There’s a scene in the movie, “Eat, Pray, Love”, where Elizabeth Gilbert (played by Julia Roberts) is sitting in the lotus position meditating after weeks of trying to learn how to quiet her mind. Her entire face was a smile, from her closed eyes, to her cheeks, to the relaxed corners of her mouth. Her look of serenity zapped me like a lightening bolt.

Later that evening, myself and four members of my family went out to dinner and I did something I never, ever do. I ate a huge bowl of pasta and followed it up with dessert. By 9pm that same night, I crawled into bed to read a magazine but fell asleep instead. Sixteen hours later, I woke up.

My family was concerned. Was I sick, my husband asked several times during the day. Nope. I was completely at peace.

There is a Season…Mine is Football and Partial Empty Nest

I accepted a part-time independent consultant position as an in-house SEO for a local company that I enjoy, although it’s with my second love (SEO) and not usability (my first). (They’re letting me combine SEO/IA/UX – yay.)

I’m putting a hold on new usability audit work.

When I started out, I was in my small townhouse kitchen, unemployed, newly single and determined as hell to raise my kids well.

Today, my eldest is moving into her college dorm room this weekend as a transfer student at Kutztown University.

I already know I’ll sleep in her bed at home whenever I miss my little girl.

Anyone who has an athletic child knows what it means to sacrifice for that kid, especially when they consistently earn it. My son, Stefan, has played soccer, hockey and wrestled. He’s could skate at 3 years old and was a hockey goalie at 5. Every baseball season he balances his time between 4 baseball teams and I go to every game humanely possible. He’s played football since the fifth grade.

Now, as a high school Junior, he’s on the Varsity football team. Yesterday, the last day of “2 a days” (grueling football camp from 8 am to 6pm in August heat), coaches assigned him to first string Offensive Quick Guard, second string Defensive Line Back and “backup everything”. At a scrimmage last Saturday Stefan rammed the other team’s Running Back hard enough to knock the guy out of the game.

I’m nurse, massage therapist, taxi (until he gets his license next month), nutritionist and cheerleader.

My youngest son has a heart defect that prevents him from most activity. However, he has a gun and a fishing pole. Target shooting and torturing fish are his main loves. I strongly dislike killing anything, even when it’s blowing things up in video games. He thinks I’m overly protective and silly.

I’m not writing about tech stuff because I after seeing the look on Julia Roberts’ face on a big ass movie screen, it hit me that I want to do that too.

I’ll be back.

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Bio:

Kim has been working with web sites since 1995, running a free web development forums since 1998 and been self employed as a consultant since 2001.

Besides the volunteer nature of the forums, she’s on the Board of Directors for her local baseball Little League and is their volunteer head webmaster. She’s the volunteer creator and admin for the local high school’s football Facebook page. She built and maintains several family and friend web sites for free or barter.

Presently she’s building a brand new web site for the general public – to generate revenue.

Economy blues? It's not too late to increase your web site conversions with Kim's affordable usability audits. Get the answers you need NOW!

Eat, Play, Love More

Have you ever sat around a large table with a group of people working on a giant jig saw puzzle? Some people are really good at it. They understand the puzzle. Others are content to find border pieces. It takes patience. It brings the group together while they put it all together.

What if you have the chance to build your own house? You’ll hire an architect who listens to your goals, likes, dislikes and dreams. From that a plan is established. From the first shovel of dirt to the last drop of paint, it’s built with you in mind. You’re the mental model. You’re the person or family who will be using the final product.

Pretend, for a moment, that you are The Creator. You want a tree. Where do you put it? What kind should it be? Who is it for? What does it do? If you want birds to use it, what might they need from the tree?

Underneath a tree is its information architecture. We don’t see it working in the background, but it’s there. It controls how the tree grows. It relies on input from above ground for its sustenance, such as water or interference from a close neighbor tree that makes it harder to find. This is “findability”. Our tree wants to be found by its “users” such as the birds who need it for their nests or a hot and thirsty human who needs its shade. The Creator knew in advance that this tree would be popular. It was designed to be talked about. With some pruning of branches, good soil or perhaps a tire swing for a visiting grandchild, it could certainly be talked about and referred to by others who found and love the tree. With enough social networking and marketing, the entire planet could be populated with trees.

Information Architecture is Your Canvas

My favorite artist likes to work on blank white 8 x 6 feet canvas and larger. When he performs live art with music for an audience, he enters a zone where he is the creator. From the outside, the paint splashes and brush strokes look chaotic. It’s only when you stand a few feet away when its finished that you see he’s painted a street in New York’s Times Square, by memory. People feel drawn inside the canvas. They often feel emotional. Sometimes the details he has added, that weren’t obvious at first, trigger a memory or a moment, similar to how we might feel when a certain song comes on the radio.

