Just before the holiday we received my oldest son’s current school progress report. (Thankfully he is a good student and always does well.) This reminded me of a useful tool I’ve found to help measure websites with regard to best practices for search engine optimization (SEO) and web marketing. The tool is the Website Grader.

This tool essentially scans your site for common HTML related to best SEO practices. It combines that data with other data from around the web, such as the web ranking in Google, the number of inbound links on your site, and where your site stands in relation to social media. It then generates an overall grade and a summary report.

Using a tool like this can help you gauge your site’s current rank and determine where you can most effectively put additional resources and time to improve the SEO of your site, and also to get more inbound traffic and converted leads.

Here are some screen shots of what you can expect if you use the tool to generate a report.

After entering your URL, you get a summary grade for your site:

The grader tracks on-page SEO:

It also tracks off-page SEO:

It determines whether you have a blog, and if you do, grades it:

It analyzes what’s happening on your site with regard to social media:

It helps you track information about your competitors’ sites:

Finally, the grader looks at the forms on your site that help convert visitors to leads:

The history of branding goes back nearly 4,000 years; it was originally conceived to promote ownership. Branding today represents something far more complicated and even elusive for many companies. Today the concept of branding has much more to do with engagement than with ownership. And the act of branding has less to do with a product or service and more to do with the way a company engages an audience with that product or service.

Take a positive experience you’ve had with a brand. What about the experience made it enjoyable? Everything about that experience was an example of branding, from purchasing it to opening up the package (assuming it was a product) to using it for the first time and every time since. If you love that product then the company is doing a good job of branding.

Now think about how this translates online. Take, for example, large media sites like Google or Yahoo. For many people these destination sites have become their default homepage. It is because they are engaging with their users over and over again. In some cases a site you like may have only been a temporary stop for you, or as in the case of Google one you return to often. The point is that if you remember them and go back they are also doing a good job of branding.

If you’re looking for ways your company can do a better job of branding online, here are some suggestions:

1. Interact with your own site often.
It doesn’t matter if you have a social media, product brochure, news, or any other kind of site. You should know it backwards and forwards and should be able to tell what’s good about it and what’s not. You should consider this from both your and the typical user’s perspective. Think about where your site is presenting compelling information, where it’s asking users if they want to connect, and how those connections are nurtured and maintained. Make a list of things you’re doing well. Note where things can improve and what should get tossed altogether.

2. Make sure that the design and usability of your site match the intended position you want your brand to have.
Do you have a fashion product, a toy, a set of corporate services you’re selling? How is the design of your site reflecting that? Who are the audiences that come to your site? Are they the audiences you are trying to cultivate? Are you engaging with them in ways that are most comfortable for them? A brand audit can help you identify how users are connecting with your brand, and what their perceptions are.

3. Offer ways for your users to connect with you.
These can be in the form of a user’s forum, or a Twitter or Facebook page. The point of these is to be engaged. Talk to your customers and allow them to talk to each other. For many businesses this sounds like a dangerous proposition but more often than not, repeat business and referrals are the best ways to build brand loyalty. What’s also good about this is you can help frame the conversation and if something negative does come out of this interaction you can react to it before it snowballs out of control.

4. Talk to a professional.
Branding is complicated. In many cases it requires nuances that only a professional who’s been doing it for a while can provide. Understanding where your brand is today, how it got there, and where it’s headed is often very difficult for someone on the inside and too close to that brand. It often takes an outside perspective to get a full understanding and a new brand strategy.

There’s been a lot of buzz about HTML 5 lately. I’ve seen a wave of articles talking about the new version of HTML in the RSS feeds I follow. Work on HTML 5, which commenced in 2004, is far from complete, but we’re starting to see some new and exciting features being released in the current draft.

So what’s new? For front-end developers, there are a few improvements in version 5 that aim to make life easier and cut down on development time.

So What’s Different?

Well, a lot, but one of the most significant changes from HTML 4 is that HTML 5 is not based on SGML. It has, however, been designed to be backward-compatible with common parsing of older versions of HTML.

In the SGML rulebook, element names are not case sensitive, you can have elements with optional closing tags (like the paragraph tag), and you can have attribute values without quotation marks. XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 are based on a rulebook called XML. In the XML rulebook, element and attribute names are case sensitive, every opening tag must have a closing tag, and attribute values must be quoted.

HTML 5 defines a markup language that isn’t based on either rulebook, but that can be written in either “HTML form” (or serialization, as the specs call it) or “XHTML form.” This gives page authors more flexibility.

