Flash Web Site About to Become Google / Yahoo Searchable!

I just found this article by SchoolOfFlash.com and they said the following. How exciting!!

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For years, the advice has always been that if you want good search engine results, then you don’t want to create your website entirely with Flash, because search engines have no way of effectively indexing swf files. Well, all of that is about to change.

Adobe just announced that they are teaming up with Google and Yahoo in order to address this issue. Adobe has supplied these search industry leaders with technology that will allow them to index swf files in a way that has never been possible before. In fact, Google has already started implementing this technology, and as I understand it, Yahoo won’t be too far behind.

“But wait,” you say. “I thought search engines already had a way to index swf files.”

Well, you’re right, but up until now, they could only index the static information and static links within your swf file. With this new technology, even the dynamic content of your Flash files will be open to search engine indexing, making it infinitely more possible for your all-Flash website to achieve top rankings in search engine results.

Create Sites With Impact

First impressions count and with the clock ticking, make sure your site has impact.

You’ve got 50 milliseconds – just one twentieth of a second – to impress us. If you aren’t sure how long that is, go and get a stopwatch (or use your mobile) and time it. According to recent research, it’s the length of time it takes site visitors to decide if your site has anything of value for them. Scary isn’t it? It doesn’t matter how great your navigation, or how popular your online store, if you don’t make that all-important, top-quality, first impression, you’re history. This issue Karl Hodge shows you how to beat the clock with tips and tweaks from web professionals...

It’s long been assumed that web users make their mind up about sites in a short space of time. Some sources say you’ve got twenty seconds to make an impact, others a more speedy ten. A recent series of studies by academics at Careleton University in Ottawa, Canada suggests, however, that the allimportant first impression is made in less than one tick of the clock. They flashed a series of sites in front of test subjects and asked them to rate the pages for visual appeal. The finished study concluded that visitors were able to make their mind up about whether they like a site’s home page in just 50 milliseconds. That’s one twentieth of a second.

If you’re surprised, you’re not the only one. Even Gitte Lindgaard, Director of the Human-Oriented Technology Lab that carried out the research had set the bar much higher; “My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds,” she told the journal Nature. “Unless the first impression is favourable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,” says Lindgaard. It’s enough to make your head spin.

There’s more too. Cathy Dudek, a researcher who worked on the third phase of the study, told us there was a ‘high consistency’ between the sites rated as visually appealing by test subjects. “In study one, the 25 most appealing home pages were also the 25 most appealing in study two, and the same was true for the 25 least appealing home pages,” said Dudek.

If that’s the case, then perhaps visual appeal – the measure that was common to all three phases of the study – might be something you can predict and even design for. John Knight, Director at usability research centre User-Lab (www.user-lab.com) suggests there may be something in that hypothesis, “You can probably generalise an aesthetic preference to a specific audience,” he told us. Interestingly, there were also matches between the visual appeal of a site and how several other characteristics were rated. These included design, layout, colour use and ‘imagination’.

While the researchers at Carleton couldn’t venture any conclusions beyond those already in their research, Cathy Dudek admitted these were interesting results. “It opens lots of doors, and should inspire further research,” she said.

What this study shows academically, many good designers already knew intuitively; you really don’t have long to make your mark. To create a positive impact with your home page and site there are some broad rules you can and should follow – and the basics are easy to identify. Your pages should look and work the same way on all target platforms. Sticking to W3C standards (www.w3c.org) to ensure consistency helps, but browser quirks should be taken into consideration. We’re pretty sure by now that slow loading Flash splash pages are a big turn off – even in broadband Britain. “Can you imagine the BBC with a huge spinning globe intro page and music that you were forced to experience or click to surf through every time you visited the home page?” asks Tim Gibbon, communications director of WebTrafficIQ (www.webtrafficiq.com).

We also know that people expect and, indeed, should get clear navigation cues within the first half of the page. But what about more esoteric issues? What about those elements – design, layout and colour – that the Carleton study identified as being so important?

In the eye of the beholder
“What makes a visually appealing site is often in the eye of the beholder, but there are some general rules of thumb,” says Jason Arber, co-founder at Pixelsurgeon. “As the Canadian study shows, users have become very adept at deciding whether they like a site in less than a second. The eye scans the page from top left to bottom right, looking for visual clues, so having extremely clear navigation and a clean layout will work in your favour. The brain can process images very quickly, so a couple of wellchosen pictures will help, as will a complimentary colour scheme”.

