In SEO, Information Architecture and Interface Design, Shari Thurow writes:
The most important building block of SEO is the information architecture. If you want your HTML/XHTML, audio, video, and image files to generate qualified search engine traffic, the key ingredient to making these files appear relevant are the information architecture and the interface that communicates this architecture.
(Hat tip to Peter Morville.)
Congratulations to Craig for being selected as a judge for the 10th annual Web Marketing Association International WebAwards!
The WebAwards is the standards-defining competition that sets industry benchmarks based on the seven criteria of a successful Web site. It recognizes the individual and team achievements of Web professionals who create and maintain outstanding Web sites. The 2006 WebAward judges consist of a select group of Internet professionals who have direct experience designing and managing Web sites Ð including members of the media, interactive creative directors, corporate marketing managers, site designers, content providers and webmasters Ð each with an in-depth understanding of the current state-of-the-art in Web site development and technology. Judging for this year’s awards will take place in July and August, with winners announced in September.
The venerable user experience webzine Boxes and Arrows has come out with its comprehensive wrapup of the 2006 IA Summit. A few of the writeups there are by me (coverage of a pre-conference session on prototyping with comics that I first wrote about here on this blog, coverage of two presentations, and coverage of a panel on tagging that I first wrote about over at You’re It!.
You can start reading the B+A coverage with the article called Learning, Doing, Selling: 2006 IA Summit Wrapup: Overview and Pre-conference sessions. Then continue on to Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
Philip, Anjali, Gaven, Dan, Chris, Marsha, Joel, and I had dinner at the Young Avenue Deli tonight. Great food and nice divey atmosphere.
We also played a little Galaga (vintage video game) and pocket billiards, although the cue ball kept going down into the coin-op vault.
UX Magazine - The User Experience Magazine writes about getting Dugg after their launch and having to locate a new webhost to deal with the influx of traffic. Not bad for a fledgling webzine.
Fundamentally, the magazine is a blog. The articles are short and the site is powered by TextPattern. But the homepage presents more of a magazine look and feel, with featured articles, departments, and a pretty layout offering multiple links to past entries. I’ve added it to my aggregator.
I stumbled across Yahoo! Next last night. Similar to Google Labs, this is a glimpse into what Yahoo! is working on. It’s a collection of some pretty nifty beta services. I particularly like the Open Shortcuts.
Todd just sent around this BBC News article discussing a US study that found thatsearch users stop at page three and that, in fact, “Most people using a search engine expect to find what they are looking for on the first page of results.” This jibes with my own personal experience. I rarely even go past the second page. I wonder if some people don’t even go below the fold.
Also: “41% of consumers changed engines or their search term if they did not find what they were searching for on the first page.”
Dan and I are heading down to PARC this evening for Beyond Search - Social & Personal Ways of Finding Information, a BayCHI event:
Several exciting developments in social search and personalization help users find information: recommendations based on personal tastes, social trends, tags, ratings, popularity, and friends tastes. These methods go beyond the classic search paradigm of relevance and flat lists of results, resulting in different user experience challenges. This panel brings Neil Hunt (Netflix), David Porter (Live365), Tom Conrad (Pandora), Kevin Rose (digg), and Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us) to explore trends in social search.
We’ll report back tomorrow!
It’s been years since I’ve ridden the N-Judah muni streetcar on a regular basis but for a while there back in the late ’80s and early ’90s I practically lived on it.
I rode it to get downtown, to get to BART, to get to the east bay, to get to Dead shows. It was always late and it was always crowded.
My friend Nick tells me there was a song by some obscure SF band in the ’60s called the N-Judah blues.
I can believe. Now the line has its own blog: The N-Judah Chronicles.
I’ve been itching to attend an unconference since I heard about the first BarCamp, but they were mostly very heavily coder oriented and I’m a floaty-on-the-surface presentation-layer kind of guy, but then I read Rashi Sinha’s announcement of DCamp (or maybe I saw the announcement in the BayCHI newsletter first) and I decided this sounds like my kind of party networking opportunity workshop conference. It’s the weekend of May 12-13 and the planning is collaborative, like everything else. Visit the wiki if this sounds like your bag too.
On their blog, the Zimbra folks explain a technique they called ALE (for Ajax Linking and Embedding). I saw Zimbra demo’d at South by Southwest. It looks like a pretty cool next-generation groupware application, a potential Outlook killer, with easy drag and drop from numerous external applications into a calendar, address book, phone dialer, and so on.
In the world of web design, especially among those developing community sites or sites for collaboration, 37 Signals’ Get Real philosophy is all the rage, but frankly those guys are too timid. They come close to a breakthrough but then they fall back on safe ideas and the tried and true.
Thus its falls to me to unveil the new new model for social web app design, which I call…
Getting Really Real
The Starting Line:
Stay Lean:
Priorities:
Feature Selection
Process
The Organization
Staffing
Interface Design
Code
Words
Pricing and Signup
Promotion
Support
Post-Launch
Conclusion
Today (April 05, 2006) has officially been earmarked as CSS Naked Day. The aim of this project is to promote web standards by showing the world what each site looks like sans markup. Those who sign up for the project agree to remove all CSS styling from their website for that day. The result is well, a site without a style sheet.
Dan Brown is a brilliant information architect and content management strategist with a forthcoming book called Communicating Design, about producing IA deliverables for websites.
On his blog, Green Onions, he posted a few months ago about an emerging design pattern he’s identified related to managing incoming information.
He describes the object model thusly:
That’s just the bare bones, though. Read his whole entry to get the details.