Can you imagine building an online store where visitors arrive and are emotionally moved to make a purchase? We’re not there yet. Sometimes in the effort to provoke feelings, a site will rely on videos, rotating images and artistic Flash presentations designed to lure you into the web site. Despite how fun this is to build and watch, the distraction, download time, and typically strange navigation make completing a task frustrating. Information architecture covers many areas.

For persons looking for how it used for search engine optimization or user experience design, the emphasis is on organizing information so that tasks can be performed, pages are easy to find and index and will appear at the top of search results.

This is a tall order and absolutely not easy. I have notepads on my desk of sketches where I try and work out the entire foundation of a web site and organize it for navigation, searchability and easy task completion. Every element I put on the page, from a link label, to an image, to where a navigation link makes the most sense is attached to a round of questions in my head.  Who is the site for? What are the products and what is the best way to organize and present them for people and search engines? Do I need hubs or groups and if so, how do I connect them to other levels? Where do I put the lead task, once I understand what that is. It’s goes on and on…

You can spot a web site that has not had a proper information architecture prepared for it. The homepage shows everything at once. It’s crammed with products, ads, redundant navigation (based on the fear principle that says, “If they didn’t find this earlier on the page, here it is again and again.”), no breadcrumbs on inside pages and overall feeling you get while looking at it is sheer exhaustion.

This may be a factor in the increase of persons seeking expert help with blog setup and design. Much of the foundation is already finished.

Fear Not – IA Help Is Here

There has been a spike in interest, so the following are our recent writings for you to choose from:
When Good SEO Becomes Bad Information Architecture by Shari Thurow

Site Navigation & Information Architecture Fundamentals For SEOs by Kim Krause Berg

Key Information Concepts Every SEO Should Know by Shari Thurow

Economy blues? It's not too late to increase your web site conversions with Kim's affordable usability audits. Get the answers you need NOW!

Do You Know The Way to Good IA

Last week I conducted a web site usability audit for a famous brand corporate web site. It never fails to amaze me why these companies don’t hire designers trained in search engine marketing and user experience design.

I won’t divulge who they were. I never do that with client work because for starters, they had the brains to find me and get help. But what I found illustrated what I often find on corporate, famous brand web sites. There seems to be this arrogance that says, “We have the brand. We don’t need to optimize.  Who cares if people come.”

Fashionistas

Certain brands have an interesting way letting you know that you don’t meet their user standards. Take Prada for example. Unless you have Flash loaded and your computer has speakers, their web site is completely useless.

This is what it looks like without Flash installed.

This is what it looks like if you have Flash, JavaScript and sound.

It’s really cool. It loads a video with catwalk music, which immediately shows their new line being modeled. This is different than images with click to enlarge. Prada wants to create an environment. A vibe. A la-te-da. It does this beautifully. However, this is what Yahoo cached:

If I could afford a Prada shoe versus the ones I get at Famous Footwear for under $20, I would search Google with my perfectly manicured pink fingernails for “prada shoes”. And this is what I would get:

My pretty little head would be thrilled to find all the sites that sell them or have rip-offs or offer  them on sale. I never have to go to Prada’s web site – which by the way is somewhere down there in the SERPS. Google found the homepage but no inside pages. Certainly no shoes!

But hey, it’s Prada. It’s a select market. No dial-up user or sight impaired person buys from them, right?

Too Posh to Care

When searching for a place to hold a wedding or fancy gathering, this web site hopes to God you know about them before you go searching on the Web. If you have ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) or flickering movement will cause you to have seizures, do NOT visit this web site.

If you know the business phone number, you win their challenge because by golly, their domain IS the phone number. (Click the image to view.) If you don’t know what the site is about, join the club, but I warn you that if you click a link to an inside page, you may be stuck there. I couldn’t find the back “home”. Leave a comment if you found it.

Just for jollies, check out the source code. It’s an SEO’s nightmare. There is no title tag. No meta anything. No content. At all. The entire site is AJAX driven, so no matter where you are, the URL never changes. If you aren’t the type of user who has the latest computer equipment, you most definitely can’t afford the services of this gorgeous place. This is what you do get.

Thanks to a funny discussion in Facebook that began when I mini-vented about poor site usability, I was offered some leads on sites that are absolutely not designed for everybody to use. They’re targeted to those with the latest technology and which don’t need search engines.  If you need to control sound or are using JAWS, these sites must be frustrating.

For ChristianLouBoutin you must have Flash 7 installed.

For Versace please throw out your dial-up and set aside 5 minutes for the site to load up if you have DSL or cable. When it does, hope for a horizontal scrollbar if you’re using a wide screen monitor.

