Before the days of WordPress, there were really only a couple of CMS options that provided the flexibility for search engine optimization. But now there are SEO friendly CMS systems popping up everywhere.

But before you decide on a CMS for your site, there are still some crucial aspects you need to consider.

Stephan Spencer has written a helpful article to this effect called How to Choose Content Management Systems for SEO. He breaks down CMS features into the following categories:

• critical
• important
• desirable
• optional

Then he explains why the various CMS features meet those categories and how they impact SEO.

Great stuff!

An invitation to join a site called Scribd from somebody I didn’t know was the straw that broke this particular camel’s back and I decided to bitch about it on Twitter by creating my list of Top 10 #dumbsocialnetworks:

“I’ve been sent too many invitaspams lately so fighting back. Here’s my Top 10 list of #dumbsocialnetworks, in reverse order, Letterman style”

Here they are:

• 10 – No. 10 of the Top 10 is Scribd a “social community sharing original writings with friends, family & the world.” VOMIT
• 9 - Sitting in spot 9 of the Top 10 is Ecademy “Market your business & get found on Google” because you can’t do that on own?
• 8 – At number 8 in my list of Top 10 dumb social networks is Gooruze “a ranked advice community”. The concept is ok but I just CAN’T get past the name.
• 7 – Number 7 is WAYN. Yes, in caps. Makes me imagine I’ll be greeted on the site by some guy with plumber’s crack, wearing stubbies and holding a beer.
• 6 – In position 6 of my Top 10 is Yedda – “Actively finding the best answers from the most relevant people”. Shame that many of those people are spammers.
• 5 – Sitting at number 5 is Unyk. An online address book for people who don’t know how to use Gmail.
• 4 – At number 4 of my Top 10 #dumbsocialnetworks is Naymz, who like to use retro spam. Specifically, keyword stuffing and lots of it.
• 3 – Number 3 on the list is Plurk. Tired of your other social networks? Spam friends, family and complete strangers with endless Plurk invitations!
• 2 – Grouply is our Number 2 on the Top 10 dumbest social networks. Hand over your Yahoo ID & they’ll override your privacy settings & data mine your info, yay!

And drumroll please for the Number 1 on my Top 10 dumbest social networks list…

• 1 – Claiming the number 1 spot for dumbest social network is Plaxo: “Hi, I’m updating my address book for the nth time today. Please take a moment to scream”

I’m not alone in my hatred of Plaxo. Apparently it was voted one of the 20 most annoying tech products in 2007. Thankfully, the self-updating address book company decided a couple of years ago to stop clogging up our In boxes with those super annoying contact update request emails.

Oh and before you’re tempted, the next person to send me a Plurk invitation gets Plaxoed in the head.

Live blogging The Short and Glorious Life of Web 2.0 presentation at Webstock 09 by Zeitgeist Author and Wired Blogger, Bruce Sterling.

Bruce starts by saying, here in New Zealand, we have lost sight of Web 2.0. Mistakes have been made. You think it’s the world of tag clouds, drop shadows and fonts.

Web 1.0 was the Britannica online while Web 2.0 was Wikipedia. Web 1.0 was portals while Web 2.0 was search engines. The canonical definition of Web 2.0 was coined by Tim O’Reilly: “.. the network as platform spanning all connecting devices, apps that make the most of blah blah blah…..”

The definition is thesis-long and reads like a Chinese takeout menu says Bruce. He then showed a slide of the visual flow chart of the defintion (see below):

Web 2.0 looks like a social network. Add some scenery and pictures to this Web 2.0 diagram and it becomes a Webstock Conference (at this point there is some sniggering in the audience).

You can’t break it down and analyze it. What’s exciting about this 5 year old flow chart is the pieces that are utter violations of previous common sense e.g. the web as platform. Native web logic is a new turtle, sitting on another, older turtle, sitting on another older still turtle. Just like platforms sitting on clouds. (This imagery has me grinning because I actually have a ceramic representation of the turtles on turtles analogy on my bookshelf).

AJAX is an acronym. How the hell can you make an acronym of an acronym? (more sniggering). Everybody knows that Web 2.0 with it’s JavaScript binding everything is made out of AJAX. After all Sun built Javascript. Javascript is the duct tape of Web 2.0 – it’s the ultimate material that will bind anything. It’s the glue of mashups.

