshare. There’s nothing really ground-breaking in this presentation, but it’s intended to be a primer for anyone who wants an introduction to writing for online media. It’s also tailored a bit to church websites.

Short version

You can view the slides of the presentation below:

Can’t I just whack the A4 brochure onto the website?

Before we plunge into the 10 golden rules, it’s worth comparing the traditional way of reading with the online way of reading. I’ll look at differences in format and our reading behaviour.

Format

1. Print tends to be portrait format, whereas reading in a web browser tends to be landscape format; this affects how long our eyes can sustain reading along one horizontal line before fatiguing and getting distracted.
2. In print, you’re more or less locked into a linear bunch of pages, where one follows another. With web, you can jump all over the place, usually with links. The one different example I can think of is those old Choose your own adventure books I used to read as a kid. They were the web of my childhood!
3. Printed material rarely has text opening and closing and popping out at you, whereas in the online space, there’s all sorts of dynamic things going on to show and hide text in the context of what it’s there to say.
4. Online material has the added dimension of time; it takes time to download, it’s not (yet) instant; in print, all the information is already there when you pick it up.
5. We have some control over its presentation (in web browsers and handsets), e.g. how big or small the text is; with print, the producers have total control.

Behaviour

1. In print, there’s not much of what psychologists call cognitive load in turning a page. In web, we always stop and think at some level “where will this link go? Will it go where I expect it to go? Do I have time? Will I keep going in this direction? Or another?” and so on.
2. People are very task-oriented when reading content online, and have diminishing patience the longer they have to read text. People scan rather than read all the text on a screen. This is known as the F-pattern. You can see this F-pattern in action in the heatmap screenshots here.
3. The increases in download speeds has actually made us jump around websites more, so we’re even more impatient and more fickle than we used to be about staying on one page.

OK, so with these things in mind, let’s jump into some golden rules:

Rule 1: Be clear

Think about why you’re writing in the first place. What do you really want to say? It can be easy to shift into auto-writing mode and churn out the same phrases, but we all appreciate accuracy and clarity. Avoid clichés and phrases that don’t actually mean anything. Avoid acronyms and prioprietary terms that readers may not know what they mean (unless you’re going to explain what they mean). In ‘Christianese’ we have to be careful using words like sermon, worship, grace and parishioner. Even the term ‘non-Christian’ can be pretty alienating.

Rule 2: Be concise

Considering what we know about online reading behaviour – that people scan, rather than read – be ruthless in cutting your text down; be as sharp and brief as possible, without losing meaning and clarity. Use shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs.

Rule 3: Be compelling

Have you thought about what reward there is to your reader for reading your content? Know your audience and decide who you want to grab first. Depending on the nature of what you’re writing, be bold, stake a claim, be exciting and excited, be honest, be real, be confident. Use words that will resonate the most with your intended audience, and not necessarily you. Using keywords that people are actually looking out for as signals to ‘hook’ onto will not only make it a more compelling read, but it will attract more visits to your website through search engine indexing for those keywords.

Rule 4: Be creative

Could there be a new way of presenting your message, rather than three paragraphs and a title? Would starting the content with an intriguing question help? Could it be presented like an IKEA catalog? A chart?

Rule 5: Be current

Replace or remove old content. Update the home page. Update the blog. Leaving outdated content lying around a website is like never cleaning the church. Who’d want to walk through a door and have to brush away the cobwebs? Or brush the crumbs off a chair before sitting down?

Rule 6: Mind your spelling and grammar

It is worth it, it does matter, people do notice, and it does reflect better on you and your church/organisation. Why? In his book Don’t make me think, one of Steve Krug’s lessons is to remove the points of friction between your message and people’s understanding. Every error or poorly constructed sentence we have to read makes us stop and think, which distracts us from the actual goal of the writing. So mind your apostrophes and ellipses, learn about sentence fragments and clauses and use commas correctly and so on. Try to use active voice where you can. Separate your ideas and statements so that there’s one idea per paragraph. But having said that, know when you can break the rules of grammar a bit, to add colour and interest to your writing.