As one of my friends said,

“And then the brands wonder why counterfeiters are the ones in the top 10 of Google.”

What Makes It a Vanity Site?

If you need something to see, hear, load and install to use it, it’s a vanity site. If there is no text anywhere  it won’t have information for you. Rather, via images and video, you’re supposed to see and sense the aura and telepathically communicate with the navigation.

Artistic sites by graphic artists tend to love to break rules. They’re all about the art and the newer technology which offers them great freedom to express themselves. The site is all about them. “You” are secondary. If you come, thank you. If you don’t, you won’t be missed. It wasn’t designed for you.

One design fad are  Horizontal Websites (Discussion link). Here is an example of what it can look like:

VanityClaire -  It’s pretty clever but the bottom part of the site can’t be seen at all on a wide screen monitor. There are no vertical scroll bars on horizontal web pages. That defeats the purpose of the design.

With Flash and JavaScript disabled, it looks like this:

A cleaner, less jerky example that doesn’t depend on Flash, is one by Donna Fontenot aka “DazzlinDonna”. It’s a free slider launch template.

What Makes a Site Non-User/Non-Search Friendly?

Many web site owners try hard to make sure their web sites function for most people. For them, my site audits are filled with logical recommendations that often make them smack their head. It’s always the little things that make a big difference for the user experience and search engine crawling. The bulk of non-usability falls into the accessibility area. The plus of making a site meet accessibility standards is that it automatically pleases search engine “bots”.

My friend, Joe Dolson, writes on this topic. These two links may be helpful in deciding whether it’s “worthwhile” to include users who have health issues of various kinds that prevent them reading or ordering online without some type of software or other assistance.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1417-Accessibility-How-Many-Disabled-Web-Users-Are-There->Accessibility: How Many Disabled Web Users Are There?

I often hear business owners claim that their sites aren’t used by people with disabilities, so they don’t need to pay attention to web accessibility. But there’s no basis for such claims because the merchant can’t possibly know this information. The tracked profile of a user with a disability, via a typical analytics package, is identical to anybody else using that browser.

United States disability statistics: Measurement and sources

Take the time to follow his leads on statistics sources. The number of disabled people is staggering. States such as mine (Pennsylvania) have laws for any state government website that  requires them to be usable by everybody, whether they are using assistive software,  older computers or have health issues that make using a mouse or page viewing frustrating. Why? Because the state wants to do business and provide services online to every citizen.

Doing Away With Basic Usability, Accessibility and Search Engine Marketing

A company that doesn’t care if its web site comes up for specific product searches is one that believes its brand name is doing the job just fine. They may be right. However, sooner or later, I hope they discover their competition is a user click or search result away.

It’s scary to keep finding web sites that most people can’t use or search for. I can understand new sites with inexperienced (but learning) owners and designers. We find them in forums and blogs asking questions. We rarely find anyone from big shot sites or who are willing to identify themselves as such asking for help in forums. At their level they’re expected to know what they’re doing.

The big brand site that threw me into a tizzy last week had no text on the homepage at all. With Flash and images disabled there was a big fat nothing. No textt, no links and no navigation. It’s an ecommerce web site with no signs of an order form.  The lead task was viewing their pretty pictures. There were no call to action prompts on the homepage. If you could figure how to add a product to the cart, you couldn’t continue shopping.  You could only order ONE product. That cracked me up. And finally, I’ve never seen a site completely change the entire homepage so that every time you load it you get a different design.

Sites like that one have gigantic egos and a funky way of creating brand loyalty. Nothing says “You don’t matter” more than a web site that won’t let you use it.

Economy blues? It's not too late to increase your web site conversions with Kim's affordable usability audits. Get the answers you need NOW!

The You-Don’t-Matter Website (A Look At Ego/Vanity Sites)

After taking a sorely needed break from Stuff and doing lots of chilling with “Mom, can we go shopping” daughter, I’m back – poorer but happier.

My office was moved and expanded to a new section of our finished basement and repainted. My old space is now the 16 year old’s “cave for the dudes”. I have a docking station with 3 monitors for testing and space for my laptop, so I can feel geeky. To my left is a whole bunch of exercise equipment that I may stop staring at and cutting articles out of magazines to show how to use. On my right is a gorgeous large bar built by my home’s previous owner. The fridge is filled with water and gatorade for the 16 year old who is on 3 baseball teams and just started mini-football camp yesterday. Plus high school isn’t over yet.

Last year we never opened our pool because it needed so many repairs. On Memorial Day we had good friends over to celebrate its new pump and liner and my terrifying next water bill after refilling it. We had the perfect fire going in the fire pit, making “smores” and the kids perfecting burnt hot dogs on a stick. Even when there was a sudden thunderstorm for 10 minutes, that fire kept on going and so did we when it stopped raining.

