Matt Cutts on building good websites

Google's Matt Cutts talks at a workshop about building a better website.

sandcurves

Hey, gained a new follower. Well, if you look at the dates on this blog you can see I don't come here often. But I do plan soon to kick off my own blog called Sandcurves. It will have lots of things relating to blogging, web design, photography and photo editing and anything else that I have an interest in. I am in the process of changing my whole life to do more web/photographic stuff and less tour guiding. Stick around, I will post when the blog is up and running (perhaps another two or three weeks)

the url is http://www.sandcurves.com/

I am trying a new favicon

I decided to try a new favicon on my Website. I still only have it on the index page and some of the sandbox pages that I use for testing. It's a leaf. I love it. Do you?

I guess, after a lot of reading, that xforms are still not used by most browsers. I feel a little frustrated because I have such a limited amount of things that I can use on my server. Perhaps it's time I changed. Trouble is, I get it for free from my father-in-law. Free is a really good price. But he isn't interested in loading php or python or anything else because he just creates pure html/database websites and uses FrontPage for everything.

What I'm working on

I am busy working on my website at the moment. I thought I would post a list of goals here so that I can refer to it when people are trying to help me.

My website is at http://www.frantic-naturalist.com/

I created a folder called Sandbox, which has the pages that I am working on.

The main page that I have been working on is http://www.frantic-naturalist.com/sandbox/test_ul_nav.htm

My goals:

• Well, you can tell from the name...make a drop down menu using the <ul> tags - This part is done
• New look - I can't resist. It's always changing. It's getting there, but you can still expect some tweeking
• Totally get away from Tables for the page's design. Why, I just want to.
• Comply with the sticktest w3c standards that I can manage (xhtml and css)
• Use xml for my bird lifelist and the nature tours directory
• Use xforms for comments or well, whatever. To learn what xforms are all about, what is the support like for them from browsers
• In terms of content I would like to divide the website up a bit more from the start, in order to have the directory as one part, but Namibia info as a big part of the site.

I am also working on the following pages, so you can have a look.

http://www.frantic-naturalist.com/sandbox/sandbox.xml

http://www.frantic-naturalist.com/sandbox/sandbox.htm

The time frame depends on how much else I have to do. Any help or advice, or even questions, would be appreciated.

Web site development - your measuring stick

Anyone who is developing content for the Internet needs to consider who is going to read it, and what they are going to get out of it.

To that end, as I am developing a website, I have done a lot of reading on usability. I am very interested in creating the best website that I can.

There are several URLs that I keep going back to. They are my measuring stick to see if I am on track. I will not say that the website is perfect. Certainly not. But I think it has been very useful to look at things like this. Here are some links to super useful stuff before you publish anything on the Internet, read:

Usability 101: Introduction to Usability
A definitive source of information about making your website work for an audience on the Internet.

50 Web Usability Tips that Help You Attract and Retain Visitors to Your Website
It is on the DoshDosh blog, which itself is worth following if you are serious about your presence on the Internet, especially if you are blogging. Each time I start to work on something big on the Internet, I come back to this post. I find it one of the most useful I have read on the Internet.

The other thing is your own common sense. If you are blogging or doing a website for a specific audience, perhaps you know more about the reading habits of that audience than those 'usability' experts do. If you are in a very academic field, for example, your readers may read more of the content of the website than the norm on the Internet.

Lastly, use your friends. Other's eyes can be great to help you find and weed out the obvious mistakes that you missed. The most important thing to ask them is, did you actually read it all. If not, delete some, make it more readable, break it up more with useful headers and so on.

What I am up to

Well, I haven't done anything to promote this site. It isn't even linked to my profile yet. But somehow people find it. So I must post in it. I was hoping that it would live in a secret corner of the internet until I had put in some really useful posts.

Seriously, I will not post to often. It's more an outlet, and when I have something that I am working on, their will be occasional floods of stuff.

So currently I am building a website. Frantic Naturalist Nature Tours Directory. I am having a lot of fun with it. HTML (and CSS) is so much like Lego blocks. You can build what you like. I hope to at least post a provisional bit of the site by tonight (in about 10 hours from now.) If you live in Africa you become all to aware that many people on the internet are in different time zones. Actually, I guess that goes for a lot of the world??

Anyway, when the website is up, and you would like to have a look, you should find the HTML very fairly easy to understand. I comment a lot. If I use id or class or whatever tags, the names I make up usually make sense (as opposed to stuff done on a html editor.) I coded the whole thing in a text editor (Notepad.) So it is really basic.

It's a really fun website for me to run, as it's sort of a combination of my interests - computer stuff and nature/travel stuff.