Rule 7: Arrange your content for scanning

Remembering that people scan online content, there’s lots of things we can do to maximise the scannability of our content:

• Use plenty of subtitles
• Short paragraphs
• Bulleted lists
• Think about the priority of your messages. If people only took one thing away from your web page, what would it be? What’s the most important message? Make sure this is most prominent, and so on.
• Use magazines as inspiration to see how they move your eye around the page. Think about the various chunks of information they present that help scanning. Think about how you can chunk your content into a title, a primary area with, say, one leading paragraph, and a couple of associated content areas.

Rule 8: Adapt your writing for the right type of website

Writing will be different depending on whether it’s a ‘location and directions’ page on your church website, or on a blog, or on Twitter. Here are some applications:

Twitter

• Make those 140 characters count! Hone your skills in clear concise text.
• If including links, it’s good to include a punchy lead-in for the link, but even better to make it personal and different, e.g. “This blog post changed how I pray! [Link]”
• Remember to use link shorteners, like bit.ly and clicky.me
• Leave room in those 140 characters for others to retweet
• use hashtags, like #create09

Blogs

For blogs, I’ll focus on the headings. According to top copywriters, there’s a 50/50 rule of headlines, where they say you should spend half the time it takes to write an article just on the headline. Here’s where we can apply our rules 3 and 4 (being compelling and creative), e.g.:

• Read this, or the puppy gets it!
• How to design better church handouts (or How to anything, really)
• Top 10 reasons… 10 Golden Rules… (you get the idea)
• What I didn’t know about Jesus

Marketing and advertising companies know that on average, 8/10 people read headline copy, but only 2/10 will read the rest. That’s why it’s important to invest time in a killer heading. To be effective, try to make it useful, convey a sense of urgency, and convey a unique benefit.

You can also use subheadings within your blog posts to tell the story of the post:

• “I used to mock Christians”
• “Then He turned up”
• “Now by God’s grace I’m planting my third church”

Another tip for blogging: front-load your post. Start with the conclusion. You can then include the rest of the vital details, and then off you go. Next time you read a newspaper article, just tick off how many of the who, what, when, where, why and how of the story are dealt with in the headline and first paragraph.

Rule 9: Don’t let the experts write your web pages

By this I mean, just because you’re super knowledgeable and passionate about your subject, you may not be the best person to write the web page. If it is going to be you who writes the content, I hope these sorts of rules help. But delegate and share the load if you can, and if you think it’s appropriate. Here’s some ideas on how you can do that:

• Assign one person to take charge of gathering all the content from everyone who has the content. They might be the writer, or they might just be someone who is champion of the website, or tends to be the person who just gets things done.
• Ministers and pastors, endorse this person to your congregation or organisation, give them support and authority to gather the content and ask people’s time to interview them.
• Define a content workflow: for each page, or content type, who writes, reviews, edits, approves and publishes? Think about a publishing schedule: change the home page once a month? One blog post a month? A few tweets a week? That sort of thing.

Rule 10: Use content templates

Make it easy on yourself, and others tasked with content on your website, and come up with some templates. These are a big help for people you need to get the information from, and it makes it much easier to know what ‘boxes to fill in’ rather than giving them a ‘blank canvas’. For example, a template about a church event could look a bit like this:

1. Title
2. Short description, mentioning purpose and selling benefit
3. Where is it
4. When is it (date and time)
5. Cost
6. Contact information
7. RSVP date
8. Full description
9. Quote from previous event?
10. Photo from previous event, or a generic ‘event’ photo?

Well that wraps up the 10 golden rules. I hope you found them helpful. Are there any areas that have particularly helped you in your writing? Do you have any other ideas that have helped you?

This is the first talk I gave at the recent Create Conference (November 2009), which is all about improving the organic search engine results rankings for your website. I thought I’d reproduce it here for those who were asking me about it afterwards, and for anyone else for whom this might be useful. You can also view the slides (below) and on Slideshare. I’ll say up-front that there’s nothing ground-breaking in this presentation, but it’s intended to be a primer for anyone who wants to get started in search engine optimisation. It’s also tailored a bit to church websites.

