Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

How much content are you putting on a page, and is it useful to your visitors? Or could it be useful to you?

Could blogrolls be a thing of the past? I ask, because you may find that more sites are dumping their blogrolls for other features. Links pages are popular to a degree, but I think that they are taking on different forms. I debate about blogrolls on my sites. A few years back, I carefully crafted my blogroll to meet the best needs of my users. I began to use it as a social tool as well. I would include other blogs on my list that I wanted to interact with. Sometimes this tactic worked; sometimes not. As I became smarter about link building, I used the blogroll as a tool in this campaign: I will put you on mine if I am on yours. Eventually, the blogroll became a dead feature for me. I hardly ever clicked on anyone else’s list, and I did not go to many links/resource pages either.
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Writing quality content may not be enough if no one is looking for a post on your topic.

I used to write an informative post without concern if the post would be read by users or found by the search engines, because the post served my greater writing goals in regards to my business. With a website, this can be an error. Each written post should add value to the site. Value will be defined as bringing in users to the site; users who will hopefully convert to being your clients. Yet maybe you still need a post on a topic that will not add value, so how can you craft your writing to meet the goal of adding value?
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A good checklist can save you time and money, but you should think about the design to help your business get it right.

I have so many projects going on at the moment, that I decided to create some checklists to make sure that I am hitting all of my tasks. Checklists seem to be unacceptable to many people though. When I tried to help my fellow home inspectors out by creating a checklist to help them with the new rules for home inspection, I received several negative responses. The idea was that a person could not catch everything by following a checklist. Another person commented that you cannot be creative with a checklist. I beg to disagree.
    The professionals who do their job best have designed their tasks to meet their goals. Part of that design starting point is a checklist. To create a checklist, you have to think about what you need to do to ensure success at each step. I will agree that going through the steps, checking them off, is not going to be the best option for your business. I leave space to write notes in my checklists. Note taking helps me to reach the next level; however, a not might not have occurred to me without having gone through the checklist first.
    Multitasking requires organization if you wish to be effective. I began to think of how I would form a checklist for my websites. I began by looking at different tasks that I need to accomplish, and how those tasks can be handled on different days. Since this is a checklist for my website, and there are quite a few tasks which need to be taken care of while I am on the internet, I created an HTML version of my list, so I could set my browser home page to that list. When I open my browser, the first thing that I see is the task which I have to undertake. Here are my beginning notes. Your task could be very different, depending on what you need to accomplish.

Monday    Google Analytics, Webmaster
Central, site optimization, rank check to fill out terms, forum
Procedure:    1) Find Top landing page articles to compare to the week before
2) Check if pages have been optimized by using term target or semager(need chart)
3) Find websites sending traffic to me; discover why (need chart)
4) Record Adsense revenue
5) Use Rank Check to discover where I sit with keyword ranking process (need to chart)
6) Find keywords that I am hitting with SEMrush report
7) Go to forum A to respond to questions

Tuesday    article for free sites
distribution
Procedure: 1) Look up articles from week before
2) Rewrite sections or create a brief article referring back to original article
3) Places to submit to:
ezine Article
ehow
articles4ever
4) Go to forum B

Wednesday    Keyword research on semrush, Google Insight, Google Trends, Website link building research
1)Pick a term to target that you have not been ranking for on the semrush report from Monday
2) Find a term with a high CPC and preferable low competition
3) Go to Google insight and Google Trends (Can this be done with tool on iGoogle?)
4) Pick terms to target for the next week
5)Find websites for dofollow comments on commenthunt(?); look for edu blogs; seospyglass?
6)forum A

Thursday    Photograph editing for articles
Procedure:   
1) Find or take photgraphs based upon keywords found on Wednesday
2) Use GIMP to Size them
3) Plan out articles (titles, h3, body paragraphs)
4) Go to forums B and C

Friday    Write articles for the next week 
Procedure:    1) Write articles when I have a chance on Friday and Saturday
2) Go to forum A and D
3) Commenting for linkbuilding

This web development checklist will be an ongoing process. Creating a checklist and never altering it can lead to failure. I found that doing these tasks can help improve my site. At one time, I performed them all on one day, which lead to a long work day. Currently, I am spending around two hours each day on this checklist; however, this is because I am getting into my groove, and I am trying to find ways to improve my website’s performance. Once my system is in place, these jobs should go fairly quick, yet I will still spend time evaluating the checklist.

