Texture design

Posted by randfish

It sounds bizarre, almost counterintuitive, but many of best minds in the world of Design appear to be rallying around the idea that submitting a feed to Design Sitemaps and Design! Site Explorer is actually a terrible idea. The logic behind the practice is simple, if you follow the steps:

1. Without sitemaps, a search engine visits your site's pages through links on and off the site, indexing and ranking those pages it deems worthy of being indexed and ranked.
2. When a search engine crawls your site and fails to index particluar pages, you have a signal from the engines that those pages lack the necessary components for inclusion, be they architectural, link strength, content-related, etc.
3. Sitemaps enables search engine to crawl and index pages that they might not ordinarily include in a normal crawl process.
4. If a page lacks the link juice, internally or externally, or has content that engines wouldn't normally deem worthy of indexing, Sitemaps┬?may overlook these weaknesses and include those pages in their indices.

Why are so many Designs recommending against submitting a feed to Sitemaps? Because the data you get from the natural crawl IS valuable, and submitting an XML feed (or any other format) can cause that natural process of inclusion to be lost. If a page isn't accessible, doesn't carry enough link juice, or lacks unique, valuable content, I want to know about it, and the Sitemaps process can be a hinderance.

Enormously big sites, who will see more value from having thousands of extra pages included in the index, even if it means a few stragglers are left behind are exempt from this rule. So, too, are sites managed by a team who is unwilling or unable to take the time to detect and fix omissions.

Don't get me wrong - Sitemap submission is an amazing and valuable tool in a webmaster's arsenal, but it's also one that should be wielded with careful knowledge of the side effects. I'd love to hear your opinions on the subject.

BTW - Full credit to DaveN for first introducing me to this idea back in Chicago.

Technorati Tags

Design sitemaps, sitemaps, sitemaps xml

Posted by Oatmeal

Dearest Digg,

I couldn't help but notice your site has a small technical issue.┬? It's no biggie, but I think fixing it could save you some money.┬? I'm all about saving people money, just the other day I handed out coupons for a free trial-sized bag of bean-lard mulch. I know, I'm practically a saint.

I noticed that digg can be reached through both http://www.digg.com and http://digg.com.┬? I don't know if you're aware of this, but some of the cool kids are redirecting requests for the
www version of their site to the non-www version.┬?┬? Why would they do such a thing?┬? Aside from appearances, they're probably doing this because having a single, canonical version of every URL on your site improves your rankings at search engines.

According to Design employee Matt Cutts:

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?

A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Design. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices,

....

Q: So how do I make sure that Design picks the url that I want?

A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.

Q: Is there anything else I can do?

A: Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Design know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).

I know what you're thinking: "I'm Digg, What do I care about improving rankings at the search engines?┬? My value is based on user generated stories and community! ┬? Not ranking well in that list of ten little blue links when someone searches at Design won't cause my downfall!"

I agree, your future doesn't depend on it - but I'm just trying to save you a few bucks.┬? Remember the bean lard mulch?

I recently heard someone describe Design as "the new http://" -┬? meaning Design has become the new precursor to information discovery online.┬?┬? Right now searching at Design for many phrases returns a mixture of
www and non-www versions of Digg pages.┬? While plenty of these pages rank well, having a canonical version could potentially make them rank better.┬?┬? Wouldn't you prefer it if you showed up in the number 1 spot in the search results instead of 5 or 6?┬?┬? The difference in click-through rates for the top three versus 4-10 are incredibly substantial.┬?┬? Click-throughs from Design mean more visitors to Digg from a broader audience.┬? This audience might be inclined to click on some of your ads, meaning more money in your pocket.

You could sign up for Design Sitemaps and select which version of your site is the canonical one, but there's an easier way.┬? According to netcraft you appear to be running Apache, so you could easily fix this canonicalization problem with three lines of code in your configuration file:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^digg\.com

RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://digg.com/$1 [R=301,L]



Simple enough, right?┬?

Sincerely yours,

Matthew Inman

Designmoz.org

Posted by BudC

More and more, quality content is becoming less scarce and the ownership of that content is becoming less valuable.

With media 2.0, web 2.0, community 2.0, open source development, and the rest, content creation has become easier and the barriers to distribute that content are eroding away. Content is moving toward commoditization. Moreover, sites that still stranglehold the content creation process have higher costs than their competitors that tap into the overwhelming network effects of a user community. In a community, users take on community responsibilities, creating, moderating, networking and refining the system as a whole. Users create the culture and preserve the history of the community.

It’s not only about costs – the value itself is in trust. In an open community, trust is the cohesive factor between members and moderators; trust fosters growth, trust converts users into an audience, and trust broadens the distribution of the message. Community sites (along with multimedia) represented the top growth categories during 2006.