Short version

You can view the slides of the presentation below:

Wave your hands in the air

Years ago I was down the front at this concert in Canberra, it was near the end and the guitarist strode up to the front of the stage and got ready to toss his pick out to the crowd. Now, who knows how he would choose where he’d throw that pick – or who to – but I jumped up and down and waved my arms around like a total git, as much as I could, to get his attention. And it paid off – he threw it right at me, and I caught it!

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is EXACTLY like that – it’s all about getting your website to wave its arms around to say hey! Here I am! Click on me! The 10 tips will focus on SEO (rather than search engine marketing (SEM)) and cover the three areas of SEO: your website’s code, your website’s content, and your website’s link popularity.

The top 10 tips

OK, so strap yourself in, here we go.

1. Ask the tough questions first. Why do you want people to come to your website? This seems pretty obvious at first, but really breaking this down will help you be strategic in your approach and efficient with where you spend your time. Church websites usually aren’t selling products and services like commercial websites, and they tend not to be in direct competition with other church websites, but they do tend to promote the church’s meetings, events and resources such as sermons and Bible studies, and of course presenting the gospel in various ways. You might find there are specific answers that come out, like:
   • Your church is the best one to go to for a certain area of suburbs
   • Your church is passionate about holding local community events
   • Your church has great worship music, or kids’ groups, or outreach nights… and so on.
2. Pick an SEO-friendly CMS. Now here I’m assuming that you will manage – or are managing – your church website using a content management system (CMS). If not, that’s fine, the same principles apply (and you should still consider using a CMS). But if you are looking to use a CMS, here’s a bit of a checklist to bear in mind:
   • Does it publish your website using standards-compliant code? It’s very nerdy, but it does matter.
   • Does it allow you control over code that’s relevant for SEO, like meta tags, especially on a page-by-page basis, or is that part locked away?
   • Does it allow you full control over all of the text on each page?
   • Does it allow for website links (or URLs) that you can use specific keywords (e.g. http://www.yourchurch.org.au/drummoyne-events/) rather than something like http://www.yourchurch.org.au/?xid=9875&y=8&z=wonderwhatthisallmeans?

   I would recommend: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, or Typo3.