We leave our website’s url all over the net to build links, but we forget how important it is to build links internally.

I was running SEO SpyGlass to examine my links and that of my competitors. After running a report on semrush, I thought upon my site’s architecture, and how different users move via internal links on that site. External link building is improtant, and new site owners are geared towards building those links; yet they forget that internal links within their own site can help them out. One fact which struck home when looking at the semrush report is that pages are ranking well for a given term; however, these were not always the page or keyword that I wanted to emphasize. I began considering how I want people to move through my site, and how they actually might wish to use the site.
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There are free solutions for a small business when you need data from your site.

When I started off as a manager, I was not overly concerned with data. I was more focused on my staff, and the job at hand. As I developed as a manager, I saw how understanding an MIS report could help me perform better. I became involved with budgeting more, so I found that I really needed to understand my numbers. I think that some small business owners may ignore their operating metrics in areas where they are not familiar. Setting up a website may be one such area.
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How different is your site from the next guy’s site? Have you considered a new format for your blog?

I was discussing the state of real estate portals recently, when it was pointed out that we are reaching a “plateau of similarity”. Not long after reading this phrase in an email, I receive another email informing me that another site is adopting the features of two other popular sites. The move makes sense. You copy what works for others. Refine the element to make it work better for you. Then others copy your imitation; hopefully some will refine the element with a clever innovation to take it a step further. Eventually, we obtain a distilled feature that works at its optimum level.
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Navigation Bars are great for visitors. They make it easy for users to find information quickly. Since they may wish to explore posts in certain categories, you may want to feature your categories in a navigation bar format.

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A theme inspired by some steampunk objects and a video. The theme contains dark tones with a more sci-fi feeling than Victorian.

    I like steampunk, and I have been working on a few object for around the house and garden. After seeing the video for “Sleep Isabella” by Abney Park on YouTube, I thought that creating a WordPress theme may be fun. I did go looking for steampunk websites to see what they had done. I did like them, but many seemed to focus on the look of printed material, and I was thinking “what would a steampunk computer interface look like?”. Since seeing the other sites, I do want to create two more steampunk inspired themes. One theme will be closer to Victorian/Edwardian printed material, while the other will be a play on a Biedermeier desk.

    First, if you know me, then you know that I am concerned with eco-issues, and I like the idea of a dark theme to save energy via monitor usage. I focused on using different dark textures with bright highlights. The use of stripes was based on an outfit from one of the singers in the video. I am not the best when it comes to creating web graphics. I opened up Gimp, and started creating collages from some images that I had, so these could be better. I would love to create a better clock icon for the date. Still, I like the results.

   Fonts became an issue. For the next theme in this series, I will work with the @font-face in the stylesheet, and see if I can find more appropriate fonts. For this theme I chose a variety of fonts that are fairly common which I thought worked. Most steampunk sites work around the font situation by placing fonts in the images, but for a free theme, that would mean making a header image with a fixed slogan on it. I wanted users to have their own options. I think that I would add images to this theme.

    The menu bar has drop down submenus. I went with colors that I thought worked well for a dark theme but also reflected some common colors seen in steampunk objects. For visited links, I had the color go gray. For hovered links, I simply went to an itallic font. The brass bar that is seen in the index page is not used for pages or single posts; I thought that would be too much. That image is in a div element, so you can easily add it to those pages if you want.

    Overall, I think this theme works for deign sites or retailers who have a creative edge. I was thinking of developing a design site for objects that I collect after I had created this theme. The dark background does show of images. I saw some retailers who may like this type of theme. I might modify some icon elements to better fit with the specific business.