This advice should be taken in context and sites designed with a specific audience and its needs in mind. “If your web site is for a company specialising in relaxation techniques and the site is bright pink, you’ll find your visitors quickly hitting the back button,” says Arber. This is an appropriate example, as colour is especially important when thinking of the initial impact a site will make on the user. Whether you choose a bold statement or a more subdued approach may depend on your audience, but either way, colour choices will have a profound influence. “Colours work online in the same way that they do in print,” says Arber. “Certain bright colours can quickly draw the eye, while more neutral colours are calming and sophisticated. Unlike print, however, once a site is live a quick tweak of the style sheet can create a whole new colour scheme”.

For more on conducting your own usability tests, check out the US government’s own usability site www.usability.gov/methods/usability_testing.html

Web design evolves over time; it’s not a static thing. Pages with silver backgrounds were all the rage in 1996. At the beginning of the noughties, sliding Flash navigation bars could be found on all the hippest sites. Does following these trends make your site more appealing? “By coincidence or design, many “Web 2.0” sites favour a stripped down look,” says Jason Arber, “There’s clean typography and simple neutral colours, such as dark greys for text. Because these sites are leading the way with technology, expect their look and feel to permeate the entire web.”

We’ve noticed a further trend among Web 2.0 sites: rounded corners and distinct, colour-delineated content boxes. Visitors love sites like Flickr and Technorati for their content and design, so if you use similar visual elements in your layout it’s reasonable to assume that some of that success will rub off on your site. Be careful of trying to be too ‘contemporary’, though. This year’s Google may be next year’s Altavista. Trends age extremely quickly, while classic design lasts.

While the Carleton study concentrated on visual appeal, content plays its part in making a positive impact. In fact, the research found a symbiotic relationship between the two. The tests discovered a ‘halo effect’, where content on pages that were deemed aesthetically appealing by the participants was more highly rated than page designs they didn’t like.

John Knight makes an interesting suggestion. Sometimes it’s best not to saturate your front page with content. Although it’s important to clearly state what your site provides in a tone and manner that’s appropriate to your audience, curiosity is also key. For maximum impact, you want to draw users into the site – not give them everything on the front page. That means linking to content in an eye catching way, rather than running your big stories or listing your full catalogue on your home page.

Measuring success
Although these design tips can be applied broadly, there’s one rule that overrides and informs them all; know your user. “People tend to think of other folk’s taste being like theirs,” says John Knight, “That’s not the case”. Different people and different audiences have different tastes, desires, needs and aspirations. While you may be able to generalise about those tastes at the prototype stage, there’s only one way to find out if you’ve got it right for certain; and that’s to test your site.

There are two distinct types of research you can undertake. You’ll start with usability testing before you launch. We’ve got some great tips elsewhere in this article, but the first thing you should know is that it’s not brain surgery – anyone can put together a usability study. “It’s probably possible to hash together a guerrilla version of the Canadian study,” says Gerred Blyth, Head of Consulting at Human-Computer Interaction experts Amberlight (www.amber-light.co.uk). “Take a screen shot of the home page and make a PowerPoint presentation that advances the slide after a fraction of a second. Put the slide show in front of your participants and record their reactions.”

Though your home page is important, don’t forget the rest of your site. “A large number of visitors arrive through internal landing pages. It’s equally important to usability test these journeys and ensure that users are driven into other areas,” says Blyth.

With template based content management and external CSS is becoming the norm for page building and layout, it’s easier than ever to tweak your site after the fact. You can continue running usability tests after your site has gone live, but now you’ve an additional source of data too – your actual users.

Tim Gibbon explains: “Web analytics software is used to determine and understand how visitors arrive at web sites, how they navigate, where and how they are exiting it and why. It’s one of the first and most crucial factors a web site owner needs to consider when making their web site ‘sticky’ because this creates the relationship and builds a rapport with them,” says Tim.

Agencies like WebtrafficIQ can use their expertise to do this for you, though, there are options for personal pages and outfits on a small budget, too. AWStats is one of our favourite site traffic tools. It’s free, CGI powered and displays the data it gathers about your site traffic in colourful, easy to understand charts and tables.

