Web pages are read differently than print

By Molly Morris, memDesigns, August 2008
© Molly Morris, All rights reserved

Long-standing research has shown that when readers scan an English language print page like a flyer or newspaper, they do so in a ‘Z’ pattern, looking first across the top of the page, then scanning down to the bottom left and again reading across from left to right. Not so with web pages. Research from the Neilsen Norman Group, gurus of web-page usability studies, has determined that when we view web pages we generally do so in an ‘F’ pattern, scanning across the top of the page, then down the left side and, if we’re still interested, going back up to scan across the middle of the page. This finding has significant implications for how you design the content on your web pages.

To maximize usability and get your message across effectively, here are some guidelines to follow when creating your website.

Important information must be contained in your titles and headers, particularly those that do not appear at the top of your page. Instead of “Pooping puffin knocks Tories off message” – a recent headline in a Canadian Press article that’s catchy but uninformative - “Harper apologizes for sleezy election ad” would be a better use of web space.

Use bullet points, which lend themselves to the ‘F’ eye-scanning pattern rather than large blocks of text.

Highlight keywords or phrases in a different colour. Because so much of the page is scanned rather than read, highlighting, used conservatively rather than liberally (oops – there’s my election coverage coming back again), will draw the readers eyes to significant material.

Use an inverted pyramid structure for conveying a story. While traditional academic writing is modeled like a pyramid – start with the principle, build the arguments and end with the conclusion – web writing should be done in reverse. State the conclusion first, then list (remember bullet points) the supporting information and provide background information at the end.

The same researchers determined that, on average, readers have time to read at most 28% of a web page’s content. And, since reading on screen is still more tiring on the eyes than reading paper, 79% of web users scan, rather than read, content.

So make every word count.

Are the forms on your website protected from robots?

By Molly Morris, memDesigns, August 2008
© Molly Morris, All rights reserved

If you have a form somewhere on your website for collecting contact information or receiving online orders, and you have received form submission emails in which the fields are completed with gobbledygook (there’s probably a more technical word, but definitely not a more expressive one), your form has most certainly been visited by a robot.

Why is a robot interested in filling out your form?

In general, web robots are visiting sites to hack, spam and collect email addresses. Unless your site has high-level intelligence secrets, you’re probably not too worried about hackers. But spammers are concerning for a few reasons. First of all, they fill your Inbox with unwanted junk. Secondly, those emails may carry viruses. Thirdly, if your submission is answered by an automatically generated email from you, then every time you get a form submission, you send your email address to the party submitting the form. If that party meant harm, or is a spammer, and you’ve just handed over your email address, you’ve made them very happy.

You can prevent robots from submitting your form

When you submit a form over the Internet and you are asked to type out the word you see in a box – usually somewhat obscured by some optical illusion effect – or answer a skill-testing question, you are using a CAPTCHA. I’m embarrassed to admit that, up until recently, I thought CAPTCHA was some slangy (think Chicago Mafia) way of referring to “capturing” information. In fact, CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. A Turing Test is an experiment described by Alan Turing in the 1950s to test whether computers could have intelligence. It goes like this: A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one of which is a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test.

Including a CAPTCHA on a web form prevents machines, in this case web robots, from submitting the form. As it turns out, computers do not have intelligence, and only a human can reliably complete a CAPTCHA field. When the CAPTCHA field is not completed, or completed incorrectly, the form is rejected, you don’t get an email, and all is well.

It’s comforting to know we humans can still beat computers.

 

Do you need to copyright your web content?

by Molly Morris, memDesigns

The World Intellectual Property Organization defines copyright as “a legal term describing rights given to creators for their literary and artistic works”, but then offload the specifics to individual countries. The Government of Canada defines copyright with a great deal more flourish, but it amounts to the same thing.

What is the real harm in having your website content copied?

