designforweb.co.uk/blog

Subject: RSS 2.0 feeds for latest package changes Author: Manuel Lemos Age in days: 211 Summary: This post announces the launch of the RSS feeds that list the latest changes made on each package. The enhancements made on RSS feed items are also explained. The site uses HTML to format RSS feed contents in a more pleasant way that includes package screenshots and additional links of interest. The site also provides RSS 1.0 and 2.0 feed alternative formats to please a greater audience. Details about the RSS generator class used by the site are also mentioned.

What can be assumed is the final list of what to expect from IE 7.

I discussed starting an e-commerce business on a shoe-string. I compared a show string operation to a farm kid first car. I used my own hardware as an example. I talk about the elite programmers and technicians that do not write programs for low-end folks, but there are work-a-rounds. In line with that, I argue that the function of a website is far more important than it's appearance. I talked about watching helplessly as a single mom was ripped off by a fast-talking get-rich-quick jerk. After the concluding bumper, I tacked on abstracts from the previous nineteen podcasts, in preparation for submission to Podcast WDS DotCom, the archive program.

My vote is neither. Try and tie in as many API's as possible and/or build a basic network that can manage their Alumni profile by listing all the places you can find them.

I was disappointed when the FWA’s Most Infuential Flash site of the Decade poll did not include the first Flash site that really blew my mind - Gabocorp.

Rob at the FWA let me know that after 2 weeks of trying to locate Gabo, he’s finally found a version of Gabo’s 1997 site and put it online.

I remember first seeing the Gabocorp site (9 years ago!) and being blown away. At the time I was doing multimedia CD-ROM development using Visual Basic, C++ and Director. It was amazing - not only that you could achieve such smooth, seamless full-screen animations, but that that you could do it on the web! I knew I had to get into flash development.

The cinematic feel, use of sound, and seamless transitions still stand up today.

Download the MP3 (5.17 MB)

Questions and topics we cover in the interview

1. What’s the story behind Cork’d?
2. How did you manage to grow your user numbers?
3. What’s better - working for yourself or working for clients?
4. What are your plans for the future?

URLS Mentioned

1. Cork’d
2. Hivelogic.com Dan Benjamin’s blog (co-developer of Cork’d)
3. Flickr
4. Netflix
5. SVNOpen source version control software

Full transcription of the interview

RC: We’re here in London with Dan Cederholm and I’m just going to ask him a couple of quick questions. So Dan, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick and then we’ll get started?

DC: Yeah, thanks Ryan. I run a site/business called SimpleBits which is basically myself! I’ve been doing client work for the last couple of years. I enjoy writing about CSS-based design and web standards and all that kind of stuff, and uh, that’s me.

RC: Sounds good. So the first question I have is about Cork’d. You just launched it, can you tell us what it is and why you built it, and the URL?

DC: Yeah, so it’s Corkd.com, which is essentially a wine community site. It originated with a friend of mine, Dan Benjamin, who’s a well-known developer in the Ruby on Rails scene and has a site called Hive Logic that’s been well read over the last few years. So we’ve been chatting back and forth about wine and how we like wine but we’re certainly not wine experts and we’d occasionally trade bottles and say ‘Oh yeah, so what did you have last night?’ and ‘Oh yeah, this was really good’ and maybe using Flickr to post the bottle and make a comment on it and started thinking you could really turn a site into this… Create a site that’s sort of - and this was sort of tongue in cheek at first - sort of like Flickr, that lets people enter wines, keep track of their cellars and make shopping lists like Netflix. And so we had all these community site features that we wanted to apply to wine, which seems almost like silly at first but as we started building it we realised that this is pretty cool and we’re going to use this, so at least two people will use it!

We just wanted to keep track of what we’d tasted and what we thought about it, and as we were building it we thought, this is pretty cool, maybe people will use it, and there’s a lot of different directions we can go with wine. So we took several months on our spare time to build it because it was just the two of us, and we didn’t think of it as a legitimate company per se, but it sort of tuned into this neat thing that a lot of people are using now and sort of opened the doors for the other sites as well, so that’s the quick, or not so quick introduction!

RC: So, how is it going? Do you mind sharing how many users you have and what the revenue model is, and if it’s going to become a pretty big part of your business and life?