With all these tweaks and testing guidelines, your site should be as attractive to your punters as pollen is to bees. Hopefully it can do that in the fraction of a second that your user take to make a value judgement about your front page. It’s not all about design, though, the Carleton study deliberately excluded sites that were famous or familiar to the test subjects, so you’ve one last weapon in your arsenal: spin. “Lots of research shows that branding is persuasive in forming favourable impressions,” says Cathy Dudek; “I think it does have an effect”. We think that combining our ninja design tips with a bit of judicious marketing should be everything you need to make your mark.

How to Redesign a Web Site

Most designers would jump at the chance to revisit their work but what is the right motivation for a site redesign and how should the process actually work? .net puts you in the know

Even if you get it right first time, there are plenty of reasons to take a fresh look at an older site. For a start, the web is changing. Again. Consider the web circa 1994 – design didn’t even come into it for those of us struggling to view grey, graphics-free pages using Mosaic. Today’s Web 2.0 revolution promises an epochal shift in user-expectation as significant as that caused by the introduction of streaming media, WYSIWIG web design applications or Flash.

There are other factors, too: accessibility, for one, and, of course, the time-honoured tradition of corporate re-branding, which is as good a reason for redesigning a website as any other.

When it comes to redesigning, there is a clear divide about how websites should be handled: is it better to patch-up any problems and give a quick coat of paint to the original aesthetic or burn the whole thing down and start again from scratch?

To redesign or not to redesign

Ultimately, the level of redesign required depends on how well-designed the site is in the first place. A poorly designed site that makes use of tables, deprecated HTML, lacks accessibility features for disabled users, doesn’t work properly or is simply horrendous to look at will need something rather more comprehensive than a makeover.

“Good designers redesign, great designers re-align,” says the respected new media designer Cameron Moll. Moll, who contributes to webzine A List Apart (alistapart.com), explains that some sites can be redesigned comprehensively and immediately while others need to take a more gradual approach: “You have to understand and evaluate the users’ switching costs – will a full-blown redesign shock them? NationalGeographic.com is undergoing a phased redesign at the moment. You can go through the site and see how some areas have the new design and some, the older one. They’re doing a live redesign in pieces, which may not work for everyone.”

When dealing with well-established brands the process is likely to be a much more protracted affair because such work has extra considerations. Damian Cranney, managing director and co-founder of Frank (www.frankbelfast.com), explains that if you’re not working on everything from the branding upward, dealing with someone else’s design is going to be a certainty: “A lot of the time you’re inheriting other people’s work and this is the most frustrating part of any redesign,” he says.

A question to ask of any site undergoing a redesign, or any client interested in pursuing one is: what is the motivating factor? The answer will often define whether a site needs a simple revamp or a complete re-imagining.

When it comes to motivations for redesign, there are good reasons and bad. Good reasons include a company or product re-brand or a desire for marketplace re-positioning, updating to web standards or implementation of much-needed new functionality. Bad reasons might include keeping up with fashions, or even just a vague notion that a site needs to be changed – something rather different from knowing through business experience that a site is underperforming or is just plain ugly.

“There are two camps,” says Moll. “One typically relies on aesthetics with someone deciding ‘It kind of looks old’. That kind of emotional response to aesthetics brings about the redesign. The other focuses on strategic objectives and user-needs to decide that ‘our demographic has changed’ or ‘the market has shifted’.”

Stuart Avery, joint managing director of Bristol’s E3Media (www.e3media.co.uk) explains that his clients approach redesigns very rationally: “A redesign can be triggered by a branding change – some of our clients, such as Triumph, have gone through this – others may have under-performing sites. Also, there are patterns of design and usability that people get used to, particularly in ecommerce,” he says.

www.betfair.com

Based in the UK and licenced in Australia, Austria and Malta. www.betfaircorporate.com British-based betting website Betfair overhauled its site in February of this year. Originally launched in 2000, Betfair won a Queen’s Award for innovation in enterprise. The company, a registered bookmaker, uses its website to take a different view of betting. Betfair is a betting exchange, which operates in a similar fashion to stock exchanges, allowing punters to bet at odds set by other punters rather than the bookmaker itself. .net spoke to Joe Waller, Betfair’s head of exchange engineering.

.net: Why was Betfair redesigned?
JW: There are several reasons: from a product perspective, it’s important to not only deliver new products but to keep users involved and make usage easier; we read our forums – there’s an active community and we take notice of what they think; we have enormous access logs and use that data to try and understand our customers. The question to ask is how can we become more successful and that, for us, involved a redesign. Also, the technology of the web grows – things become possible that were not before.

