By Brendan Dekker

If you’re the type of person that gets confused with words like aesthetics, visual tension, fluidity, dominance, and balance then this article is for you. In many industries (and the web industry in particular), it is extremely important that a designer and a client can communicate their thoughts and ideas in a very efficient manner. It is often difficult for a designer to grasp a business concept, as well as for a businessman to understand the importance of good design. This is a gap that must be closed for a project to be executed efficiently.

It must first be established that the client/designer relationship be founded in TRUST, each one knowing undoubtedly that the other is good at what they do. Contrary to popular belief, a designer’s job is not merely to make something look nice… that job belongs to an artist. A designer’s efforts attempt to merge functionality and ease of use with style and attractiveness, as well as to do so in a way that fits with your company’s image. This is not an easy task. At the same time, it becomes the clients responsibly to communicate to the designer their wants, needs, and initial ideas (if they have any) BEFORE the design process has begun. There is nothing more inefficient than a client telling a designer what they want AFTER the efforts have been made to create a good design.

The next step is communication throughout the design process. If your designer starts rambling off an assortment of terms that don’t make sense to you, stop them. The designer’s job is not to confuse the client. Don’t be afraid to ask questions to find out what something means. After all, the designer is working for you. In contrast to this, always remember that you trust your designer. Why would you have hired them in the first place if you didn’t? If efforts are made to communicate ideas throughout the process in an organized manner, the result will effectively be a happy client. If a “happy client” is something you’d like to be, it is important to remember three key terms… trust, organization, and communication.

What are meta tags you ask?
It is kind of hard to start out without a brief description of what meta tags are. You have probably heard about the importance of the ‘keyword’, but what does that mean? The meta tag is a way to place site relevant information on a web page without it distracting the visitor, and making sure a passing search engine will find the content, hopefully adding you to that particular search engine’s list of search results. So, in short, meta tags are part of a web page’s code that is only meant for search engines.

Why do you care?
In the past it was thought that meta tags, or meta data was the way to get ranked higher on a search result at you favorite search engine. If you had site relevant information in your meta tags, you should place higher on a search than a site that did not use meta tags, or a site that had tags that were not related to that site’s content. But then the abuse started, sites placing keywords in the meta tags that not only were not related to the site’s content, but since the tags were commonly searched on the search engines, these sites started ranking higher just for this fact. So if you did a search for “ice cream” you were given a result of an adult-orientated site. Obliviously not related to your search, but since the web designers knew how to manipulate the primitive search engines, you were stuck with the fact that you had to manually search you search results. This defeated the entire logic of searching, since it still led the searcher to do most of the work.

So what happened?
In late 2002, most search engines released information that they had stopped supporting the keyword meta tag for input for search relevant content. “In the past we have indexed the meta keywords tag but have found that the high incidence of keyword repetition and spam made it an unreliable indication of site content and quality. We do continue to look at this issue, and may re-include them if the perceived quality improves over time,” said Jon Glick, AltaVista’s director of internet search. Many search engines followed Alta Vista, but not all.

So now what do I do?
Since the ‘keyword” meta tag is not really supported by any major search engines, what does this mean to the design and optimization of you web page? There are other meta tags available to use and that are supported by search engines, such as the ‘title’ tag, the ‘robots’ tag, and the ‘description’ tag, not to mention some others. Having other tags in your page is helpful for the search engines, it just may not help you placement in their rankings. Spending time developing the title and description tags on you pages so that your page content is clear and informative is much more important. When the search engine indexes your site, the information in the title and description will be benificial to the searcher, and in turn, be beneficial to you.

In conclusion…
Since there is no real way to guarantee search engine ranking placement, and since meta tags aren’t the “secret ingredient” to maximize those rankings, what have we learned? Meta tags are useful for delivering data to search engines that is relevant to the content of a page. Meta tags will help with the display of your content in a search, just not the actual ranking position. There are alot of things to consider to optimize your web page, but spending endless time creating meta tags, especially keywords, is no longer worth it. The focus of content on the page is much more important, and there are other ways to optimize your site, but that is a whole other article, or few.