3. Do your keyword research. Find out the sort of words people already use to get to your website. Your website traffic reports might tell you this, or if you have Google Analytics plugged into your website it definitely tells you this. Ask around your church membership; odds are there are people at your church who found out about it online by using Google. And remember that the sorts of words you use may not be the ones others use. Use online keyword suggestion tools like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.
4. Write really good keyword-rich content. Use your keywords throughout the text of each page, especially in text headings and sub-headings, and link text (e.g. Download Mark Driscoll sermons rather than click here). Use most (all if you can) keywords on your home page, and one main keyword per content page.But be careful of keyword density, i.e. the percentage a particular keyword is used in a page compared to all text on that page. Anywhere from 2% to 8% is fine; any more and search engines may drop your website. It happens. Using a free tool like Link Vendor’s Link Density Check tool is the best way to check.Most of all, don’t try to contrive text to be full of keywords; if it’s relevant and engaging to your readers, it’ll be relevant and engaging to Google.
5. Optimise your code for SEO. Remember to ensure your keywords are used well in <title> tags of each page (e.g. not just ‘Home page’; more like ‘Family-friendly church in the inner west – Drummoyne Presbyterian Church’), and meta tags, including meta description and meta keywords. Most people say these tags don’t count for much, but I like to think it makes good sense to categorise your pages like this – a bit like in a library – and I reckon meta tags will have their day again, just you wait and see. You can get help generating them with this tool: http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/meta-tag-generator.shtml.When it comes to the Alt attribute in image tags (img alt=”...”) try to make it more meaningful, e.g. Not just ‘Church front door’, but ‘Front door of our church, replaced after a fire in 1948′. Don’t forget about all the searches people do on Google Images.Sitemap XML file – this is a text file stored as part of your website to help search engines index your website better. It’s really only for very large websites, though. You can generate these for free at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.
6. Work keywords into the URLs. If you can, register domains that contain your primary keywords and point them to your main URL, e.g. drummoynechurch.com. See if you can make the URLs to specific pages keyword-rich, like http://www.drummoyne.org.au/drummoyne-church-events.html.
7. Submit to directories. It goes without saying, but having said that, Google will find you by itself. It just does. But it’s still sort of worth registering your website with the gazillions of other search engines and directory websites out there. I’m not going to spend much time on this one, because I don’t think the effort pays off nearly as much as…
8. Reciprocal linking. Work hard at getting other websites to link to yours, whether or not you link to them too, to increase your website’s link popularity. Search engines heavily consider how relevant your website is depending on your inbound links, so it’s like votes in an election. But linking is not a true democracy, that is: not all links are equal. Google’s PageRank is a measure of how important Google thinks a particular page is compared to all other pages; a number between 0 and 10. You can see this PageRank score either by installing the Google toolbar.How is PageRank derived? I’m no expert at this, but it’s roughly from the number of inbound links to the page, as well as the PageRank of those pages that have the inbound links, relevance of words searched for on those pages, and actual visits to that page. e.g. a PR9 web page that links to your website has more ‘value’ than a PR3 web page.So how do you get all these inbound links? Here’s some ideas:
   • Talk to owners of websites in your community – like schools, daycare centres, libraries and so on – and see if they’ll link to your website if you link to theirs
   • Encourage your church members, if they have online presences like Facebook and Twitter, or their own blogs, to link to their church website
   • Donate content to other websites, like opinion pieces, Bible studies and other resources, provided they link back to your website
   • Tweet like crazy!
   • Leave comments on other people’s blogs and respectfully include (where appropriate and relevant) a link back to your church website
9. Get your SEO serviced. SEO is like a car: it needs regular tune-ups. One thing you might want to regularly check on is what websites are linking to yours. You can use link popularity online tools like this one, or Google Analytics, or if you feel you must part with case, use something like Raven SEO Tools. The rules of the game change slightly from time to time, and the nature of the content on your website will change over time too, so it’s worth the effort.
10. Get someone else to do it! Yes, if it’s all too hard, you can get someone skilled in web development, standards-compliance and SEO to assess your website for you, and/or optimise it as a one-off, or agree on a regular schedule. This definitely includes SEM: if you’re interested in investing money in pay-per-click campaigns, unless you’re experienced I would definitely advise taking on an experienced professional for SEM. Trying to do PPC campaigns yourself is time-consuming, distracting, and you could be throwing good money away – it may not be good stewardship of funds.

Well that’s my top 10 tips. SEO is a complex art and science, and I don’t pretend to be an expert, but hopefully this is a good introduction for you. Very happy to hear if you think anything here is erroneous or could be improved.

References:

• Google SEO guidelines
• Yahoo! SEO guidelines

Create Conference - the conference run by FEVA for churches and other ministries to tackle gospel communication issues - is on again soon, and I’ve just completed the latest version of the website.

Create Conference 2009 website

The Create Conference is on Saturday 14 November, and by the looks of the program, it’s about twice as big as last year. The conference aims to equip Christians to understand the times, generate compelling ideas and messages, and package them relevantly.

Last year, the website design I did focused on the vintage neo-Victorian aspect of the airship, the main part of the Create identity, so it came out looking all steampunky and weathered. This year I expanded on the steampunk-inspired pop-art feel to the illustrations, but went for a lighter, airier feel.

My illustrations went to Andrew Nobbs over at Barton Design, who put together an amazing brochure for the event. His exploration of sky and clouds and bold typography was then translated to the website design. What a neat little example of collaborative design. 

Visit the site, and if you’re keen, register online.

After Day 1 of Oz IA, I thought I’d put up a few extra thoughts about Day 2. It was cut short for me due to other responsibilities, but all up it was a hugely humbling, rewarding, energising and inspiring experience.