.net: How comprehensive was the process and what did it involve?
JW: We really tried to do an awful lot of stuff – our timelines were quite aggressive. We launched [the redesigned site] in February this year, having started the redesign in August 2005. This was a long time for us but we developed prototypes and wireframes that went to internal and externally focus groups. If we do a redesign it’s really important to keep focused. It’s very easy to lose it and say things like ‘this will look cool over here’. You have to ask the question: are we keeping our eyes on the ball?

.net: What were the biggest challenges?
JW: It’s incredibly challenging technically to run an exchange. We promise you the price you wanted or better, so it operates on a first come, first served basis. This means that it is a serial process, which is a significant technical challenge. A normal stock exchange runs during business hours – we run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As far as transactions go, we process more than most stock exchanges. The design is largely in house because of the huge technical challenge.

Accessing the users

A growing factor in web design is accessibility. In the early days of the internet, this wasn’t an issue – disabled users simply were not catered for. Today, things are different. Patrick Lauke, webmaster at the University of Salford and freelance designer at splintered.co.uk, says: “A site should definitely be redesigned if the current one isn’t up to scratch – there are both legal and moral reasons to do so.”

Designers in the UK need to be aware of compliance issues surrounding websites because the Disability Discrimination Act (1994) has now been amended to cover websites. “Basically, it comes under the provision of goods and services,” says Lauke. “The code of practice, which came out later [than the DDA (1994) itself] does specify websites. They have to be accessible to the visually-impaired, deaf and hard-ofhearing.” All of which is perfectly laudable, but what, exactly, does ‘accessibility’ mean? “A lot of it is common-sense, really. If you provide audio content, for example, you should also provide text transcriptions,” says Lauke.

There are collateral benefits to making accessible sites: market expansion, of course, is one but there are others. “If a university lecture is made available as a text transcript, it can be used for quotations much more easily than an MP3 file,” says Lauke.

Lauke flags the growth of podcasting as a problemarea for accessibility: “For some people, it’s so much easier to put on a mic and talk rubbish instead of typing it.” Here Lauke is echoing comments by Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original designers of the Apple Macintosh computer, who feels that podcasts go against the very nature of how information is presented online. One major benefit of offering a transcript is that, unlike audio content, text transcriptions are fully searchable and will be indexed by search engines.

“With web-accessibility, I see a parallel with access ramps in architecture. That’s not done purely for wheelchair-users. It has other benefits, for example, delivery of goods,” says Lauke.

There is a danger that the DDA (1994) – and similar provisions elsewhere, such as Section 508 in the United States – may be used by unscrupulous designers to make a quick buck by forcing redesigns on clients. Clients should not have their hands forced, at least not by designers, when it comes to accessibility. Instead, if a client is not convinced about the need for accessibility, explain to them that a standards-compliant site is not only an ethical imperative, but will also create greater market opportunities. After all, business people think in business terms.

Surfing the zeitgeist of redundancy

When it comes to motivations for redesigning, an oft-quoted response is desire to keep up with the cool kids – trend following.

Trends are all very well, but there is the danger of becoming too obsessed with ephemeral fashions. A newly designed site may look good today, but if a designer becomes obsessed with following each and every passing fad they may well awake to find their work the visual equivalent of Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

Cameron Moll is suspicious of redesigns motivated by trends: “This goes back to redesigning merely for aesthetic reasons. I think it is harmful to redesign to just keep up with trends.” For Moll, such redesigns are not just unnecessary, they also risk not fulfilling clientand user-needs: “This is allowing external factors to dictate what you do,” he says. “I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to adapt to trends. Apple does a great job of not only adapting, but setting trends, but to just slavishly follow is not very creative.”

In a sense, obsessive style-watching is a failure of imagination. Certainly, to begin emulating ‘what’s hot’ in a purely robotic fashion is to start out on a journey that’s likely to end at the dole office, but, conversely, it’s impossible to not be influenced by what you see – nor should you try.

When Moll says, “Good designers redesign, great designers re-align”, he is playing on the old adage: good artists copy, great artists steal. Reportedly coined by Pablo Picasso, this comment itself has been purloined so many times since then it’s now routinely attributed to all manner of people and has been regurgitated by virtually every media commentator you could care to mention. In truth, Picasso probably didn’t even say it, though he did note that artists should be aware of other artists’ work – and this is an important point.