You’re probably thinking about your new website in terms of what it will be and do.  It’s equally important to consider it in terms of what it won’t be and shouldn’t be.

Imagine delivering sales presentations as epic poems, and telling your spouse about your love for her with a PowerPoint presentation.  Obviously, it won’t work well.  The web’s exactly like any other medium– ideally suited for certain tasks, clunky for others, and downright silly for some.  If you go into the web development process with a clear understanding of what websites aren’t good replacements for, you’ll make choices which produce a better website.
Websites are NOT desktop applications.
If you’re looking at developing a website as a replacement for software that once ran on your internal network or PCs, you may come in dreaming that your new website will be essentially the same environment, only living in a Firefox or IE window.  This mindset, carried too far, can result in significant added complexity, and potentially limit the benefits you’re getting by moving to the web.  It often means ignoring the things which make the Web a usable place.

First, users have far more control over the flow of a website session than if you work with a desktop application.    Although you can provide navigation, the odds are fairly strong that users will instead click the “back” and “forward” buttons to make their way through a multiple stage process.  Some users tend to open new browser windows at certain steps in the procedure.  This becomes dangerous when you use frames or AJAX technology to provide a site where parts of the site stay in place as you change others.  If you click “Back” on the browser instead of the site’s own “Go Back” control, you may find yourself returned to the beginning of a multi-stage task, or worse yet, stranded with no easy route back to the start or where you were before.

The news isn’t all bad there:  you can often design to exploit this situation.  A user who can open a new browser window is less likely to become stranded because they can’t get the information needed to proceed, and some tasks obviously make sense to present as “click the back button and try again”.

Second, websites should be “self-contained” when possible.  Even if you can’t have the databases and the code on the same machine, you can at least strive to move the whole assembly onto remote hosting.  Many desktop applications, especially for a business’s internal use, rely on a server for the office.  Every PC in the office draws information from that.  If you follow the same model for your website, you end up still having to take care of the office server, AND constantly monitor its connectivity to the website.

Finally, performance characteristics are going to be different on the Web.  Desktop applications are frequently processor- or disc-limited, but graphics are essentially free.  In comparison, web servers generally have adequate processor and disc resources, which are constrained by fairly limited transfer performance to the user.  You might find you get better responsiveness by devoting more time to processing data, if it can avoid the transfer of unnecessary large images or intermediate tables.

-Websites are NOT PDF files.  You all know PDF files– those little “land mines” of the web, which unexpectedly spawn a slow-to-load plugin and a 5Mb download.  Their saving grace is that they generally look the same on every computer you view them on.   If a 1040 has to look a certain way, fine, use a PDF.  If the document is really destined for printing, then it’s okay to force specific font sizes and page layouts that look good when printed.  There are, however, just as many situations– such as product specifications and data sheets– where the target is the screen– and site owners seem incapable of converting these documents to true Web documents.

Replacing a bloated PDF with a comparable set of HTML and images often results in faster loading, improved browser compatibility and stability (with no external plugin required, browser crashes and hangs are much less common), and less clumsy navigation (PDFs tend to throw off the “back” button’s behaviour)

Even those site owners who avoid using PDFs directly often want to turn their web site into the functional equivalent of a PDF file– they’ll attempt to force the use of certain fonts, colours, and in some cases even browsers in an attempt to control the presentation of the page.  While a reasonable amount of corporate style is entirely acceptable, and can improve your image online, you can’t hold a lot of hope for everyone seeing your site exactly the same.  Eventually you will have a user on a mobile phone, or a person with fonts enlarged to accomodate weak eyes, and your vision will collapse.  In that situation, the best approach is to plan to let it collapse gracefully– ensure the navigation and content can still be read even under adverse conditions.

