“I want to set up a site so people can find me.”

I’ve been getting lots of questions lately about being found on the web and when I try to answer them I sound like I’m talking in circles.  What sounds like a perfectly reasonable question like what domain name to choose is the wrong question to be asking.  Instead you need to know how you want to use the Internet for communication and develop a strategy to make it work. Search engines, web sites and computers in general tend to seem a lot smarter than they are. While technology as  come a long way it’s good to remember that things are simpler than they seem. Here are a few things to keep in mind when contemplating your web presence.

Google is not the phone book.

Google searches are geared toward finding content – not people or companies.  When google indexes a site – it indexes the content of the site and gears it’s search results to what it deems to be the most relevant information related to the search terms someone has entered.  It does a really good job of sifting through an amazing pile of text and coming up with a page that probably has something useful – but the results are based on content that google has indexed.  If you’re searching for a product,  you can find it on google because someone has written something useful about the product. If  you’re looking for a person, you may find them because something’s been written about them. Just having an email address or website though won’t help you a bit unless you say something with it.

You are not just your website.

If you’re looking to establish a presence on the Internet, you need to be where everyone else is. No one is going to ‘hang out’ looking at your website unless you have something really interesting to say or look at. That doesn’t mean you’re not interesting and people don’t want to find you – but if you’re not out to publish something you’ll want to be findable on sites where people are looking for you.  That means having a profile on social networking sites and  being listed with any professional associations that are relevant. If you’re trying to promote your company, make sure it’s listed on index sites like yelp.com and dmoz.org.  It’s just like being listed in the phone book – you need to put your name out there for people to find it.

Don’t expect instant results.

It takes time for a site to build a reputation. If you’re launching a new site – it will take a bit for your ranking to build. Getting some links to information on your site from other highly ranked sites will help a ton. A successful web presence requires a lot of work – your presence.  If you’re trying to promote your brand, someone needs to be online talking it up. If you’re looking to sell a product you need to be positioned so that someone looking for that product will find you. If you want your expertise recognized, you need to show the online community that you are worth listening to.   While there are a lot of bad SEO firms out there who are selling smoke and mirrors, a good SEO firm or Internet marketing company will help you identify where your audience congregates on the web and should help you make your presence known.

Tilka Design has been creating some nice templates for email newsletters and marketing. We’ve managed to get some fairly complex layouts working for everything from Entourage to Outlook 2007.  Getting css layouts to behave across multiple platforms is childs play compared to the issues one runs into with HTML emails – especially with Outlook 2007.

The Microsoft HTML  reference for Outlook 2007 makes for some scary reading. What it’s boiled down to for me is going back to the IE5 days of tables and spacer images to make the elements behave.  Forget being able to assume that your width and height properties will actually work.  Add to that the complete lack of background image support for anything but the body tag and it makes for lots of rowspan and colspan hell.

For email marketing platforms – Mailchimp is the winner hands down in my opinion.  I haven’t had a chance to play with constant contact – but building usable templates in Mailchimp is much easier that myemma.com or exacttarget.com and their inbox inspection service is a huge timesaver.   We’ve played with phplist as an alternative that we can run locally – but the features and usability of Mailchimp make it a good value.

Check out some of Tilka Designs Email Pieces

Kelly was kind enough to show me  Selenium today and I had to share.  With most wizbang tools – if I can’t make it do something useful for me within about 20 minues I generally move on unless it’s something really amazing.  Selenium is not only amazing – but I was up and running with the help of Sauce Labs in no time at all.

Selenium is a tool which allows you to build a script for testing a web site or application.  It captures events as you walk through the site and creates a script to reproduce them for testing purposes. Just open the tool, click record and perform your test task . At the end you can have it run a bunch of checks to make sure you ended up with the output you expected.  The really cool part comes with the ability to then run a server process which will execute your script in different browsers on other platforms to verify compatibility. Sauce labs provides a distributed service to run your scripts on all of the major browser platforms while capturing the output to flv videos.  Once I had everything set up – it took all of about 10 minutes to build a test script and have video of it running in IE6,7,8, FF3 and Safari – pretty awesome and much more informative than just checking for css consistency between machines.

Sauce Labs – Selenium-based Downloads, Hosting and Support.

I’ll stick with Firefox just because I can’t live without Firebug – but here’s an interesting look at browser features. Big surprise – IE is still awful!

http://www.deepbluesky.com/blog/-/browser-support-for-css3-and-html5_72/

This article has spawned a lot of discussion over SEO techniques and the general perception of the SEO industry.  While SEO has it’s place – covering the basics of good site structure should be plenty to get you found on google as long as you have content that’s worth viewing.  Any decent SEO company will help you build page structure and content that’s easily accessible – both by your audience and google.  Anything beyond that is really smoke and mirrors.

We recently stumbled upon this tool – http://websitegrader.com/ which gives you a nice quick report on your site and it’s search engine placement. It covers the basics and will give you some pointers on what you can do to improve your site.

Derek Powazek – Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists.

In case you noticed – we just switched the news page to an install of wordpress. We’ve been integrating wordpress as the blogging engine behind our CMS for a few sites and it seems to be a nice fit. We’re not out to build a tool to be everything to everyone – so it’s good to find tools that we can integrate to build a seemless transition between site content and other components. For a site forum – we’ve built some hooks for phpBB3 and we’re looking into replacing our simple cart module with a wrapper for Opencart.

Wow! Where has the summer gone. We had a short unplanned outage last evening from about 10:15-10:30pm due to some network issues on our border firewall during an upgrade of some server gear. Service came back up just fine after a restart but we’re replacing that piece of hardware just in case.
Some highlights since July:

• USASportsCareers.com just launched a web service for job seekers in the sports industry. The site runs on our cms framework and has a ton of custom functionality for tracking the job application process.
• Chippers Inc launched a new site to highlight their services.
• The Center for Victims of Torture launched a site for sharing healing resources related to torture call healtorture.org
• Our good friend Mike Reed of Flamewarriors.com fame had Tilka Design update his site for a show he has at the College of Visual Arts.
• Randy Smith of Synchronicity Web Designs released a new album and has been playing all over the East coast – go Randy

We’ve just launched another lifetouch site for our good friends to the north. Check out http://www.lifetouch.ca. Our CMS system has seen some major updates with this project to accomodate some cool photo gallery features.

Good times today at the Hut. We’re proud to be the recipients of the Guadalupe Award for volunteer service at San Miguel Middle school in Minneapolis. Check them out at www.sanmiguel-mpls.org. The National Association of Realtors just added a carbon calculator on greenresourcecouncil.org using the system we developed for Eco Hatchery. Lots of jQuery ajax goodness.

Walsh Design hat trick! The third site for Walsh Design Group just went live today – great artwork from Velvet Peel. Full service interior design plus 2 retail outlets – I don’t know how they do it! The portfolio and product displays on the site use some nice modified jQuery carousel items and an integrated javascript calendar.

• www.walshdesigngroup.com
• www.id-insidedesign.com
• www.martinpatrick3.com