Bob Metcalf, the inventor of ethernet had to eat his words claiming that the Internet would fall over. We’ve used JavaScript to duct tape the turtles all the way down. What’s with this blog business? Most of the things we call blogs today have zero to do with weblogs. True Weblogs are basically records of web surfing. Bruce’s own *blog* is consumed with link rot. He blogged stuff that is now in mystical 404 Land. (At this point the sniggering in the audience has turned to a little bristling and some vexed looks. Tweets fly about the room with the same theme – is Bruce Sterling giving us geeks a public spanking for worshipping Web 2.0?)

The phrase Web Platform is weird. Up there with *wireless cable* and *business revolution*. What about *dynamic content* – content is static for Pete’s sake. It is not contained.  And don’t forget *collective intelligence*. Google apparently has it and therefore it matters. Businessmen and revolutionaries alike use Google.  Bruce sees Larry and Sergey as the coolest Stanford grads ever, with their duct-tape ridden offices (more laughter).

Geek thought crime is the assumption about what constitutes *collective intelligence*. This attitude makes you look delusionary. He’d like to see a better definition such as: *semi autonomous data propagation*. I paid attention to Web 2.0 because I thought it was important. I supported Tim’s solar system invention and thought Web 2.0 people were a nifty crowd. The mainframe crowd were smarter than Web 2.0 people – the super selective technical elite. Problem was that all sense of fun had been boiled out of them.

The telephone system was the biggest machine in human history, but the users couldn’t access the cables or the pipeline. Unlike now = where everyone gets their hands on the components. But I’m not nostalgic for the old days, after all nostalgia is not what it used to be.  Look at Microsoft: the place where innovations go to die (loud guffaws, including one from me and we all rush to tweet that little gem).

Next for the web is a spiderweb in a storm. Some turtles get knocked out. The Fail Whale fails. Inherent contradictions of the web get revealed. Prediction: the web stops being the fluffy meringue dressing of business. What kind of a world do we live in when pirates in Somalia can make cell phone sonar calls via super tankers? We’ve got a web balanced on top of a collapsed economy.

Next is a transition web. Half the world’s population is on the web and the rest are joining. We need to know how to make the transition. During Web 2.0, we sold ourselves to Yahoo. In the transition web, we have no safety net. We’re all in the same boat. I’m bored of the deceipt, disgusted with cynical spin etc. etc. Let’s get on with real lives. (Bruce’s rant continues, but at this point I am seriously rapt and stop typing to be able to pay more attention).

To experience the full spanking by Bruce, see his own transcript of the presentation.

Live blogging Open Web, Open Data, Open Panic? presentation at Webstock 09 by Author of “Teach Yourself CSS in 10 Minutes”, Russ Weakley.

Russ works at the Australian Museum. He had an idea for the museum web site about four years ago and it has taken this long to get to the pre-launch stage.

The public services world is about analysing, justifying and strategizing. The commercial sector is fast but the public service process is incredibly slow. This has had one unexpected benefit: Having to defnd every aspect has meant that we had to carefully think about many issues before launch.

The museum’s site was launched in 1994. It grew enormously and now has 43,000 pages plus 16 sites. Sounds good? Nope, trouble in paradise. It’s hard to maintain, users can’t find content, so there’s lost relevance. The site provided a one way contact stream but this is no longer relevant in a Web 2.0 world.

Four years ago we went to management with an idea: To build a rich, interactive web site concentrating on 4 objectives:

1) Communication. Interaction, not static. Allow users to communicate with museum and each other.

2) Allow users to share their own content

3) Provide new and easier navigation pathways

4) Allow all staff to publish easily

Management reaction? Initial shock! Than 1 year of silecne, 1 year of discussion, 1 year of planning, 1 year to build.

The overall concept:

- site has 3 levels, categories, sections and assets

- every piece of content will be an asset, no more web pages

- there will be a range of different types of assets

- wanted assets and sections to exist in multiple locations

Traditional model of site design doesn’t work because things are boxed together in a static location. We wanted it to have a dynamic, multiplicet model.

- every asset will have five different navigation methods. New asset pages show “other sections”,

- in new model, users can comment on any asset

- users and staff can add tags any asset

- author and user tags will provide new methods of navigation and richer search

- allow users to collect favourites and sets and share them with others

- upload their own images, movies, audios, comments, stories

- allow people to apply for expert status

- Wanted the system to be seamless. Allow users to move seamlessly through any type of content

What about staff? Every staff member will become an author

- allow staff to publish assets directly (after training). Initial management concern but now overcome with approvals in place.