DC: So we launched, and in about a month’s time we’ve had 6500 members sign up and about 5000 wines were added by users, which is great. We started with just 1200 wines from Wine.com, actually, an affiliate thing with them just to see the database but now that users are adding wines there’s tons added each day, and we have a lot of members, so I think that, y’know, the revenue model, there’s a couple of different ways we could go. Right now there’s a lot of vineyards that are contacting us, and wine sites and wine companies and we’ve been on a lot of phone calls with wine people, which is sort of weird because we weren’t in the wine world before this, we like to drink wine but all of a sudden ‘wine people’ are taking notice and saying ‘Wow, this is a cool way of discovering wine’ so there’s some advertising opportunities there.

Because it’s so targeted I think that’s why it’s attractive to all these wine people, so there’s that, we could create a ‘Cork’d Deluxe’, where signing up, having a fee that offers extra features beyond what the free Cork’d does, that’s a possibility. Secretly, or not so secretly I guess, we’ve been thinking about other sites, I won’t go into detail right now, but there are other beverages beside wine, so we’ll see what happens.

RC: So, it’s pretty amazing that you’ve got 6,500 users already, would you say that’s largely because SimpleBits is a popular site, or did you guys do something saucy and magical to make that happen?

DC: I think part of it is the way we were able to announce it and the blog community certainly was helpful in spreading the word about the site when we launched it, but based on the feedback we’re getting from people I think it spread quickly to the wine people - the people that really love wine. You know there’s this whole other world of wine put there that we didn’t really know about, wine blogs and wine podcasts. There’s a strange connection, I think, between wine or maybe alcohol in general and geeks and web people, so I think it helped in that we could announce this on our blogs and knew that the web design community would sort of look at it. But they’re not necessarily the target, so I think somehow we tapped into this other wine world so we hope the sign ups continue.

RC: Sweet. It’s so cool to hear about people like you building, essentially a web app. I know you’re calling it a site, but, you know, a full on app that’s attracting users and I don’t know about you but I came from client work, building sites for people and so on, as we started building web apps for ourselves it was just so much better, so why don’t you talk about that real quick? What’s your preference, working for clients or working for yourself? I think I know the answer but maybe it’s not, and also if that’s the plan for the future?

DC: A really good question. It’s so much more satisfying working on something for yourself. I’m looking forward to and writing about that more. I come from the client world too, working for clients and it was really fun building this with another person, Dan Benjamin, and we use, well he set up Ruby on Rails, and we had something called SVN, which is sort of a code repository and it really allowed us to collaboratively work on this. You can work on your own, commit changes, send a message with that change, I’m totally hooked on this way of working on web apps. Yeah, it’s so much fun working on something of your own. You feel more invested and you don’t feel like you’re on the clock so you put more detail, more attention to detail, and you’re just more excited about it. It’s fun. With a lot of the client work I do, because I’m focused on the UI a lot of times I’m handing off what I did to someone else, they’re implementing it, it usually gets messed up, that’s sort of par for the course and it’s rare when it doesn’t. Working on something yourself with somebody else when you’re both in tune with what this product is, it’s so much fun and it’s far superior.

So in terms of the future, I think largely it depends on how well something like Cork’d does, and if it leads to other sites. I’d love to continue to do that. I think that to pay the bills I’d have to do some client work at this point still. I shouldn’t say I don’t enjoy client work as I need to do that at this point, and it’s fun working with different people and working on cool projects and stuff.

RC: Thanks Dan and thanks so much for taking time. I hope you enjoy your time in London and we look forward to hearing more from you later.

DC: Thanks a lot Ryan. Cheers.

Transcribed by Scott Morris

Unique content will help you rank better in the search engines.

So you have a website and you want to rank well in the search engines. Well, you need to think about what you customers need and then define your unique value proposition.

First if you don't understand your customers you will never do well on the web. You need to understand who your customers are, what they want, and what they expect out of your site. If you fail on any of those three items, better rankings will not mean a thing (and more than likely your site will fail.) First, do a quick "average joe" profile for your users. Get answers to questions like the following:

• Are they male/female?
  
• Are they young, old, or somewhere in between?
  
• Do they have money to spend?
  