Besides the usually automatic protective, territorial response to discovering someone has copied your website content, there is a repercussion with respect to the viability of your own site. If a search engine finds duplicate content on several websites it may register the content as spam and either drop your search engine placement or remove your site from their index altogether

Equally as damaging as being dropped from search engines, is the impact that copyright infringement could have on your reputation. Do potential customers know which site hosts the original content, and which site is plagiarized?

How can you prevent it?

In short, you really can’t. The best you can do is use deterrents, the most obvious of which is inserting the copyright symbol © on your web pages, or at least on your home page. Include the year and your company (or personal) name, to indicate who owns the material, and since when. That’s all you have to do to invoke your copyright – you do not need to register a copyright with any legal authority, unless you want to license your content and charge for usage of it.

There is also a piece of javascript coding, called the “no-right-click” script, that, when inserted in your web page coding, will prevent users from right-clicking your images and saving them for their own use, instead displaying a message like this:

 

If you do need to address a case of copyright infringement, and need to prove that the content is original, and you owned it first, you can visit the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine to view archived screenshots of your website over a period of time.

Ultimately, though, if you do find you’ve been copied, you will have to contact the site owner and use all your business diplomacy and tact to persuade them to remove it.

 

Free advertising for your business is just a click away

by Molly Morris, memDesigns

Forgive me if this article reads more like an infomercial, but my intention with these newsletters is to provide you with useful information for your business, and infomercial or not, Craigslist is simply one of the best tools I know of on the web for promoting your business, finding clients, and locating resources.

If you are not familiar with Craigslist, here’s the story. Craigslist was started in 1995 by Craig Newmark of San Francisco, who just wanted a place to list local events. And in fact, that’s all it was for 5 years. But in 2000, well, it was one of those things – right place, right time, right product. Craig was asked to expand his list to 9 US cities, and the ball was rolling. Craigslist is now in 450 cities worldwide, running classified advertising for jobs, housing, goods, services, local activities – you name it. Currently, more than 30 million people log on to Craigslist each month, posting more than 30 million classified ads. Craigslist supports its operation by charging for job ads in 10 major US cities, and for apartment listings in NYC. Otherwise, everything is free.

So how, can it work for your business?

1. Advertise your business for free.Craigslist has a Services section where you can post an advertisement in a specific service area. If you set up a user account first, then you will be able to track your postings, as well as re-post, edit and delete postings. Ads can include graphics and some HTML formatting, and you can have users either email you through your business email address or through an anonymous email address.
2. Find people who need your services.The Gigs section is where people looking for help post their needs. You can browse through here and respond to potential clients with your business pitch. Similarly, the Jobs section can be used as a tool for finding clients. Although posts to this section are generally looking for employees, there’s often a good case to be made to employers for outsourcing to your business instead.
3. Grow your staff.By either posting your own Job ad, or browsing through resumes, you can hire full-time, part-time, permanent, temporary or contract help for your business.
4. Find equipment, locations, supplies.Craiglist’s classified ads include a multitude of categories, as well as a listing of free giveaways.
5. Look for and post business events.You can use Craigslist’s Events Calendar and Community Activities section to find local events of interest to you or your business, or advertise your own business event and draw new clients.
6. Communicate with other like-minded business folk.Craigslist hosts forums on a wide range of topics. If there’s one related to your business, you can swap information, ask questions, answer other people’s questions or just monitor what’s on people’s minds.

This infomercial comes with one warning – there is so much to see on Craigslist that you can easily get distracted and lose track of time. One of my favourite daydream time wasters is to go into the Craigslist in some exotic city, and see who’s looking for a house-swap.

Tools to keep your email marketing out of spam, and reduce the spam you receive

by Molly Morris, memDesigns

Email marketing is a great tool for reaching new customers and communicating with existing customers. If you are already engaging in email marketing, you are probably putting a great deal of effort into designing an effective marketing piece and generating a useful mailing list. But all that effort is for naught if your emails aren’t getting through to your intended recipients.

