Coding Color

Found a neat little article on Smashing Magazine Online (The Code Side of Color by Ben Gremillion) all about html color. Great read for designers, coders, or those who like to learn about web color.

My Experience With Domains and Websites

I've been paying a hefty sum to GoDaddy over the past 4 years for the domain, space, and Website Tonight management solution for my freelance company's website and for the domain on my personal website. After some thought, I decided to cancel my GoDaddy account this past week.

In the years that I've used the GoDaddy domain and Website Tonight services, I've been frustrated to no end by the user interface. It seems unnecessarily convoluted and incredibly bloated--a la Geocities back when Yahoo! purchased them in late 1998. It offers solid value, but in order to find what you're looking for, you almost need a treasure hunt map and tips on how to survive the deadly booby traps.

Items such as changing DNS and other drill-down management is severely dig click-intensive. However, as a plus, customer service is usually helpful, pleasant, and straight-forward if you're willing put up with moderate wait times on the phone. Also, if you purchase a multi-year renewal, your fee is much lower.

I'm all about simplifying my online presence and not adding complexity--or yet another thing to keep track of for my expenses. So now I'm two domains down, with one business left to promote. I was left to decide what my next step would be.

I decided that I wanted to continue promoting my freelance business online. I have a Facebook page, but I feel this is an ancillary tool, and wasn't really solid enough to stand on its own. I needed to identify some sort of service that could help me provide a home for my business, and the option to add dynamic content on a periodical basis, if I felt like it.

I decided to try Blogger. I've used it since 2005 and have stuck with it through a variety of UI changes, functionality upgrades, and even ownership changes. I felt it was as good a place as any to create a useful space for my freelance business and without racking my brain to figure out how to use the tool.

Blogger's Pages feature has made it an excellent avenue, along with the many customizable options for layouts, color schemes, and background themes. The navigation on the dashboard is very transparent and makes it easy to find things.

I'm not the only one who's noticed that there are benefits to using Blogger as a website creation tool (see here, here, and here as a start).

So we'll see how well the move over to Blogger, rather than a website, works out. If you're interested in seeing what I've done so far, check out http://fourtongues.blogspot.com

Blogger Photo Upload

I noticed the photo upload UI has been updated a wee bit since the last time I uploaded an image (last week?). There's now a window with the option to upload from the Blog (upload from computer also), from Picasa, and from a URL. It used to be just from your computer and from a URL.

A couple of extra click throughs are now required, but all around I think I like this more sophisticated UI.

New Twitter Front Page

SEO and Tabs

The company I work at for my day job just recently implemented tabs in their website page design. I found out because I happend to go on the website to look for something. Not a good way for a content manager to find out about a major UI interface.

As one of the staff responsible for a great number of programs with landing pages, I've had to scramble a little to figure out how to correct copy and best make it fit in with the new UI.

Each landing page now has an area of text at the top to provide some brief orienting introduction, then there are a complement of tabs underneath with each tab assigned a particular topic area or subsection of the project/service/product.

Tabs need to be concise for design esthetics and usability to the reader. We don't have yet guidelines for content length nor subhead formatting, etc. Which creates a bit of a pain point for me as I share content revisions with a very busy IT department.

The "about" tab is first, and provides some orientation to the reader about the value proposition and help them decide if they want to keep reading the next tabs. Then depending on the content and information that needs to be shared about the particular program or product, each following tab will have concise information about that pertinent sub-area. This is ideal for intuitive UI that helps the reader help themselves

These sort of changes are best implemented with a little key stakeholder discussion ahead of time, so that the content managers work with IT closely on effecting a smooth transition to the new UI. Something that didn't take place in this case. Make sure this doesn't happen to you.

So as part of my own self-education in regards to optimizing content in this new UI (tabs) environment, I am now reading up about tab navigation best practices and SEO for pages featuring tab navigation. It's not rocket science, I'm sure, but it doesn't hurt to scan the market and read up on it to make sure the bases are covered.

Here are some of the more interesting articles I discovered and a summary of why:

• The Eric Pender Blog, Tabs and SEO: Things You Need to Consider - the importance of focused content, ways to program/present tabs, deep linking content on tabs.
• The Simon Kenyon Shepard Blog, smartTabs: SEO Friendly Ajax Tabs - similar content on a site makes search engines work harder, the ease of sharing tab content, html anchors.
• The Tony Adam Blog, AJAX and Non-JavaScript Experiences for SEO Friendly Websites - importance of indexing tab content.

I will keep reading and if any nitty gritty how-to articles show up I'll post about them. What do you do to help make your tabs the best they can be? What reading do you suggest?