Warmest Greetings,

You've Come a Long Way, Maybe, Usability Baby  

:: Wednesday, May 12, 2004 ::

Web site usability has a purpose. In today's search engine driven Internet landscape, where kids are taught "how to Google" in school, there are people like me who fret over what happens when someone clicks on a search result. Will your web page hold a user's attention long enough to sell your widgets? Did the search engine accurately describe what your visitor found upon arriving on your web page? Could your customer find those comparison prices you advertised?

According to this, Web-User Satisfaction on the Upswing things are going fairly well. For the search engines, that is.

     "As people gain Web experience, they're less likely to rely on a site's navigation options and more likely to use the site's search tool to find what they're looking for. Site visitors are also more likely to arrive on the site from a search engine, according to the survey.

Simultaneously, people are spending less time on each page they open, so designers have less time to snag them. When they landed on a site from a search engine, the less experienced group spent an average of 35 seconds on the home page, and 1 minute on an interior page, while the more experienced visitors were on the pages for only 25 and 45 seconds, respectively.

"They're going to arrive from a search engine, they're going to give you a little bit of time, and then they're off," Nielsen told the audience of Web designers."

What about web sites? Did you design for search engines, or people?

Why are you spending so much money on submissions and search engine optimization, which are critical for marketing, and not paying attention to what happens AFTER someone finds your web site?

Stay tuned...I have some news for you. By the end of this week, you'll meet a group of folks who believe in folding together search engine optimization and marketing with web site usability. (And no, I'm not just hinting at the smart SEO companies who partner with me!)

Cre8asiteForums News

We say goodbye to a classy lady and DMOZ loses a real gem >>> Thank you Jean

To validate or not to validate and who cares? XHTML and search engines

     "I'm hearing that XHTML is parsed by IE as HTML but with bad syntax. Do the engines adopt this same approach?"

     "Validation is the process of making sure that your code is written well. I'm not sure that search engines really are concerned with how well or poorly your page validates."

     "Search engines are not browsers. They don't render code. They are glorified macros on a text editor looking at the raw source, and ignoring most tags except for the few they are trained to take notice off for semantic meaning - headings, emphasis, links."

     "I don't do php. Why would I need to? If it contributes nothing to the site, where is the point? No-one needs php to make viable templates."

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 5/12/2004 12:07:49 PM

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