The tech reviewer CNet recently reported on a large-scale study of email spam that found that in 2007 95% of all email sent was spam. This is up from 70% in 2004, and a mere 5% in 2001.

So what can you do to ensure your email does not become part of that statistic?

First of all, make sure you are using a reputable email service provider. Just as single email addresses can be blacklisted because they are found to be a source of spam, so too, when a large volume of spam is traced as being sent from a single mail server, that server might then be blacklisted as being a known source of spam. If that is the case, it doesn’t matter that you are sending legitimate email that follows all the rules – it won’t stand a chance of getting delivered.

Chances are, though, that you are using a reputable service provider. That being the case, there are several steps to take that will decrease the chances that your email will be tagged as spam.

1. Ask regular email recipients to add you to their safe senders or white lists.
2. Don’t send an email message to 50 or more addresses without using an email list service.
3. In the Subject field of your email:
   - Don’t leave it blank.
   - Don’t use punctuation, especially exclamation marks.
   - Don’t put any words in all capitalized letters.
   - Don’t use spamming words like “free”, “offer”, “medication”, “prescription” and “mortgage”.
   - Don’t use numbers or dollar amounts.
4. If you want to check that your email is clean before sending it, try these online tools to check your email’s deliverability rating:
   http://www.contactology.com/check_mqs.php
   http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/.

What about all the spam you are getting?

If you have a website, then the most important element on your site is a way for prospective customers to reach you – your Contact Us information. If that contact information includes your email address, it’s likely being picked up by spambots – programs designed to collect email addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited email. There are some things you can do to allow your email address to be visible, but not accessible to spambots.

1. If your email address appears in full, rather than an “Email us” or “Click here” reference, rather than having it appear as text, you can turn your address into an image that looks like text. A free online email address image generator that lets you customize how your address will look can be found at http://www.spam-proof-email-generator.com/.
2. There’s more to your email address than just what’s seen on the screen. There is the coding around it that takes the user to their email program and inserts your address. That coding also contains your email address and can be picked up by spambots. However, you can hide it by encoding it as a decimal character entity rather than real text. Again there is a free online tool that will generate the code at http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html.
3. Although there’s not much you can do to get off the lists you’re already on, you can reduce the spam you receive from those lists by blacklisting the senders and contacting your email service provider to find out what additional spam filters they can offer you.

Keep up your email marketing, but take whatever steps you can to ensure you’re reaching your market.

Netscape Web Browser: 1994-2008, R.I.P.

by Molly Morris, memDesigns 

..and don’t panic if you use Netscape – there are options  

In December, when AOL announced that it would cease supporting the Nestcape web browser and no longer provide updates for that program, I really wanted to breathe a sigh of relief because browser compatibility is an ever-present thorn in web designers’ sides. Why? Because every browser has its own interpretation (sometimes a complete translation) of your web page.

Take, for example, this page, which recently gave me a certain degree of apoplexy.

Here’s how it looked in Internet Explorer:

And here’s how Netscape read the very same page:

With some reconfiguration of the coding, we, of course, made the page look almost the same in all browsers.

This is not an atypical result. The worst case is when a site that looks fine in IE displays only a blank page in Netscape. Generally, of all the web browsers, IE is the most intuitive (or forgiving), usually displaying a page as the designer intended.

Until some standardization comes to bear on web browser engines, this is simply a phenomenon web designers are going to have to live with.

Alas, there is really no respite in site, because, wherever you read “Netscape” in this article, you can substitute “Firefox”., as it uses the same engine as Netscape. And although Netscape has experienced a rapid decline in users, Firefox seems to be on the rise.

Should you be worried if you’re a Netscape user?

There’s nothing to worry about. The browser won’t disappear and won’t become unusable. But AOL will no longer issue security patches or upgrades for Netscape – which means that in time you may become vulnerable to nasty technology, like viruses and spyware, from which your browser will not be protected. This is a good time to start looking at alternative browsers.

