Web Usability 101, Useful & Descriptive Link Text

Posted on July 6, 2008 by Alistair

I’m an advocate for sensible usability on web sites and fully support the usability guidelines that recommend descriptive link text. There are measurable improvements to a users browsing experience when a webmaster makes a conscious decision to use useful link text, instead of an uninformative ‘click here’.

One particular aspect of useful link text that I try to abide by at all times, is that the link text should be descriptive and should reflect the resource that it is linking to. As an example, if you’re linking to a web page about the Porsche 911 GT3 RS, then a useful link might be Porsche 911 GT3 RS.

A popular technology site, TechCrunch has various web real estates that it promotes at every opportunity – however I think of late they are going a little too far with their frivolous, slap happy linking. Recently, the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that California has secured the manufacturing plant from Tesla, bringing it back from New Mexico.

In the article on TechCrunch, they provide a number of links (link text and URI below):

  • Tesla Motors, http://www.teslamotors.com/
  • the Roadster model, http://www.crunchgear.com/tag/tesla/
  • “Come with me if you want to live”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHV6OzHjWV8
  • “Do it, do it now”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6ALySsPXt0

and my beef is with the second in the above list. When viewing that article, I expected that link to take me to the Roadster vehicle home page within the Tesla Motors site, instead if took me off to a completely useless page regarding Tesla Motors (the company) within their business information site CrunchGear.

I’m all for TechCrunch promoting their other web assets, however I’m confident that their readers would enjoy their site that much more if they’d find a more appropriate manner in which to promote CrunchGear instead of deceptively linking into that site.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Google News Algorithms Get It Wrong

Posted on June 26, 2008 by Alistair

Pamela Anderson image mistakenly being associated to Northern Territory council mergers on Google News AustraliaGoogle News is a great service, probably the single best feature of Google News is that it aggregates news stories from numerous sources into one place and then condenses them, so as a user you don’t need to be bothered by or read the same story more than once. As with everything else Google related, its driven by clever algorithms in how it decides what to collapse/consolidate, the snippets to show and images to associate with a given topic or news item.

When viewing the Australian Google News page today, I stumbed across something that I thought was quite funny. In a moment of algorithms acting badly, they had managed to associate an image of Pamela Anderson against a collapsed set of news items related to regional council mergers in the Northern Territory. Clicking on the Pamela Anderson photo took you to the appropriate story, so that part of the system was behaving correctly – just that she was being associated to Northern Territory council mergers wasn’t!

Posted in Services | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Source Control Commit Visualisation

Posted on June 25, 2008 by Alistair

Software development relies on source control management software such as CVS, Subversion, SourceSafe, Bitkeeper, Mercurial, Git and the like to track and manage the changes in the source code over time. As a project progresses, developers come and go, contractors come and go and the activity on a given project ebs and flows as required.

Attempting to visualise who, what and how much of a project is changing is quite complex as there are so many variables – however Michael Ogawa has built a project named code_swarm which does just that. Instead of providing tabular or static images to help visualise a projects changes, he has managed to animate it into something quite spectacular.

Following are five different code swarm visualisations of popular open source projects:

The amazing thing that a visualisation such as code_swarm provides, is to show just how many people actively participate in a given open source project, how much each of them participates and what sort of tasks they are normally performing on that project. As an example, comparing the number of different people in SQLAlchemy compared to Django isn’t a competition – Django is ahead by a mile, though compared to Apache, the others seem insignificant.

Posted in General, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Automattic Account Management

Posted on June 2, 2008 by Alistair

Automattic, the fine folk behind the WordPress blogging engine, wordpress.com and Akismet have started merging accounts between wordpress.com and Gravatar.

Toward the start of 2006, I signed up for an account with wordpress.com and for obvious reasons, I’ve never needed to use it. Not that long afterward, I used the API key that was provided with my wordpress.com to fight spam using Akismet.

Today I signed into Gravatar, a web service acquired by Automattic late in 2007 to check some settings and was presented with some information about upcoming changes to my existing account. Not having used my wordpress.com account actively, I had to go sifting through signup emails from two years ago; not unsurprisingly, my account still had the randomly generated password!

Within two minutes of finding my wordpress.com account information, I’d followed the prompts and merged/associated it with my existing Gravatar account. The way in which this is being handled is great, it’s a passive change that happens when you next sign in and if you do have an existing wordpress.com account – you can associate them together.

The best thing is now I have one less login to worry about and I can see all of my information for all Automattic assets in one place!