• Do they like to spend it or will it take a little more convincing?
• Why do they want/need your product?
• What preceived benefit does your product/service provide?

Once you have your basic users fleshed out, determine exactly what they want. Now look at your site and decide if you give them what they want in the easiest, most user friendly way. Is there room for improvement? (If you say no, you're lying to yourself.) Now, place yourself in your customers' shoes, and determine exactly what you would expect a site to do/provide for the product/service you need. You've just gotten your first glimpse of what your site should be like.

Now that you have an idea of what they need, think about what you offer. Where do their needs and your product/service match the best? This should be the point that makes you stand out from the rest of your competition.

What is your website's unique value proposition? In short, your unique value proposition answers the question, "Why should I buy from you and not from your competitor."

If you can't stand out from every other Joe Schmoe that is out there doing exactly the same thing you are, you will fail on the web. If you are just another guy that got a "free premade website" because you signed into some Multi Level Marketing program, chances are you won't suddenly get thousands of dollars rolling into your mailbox. You are just like every other Tom, Dick, or Harry that has the exact same ugly site except with your name at the top.

One great way to stand out is to have great, unique, important content on your site. The web is the information superhighway. If people can't find answers to their problems on your site, they will go elsewhere.

Providing content (or answers to problems) that people often search for is a great way to become an authority on a subject. The more you talk about your "product/service" the more people will visit your site for specific answers to that specific topic. Search engines love tightly developed sites that discuss a specific topic. People with other sites will naturally start linking to your pages because of the great content and answers that you provide.

Here is a simple and sure way to provide content that people are in need of. Join a discussion group. Listen to the questions. Pick out the ones that come up most often (by hanging around for a while, or searching through the archived questions. Heck, you might even learn something yourself.) Now do some quick research and provide answers to that question on your site. Then post your answer to the discussion group and ask for feedback.

This will not only allow you to create hundreds of minisites, but you will give the search engines new, fresh, unique content to feast upon. This will bring back the bots more and more often which allows your new pages to get indexed quicker and be one extra step ahead of your competition.

So what are you waiting for, get out there and write, write, write. Become the expert your mother thinks you are.

Give every page a unique title that is focused on that specific page's keywords.

One of the main things that unknowing webmasters do is create pages that have all the same title. This happens because they do one of the following:

• They use a template for their html and don't take the time to change the title tag on each page
  
• They name every page in their site after their business name
• They include the same header file for the top of every page and fail to add the functionality for modifying the title on a page by page basis.
• They just blow it and leave "untitled" as the title of the page
  

We'll put it another way, would you ever label this picture like this?

No you wouldn't. So why do so many people label their pages with the same title.

As you can see, Google has to guess which page is really the most important with that title and places the rest in the supplemental index. I absolutely love this post over at WebMasterWorld because it is spot on.

While making all your page titles the same may be convenient, it might also be called "suicidal" if you care about organic search results or site usability.

To emphasize what Jim is saying, I have seen identical titles cause archived pages on a major corporate site to go supplemental... not returned in a site:domain search unless you turn off the dupe filter... even though the pages had highly differentiated content.

Oversimplifying a bit... the unit of optimization is the page. The page title is your most powerful onpage optimizing element. Why would you want to throw away the most important tool you have?

As he states the title tag is "your most powerful onpage optimizing element." In order to fully utilize the title tag you need to:

• Make sure that it contains your main keyword near the front of the title
• Isn't too long
• Provides a "hook" to draw in people searching in the search engines
• Provides a quick idea of what the page is about

Four basic things you can do now to improve your search engine rankings.

The single question I am asked more often than any other is, "How can I rank better in the search engines." While there are thousands of different things that people can do to rank well, we have found that most sites out there that have a specific niche can do four things to help their sites rank better and get more traffic. Here is our four step formula.

There are four main keys to good Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

1. Title tags - every page needs a unique and descriptive title tag.
   
2. On-page content - every page needs unique, informative information that is easily read by spiders and humans alike.
   
3. Links - every site needs a system for building links.
   
4. Freshness of content - every site needs to keep their site regularly updated with fresh content that will bring humans and spiders back for more.
   

In our upcoming articles, we will discuss each of these main concepts in detail.