What’s the difference and does it matter which web browser you use?

No, it’s entirely a matter of preference – usually a preference for the look of the browser itself – toolbars, add-ons, etc. – rather than how the browser displays web pages. In a world of perfectly constructed web pages, everything will look the same to you.

Here’s a quick overview of some basic elements of the most popular browsers, based on the most current version of each., indicating that they’re really all much the same,

Browser	Bookmark Management	Auto-complete forms	Search Engine Toolbar	Tabbed Browsing	Pop-up Blocking	Page Zooming
I.E.	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü
I.E. for Mac	ü	ü	û	û	û	û
Firefox	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü	û
Netscape	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü	û
Opera	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü
Safari	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü

If you’re a Microsoft user, you almost certainly have Internet Explorer (remember the anti-trust mess Microsoft got into over bundling IE with Windows?) All of the other browsers are freely available from the Internet, so you can try out as many as you want – or at least as many as your hard-drive space will permit.

You Don’t Need Glasses

by Molly Morris, memDesigns

Well, ok, I can’t really say that you don’t need new glasses – that’s between you and your optometrist. And chances are your monitor’s working just fine, although there’s always a better model out there. But if the reason you’re thinking of new glasses or a new monitor is because you’re having trouble reading web pages, then there may be an easier and cheaper solution for you.

Did you know that, in many cases, you can choose how text is displayed on your web-browser?

First things first. For a good web page on which to run this test, go to http://news.google.ca/. Now, if you’re using Internet Explorer, click on View in the toolbar, then Text Size and you should see this:

 

Netscape works in a similar way, but your choices are Increase, Decrease or Normal.

By selecting Largest, Larger, Medium, Smaller, or Smallest, (or Increase or Decrease) you are telling your web-browser how to display text. So, if you’re having trouble reading a web page, simply increase the text size.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work. If you’ve done this on a different web page, and the text size hasn’t changed, it’s because the author used absolute text sizes, rather than relative text sizes. Web designers can specify an actual font size on a web page (for example 10 pixels), or relative font sizes (a percentage of your browser’s default text size.) But an absolute pixel-specific font size will look quite different on screens with different resolutions.

Up until fairly recently it was pretty easy to know what screen resolution to target a web page for, making it a reasonable practice to specify absolute text sizes. In the early Windows ‘95 days, most computers were using a resolution of 640 x 480 (pixels, that is). If you come across a web page now that was designed for that resolution, it will likely look huge to you, and you will definitely need to do a lot of scrolling to see the whole page. After the release of Windows XP, the most common screen resolution was 800 x 600, and web authors often fixed the font size to work best on that resolution. When larger screens became the standard, default screen resolution increased again to 1024 x 768. Today, however, screen sizes are all over the map – laptop monitors can be 3840 pixels wide and more, and palmtops can be as small as 100 pixels wide. And therein lies the problem. A font that is set at 10 pixels, takes up a much larger percentage of a screen that displays 800 x 600 pixels than it does on a screen that displays three times as many pixels, thus looking much larger in smaller resolutions than in larger resolutions.

So why do web authors still sometimes impose an absolute text size on a web page? Usually it’s because they are going for a very specific look and feel for their website, and having a fluid text size would compromise that look. They have probably analyzed web stats to determine the most commonly used browsers and resolutions being used to display their websites and designed a page that looks best in a specific resolution. But as the possibilities for screen resolutions are ever-increasing, it is less advisable to design a site that looks best in a specific resolution. Increasingly, we have to design sites that are simply more flexible and allow the user more control. And the way to do that is by using relative text sizes, and giving some control back to the user.

If you are embarking on your first website project, consider who will be viewing your website and on what equipment, and work with your designer to develop an approach to text size that will cater to your audience. If you have a website that’s in need of some updating anyway, this may be a good time to look at how user-friendly your text is and make some changes if you think it will improve the viewing experience on your website.