- allow staff to own their assets

- allow users to create their own focused, passionate and personal blogs

- allow microblog to create instant news

Russ talks about how his bosses’ first day at the museum involved taking a chain saw to a dead whale in the museum carpark. Also mentions the discovery of Mr Blobby in the deep sea off New Zealand. This type of stuff makes priceless social media juice. Why waste it? Let’s give staff the ability to share such stories with the public.

- the system will allow authors to publish all content via one simple system

Questions asked by management about the new system:

1) When we go live, can we all sit back and relax? (no, we will need to work very hard to build the site and grow communities)

2) Will we moderate comments and tags? (no, we will use a simple login and allow all comments, tags, uploads)

3) Will a forced login alienate some users? (Yes, however we will review process after a 6 month process)

4) What if the information in comments is wrong? (Deal with it. Let the comment trail educate. Mistakes benefit everyone). Therefore clearly identified author comments are important.  Allow the community to self-moderate.

5) What about tags that are irrelevant? (Misspellings are useful because it allows more people to find information, no matter if they can spell or not. Long-tail keywords add to searchability of site. Just because they’re not relevant to you, doesn’t mean they’re not relevant to someone else.

6) Who is going to take responsibility for the comments? (Authors are responsible for comments associated with blogs.)

7) What if we are inundated with comments? (Nah, won’t happen)

8 ) Should we allow staff to publish? (Yes)

9) Should we have a single voice? (What? No answer to this. Can’t provide a single voice. Have different voices for each different asset)

10) How will we encourage tags and comments? (answer comments, encourage commenting, reward good behaviour, promote outside the site, eventually – let it go)

The new site strategy for the Australian Museum has been a long, painful journey. Despite the frustration, it’s also been a lot of fun.

Enjoy your own journey!

A mini Google Maps app was actually developed before Google did it by a NZ developer using the Google API. Got Adrian thinking and he developed ChicagoCrime.org which then morphed into EveryBlock.com.

ChicagoCrime.org was a mashup of crime data put together from the Chicago Police Dept’s web site and published together with Google Maps. Searchable via route, area, block or neighbourhood locations (e.g. barber shops, restaurants), even via mobster activity. Google’s rollout of Street View added even more data.

They then added Flickr data, user material etc. This eventually became EveryBlock.com, a news feed for your block. You can go to the site, select a city and choose your neighbourhood to see all news relating to your neighbourhood that has been written about in local media. The goal is to find the news that is very specific to you that may be buried on the major news sites by national or international media stories.

The data includes restaurant reviews, product launches, feel-good stories, lost and found stories etc. You can search via trends e.g. all restaurants with particular food safety violations e.g. vermin. You can search via RSS feeds in your neighbourhood, real estate listings, press releases etc.

How Does it Work?

Complex technology is used to pull all the data together. The site uses natural language processing including datafeeds from portals, search engines, media agencies, APIs like Flickr’s, geocoding API, Craiglist, Yelp, Valpak, Trulia. Government resources.

How to Best Make a Successful Mashup:

Lesson 1: Take advantage of existing data

Lesson 2: Sort by date – this adds value

Lesson 3: The more effort it takes, the higher the reward. Unlike Google. Google likes convenient, centralized, USA building-permits databases. Anything else is too much work. Be the anything else.

Lesson 4: Governments are opening up. Be nice and appeal to civil servants (and librarians!). Plot cities/agencies against each other. Governments shouldn’t build interfaces into their data, they should offer an API so others can pull out RAW data.

Lesson 5: Avoid using maps as a crutch. Google Maps is not the app. Use it as a tool to create an awesome app – push data, don’t pull.

Lesson 6: Permalink everything. Anything that can be a link should be a link. Used IMDB.com as example. There’s a special place in hell for session cookies.  EveryBlock gets a LOT of link love and rankings for long tail search queries from Google because of permalinks. Granular Permalinks future proofs a site.

Lesson 7: The simplest way to granulize URLs: Use attributed URLs E.g. Date / crime/dates Type: /crime/types/ Address: /crime/addresses/  Location: /crime/locations/  Then drill down further e.g. /crime/locations/hotels/  Flickr and Delicious use that. Use the Django databrowse to look at database schema and create a directory structure to suit!

Lesson 8: Move Beyond Points – web apps that use geo-spatial info should respect usability. Points aren’t everything. Bubbles aren’t everything. Use lines to make the maps more usable. Use polygons, use transparencies. Don’t overlay data on data. Use GeoRSS to geographically encode objects for RSS feeds.

