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Well folks, it’s long been touted that my company will eventually not have a requirement for inhouse application development skills and when the final release of the new IT Strategy contained the following sentences & excerpts I pretty much knew that sooner or later the curtains would come down on my three year (circa) software development role with ESB International.

In accordance with the target Application Architecture IT & BP Function will not invest in the development of Application Development skills.

Buy Not Build - Purchase application software unless a substantial business case can be made for the development of a system in-house.

Minimise the Level of Application Development - An overall application architecture objective is to minimise the level of application development.

Rather than wait around until the development work completely dries up (and not wanting to move into the ‘Business’ side of things) I made a decision to resign and move over to the Algarve for nine or so months on an extended working holiday, in fact I’m ‘working’ (cough…) my notice as we ’speak’ and will be finished in ESBI on the 4th of April.

As for the Algarve, well the family have an apartment over there and I’ve managed to get a small bit of part time work with a Faro based web development company which should give me two-three days of work a week, of course I’m going to be looking after my usual quota of SEO work too. Additionally I’ve also got some Dublin based contacts keeping an eye out for any SEO/dev work which I may be able to take care of remotely so I should have enough bits and bobs work wise to keep me going.

On the three or four days I’m not working well what can I say… the place has 3000 hours of sunshine a year, full course meals (with wine) can be gotten for 15 euro-ish, bottles of decent beer cost about 30 cent, the beaches are magnificant, the females are magnificant and best of all the place is full of us Irish.

All the fun begins when I arrive on the 9th of April courtesy of a €12.99 Ryanair flight (thanks Michael…) so if anyone happens to be over in the Algarve anytime from mid April to the end of the year look me up.  If not don’t worry I’ll send you guys a postcard.

The IT industry like most industries has its fair share of abbreviations, jargon, keywords and general ’shop talk’. With that in mind it surprises me how many recruitment websites can’t handle searches for simple IT strings like ‘c#’, ‘c++’, ‘asp.net’, ‘.net’ etc. I think the IT industry in particular makes extensive use of the web for job searching so all recruitment sites should facilitate say a c# developer who wants to search for ‘c#’. Have a look at recruitment sites like elanIT.ie, CPL.ie, EmployIreland.com which were some of the sites I spotted which couldn’t handle most if not all of the above search strings.

Google and the others can handle them pretty well these days, but there are certain things you can do to make the lives of the search engines ever so slightly easier. The main things which pop into my mind at the moment include the below, which incidentally are not in any particular order of obviousness.

Use Keywords in the PDF filenames
Having keywords in your filename helps the search engines to better understand the contents of your PDF.

Don’t create PDF files from scans
If you scan a document and save it as a PDF. The document will be an image which search engines cannot understand. Create your PDF from textual content.

Use well structured keyword rich content
This is a given for information stored in any format. Use your main keywords a couple of times throughout the body of your content. Split the content into well defined paragraphs and headings. Give special attention to the first line or two of text on page one of your PDF.

Complete the ‘Document Properties’ information for all PDFs
When creating a PDF go to File > Properties to update it’s information. Updatable information includes title and description fields. It is widely believed that Google and perhaps many of the other search engines can read this information and may be using it for a) determining ranking and b) displaying listing snippets.

Link to your PDF with its Keywords and or Title
Don’t ever have ‘Click here’ as the actual link text pointing to a PDF. If your PDF is about gardening, business loans, soccer or whatever well then put them keywords into the anchor text.

There are a couple of good blog posts and articles which cover this topic in a fair bit of depth, if you have the time I recommend throwing the eye over the following pages:

Make your PDFs work well with Google (and other search engines) located @
http://www.acrobatusers.com/articles/2006/02/pdf_for_google/pdf_for_google.php

Eleven Tips For Optimizing PDFs For Search Engines located @
http://searchengineland.com/070912-095906.php 

Just noticed the other day that Guinness Enterprise Centre based Internet marketing company Ring John has put a new version of their website live. I’m not sure if it’s the final version of the redesign but it appears to be a big improvement on the previous site. The old version used the very much clichéd variety of stock images of some very good looking blonde women to ‘entice’ all us one track ponies to contact them. I personally think the use of images like that is A) very template-ish (new word) and commonplace and B) so tack that it actually turns me off a company.

Thankfully the new site doesn’t use them. The new homepage puts emphasis on what the company does, with PPC and SEO services seemingly getting more prominent positioning than other services available. Of course the customer capture form is present above the fold, any online marketing company worth their salt will have a similiar page setup. The site is easy to navigate and seems to have a decent information architecture behind it which sees each service page breaking off into well defined sub service pages.

The site kind of reminds me of WebTrade’s website, note the emphasis on the ‘kind of’. The one thing I don’t like about the site is how the link to the blog is buried on the bottom footer. Is this another case of a company overlooking the massive benefits of pushing their business blog on their website? Blogs are an excellent way for potential customers to get to know your expertise, approach, vibe etc. for that reason I nearly would have thrown the blog link up onto the main header navigation bar similar to the way IQ Content and RedFlyMarketing have done.

Of course what I think about a certain site doesn’t really matter, what matters at the end of the day is whether or not a site works. The main metric as far as I’m concerned in measuring how well a site works is conversion rate, so if this redesign or indeed any redesign improves conversion rate that redesign should be considered a success. Are things ever that black and white though?