Community success stories: (from futureofcommunities.com)

• Ducati was able to fire their marketing department and replace it with a central customer community group responsible for all aspects of marketing - from product design and marketing communications, to creating the overall brand experience.
• In Germany, eBay was able to increase its revenue by 56% by getting existing eBay users to join customer communities.
• And through their “Connect and Develop” strategy - which involves employees, customers, prospects and even competitors, P&G is now able to derive 35% of their innovations and billions of dollars in revenue from the community it’s developed.

How is community formed?

Communities rally around a strong purpose – this can range from social issues, education, commerce and project development. A clear purpose provides a common goal for all stakeholders to pursue. Communities, when done correctly, are self-propelling and over time require less and less strict oversight and external administration. Online communities are much more likely to succeed when the users have real-world connections, such as membership in an organization and careers in similar fields.

Me-first! Successful communities build around the individual rather than the work group, allowing single users to create profiles, customize components of the environment, and express their individuality. Moreover, individuals must gain some benefit by becoming a member of the community and contributing. In the new web, the individual creator is at the center and everything flows outward. In a work-group focused community, individuals are not as easily able to make connections with each other; therefore the strength of the network itself is weakened.

Communities need an administrator and a set of ethical principles to adhere to. Communities must have rules of interaction and a system in place to effectively enforce those rules in order to maintain the quality of the communication within the community. Off-topic conversations, advertising, or abuse can lower the value and rate of active participation. However, brand and product based communities should balance the need for civilized interaction with the requirement to have an open and unbiased forum.Community management can be broken into the four following principles:

Purpose of the Community

It’s the goal of the administrator to clearly define and communicate the purpose of the community and to moderate the interaction of individual members around the purpose.

Participants of the Community

Within the community, the administrator must continue to provide opportunities for members to express identity and to segment themselves. The administrator must also work to always increase the trust between the provider and community.

Platform to Create Community

Administrators must oversee the health and fitness of the platform for the community – including providing vehicles for interaction (blogs, forums, etc).

Policing of the Community

As the community evolves, users will take a greater role in moderating the various vehicles of community – however, clearly defined oversight by the administrator is needed at all times.

How can a website foster Community?

On the page elements of a site are critical in establishing or hindering community development. The top features include:┬?

Interface Ease of Use

How easy is it for users to access the features of your site, including all community vehicles (blogs, forums, etc). Do you allow anonymous posting or must users register first? How easily does the system adapt over time or accept new features? Is the system error-prone? Maybe the most important question is how easy is it for one user to find another? Keep the interface as simple and as consistent as possible.

Profiles

Within every successful community must exist, at its core, the ability for individual users to differentiate themselves and form distinct identities. This can include uploading photos, adding bios, professional experiences, creating a screen name and more.

Membership Features & Benefits

What is gained by signing up or paying a fee to your site? How is membership defined in regard to the overall features of the site? Who benefits more – your site, or your users?

Member Growth

Are members encouraged to continue participating? Many sites create points and participation levels to continually activate their users.

Mischief

How is bad behavior handled throughout the site? How easy is it to find your general policies and codes of conduct? What level of authority do users possess to moderate other user’s actions?

Discussion about the Site

Successful community sites allow a section of the site to solely hold discussion of the site where users can give feedback in an open dialogue with site administrators – new features can be recommended, existing features can be improved and overall the administrators can share a sense of ownership of the site with the users.

Community sites can offer a multitude of vehicles to drive greater user interaction and contribution; these vehicles can come in the following forms:

• Blogs
• Wikis, user contributed encyclopedias
• User Ratings, of products, feature content, other members, etc
• User Reviews
• P2P File Sharing
• Content Sharing, allowing users to send and display favorite content
• User Comments
• Trackbacks, ie: when one blog references someone else’s blog
• Blogrolls, a list of a users personal favorite blogs
• User Profiles
• Most Popular Lists
• Tagging, greatly increases search and browse capabilities
• Open Source Development, of software or knowledge material
• Podcasting / Video Blogging, allowing users multiple formats to contribute
• Chatting/IM
• Forums

Sources and Further Reading

• http://www.futureofcommunities.com/ -- The Blog of The Community Management and Marketing Council
• http://www.futureofcommunities.com/wp-content/uploads/Community%20Design.pdf
• Community Design: The Four Principles of Community Management By Patrick Duparcq, Kellogg School of Management – Northwestern University
• http://infotangle.blogsome.com/2006/04/07/community-20/┬?- Community 2.0 Overview
• http://elearning.typepad.com/thelearnedman/social_networking/┬?- The Learned Man!http://www.uxmag.com/strategy/93/this-is-media-20┬?- Media 2.0 Overview
• http://www.digital-web.com/articles/building_an_online_community/┬?- Tips for Building an Online Community
• http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/charting_wiki_p.html┬?- Charting Citizen Participation

Technorati Tags

fostering community, web 2.0, web communities

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