Posted in Services | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Changing Temporary (302) To Permanent (301) Redirects

Posted on May 26, 2008 by Alistair

It’s common place to register multiple variations of a domain to protect the brand or product that the domain is related to. At some point, a web master must choose what he or she is going to do with the variations, the normal choices are:

  • Do nothing, simply owning them is sufficient
  • Set them up, alias them so the site content is accessible via any of the variations
  • Set them up and redirect the variations to the primary domain

This post is going to discuss the third option, as I have recently seen what I’d consider strange results in that space.

Setting The Scene

Imagine you sell Product A and you have a web site at http://producta.com. For three years http://producta.com has been used as the main web site, however in an exercise for brand consistency – you opt to move the web site to http://brandproducta.com.

The change of domain is handled using a temporary redirect and is successful. Soon after the move, http://producta.com is no longer visible in the search engines and has been replaced with http://brandproducta.com.

Weirdness

As a clean up exercise, I recently went through and updated the redirects on the domain variations (including http://producta.com) to use permanent (301) redirects. At the time, I didn’t think I’d see any changes in the search engine result pages, as http://producta.com hasn’t been in use for quite some time and all that was changing was a temporary (302) redirect into a permanent (301) redirect.

What has happened is that a brand+producta search term which would have returned http://brandproducta.com as the first listing, is now sharing that space with http://producta.com. Since that domain hasn’t been in use for such a long time, Google are using the results from DMOZ for the title and snippet.

Explanation

I’ve read through the information that Matt Cutts provided when he discussed 302 redirects back in January 2006. There is a lot of good information on that page and also the previously linked article about URL canonicalisation – however nothing that I felt described what I have outlined above.

What I think has happened is that the temporariness of the 302 redirect has kicked in. Google have been seeing the 302 redirect from http://producta.com into http://brandproducta.com for quite some time and have been checking it periodically since it was temporary. When something changed (hence temporary) – Google kicked back into gear and displayed the results from http://producta.com.

Since it is now showing a 301 permanently moved redirect, I suspect that within a short amount of time Google will remove the listing for http://producta.com and it’ll be replaced by http://brandproducta.com.

I’d love to hear from someone if they have a more comprehensive answer on the results I’ve seen.

Posted in Search | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Google Analytics Benchmarking Verticals

Posted on May 18, 2008 by Alistair

In March, Google announced a new feature for Google Analytics named Benchmarking. One of the most compelling reasons to opt-in to the benchmarking component of Google Analytics is to compare how your sites perform against other sites.

Once the data from your sites has been analysed by Google Analytics, it is then possible to compare the following metrics against other sites:

  • Visits
  • Pageviews
  • Pages/visit
  • Average Time on Site
  • Bounce Rate
  • Percentage New Visits

Google Analytics allows the user to choose which one of a number of industry verticals to place their site into for comparison; telecommunications, travel, business and news are but just a few. This industry specific targeting allows for comparison against sites which are similar in theme – vitally important, as you wouldn’t want to compare the statistics of a heavily ecommerce driven site against that of a social networking site.

To make sure that the first two metrics above make sense to each site, Google Analytics automatically places a site into one of three categories based on the number of visits – small, medium or large. When viewing benchmarking data about a site, only the data from other sites within your size category are visible. As such, if you have a small but up and coming site – it isn’t possible to see what the market leader may potentially be doing.

So far, we can compare six simple but very useful metrics against similarly sized web sites within the same industry vertical, though specifying a vertical for comparison is completely optional. While very useful, having a better unerstanding of exactly what you’re comparing against would be handy. I’d personally like a little clarification on the following points:

  • What is the boundary in visits per time period for small, medium & large?
  • How long does a site need to sustain the number of visits per time period to officially be moved between size categories?
  • If a site does move between categories, as a user – am I notified that it has happened?
  • If I use a country specific domain, am I comparing only against sites of a similar size within the country specific domain name space or is it a global comparison? I find this point quite important, as users from different countries have different usage patterns.
  • Does placing your site within a country via Google Webmasters have an impact on the previous point – in case you use a top level domain such as a .com/.net?
  • How are sites placed into an industry vertical and is it possible to see what vertical a given site has been placed in? The latter part of that question is important, as if your site has been placed into the wrong sub-category list and as a user you are nominating a different category (which you feel is the correct one), it could be providing you a different skew of the results.

The benchmarking service from Google Analytics has only just been launched and is still marked beta. I expect as more people start sharing their information with Google, more and more questions will get raised, more will be answered and the product will continue to evolve as do most Google products.

Posted in Services | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Google Analytics Ecommerce Outage

Posted on May 14, 2008 by Alistair

Six weeks ago, along with colleagues from my work place – we implemented Google Analytics Ecommerce functionality within a handful of sites.*

The statistics had been pouring into Google Analytics and then around April 25, same time that Australia has a long weekend to celebrate ANZAC Day, the transactions going through the site started to drop. At first I didn’t think much of it, in the tourism industry it is common place to see lower periods of activity over a long weekend.

