Two programs, enthusiastically launched by Fresh Egg, in the UK, are intended to provide intimate, hands on work experience with professional search engine marketers, Lee Colbran and Ammon Johns. This is an opportunity to get real-world work experience from prestigious instructors.

Ours isn’t some out-of-context course. In our programme, the trainee comes to work with and for us, tutored and guided by both myself and the SEO Director of Fresh Egg, Lee Colbran. Our SEO training provides actual professional SEO practice in real life client campaigns.

The SEO Intern Training Programme offers two program tracks.

One is the SEO Internship Training, a two week, affordable course, that includes lodging as well as education. Course highlights include Search psychology, Stats and Analytics, Link Strategy and Key Word and Search Phrase research. The other is the SEO Intern Scholarship, which is free and paid off by “sweat equity”.

The selection process for scholarships is just as exacting as for the internships, perhaps even more so. Preference is given to candidates who are local, and may even represent potential staff at a future time. It is an amazing opportunity for an applicant to be able to spend a month with the guidance and mentorship of top SEO professionals, and to gain a month of work experience in a leading SEO company.

Applications are being taken now.

Ammon Johns says, in a discussion about the SEO training offer,

Of course, this training isn’t just for people wanting to get a start in the SEO industry itself. It can also offer a great deal of value to web developers and designers who want to know what we’d do with their sites, so they can do it themselves.

I’ve been watching our venture into informal user testing at Cre8asiteforums. There are presently two BETA applications being explored by willing volunteers, from various countries, computer experience and interests. What strikes me is how well each company’s programmers are taking the news.

Explore or review: Textic Talk

This JavaScript application renders in browsers, on demand, to provide website audio. We learned to not compare it with screen readers. Textit Talklets lets you highlight text with your mouse so that it is read back to you. It was designed by someone with reading difficulties, for people with sight impairment or eyestrain, and the millions of people who suffer from dyslexia, or who read slowly. Many people comprehend better when they listen to words, rather than read them.

Because this application requires a mouse (so far), it differs from screen readers. The added bonus is that it has an MP3 option whereby you record web pages, to playback later at your convenience.

Explore or review: Ask3.com

This was our debut into forums functional testing. It’s been one of our most popular threads in the Website Hospital. The company, JustASKthem.com, has sent their President, Vice President and Lead JAVA programmer to respond to questions, and user feedback, as it comes in.

Their’s is a survey application, JAVA-based, that resides inside selected web pages and rotates a series of 3 questions. The data collection system, called SMART, collects data, sorts it, cross tabs it, lets you ask it questions and over the long term, provides expert marketing data used for statistical analysis. It’s inventor has a strong background in customer service call center data.

The application has been in development for years, and arrived at a point where actual users were critical to the next steps. Hence, this is where our forum came in.

None of the testing is guided, expertly managed or requirements based. It’s essentially a “come pound on our stuff” so we can watch how it performs. In addition, everyone has opinions and in both cases, are able to ask direct questions from the developers.

All this, for free.

It’s that time of year again. You’ve recovered from last year’s holiday selling season, and are optimistic for an even better one this time. However, you’ve noticed competition is smarter, traffic is slowing, customers are spending less and promotional efforts aren’t paying off.

The following is the first of four articles I’m writing for a series called:

“Holiday Season Ecommerce Usability: Easy Steps You Can Take Now to Kickoff a Successful Selling Season”

Their purpose is to offer ways to implement positive changes to your online business that are affordable, practical, proven, and easy to do right now. The articles are intended to be provide actionable advice for small to medium online businesses, but corporate site designers may learn something new.

I. The Homepage Interview

II. Convincing Website Credibility

III. Impressive Customer Service

IV. Productive Conversions

The Homepage Interview

It’s easy to overlook important information that your website visitors may need when they first arrive to your homepage. While landing pages are helpful in guiding searchers to your site, eventually even these folks will find themselves on your homepage. Everyone has the same basic questions.

These questions revolve around Who, Where, What, When, Why and How. Answering them is fun, and not as obvious as you might believe. Using them as guides for credibility, trust, persuasiveness and desirability is an added bonus for your overall conversion rates. Don’t settle for a brief welcome statement that offers no guidance or spark of interest. These six words can help you add some zing!

Please continue reading here.

Do you sometimes feel as though your blog is ignored? There are some interesting personal stories being shared about how blog posts that sometimes “out” things like poor customer service or express complaints publically about a company, are not as insignificant as you might think.

One example:

I spent a couple of days research Acquisitions that Google made a week or so before last Christmas, and wrote about them in a blog post. I posted it, and then went away for Christmas holidays. When I came back, I found out that I had 30,000 - 40,000 visitors to my blog over the three days around Christmas to read that post.

Read and/or share your story:

Your Blog is more powerful than you think

Adaptive Path released a small part of the results of a survey “into how organizations value and practice user experience” by writing What term do you use for ‘user experience’?.

They asked:

One of the simpler questions was, “If you use other terms [than ‘user experience’] that are similar in meaning or intent, which terms do you use?”

They got back 157 terms. That’s 157 ways to describe the experience of making something usable or to communicate usability.

We had fun at Cre8asiteforums when John Rhodes asked, What is usability in one word?

If we blasted “usability” into oblivion so that it could never be used again, what word or short phrase would replace it?

Another time, someone asked for a concise definition of Website Usability?

As time goes on, responses are starting to sound etheric:

“The intuitive, almost child-like ease to accomplish anything on your site achieved through utter, transparent clarity of options and actions”

and logically practical:

Usability can be defined as “the decrease of cognitive friction users experience in task completion relative to 1) the previous version or model 2) competitor offerings 3)user goals”

Of the 157 words listed by Adaptive Path’s list that describes the experience of making something user centered, only one person chose this word.

Fun