Lesson 9: Roll your own maps – Google maps is great, BUT use it intelligently. Use colors, fonts, text size, behaviour at zoom levels, road widths, languages etc.

Lesson 10: Make a mashup!

A popular speaker and trainer, he is a former columnist for The Perl Journal and author of two books about Perl. He also runs an international IT training company which provides programmer training throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia.

Damian kicked off his presentation by revealing that his wife is responsible for him being at Webstock. A few months ago, she was trying to buy a DVD on the Internet and was yelling expletives. He went to help her and after several minutes of frustration he finally gave up. Her response was “Are they deliberately trying to make it impossible for non-geeks?” His reply was “Yes”. Damian’s impression is that mankind has evolved into two distinct species – typical web users / typical web designers.

Damian then showed the Irony Ahead symbol for the Americans in the audience. The sad truth, he says, is that the web designers are losing the battle to the masses. There are now normal humans who can almost use web sites on a daily basis! His sacred promise is to protect your web sites from infiltration by the terrible general public.

In reverse order, here are Damien’s top 22 web design ideas to fend off the non-geeks and prevent Web 2.0 from taking hold:

22) Use Zen: Confuse them with anime and odd artistic blobs that are a complete mystery. Is it a web site? Is it art? Is it impossible to enter?

21) Use yellow or black and yellow: This signals danger as in wasps and Star Trek uniforms.

20) Use xenophobia: Try geo-location as an instrument of torture. Show only products not available in their country or illegal in their country e.g. “show me products I can’t buy with a credit card issued in my country”.

19) Get a site that requires the “www” to work: This is known as a canonical URL to us normal people. Make the www necessary and confuse the heck out of them when they type in the domain name without the w’s and get shown an error page.

18) Use variable navigational layout (VNL): Use the previous and next links as people hate them. Let’s replicate it for the entire web!

17) Throw usability out the window: Navigability is the pre-requisite for usability. So let’s create navigation buttons that don’t go anywhere. The non-geeks will be occupied for at least half an hour. Use Javascript to turn the navigation into confusing shadowy arrows. Javascript your scrollbars so they don’t look anything like regular browser scrollbars. Use back buttons that embed links that take you up a level rather than actually taking you back. Your visitors will get lost in the hierarchy. Inconsistency is important.

16) Terrorize them with typography: Most non-geeks don’t care about typography. They don’t even have a favorite typeface! If they do, it’s comic sans. Or Impact! All they care about is whether they can read it. Therefore, typography DOES matter. Go with something unreadable! Go with Abduction 2 font or something just as annoying. Fonts are not toys people, fonts are weapons!

15) Make shipping a last minute surprise: Shipping is a powerful tool to dissuade purchasers. It delays their instant gratification. Don’t let them calculate the shipping cost in the cart otherwise they can go and comparison check on other sites. Instead, use the W3-recommended 34 step method and make all these fields compulsory:

• product selection
• shopping cart
• checkout
• purchaser address
• phone number
• fax number
• email address
• social security number
• payment method
• billing address
• shipping address
• shipping method
• shipping costs
• income bracket
• referral source
• etc.

With any luck, they’ll abandon the cart in total frustration.

14) Make them register and login before they purchase: They’ll be naturally terrified and run off. Even better, make them register before they can even view the web site!

13) Reduce the quality of site search results: How can you minimize the quality? Don’t provide site search facilities at all! Or make the options highly improbable. Don’t let them search for the product. Make them search by date of manufacture, or the name of the manufacturer. Or, make them search for the type of person that they are. Or what type of person YOU think they are. Pure genius.

12) Add pages ad infinitum: Don’t return more than 10 results for a search at one time, even if you have to list 250 pages of search results. God put the fold there for a reason. If you don’t follow this rule, it can result in scrolling! Protect the kids from scrolling!

13) Delay their gratification or their dis-gratification: Show items that aren’t in stock, services you used to provide, options that won’t work for them. Only tell them a product is not available AFTER they click through to the shopping cart total. This builds up a sense of hope so you can dash it immediately.

14) Don’t allow them to sort search results: This non-sortability of results preserves the natural social order. Sort things in random order. For example, don’t let them sort by product type, or price. Provide an alphabetical sorting option only. Or sort according to the web designer’s favorite items.

9) Use background music and lots of it: It’s a sure way to irritate your users. Your music choice probably sucks if you choose it carefully enough. Don’t provide a stop button. Make it restart again on every new page. They’ll soon leave.