The coffee, gourmet juices and tweets continued to flow freely, and the sessions got even more animated and engaging:

• Gary Barber took us into the courtroom with a scathing critique of tag clouds and who is to blame for their faults (hint: it could be the IAs). I was talking to him afterwards, and it’s not so much all tag clouds that are wrong, but their implementation as-is, rather than being critically assessed by IAs and reinterpreted for each individual use. Great stuff.
• Matt Moore’s Playing games with culture was the one workshop-oriented session, where everyone had a ’serious’ play with the Organisational Culture & Knowledge Management Methods Cards from Straits Knowledge. A fun way of revealing the sorts of team-culture lessons that may otherwise be lost if only resorting to dry presentation and workshop formats.
• Melissa Cooper from the ABC showed us how ruthless you have to be in designing search experiences for mobile interfaces. I can only aspire!
• Matt Fisher took us way out of our cushy little high-bandwidth graphics-rich always-on bubble and showed us the sort of ingenuity you need for designing systems for Defence, where water and dust wreck laptops and there’s no constant connection. What humbled me was the sorts of challenges that diggers are surrounded with when trying to carry out the same sorts of communication- and tech-related tasks we take for granted, and their contribution to refining such systems that can go on to be used for remote communities in developing countries. Very very worthwhile. Sort of puts my dinky little interfaces into perspective.

Oh, and one more thing I encountered: there’s this huge connection between being an IA and loving good food! You know who you are, and more power to you.

Can’t wait for next year!

I’m finally home after day 1 of Oz IA 2009, and absolutely knackered. What. A. Day. The presentation content was as diverse and interesting as the program suggested, but for me the greatest highlight was the meeting of minds of so many IAs.

First up was Matt Hodgson’s The Evolution of the Agile IA. Matt took us through a rollicking ride with where IA has come from, where it’s at now with the emergence of agile methodology, and where it’s going. One of the things I took from his messages about IA and agile was that in some ways we as IAs are already practicing some degree of agile without even knowing it; taking the big step into agile and leaving waterfall behind shouldn’t be too much of a pain.

I was up second, presenting on Guiding the way to living greener: how psychology helped IA for a new government website. I got some great feedback after it, including some requests for more information about how the ‘concierge’ model manifests itself in the various user interfaces used in the livinggreener.gov.au website. It was always going to be tricky to include the principles aspects of the presentation along with the applied aspects. I erred on the side of principles, given that the focus was on how motivational psychology can contribute to IA design. Maybe next time I would focus more on the UI aspects!

Cast herewith for your perusal (or go to my prezo at Slideshare):

Matt Balara was doing some awesome sketches of his thoughts coming out of each talk on the day, and here’s a pic of the page he sketched for my talk. It’s interesting that the key points that arose for him were:

• Designing for people where they were at
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
• ‘The Concierge’ interaction model - answer question and offer even more
• Personas are partners

Other highlights of the day:

• Non-stop supply of fantastic real barista-served coffee - Single Origin, no less. I think I had 5? Stopped counting… Oz IA, you have spoiled me for any and all conferences in future.
• Non-stop supply of fruit juice cocktails. Wanting to hold on to my masculinity, I didn’t indulge in this aspect of the conference much. But dayam, muddled mint and watermelon tastes good.
• Stamford Interactive’s war stories of the pleasures and pains of being involved in a massive government intranet redesign project. Girls, I felt your pain.
• Suze Ingram’s lightning-paced but highly entertaining review of prototyping tools. Expression Blend and Axure came up pretty well. I won a demo access pass to one of the online prototyping tools… no idea which one, now! But full points to Ian Stalvies, who won a fresh spanking new copy of Axure, for getting the trivia question right about the capital of Brazil (or somewhere like that).
• Last and definitely not least: I have never seen so much twittering in all my freaking life! It was quite weird to see so many laptops open with people having one eye on the speaker and one eye on tweetdeck. Extra extra weird to see my own tweets retweeted on other people’s screens.

More fun in store tomorrow…