Speaking

I had to turn down a speaking engagement for SES San Francisco in August because we’re moving my daughter into her college then. The entire month of August is packed with her education and son’s two weeks of grueling football camp. They work out in the weight room all summer but at the exact moment it turns 105 degrees outside, the boys are called to the fields for “2 a day’s” and other miscellaneous forms of torture they don’t want us mom’s to know about.

Blog Spam

What happened out there? Did an army of blog spammers hatch from giant goose eggs? None of you has anything better to do than drop comments in broken English with made up and outlandish ties to the blog post? Is somebody paying you to be stupid?

Forum Spam

Signing up for forums to get a profile listing, with no intention of ever posting, is nearly as idiotic as walking naked in New York’s Times Square. Sure, SOMEBODY might notice you but unless you have something worthwhile to contribute, we don’t give a flying cow if you’re there. And in my forums, we don’t let you in when Google brings up a pile of profiles for you registered at other forums.

Usability Rocks

I liked this introductory article, An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Influence & Persuasion by Rand Fiskkin.

Hey Facebook! Here’s your privacy redesign, which btw, is not the title I would have given it.

Findability and Exploration: the future of search.

Let’s make a small but important distinction. There’s relevance, and there’s occurrence. When you perform a search, you’re looking for relevant content. A strong indicator of relevance is whether or not the words you’re searching for occur in the result set, but that doesn’t make relevance and occurrence the same thing.

Leaking New

Got my server. Bought my domain. Ran my ideas and goals by one person, who helped me choose the domain when she understood what I wanted to do. I’m teaching myself Drupal for a brand new web site that has nothing to do with SEO or Usability. The only hint you get now is that I’ll be repaying the friends who stood by me, no matter what. Oh, and it will continue what I originally started out to do online back in 1995.

Because sometimes to move forward means going back to the beginning.

Go FLYERS

Living north of Philadelphia has its perks.

Economy blues? It's not too late to increase your web site conversions with Kim's affordable usability audits. Get the answers you need NOW!

Re-Lit and All Fired Up

I learned today that unknown to most Facebook users is a facial recognition application used by Facebook that is sending information for criminal investigation use by governments. In the USA, the information is available for use at the state police level.

The warning I got from my source was to get off Facebook. Knowing what he knows about how the software application is being used without public knowledge, is the reason his family will not use Facebook. I’ve been informed by other sources that ALL data from search engines and social sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin and anywhere where profiles are set up is sent to giant government databases.

Ever wonder how Abbey from NCIS so easily pops up possible criminals with nothing more than a nose hair? Any Internet application, including Whois, that contains your address and personal information, is gobbled up in ways none of us are aware of.

I went in search of something to back up this claim and found there is a company called Face.com that supplies the facial recognition application to Facebook under the innocent guise of being used for tagging and identifying pictures of yourself. For over a year the application has been out. You may know it as Photo Finder. From a recent press release, Face.com takes its face-recognition technology beyond Facebook:

Face.com has scanned more than 7 billion photos in the past year, indexing more than 52 million faces with its Photo Finder and Photo tagger apps on Facebook. Now it is expanding beyond the social network by launching a developer tool that will let you embed the face recognition technology in any site.

It may sound creepy on the privacy front, but Face.com says it uses the same privacy protection rules that Facebook does in its terms of service.

This is not comforting considering Facebook could care less about our privacy.

I have no proof that Face.com is the supplier of facial recognition from Facebook to government agencies. They just happened to come up first on my searches. This note from Face.com seems to indicate they are the vendor.

We at face.com are working hard to develop the fastest, most powerful, and most accurate facial recognition app outside of TV crime dramas. We have built the best tool possible to find pictures of you and your friends on facebook – the largest photo-sharing site in the world. Photo Finder is still in alpha, and we would love to hear your feedback, suggestions, bug reports, rants, and raves.

Out in the “real world” I’ve been asking questions and discovering that Facebook is no longer trusted. Many folks dropped it entirely, including some young people I spoke with. The common feedback is that social sites like it are a “waste of my time”. It’s a real shame that something that has reunited classmates and friends and provided entertainment is also a wide open covert gateway to Uncle Sam and god knows who else.

If anyone has more information on this, please leave a comment. I’m not into conspiracy theories. I’m looking for solid information on how our profiles and private information are being fed to government owned databases so that people can make educated choices for themselves.

Economy blues? It's not too late to increase your web site conversions with Kim's affordable usability audits. Get the answers you need NOW!

Facebook Sending Photos of You for Criminal Investigation