It is estimated that 1 in 10 men worldwide are colour blind, additionally it is thought that 1 in 100 women are colour blind. If you design for the estimated 10% of users who are still on 800 * 600 resolutions well then why not develop with colour blind users in mind too?

There are three main types of colour blindess, and I’ll get to them in a moment but in an overall sense colour blindness relates to how some people cannot distinguish between certain colours. The graphic to the left (credit to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_blindness) shows how colour blind people see certain colours.

The three main types of colour blindness are:

Tritanopia is a very rare form of colour blindness. It revolves around the inability of a person to discriminate between blue and yellow hues.

Protanopia is a more common form of colour blindness and effects people who have a defective vision of red and confusion of red with green or bluish green.

Deuteranopia is the most common form of colour blindness. Deuteranopia also relates to the inability of a person to tell certain greens and reds apart.

Remember all colours are made up of certain percentages of the three primary colours, red, blue and yellow. This means despite the fact that Deuteranopia (for example) relates to confusion of greens and reds it will ’show itself’ in many secondary and tertiary colours too as usually they contain some amount of green and red. In this respect classifying types of colour blindess as blue/yellow or red/green can be slightly misleading.

What does this mean?
The fact that some form of colour blindness effects a relatively large proportion of the population means you must factor this in when designing your website. If you make extensive use of colours to differentiate between different elements on a page, the page may become unusable by some visitors. You should therefore follow the advice of all the accessibility gurus and be certain not to use colours alone to convey important information. Practical tips to implement this might include:

Use high contrast colours next to each other in your designs. Black text on white background works best.

Specifically try to avoid using red and green next to each when the colours are significant within?your designs.

If you must use any hues of?red and green next to each other always provide a textual cue too.

Make?important text stand out not only with colour difference but also with bold, italics, underline etc.

Follow the above but also ‘vet’ your designs as outlined in the next paragraph.

Tools to ‘vet’ your designs
Take a screenshot of your site and grayscale it in your favourite graphics program. Does it still look good (and work) without colour?

Run your URL/screenshot through Vischeck. Vischeck is a way of showing you what things look like to someone who is colour blind. The tool is free and is located at http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/. The URL mode is a bit ‘flaky’ particularly if your site makes extensive use of complex CSS, flash, javascript etc., so if you have the time (make the time if you don’t) I recommend taking an screenshot of your designs and running graphic mode instead.

Run your screenshot through the Etre Colour Blindness Simulator tool. This tool is similar to Vischeck.

Run your URL through the Wickline.org Colour filter tool located at http://colorfilter.wickline.org/. This tool is similar to Vischeck.

How do Irish web design companies fare?
I decided to run a couple of screenshots from some?well known?design houses around Ireland through the Etre colour blindess simulator tool to see how they got on. As Deuteranopia is the most common form of colour blindess, this is the condition I have opted to simulate. I decided to test Continuum, Fusio, Red Sky, Arekibo and Webtrade. I won’t put screenshots for them here as they pretty much all passed with flying colours (pun intended ). I don’t know if this means they designed with colour accessibility in mind, my choice of test sites was brutal or they fluked it.

One pair of ‘before’ and ‘after’ screenshots which I will include below is for Continuum. Continuums’ site uses plenty of colours via their primary tab analogy navigation so their site is particularly susceptible to ’shortcommings’ as far as colour blinded users are concerned. It’s good to know however that their site passes with ‘flying colours’ (sorry I couldn’t resist using that one again…). The regular and Deuteranopia simulated screenshots for the Continuum home page are below. Although some colours appear similiar they are not beside each other in the tab navigation.

How can I tell if I’M colour blind?
There are a couple of online colour blind testing tools available. It should be noted however that due to the hugh variations in screen resolutions and colours that these should not be considered a replacement for proper medical diagnosis. Two tools I’m aware of include the one located at http://colorvisiontesting.com/online%20test.htm and the Ishihara one located at http://colorvisiontesting.com/ishihara.htm

As always your thoughts and comments on my posts are greatly appreciated.

One thing that annoys me and amuses me at the same time is when companies offering certain Internet services quite obviously haven’t got a clue about the service their offering and or haven’t got a clue how to sell themselves. As an example have you ever seen a company claiming to offer web design services whose own site looks absolutely awful? I have. I mean come on, how does a web design company expect to make credible claims about its design expertise if its own web site looks like something from 1994?

Tonight I came across a similar case where a company who offers search engine optimisation solutions from their website clearly haven’t got a clue about SEO, I can judge this from their HTML title tags as well as one or two other elements of their site. The company in question is Pixel (not to be confused with Pixel Design). Below is their 20+ word title:

Web Design Ireland - Pixel Website Design and Development offers professional web design services, logo design, e-commerce and content management systems. Dublin, New York, Kilkenny.

Those that know anything about search engine optimisation will tell you straight off that this title is far from optimised. Do they think ‘cracking’ the New York market is going to be that easy? Not only a bad title, but one that is present on every single page of their site. Having the same title on all pages is a fundamental optimisation mistake and thus any company that makes this mistake hasn’t got a clue what it’s doing as far as SEO is concerned. Hell would have to freeze over before I would hire this company for Internet marketing of any kind.