A Wiki What?

A Primer to The Wonderful World of Wiki 
by Molly Morris, memDesigns

Pop quiz from last month’s article: What is the easiest way for me to find the definition of wiki? Answer – type “define: wiki” in the Google search bar. Having done that, I now know that the word “wiki” comes from a Hawaiian word that means “quick”, and a wiki is a collaborative website that can be quickly edited by visitors.

Wikipedia is an online free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers from around the world. You, too, can be an author. Because of its free-content and collaborative nature, you might wonder how accurate the articles in Wikipedia can be. After all, we all know people who like to think they are authorities on a subject, but how much stock would we put in their expertise?  In fact, the reliability of Wikipedia articles is better than you might think. In 2005, the British journal, Nature, conducted a peer-reviewed study of the accuracy of 42 comparable scientific articles from each of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, and found four errors in each source. What’s impressive is that because of the open-content and “wiki” nature of Wikipedia, the errors that were found in Wikipedia’s articles were immediately corrected upon identification.

In addition to the collaborative encyclopedia, there are several other open-content projects which deliver a cornucopia of information. Below is a list of Wiki-reference sites with short descriptions provided by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (owner of these Wiki-sites).

Wikiquote: Can’t remember who said it? This is a free online compendium of quotations from notable people and creative works in every language, including sources (where known), translations of non-English quotes, and links to Wikipedia for further information! The English version of Wikiquote has 13,944 pages so far, with many thousands of quotations and proverbs.

Wikispecies: Is there a budding biologist in your life? Wikispecies is an open, free directory of species. It covers Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Bacteria, Archaea, Protista and all other forms of life. So far they have 113,150 articles.

Wikinews: This is a free news source, similar to Google News or any other online news source with the exception that the stories are not from mainstream news sources (although mainstream sources are often referenced.)

Wikibooks: Here is where you can find a free collection of open content textbooks that anyone can edit, including a Wikimedia Cookbook and WikiJunior (see below.) Since its founding, volunteers have written about 27,384 modules in a multitude of textbooks.

WikiJunior: The aim of this project is to produce age-appropriate, non-fiction books for children from birth to age 12. These books are richly illustrated with photographs, diagrams, sketches, and original drawings. WikiJunior books are produced by a worldwide community of writers, teachers, students and young people all working together. If the words “science fair” strike fear in your heart, you must check out Wikijunior’s Big Book of Fun Science Experiments.

Wikiversity: This is a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities.

Wiktionary: The lexical companion to Wikipedia, this collaborative project has produced a free, multilingual dictionary with definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations.

Wikisource: This online library of free content publications collected and maintained by the community can be searched by genre or subject matter, and includes some 200 audio files (including our family favourite, Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll.)

Commons: If you’re looking for free image, sound or video files, this database of over 2 million media files is a good place to start. Each piece of media comes with copyright and licensing information, but almost all of it is freely usable.

With all this information at your fingertips, you should be able to get the answer to just about any question. So, wiki-away!

Everything is Searchable

by Molly Morris, memDesigns 

I was recently asked – “Who owns the Internet?” It’s a good question with an interesting answer which I wanted to write about, but you’re going to have to wait until next month. In the process of doing some research on the history of the web, I got terribly distracted and spent too much time playing with some new Google search utilities I tripped over. Since many of these tools were new to me, I want to share them with you. So here is a list of Google search tools and interesting ways of doing searches that you may not have heard of before. Word of warning: Don’t get started down this road if you don’t have a little time to spare!

Calculations: Google has a built-in calculator function. Enter any mathematical calculation (2514*76+9) in the Google search box and your first result will be the answer. (Remember – ‘*’ is the multiplication symbol on the computer.)

Currency Conversion: Google also has a built-in currency converter. Enter the conversion you’re looking for in the search box (for instance ‘100 CAD in USD’ or ‘100 Canadian dollars in American dollars’) and voila – an answer we haven’t seen in over 30 years!

