A colleague just pointed me in the direction of an interesting article over at UIE (User Interface Engineering) by the formidable Jared M. Spool. “Assessing Your Team’s UX Skills“, is a slightly different angle on my earlier post about “What can your web team do?”. Whilst UIE step back and look at the team as a whole, it’s nice to know I was thinking similar thoughts…
PS. Apologies for the last 8 months of radio silence. It’s a long story and not an interesting one, so I’ll keep it to myself for the time being, but needless to say, I’m back and hopefully this blog will up and running again from here on.
Monitoring where pages appear in search engine results for search terms and keywords isn’t easy. Due to the complexity of search engines and their ever changing algorithms, each individual can get different results, and even they may not be the same from one day to the next.
Despite that, there are things you can do. One that I’d like to draw your attention to is the Top Search Queries in Google webmasters tools. You’ll need a Google webmasters account and to verify your site, but then your up and running (for free).
You can find the “Top Search Queries” report under the statistics section. If you’ve used it before it’s worth revisiting because in the last month or so Google have added a history feature so you can now track keyword performance over time.
Continue reading: Search engine position monitoring with QuerySiteStatsGlobal
Next week Google are running an online seminar as an Introduction to Website Optimizer (New or inexperienced users). Registration is free and open to anyone - and if you’re part of a web team you probably should find out about it, or look at the more advanced seminar later in the week.
If you’ve not started or don’t know much about A/B or multivariate testing, I expect this will be a pretty good place to start. Previously, optimisation testing like this has required a fairly large outlay in terms of a technical solution. Google’s web optimizer has changed that (it’s free if you have an AdWords account). So if you’re not thinking about how you can use these tools, you’re off the pace.
It’s definitely an area that anyone in a webteam should start becoming au fait with, as it touches every role who works on developing websites - marketeers, content managers, developers, designers, IA’s, copywriters, analysts and so forth. Why? Simply put, because it closes the gap between you and your users - you can find out what works for them.
If you like metaphors, you could think of it as another tool in your box, however one of the most powerful weapons in your arsenal is probably more appropriate. So scoot on over an sign up (I have).
And if you wanted to know the time difference if you’re in the UK, it’s between 5-6PM Tuesday, October 30.
[PS. For regular reads, apologies for the recent hiatus in posts, everything should be getting back on track now]
Today I came across an idea that intrigued me: Hatch Day. The idea is to get together people who have ideas about projects they want to start or move forward with people who like working on projects - and then to present a prototype at the end of it.
I’m always a fan of finding ways to move projects forward more quickly, and I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to do a day like this within a company. You could even have a final stage of assessing the prototypes by merit/commercial return, and viola - you’ve got yourself a development plan.
It certainly would be a novel way of tackling some of the difficulties around balancing different demands from the business.
Continue reading: Incubating ideas Aussie style
With the rise of social networks online there appears to be a corresponding rise in social networking offline. Apart from the fascinating anthropological aspects, the impact on web and IT professionals shouldn’t be underestimated.
Last week I went to a Geek Girl Dinner (in fact it was the 2nd Anniversary of geek girl dinners). I have been to a few before, but this was by far the biggest I’ve attended. I said hello to some people I’d met previously, talked to some new people, put faces to a couple of email addresses and collected a few moo cards. Overall I enjoyed myself - but that’s not the point.
Prior to attending these type of events, I didn’t know many people who worked in the field of web, other than those I’d worked with before. When I needed advice I had a rather limited number of people I could talk to. Now have a much larger group of contacts to turn to and bat ideas around with – people from different industries, with different experiences and all passionate about working in their field. Continue reading: Social networks and their physical counterparts
Balancing the maintenance of a website against developing new features is always tricky. However it’s a decision site owners should not shy away from – with finite resources and competitive marketplaces, it is one of the key decisions that will determine the success of a site.
Spend too much time keeping what you currently have current, and you’ll loose users and customers to other sites with expanding services.
Build and move on, without revisiting what’s already there, and nothing you build will last for very long.
And we haven’t got on to how much time should be spent optimising what you currently have.
Continue reading: Maintenance vs. development
If you’re on the management team for a website, then here are some indicators of whether or not you’re in the right spot.
(There aren’t actually 101, but it sounded good in the title)
Balancing a web teams’ efforts between site maintenance and new features is a very important issue, but not one that will be discussed in this post (you’ll have to wait for that one). What will be discussed is one way to ensure you can understand where a web team actually spends most of its efforts.
Invariably for most sites there are maintenance jobs – fixing typos, updating links, replacing old content, etc. Good content management and tight QA will save your web team maintenance time, but there will always be updates to content and corrections to be made.
On the other hand, successful websites also need to keep evolving. Competitors release new features, users’ expectations change, new technology becomes available and new campaigns come along. This is most web teams’ raison d’etre.
Consistently monitoring how much effort your web team spends responding to these two challenges will mean you’re in a good position to ensure the web team’s efforts are aligned with your strategy.
Continue reading: What does your web team actually do?