Keeping-up with every passing fad in web design is a fool’s errand, but knowing what other people are doing – and being inspired by it – is just good sense. Plagiarism is bad, but inspiration is vital.

Stuart Avery explains that his company E3Media keeps an eye on the web design world: “We have a creative database of sites that people, internally, think are cool. We also try go get out and about and see design in the real world.”

It’s not just other designers you should keep an eye on, though. As a rule, designers should keep their eyes open and pay attention to the world around them. Damian Cranney from Frank says that he gets inspiration not only from works of design, but from the world around him – and his clients: “It could come from a conversation, something the chief-executive says in a meeting with you, it can come from the company’s location or the way they work. Inspiration can come from anywhere.

“We find trends occur on a micro-level – a year ago we found that a lot of clients wanted content management systems for sites that would be updated daily, now we’re finding that people are, once again, wanting really cool-looking sites.”

Frank’s unapologetic, design-focused strategy is not necessarily suited to every client, which is something that Cranney freely admits: “We’re not focused on search engine optimisation – that term makes my head explode. A website is an affirmation of what you hope people think of you,” says Cranney. “I believe that design, though an inherently commercial activity, is about employing visual images to solve communication problems. The media are deployed to say something. Some people wax lyrical about the business-to-business aspect of things or site optimisation. Well, that’s for the marketing department to consider and it should all be in the brief. The designer has to produce a working design of cultural significance.”

Cranney is here exhibiting some good business sense: all designers are different, as are clients, and all will bring different things to the table. In order to succeed, it is vital to know your clients and to play to your strengths.

The National Geographic home page circa 2005 was a fairly typical info-rich design. It’s quite stark by today’s standards and uses a lot of tables. The new NG home page makes extensive use of CSS for both styling and positioning. Tables are still used, but not to the same degree as in 2005. Note that the subtle colour-scheme using gradated greys makes the page more attractive.

Value judgements

It sounds so simple: a successful website is one that works. But how on earth should a website be evaluated? From a prosaic and purely functional perspective? Or should you grapple with the more nebulous area of aesthetics?

It’s difficult to make value judgements on aesthetic issues, but not impossible. One problem is our criteria for quality have changed and the notion of a ‘correct’ design has been exploded. Nevertheless, judgements must be made.

An amateurish site will be easily identified – bad design of that order is easy to spot, but there’s more to aesthetics than avoiding the use of corny type faces and dodgy images. The aesthetic of a site should be judged by the needs, desires and expectations of its users. Technically, both the Guardian and The Sun are the same kind of product: newspapers. However, they take rather different approaches to design and layout, approaches that can be seen as clearly on their websites as they are in the actual newspapers themselves. In short, keep the audience in mind: there’s no point employing the simplicity of Die Neue Typographie if your client is a discount superstore.

Beyond the rarefied realm of art, there are other methods of distinction and qualification that a successful designer must employ. For a start, most sites function as part of a business. A typical pitfall in the redesign process is to become over-involved in art issues or side-tracked by colour-schemes or obsessed with technical details and forget to keep an eye on the bottom-line: does the site do what it is supposed to?

This happens time and again in web design. It happened with frames, it happened with Flash and it happened with streaming media. Now it’s happening again with AJAX. Cameron Moll explains: “AJAX came along and suddenly there were two camps. The first group thought: ‘we’ve got to put it everywhere’ and the second decided: ‘it’s useful but to use it for the sake of it is poor judgement.”

There are methods by which a designer can assure success – clear and frequent communication with the client is one and site-testing is another: “We have a level that we want to achieve,” says Avery. “Alongside that we perform user-testing.”

Thanks to today’s sound-bite politics, focus groups have a bad reputation, but if a site is to face heavy traffic from the public they’re virtually essential – people often approach websites in ways that no designer could ever think of and a focus group should help show where any otherwise invisible problems lie.

The best way to avoid mistakes is to stay on track and the best time to judge is actually at the beginning and throughout the project. Damian Cranney explains: “That kind of judgement happens at the beginning – you set the objectives and come back to the client, showing sample projects. At that point, set up a meeting to discuss these things. Therefore, the judgement is made by the client as you go along. The feedback at later stages should simply be things such as changing images.”

Ultimately, though, there is one over-arching objective in any redesign: the new version must be better than what preceded it. Keep this in mind and you’re set for success.