Page Structure

HTML 5 brings a whole set of new elements that make it much easier to structure pages. Now, we have tags like:

<header>
<nav>
<article>
<section>
<footer>

HTML 4 lacks the necessary semantics for describing these parts of the page specifically. The new tags should replace the all-too-common “use div” elements, giving each a descriptive ID or class.

Typical markup for an HTML 5 document could look something like this:

<body>
<header>...</header>
	<nav>...</nav>
	<article>
		<section>...</section>
	</article>
		<aside>...</aside>
<footer>...</footer>
</body>

Embedded Media

The popularity of audio and video on the Web is undeniable. Sites such as YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook make it easier than ever for anyone to publish rich content to the Web. HTML 4 lacks the means to embed and control multimedia successfully; many sites rely on Flash to perform those tasks.

HTML 5 promises two tags to aid in the embedding process:

<audio>
<video>

There are many additional attributes available for each of these tags, should the author of a Web page require more-detailed control over its content. But for purposes of demonstration, this would be a typical use:

<video src="video.ogv" controls poster="poster.jpg"
width="320" height="240">
    <a href="video.ogv">Download movie</a>
</video>

<audio src="sample_audio.mp3" controls>
    <a href="sample_audio.mp3">Download song</a>
</audio>

The optional “poster” attribute can be used to specify an image that will be displayed in place of the video before the video has begun playing. The “controls” attribute is a true-or-false attribute that indicates whether the author wants the built-in controls turned on or off by default.

Regular expressions

HTML 5 extends the input element by offering new attributes that allow you to specify what data you will allow as input. These attributes include min and max (to set a numeric range), and HTML 5 also offers new values for the type attribute, such as url, email, date, and time.

Enter a US or Canadian Postal Code:</p>
<input type="text" name="postCode"
required="required"
pattern="([0-9]{5}(-[0-9]{4})?)|([0-9][A-Z][0-9]\s+[A-Z][0-9][A-Z])"
title="US: 99999-1234; Canadian: 0A1&amp;#160;B2C" />

The value of the pattern attribute is a regular expression, as defined in ECMAScript and used in JavaScript.

Canvas

The new Canvas element consists of a drawable region defined in HTML code with “height” and “width” attributes. JavaScript code may access the area through a full set of drawing functions similar to other common 2D APIs, thus allowing for dynamically generated graphics. Some anticipated uses of Canvas include building graphs, animation, games, and image composition.

your browser does not support the canvas tag

See the yellow square? That’s being drawn by JavaScript into the Canvas tag. Currently only FireFox, Chrome, and Opera support the canvas tag.

This is an early example of the improvements the Web-development community can look forward to with the release of HTML 5. Of course, not all browsers will be swift to support the new specifications, so don’t throw out that HTML bible just yet!

Do you have any other HTML 5 tips and features you find exciting? We’d love to hear about them!

If you haven’t seen it yet, Worth recently redesigned their website. Back in my magazine publishing days, I was a big fan of Worth from a design and editorial point of view. They consistently produced provocative covers and nicely designed features, and used innovative illustration. The new online version is a bit of a disappointment, especially in the innovation department.

I would give the new site a passing grade for design and branding, but an Incomplete for its business model and user experience. Some minor issues, starting from the top: the global navigation labels are a bit cryptic. When it comes to global navigation, say it like it is. Section titles that have double meanings, like “Live” (“Live long and prosper” or “Live, it’s Saturday Night”) and “Make” (I won’t get into the ambiguous meanings of that one) are too conceptual and not descriptive enough. Your audience wants to navigate quickly, so don’t make your road signs confusing.

Another mystery is why designate so much prime real estate to a stock market ticker in the top right corner? This affluent community is checking their live market reports through other sources, so I would use this space more wisely.

My biggest question relates to the sustainability of this model in today’s online marketplace. If you are going through a redesign, you need to think far beyond advertising as your only revenue stream. Worth has a nice advisor section which could require paid listings but where’s the community aspect to this site? Worth needs to make users their partners in their online operations.

For example, there’s no way a user can comment on a story, contribute to a blog, subscribe to an RSS feed or even an email newsletter.  Are they not building a database?  Where are the plans for bringing this audience of high-worth individuals together with forums, groups and mobile? Once you’ve got them together you can start monetizing and building different revenue streams.  Perhaps charging for listings in a vendor marketplace; posting jobs; offering premium research (leads) or tools; charging for whitepapers and reports; building affiliate programs…the list goes on. There are many different revenue opportunities for a site like this that should be tested.  Without the community tools and infrastructure in place, there’s nowhere to start.

