User-Centered Design – Kelikuru.com

TG was busy with projects, helping moving new domain or URL without sacrificing traffic and search engine’s PR. Needless to say, moving a domain name is not funny and always a complication. Using search engines is the primary way your users would find your web sites so ”home moving” needs to be done very carefully.

A few things we have taken into consideration:

1. Prefer short over long domain name. We found several options after a series of researching, we decide to use a rather short one since long domain name is no fun to type and difficult to play with.

2. As a rule of thumb, register for a top-level domain name with .com extension if possible. Yeah, we know you are going to tell  us a lot of good .com have gone… A new domain name should be more user friendly than the old one, meaning the new domain is easy to spell, more memorable and be good for branding in the long run.

3. It seems not uncommon that some site owners have multiple domains – there’s good reason to own several domain names, yet we need to make sure that all of them have to be directed to the same web site.

4. Be mindful of using a 301 Redirect. TG asked our hosting company did it on our behalf. If you feel comfortable creating a .htaccess. file in your root directory or it has already there, you can add a piece of code - Redirect permanent / http://www.newurl.com/page.htm 

5. As social media tools such as, Twitter, Facebook and Digg are booming and become more and more popular, it’s recommended to change their naming convention across the board for the benefit of branding in the future.

Stoney deGeyter has a good post Securing a Marketing-Rich Domain Name.

______________________________________________________

Visual Design process as an integral part in web site development should not be omitted easily. A finalized style guide focusing on web typograghy, layout grid design and navigation can be a road-map for visual designers, interactive designers, web developers and project managers to follow through in different phases of design.    

BBC recently disclosed that the British broadcaster has put together a project team to redesign its website after putting up  the ‘Wall of Shame’ two years ago. TG jokingly calls it “嘆息之牆” in Chinese.

BBC creates its Wall of Shame for web site revamp - image courtesty of BBC Internet Blog

It’s an excellent opportunity to have a peek of visual design process established by professional team and international corporation. Here comes the step-by-step visual, typography and color managment model:

1. A thorough discussion of conceptual design and design philosophy by digging deep into inspirational design resources

2. Design page layout with an underlying grid pattern.TG recommends Yahoo Page Grid for further reading   

3. Streamline navigation system and create universal user experience in using a consistent online media player

4. Web typography mix-and-match combination 

5. Color palette including tones and shades studies

6. Icons design

This style guide is a set of page elements that can be pulled together in any number of ways. We wanted to create something that is flexible enough to allow all our brands their full expression whilst uniting them into a coherent user experience. We also wanted to strip out any superfluous decoration and allow the content and imagery to shine through. To me, this new visual language is exciting and refreshing. It feels timeless, yet very of the moment. I hope you agree. Bronwyn van der Merwe 

______________________________________________________ 

For curiosity, TG revisits the use of  IMG ALT tag for the benefit of usability and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The topic may be years old but I think it’s relevant and worthwhile to research a bit while optimizing my site.

For usability, TG looks up reference from W3C.org

nowadays, Web browsers are available in a very wide variety of platforms with very different capacities; some cannot display images at all or only a restricted set of type of images; some can be configured to not load images. If your code has the alt attribute set in its images, most of these browsers will display the description you gave instead of the images

some of your visitors cannot see images, be they blind, color-blind, low-sighted; the alt attribute is of great help for those people that can rely on it to have a good idea of what’s on your page

search engine bots belong to the two above categories: if you want your website to be indexed as well as it deserves, use the alt attribute to make sure that they won’t miss important sections of your pages.

Imagine that your users cannot see the images in your site for some reasons, what do you expect them to know in text format. The ALT attribute should serve the same purpose of image supposed to be.

Using an ALT attribute for each image is critical to enhance accessibility. It is required to meet the minimum WAI requirements, which are used as the benchmark for accessibility laws in UK and the rest of Europe. They are also required to meet “Section 508″ accessibility requirements in the US.

Google Matt Cutts has previously posted a video to explain the importance of IMG ALT tag to SEO. In summary, what he says are:

1. use them
2. give more information about the image so it can be more accessible to Google spiders
3. no spam please, don’t stuff with 200 tags!
4. words being used preferably to be accurate, descriptive and relevant to the image itself

Is IMG ALT tag means more to usability than SEO or vice versus? I guess you can make your own decision.. While at the same time, I need to spend time to adjust my IMG ALT tags. SEO worker.com provides a good post in ALT attribute and Image Search Engine Optimization. You may want to use it as a reference too. Enjoy reading!

______________________________________________________

Our last post about Site Speed Optimizer – Yahoo YSlow and Google Page Speed surprisingly sets off a fanfare of discussion among ourselves during Lunar New Year of the Tiger. Perhaps my blogger friends in China get more vacations than we do in Hong Kong. Haha!!

Some remarks on the usability of the tools, some says they are designed for technical savvy users who have an in-depth knowledge of codings. Bloggers like us have to take a course to understand terms such as CSS expressions, minify Javascript and CSS  and Etags etc.

Like many of them,  TG does everything on my own – from web design, blogging to SEO. To get the problems fixed is indeed a great challenge.

TG at Kelikuru.com hardly calls myself a site optimizer guru as it takes a lot of time and expertise to perform the optimization across the site.  Site tune-up and analysis is very different from landing pages or channels optimization in terms of scale and ranges of service.

To enhance our sites’ usability, we need to perform a site analysis periodically.  Besides Google Webmaster tool and Analytics, linkvendor.com and SEO Workers are another tools you may want to try, which cover a wider spectrum.

It checks technical side of your site along with other high-level parameters including SEO Statistics, Social Media Entries and Linkings. We can easily use the graphical charts to talk out a solution somehow as we are all visual-minded persons.

My friend also recommends Michael Gray’s How to speed up wordpress, which focuses more on Wordpress usability. Mr Gray was able to bring the page download time down to 5 seconds or less.

Once have your feet wet, got to clean them up to stay warm!!

We need to stay warm and so are our sites

______________________________________________________