-Websites are NOT TV commercials.

I’m sure you’ve went to more than one website which had a huge Flash introduction, followed by two screens of text which add up to maybe three paragraphs.  This is the web’s answer to a 30-second TV spot.

Think about what you can’t do in a 30-second TV spot– these sites have the same problem.
-You can’t sell effectively to multiple audiences.
-You can’t provide detailed specifications.
-You can’t build a community or resource that people will come back to.  How often do you watch old commercials for their informative value?

Some people might hope to use websites primarily to build brand awareness, or as a teaser, by which to “force” your potential customers into contacting you for more information.   Both of those assumptions are naive.

First, it’s only practical to build brand awareness alone when you’ve got a huge audience.  This is the mindset behind Super Bowl ads– if you’re lucky, enough people will remember you’re the belching hamster company and see what you’re about.  An ad on the Super Bowl reaches 60% of the TV audience at the time.  Even the most popular websites– Google and Yahoo– reach 30% or less of the web-user population on a given day, according to traffic-analysis firm Alexa.  For a more typical example, the site rated as the 37,249th most popular site on May 8th, 2007 only reached about 11 out of every million web users that day.

Second, users resent being steered into making contact with you.  Bandwidth and storage have never been cheaper, so there’s very little excuse not to provide detailed information on your website.  If everything is a “call us for more details” message, many users will bounce.  They’ll either be concerned that the company isn’t professional or capable enough to adequately fill out its own website, or suspicious that they’ll have to sit through solicitations once they make contact with you.

-Websites are not TV itself either.

People have been trying to turn the web into TV at least since Internet Explorer 4 and its “Channel Bar”.  It’s a terrible metaphor.  The Web offers so much more than TV.

-Television tends to offer a selection of content that’s a mile wide but six inches deep, while the Internet is both wide and deep.  If I want more information on a subject once a show has ended, the show itself rarely provides me with options.  A well-planned website will provide both its own resources and links to quality sites, allowing me to go as far as I want in the topic.

-There are no “Channels” on the Internet.  If I turn on a TV station, particularly a cable one, they’re going to stick fairly close to their target subject matter.  It’s not like they’re suddenly going to make pastry on the Cartoon Network.  This is perfect for a passive medium– the program changes every 30 minutes for you, but doesn’t wander far from home.

The Internet is more active.  You choose both when to leave one site and where you’re going next.  Therefore, the click of a link corresponds to BOTH the click of a remote (switching to an entirely new line of content) and a change of show (switching to new content on the same theme)  If you start organizing your site content into “channels”, it tends to encourage to restrictions on navigation, trying to ensure that the user doesn’t jump into a different “channel” too easily.

A “channel” mindset may also result in dividing content in ways that don’t match up with user’s expectations, just to fit into the existing set of channels, or an imposing proliferation of channels.

A good example of this is the otherwise excellent Craigslist.  They organized their classified ads into types of merchandise.  These are classic channels– once you get in one, the navigation doesn’t provide an obvious way to jump into another.  As a result, if you’re looking for an item which doesn’t fit clearly into one of the categories, it’s common to make several wrong guesses before finding the “right” category.  Furthermore, once you find the “right” category, you’ll probably miss any ads which were placed in the “wrong” category.

If content has to be divided, there are some interesting approaches which can help to lessen these problems:

-Wider categories reduce the ambiguity about where the desired content will be found.
-A site could present a category and still have links to its conceptual “neighbours”.  Alternatively, the default view could include the neighbouring categories to ensure overlapping content is made available.
-Heirarchical categories (like many online shops) avoid the risk of a menu with 500 categories.
-Tags instead of fixed categories allow users to arrange the content in ways that make sense to them.

The key to successful web development is to recognize and cooperate with the foibles and strengths of the medium.  If you choose to design by metaphor, ensure that you’re not becoming caught up in the parts of the metaphor which won’t work on the web.