8 ) The little things count: Like tiny little font. It’s the most effective deterrent for anyone over the age of 20. Damian finds size 4 or 3 point is pretty good. Government and news sites use it all the time to great effect. Some browsers have the ability to change text size. Thankfully, most web users Damian surveyed didn’t know this until it was pointed out to them. But it’s ok! Because 2 weeks later, they’d forgotten again. Tiny text is the web designer’s ally.

7) Use Cute Kitten Aversion Therapy: There are some web sites that you don’t want your kids to see, Damian says. One of these is the W3 HTML Validator. AAARGGGGHH! It means that solutions for non-valid HTML code could be discovered by anyone and you don’t want that. So spread the message, every time you validate, someone kills a kitten!

6) Use J-version therapy: The non-geeks have a strong aversion to the letter J and things like Jscript, Javascript etc. These J languages create fear in the non-geek. Online security companies have scared them into avoiding sites with Javascript or other items starting with J because hackers use them to distribute viruses. If you’re lucky, they’re so convinced by these fears that they’ve turned off Javascript in their browsers. This means that if your site uses Javascript menus, they can’t be navigated! Brilliant.

5) You can never use too many images: Encode your important data and text in an image so it can’t be cut and pasted and make the images huge and dark so that they can’t be printed out. Or they can be printed but they use up masses amounts of printer toner. It’s a great way to scare off even the most persistent of non-geeks.

4) Play hide and seek with your site visitors: They don’t like to wait, so make them. Information that is impossible to find is safe. Don’t use a sitemap and make sure there is no rational hierarchy to your site. Hide your most important data on a page that has no links pointing to it!

3) Use gray: It’s the new black and it goes so well with black or darker gray. When using gray, make it impossible to read. Use nano-text in gray or even gray text on white. The site visitors run away! Even better, use gray on darker gray – it’s the low contrast approach. This is even more effective for site visitors with a color impairment. If all else fails, use intestinal beige. It’s apparently the new gray.

2) Flash is very important in our defense against web-mortals: “Clocksucking Flash” they call it. Some non-geeks even have their Flash facilities turned off so make your site entirely in Flash. Once visitors arrive at your Flash page, they see – “loading 1%”. This is delayed gratification at it’s best! Also, don’t provide a “skip intro” button. Or if you do use it, make the link move away from the mouse. Over and over again. If the visitor persists, then make it disappear entirely. If the visitor without Flash is determined to view your Flash site, provide the “You Need Flash” link. Then make them download an enormous file that maxes out their bandwidth limits. Even better, use a Flash-based installer that requires them to have Flash installed first.

1) Combine all of the above for optimum effect: This is Damian’s number #1 best way to scare away non-geek visitors. His favorite example of this in action is the World Glaucoma Association. Scroll down and place your mouse over the eye for the full effect. [Editor note: My own personal favorite is Fred Frap and Friends where the pink text on the purple background asks you to click on the non-existent image to enter. Nice!]

But seriously folks, Damian says, the non-geek level is the SAME LEVEL as the MAJORITY OF YOUR WEB SITE USERS. Remember this. The typical experience for web-mortals is bad. He’s here to plead with us all to build software for how people really ARE. The non-geek users.

The Grandma Usability Metric

The single biggest mistake that web designers make is not doing accessibility testing on their grandparents. Your grandparents are the typical Internet users. Use the Grandma usability metric. It’s not about what your client wants. It’s about what your client’s customers want. It’s not about clever, it’s about comprehension. It’s not about style, it’s about usability. It’s not about searching. It’s about finding. It’s not about ambience it’s about the outcomes for people visiting your site.

Web 2.0 is Web 2.0verwhelming for most people. So make their experience measurably superior.

The marketing and affiliate gurus are expert content recyclers and they make a LOT of money using this system. But guess what? You can apply the same principle to your own web site content. Here are some ideas:

• Documentation such as training manuals and client case studies make great web page content.
• Web page content such as product reviews and descriptions make great fodder for “how to” articles.
• That silly staff Christmas video might make a terrific viral marketing tool.
• A set of FAQs would make for an interesting webinar or video blog.
• A group of case studies could be made into a free white paper or auto-responder email series.
• A collection of articles or bookmarked tools could easily be converted to a downloadable e-book or give-away CD.

Get the picture?

The more ways you can re-package your information, the wider audience you will reach because not everyone responds to the same medium in the same way. Some people like to read articles, while others prefer a structured training program. Some people absorb material better if it’s presented in-person and others like e-books and YouTube videos.

Read the full article.