Definitions: To see a definition of a word, type the word ‘define’ followed by a colon and a space and then the word you want defined (for instance ‘define: entrepreneur’). Your results will show a list of definitions and their sources.

Weather: Just type in the word ‘weather’ followed by a space and the location for which you want weather information (for instance ‘weather Palm Beach’ – yes, I’m thinking about somewhere warm because winter is coming to Toronto). In most cases you’ll get a 4-day visual forecast, but for some locations you’ll simply get a link to the local weather information website.

Specialized Number Searches: Here’s where I really lost some time this morning. Not that I was searching for anything useful whatsoever, I was just amazed at the accuracy of this search tool. Google’s search engine recognizes certain sets of numbers as specific number types. You can currently search UPS tracking numbers, FedEx tracking numbers, Vehicle ID (VIN) numbers, UPC codes and telephone area codes simply by entering the numbers only (you don’t need to tell Google what kind of a number it is) into the search box. You can also search patent numbers, but for best results you should enter the word ‘patent’ and a space before the number (for instance ‘patent 20070128317’ – martini popsicles – why didn’t I think of that?) 

Google also has several specialized search engines, many of which you probably already use (like Images, Maps and News). There are some new ones though, either just out or in Beta version that are interesting new additions.

Google Blog Search – www.google.com/blogsearch – searches for topics within blogs.

Google Scholar – www.google.com/scholar  – searches scholarly literature by author, topic or title. The results contain full bibliographic information.

Google Books – www.google.com/books – searches the full text of books. If a book is in the public domain (no longer subject to copyright) you can page through the entire book, download it, save it, and print it to PDF.

Google Alerts – www.google.com/alerts – provides email updates on the latest relevant Google search results based on your choice of topic (i.e. developing news stories, industry news, celebrities or sports teams).

Did you ever wonder what the I’m Feeling Lucky button next to the Google Search button is for? If you enter a search term and press I’m Feeling Lucky, you will be taken directly to the web page of the first search result.

If you know of any other neat search capabilities, please let me know and I will share them on this blog.

Who thinks you need a website?

by Molly Morris, memDesigns

Have you ever had a customer ask you “Do you have a website?” or “Can I go on your website to see samples of your work?” If you’ve answered “no” or “not yet”, did you do so with the sinking feeling that you may have just lost a customer?

If that has been an experience of yours, then you already know that, in fact, you believe you need a website.

Recent studies have indicated that the Internet is the preferred information source for 64% of Canadian consumers. A 2003 Canadian study showed that 79% of Internet users expect a business to have a website that will provide information on their product or service. Furthermore, 47% of Internet users say that they are more likely to purchase a product or service from a business that provides information on that product or service online, than they are likely to purchase from a business with no web presence. With respect to B2B sales, Statistics Canada reported that in 2003, 37% of companies made business purchases online, up from 32% in 2002 and more than double the number that did so in 2000.

So, it’s clear that your customers don’t just think you need a website but expect you to have one.

From 2001 to 2005, the number of small businesses owning a website increased 37%, more than triple the increase seen in medium and large businesses (Strategis – Key Small Business Statistics, January 2007). The main reason cited for owning a website is to increase business, which does not necessarily mean through direct e-commerce, but includes increasing a business’s visibility and bringing information to a business’s customers and clients.

Clearly, small business owners are increasingly seeing the need for a website.

The trend towards website interactivity has brought a new dynamic to websites of all sizes, an element once available only to large corporate sites involved in e-commerce. Now, even small businesses are increasingly adding mailing lists, RSS feeds and blogs to their websites, increasing their potential clients’ involvement with and time spent at their websites. No longer are websites for small businesses merely electronic brochures – they are now used as a means of interacting with clients and providing them with service even before they have made formal contact with the business.

So, who thinks you need a website? Everyone!