I continued to keep an eye on the transactions being reported and expected them to resume the next work day, however that didn’t happen. At this stage, I investigated the issue further to see what the actual figures were and my suspicion was confirmed – the transactions going through the site had dropped, however no where near the levels that the ecommerce functionality within Google Analytics was suggesting.

A fortnight has passed and I haven’t seen any noises about it online and then today when I logged into Google Analytics, the dashboard included a notice stating that analytics was delayed in processing data from 30th April to 5th May and that ecommerce data across that period was unable to be recovered. I’m pleased that the Google Analytics team have posted a notice about it, at least that confirms that it wasn’t something that we had done which inadvertently stopped us reporting the transactions into Google.

Two things:

  1. The image above suggests that the outage began on the 27th April, not 30 April as Google suggested. Either the sudden drop was the lull of the long weekend or Google have reported the wrong date?
  2. Why did it take a fortnight to post a notice about the unplanned outage? While I appreciate it wasn’t going to change anything, if I had of known that there was an outage in place – I wouldn’t have spent any time investigating the lull and just moved on.

* For those that have an ecommerce site and aren’t utilising the ecommerce functionality within Google Analytics, I cannot impress on you how amazing this feature is; the insight it provides into the revenue that your site(s) generate is amazing.

Posted in Services | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Gaming Google Reader For Higher Click Through Rates

Posted on May 13, 2008 by Alistair

Everyone looking to promote their web sites are always looking for ways to get more traffic, higher click through rates and better conversion rates (whatever a conversion might represent).

For a long time, publishers around the world were looking at ways of exploiting small omissions in how the search engines crawled, indexed and subsequently displayed a result within the search engine listings. One of the most popular methods was adding in non-standard characters into the <title> element for a page, in an attempt to make it stand out within the search engine results.

It didn’t take long for the search engines to cotton onto this tactic and it was shut down – however I’ve recently noticed that a handful have slipped through into Google Reader.

Based on the image above, does the additional star at the start of the title catch your attention? For me it immediately grabbed it, as its similar to the star used by Google Reader to remember a feed item for later.

For comparisions sake, you can see that Google search is filtering that same non-standard character out of the search results; it’s a matter of time before the Google Reader team pug that hole.

Posted in Services | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Detecting Duplicates Within XML Feeds

Posted on May 8, 2008 by Alistair

The same web page, shown within Google Reader multiple times

At the end of January, I commented on and offered a suggestion to the Google Reader team about how to improve their product by removing duplicate feed items.

At the time, I didn’t think to post a screenshot to aid in my explanation but remembered to grab one recently and felt it would help explain just how annoying this can be within Google Reader.

From the screenshot, you can see that I have highlighted eight different references to an article by Simon Willison about jQuery style chaining with the Django ORM. When a human looks at that image, it is abundantly clear that each of the eight highlighted references are ultimately going to link through to the same page.

The Google Reader team could use this new feature to their advantage by collapsing the duplicates and offering a visual clue that the item is hot/popular based on the number of references found to the same article. Google search already has the notion of the date/time when content is published, so using that information along with the number of inbound references they discover, the number of duplicates collapsed within your RSS streams could be quite useful.

I know I would really love better facilities within Google Reader for detecting duplicates within RSS, it’d just remove so much noise from the information stream when you’re trying to keep a eye on what is happening within the community.

Posted in Services | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Non-English Languages & Whacky Domain Names

Posted on May 2, 2008 by Alistair

Asian language glyphs from the web sites of James Holderness While doing a little research for an upcoming article tonight, I revisited the web site of James Holderness. If the name looks familiar, it’s because I linked to him in January regarding detecting duplicate items within RSS feeds.

When I stumbled onto his site, I couldn’t believe the domain that he was using:

  • http://www.xn--8ws00zhy3a.com

as it seemed completely unmanageable for a normal person. At the time, it seemed so unmanageable for a normal person that I thought James must have been participating in some obscure SEO challenge; today I realise that isn’t the case at all.

The image shown above is displayed on James site beside his name. It turns out that those three glyphs some how translate into the obscure domain listed earlier as can be seen by the following screenshot from Google Search:

Non-English written characters or glyphs displayed within a Google Search result as the domain name

For those that are interested, Yahoo!, MSN and Live search all showed the English translation of the foreign language in the domain name and not the glyph based version – though were more than happy to display the glyphs within the title of the web site.

Does anyone know how a glyph is translated into the standard English alphabet and more so, what within the domain name delineates one glyph from the next?

Posted in Search | Tagged , , | 1 Comment