   Tell me what you think. Does it meet your vision of SteamPunk?

Download the theme.

A user interface is more than the buttons and menu bars on your website. There are all types of navigational elements, but the words that you deploy can have a greater impact.

We are careless in our use of language. We take a word that we feel best suits our intentions, even though it might not suit our meaning. Sometimes we are not aware that words imply meanings to others that may be contrary to our intent. Sometimes we reveal our thoughts when we did not intend. Our users though will pick up on the cues that words transmit, so we should consider which words will prompt the actions that we desire.

    You are selling widgets to the public, so you have a page entitled “widgets” or “products”. Standard fare for a website, and a user coming to your site obviously is looking for this item. What if they are looking for items under $20? Does the word “products” help them? Let’s be more specific: what if the customer is looking for a bargain, because they need to save money? Will they find what they want under “products”? They will, but the implication is that they will have to hunt for this item. They may not want to go through that task. What if you have an option “cheap products”? Cheap does imply low cost, but it does have the implication of low quality too. “Sale Items” may work; “under $20″ may be better.

    This problem surfaces on a website more often than you may imagine. The visitor is going to be on our site for a short time span before deciding to stay or leave, so we need to choose the words carefully that will call them to stay. After they have decided to stay, we have to prompt them to take specific actions. There are various techniques in the design process of a site which assist in this effort, but we are not always so creative when it comes to words. Users want to feel comfortable, so we rely on phrases that we see on many other sites. If they want to know about the author , they will scan for an “About” page. If they do not see a page with that label, they may scan for the “Contact” page, since author information is sometimes placed in that location.

    Having consistent lables to other websites can be good for creating a user interface; however, we can take the expected in a slightly different direction to pique the interest of our visitors. Did you notice how I set up the posts on the landing page of this blog? I have an excerpt, then there is the means to click through to read the remainder of the post. Typically the phrase used is “continue reading this post”. To draw attention to the fact that the user should click, designers may increase the size of the font of this phrase, or they may highlight in a box or by a color element. I chose to alter the senetence to “Intrigued? Well read on”. The excerpt is meant to intrigue them, so I am asking were you intrigued? I then ask them to take an action. The basic concept of continue reading is expressed, but not in those words. The phrase does catch a user’s attention, because it is not quite what was expected, but it fits the parameters, so it helps to force a decision. This phrase may not be a big deal, but there are moments like this all over your blog. You could place a header over a tag cloud that states “tag cloud”, or you could invite them to take an action: “explore through tags”.

    Subtle differences from the norm help the user to think, and I feel that may be better for your site. Take the tag cloud example. These are becoming common on sites, and most users understand their function, so they glance over that section without a thought to interact with the site in that way. By having the heading stopping the user’s attention on what has been written, you may have created the opportunity to cause an action that benefits your site. Consider other features, like breadcrumbs. Those are the lines that show the visitor where they are on the site (home>category>subcategory>post). Intuitively the user understands that he can click on part of the breadcrumb to be taken to a page that contains other related posts in a category, or he could go back to the home page. What if you prefaced your breadcrumbs with a phrase like “You are Here”. We imply that this is a map. We have caught their attention, and they may actually click the category or subcategory button to orientate themselves in the site.

    Does this method work all of the time? Each change of word or phrase will effect the visitor, but they may decide not to take the action. Most of our visitors will never read an “About” page, unless they want to know the author better. I titled my “About” page on one site “About the ever curious Frank”, which caused the hits on that page to rise. I have been trying an experiment for a while now, where I replaced the navigation bar that had page titles to one that had icons. Initially, I did see a spike in traffic to other pages, because I think users were curious. I am letting the icons stand, to discover if they will continue to draw visitors in after the novelty has worn off. Personally, I like the clean look of the icons.

   Words carry a weight that we do not always stop to consider, but we may want to think of the possibilities if we want users to interact with the site more. 

A two columned theme that was inspired by my garden.

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