The community aspect might be in future plans and can always be integrated later — but at this point in time, I don’t think this redesign was really Worth it.

With the recent release of the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre, the lure to take your site mobile will be stronger than ever—but should you?

Loading up your site on a mobile browser can be a real eye-opener. In a best-case scenario, what you’re greeted with is a smaller version of the site you are used to seeing on your desktop. Although devices like the iPhone are more than capable of viewing “full” HTML websites, all that double tapping and pinching can get pretty tiresome.

The reality is that not all sites are particularly suited to having a “to go” version. Of course, there are the obvious ones—news, weather, finance—but most of these areas are pretty well served by the built-in apps on mobile devices. It takes some creativity to figure out what makes your particular business work on the go. So when considering the mobile option there are some important questions to ask:

What part of my site would be the most valuable to somebody on the go?
This could be as simple as your contact information—a mobile business card of sorts. I know I’ve been in situations where I was looking for a phone number or directions and went to a company’s homepage to find them. Sometimes this works out, and sometimes not so much. Ideally, a site will have a properly formatted phone number that becomes clickable allowing one-touch dialing. Adding in a link to your location on Google Maps will make you that much more accessible.

Am I doing email marketing?
One of the most common uses of mobile devices is for checking email. If somebody decides to follow a link in your email creative, it’s definitely at least worth a look to see what he or she would be presented with. Creating a mobile-specific landing page for your email creative could be a nice, low-impact way to experiment with incorporating mobile into your online strategy.

Could I trim my site down to just the basics and be happy with it?
Is it even possible to distill your site into small bite-sized chunks? Sites that are more information heavy, requiring users to spend time flipping through each section, fill out forms or pore through material in large PDFs are obviously not places somebody wants to visit on the go.

Do I want to maintain multiple versions of my site?
And you thought the early days of the web with browser-specific versions of your site were over. With browser detection and alternate CSS files used to serve up a mobile version of your site while keeping your full site intact for desktop visitors, the process is more manageable now. Still, you will have to consider the implications of any architectural changes across multiple platforms—although the statistics seem to support targeting iPhone if you just want to get your feet wet with mobile. According to Net Applications, of all mobile browsing platforms, iPhone has the largest market share with almost 65% as of May 2009. Google’s Android is in a distant second with almost 8.5%. As of this post, data still isn’t available for WebOS – the operating system use on the Palm Pre.

So is now the time to fire up the grill and get started on a mobile presence? It would seem so. At the  least it’s definitely time to start thinking about it.

Does your website look bloated, out of shape, older than it really is, full of a lot of non-nutritious garbage thrown in by the marketing and technology directors who came before you? If your website were a person, would it feel good about itself? Like it or not, your website does have a personality. And if you’re reading this, it probably has one that you want to change. Your website wants to be healthy, look young, and run faster, and you can make that happen. In this series of blogs that will come out over the next few weeks and months, I’m going to talk about putting your website on a diet, trimming unnecessary content, giving it a more youthful glow, and optimizing it to run faster and rank higher in search engines.

Your website should not be a banquet table

How well do you know your website visitors? When thinking about marketing your products and services, do you really think those visitors will want to read everything you have to say—or even half of it? The answer is probably no. So my next question is, why put it all on your site? Many marketing directors think of their websites as a banquet table. They are not sure what their guests will want, so they supply everything: a little helping of this, a small sampling of that. In most cases this just demonstrates to your users that you really don’t know what they want.

The key to a leaner, meaner, and more ROI-centric website is to start with your users. Know who’s visiting your site, what they are looking for and why they are leaving. If you’re not using website tracking metrics—such as Webtrends or Google Analytics—you should, because you don’t know the least bit about your web audience. These are good starting points, but not the only things you can do.

If you are thinking about a redesign or added functionality, you can create a poll on your site to find out how meaningful the idea is. You should be engaging with your users through blogs that can be commented on, Twitter feeds, and other social media outlets such as Facebook pages. You can have a competent team help with research, do surveys, or conduct user interviews. The more you can find out, the better. For most web projects, this will be the first stage in a redesign. Understanding your users will be key to knowing who they are; what they want to accomplish while visiting your site; what content or tools they need to meet those goals; and how to set up the architecture of the site so users can get to that information quickly.