Beantin

9 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 39-41, 2010)

Implementing Yammer within Your Organization Using Twitter Best Practices

The featured tool in this article is Yammer, but the tactics and principles described are valid for whatever intranet collaboration tool you are rolling out. Three critical tactics according to Hanesbrands: Gain leadership support, Partner early with IT, Help employees use the platform & see value.

Should intranet links open in a new window?

James at Step Two Designs has written a blog post based on a lively discussion on the Intranet Professionals LinkedIn group. I’m in agreement with James on this one - try having opening links in the same window whenever possible (or practical). Let the user choose.

Culture, Contribute, Confidence – The Gateway to Intranet Success

Some concrete advice & ideas by Carolyn on how to initiate a shift in company culture towards a collaborative and sharing organisation - a social intranet.

Information flow overview

In the first of a series of blog posts, Kristian has sketched the intranet information flow at Västra Götaland Regional Council. Understanding how all the information inter-links and flows around helps you maintain the information quality and ensure users are obtaining the correct information when and where they need it.

How to measure the effectiveness of web content

Website owners generally don’t do anywhere near enough testing, and testing of content in particular is almost non-existent. This article describes a three-pronged approach for measuring the effectiveness of your content. It’s a pipe-dream, and not really practical for a major re-write; but the theory is good and useful for more contained content changes.

How to find bloggers relevant to your business

Taking the time to find, nurture, and reward relationships with bloggers is a key task in marketing (and SEO, branding, PR, etc). Not only is it effective, it can be really cost effective too.

Nokia upsets blogger due to marathon PR failure

Nokia’s PR company Mission shows you how not to engage the blogging community. They have subsequently apologised (in the blog comments of the original post). But still. Smells of time-pressure & poor project management at the very least.

SEO starter guide updated

Two years after releasing their first SEO Starter Guide, Google have updated it and released an updated version. A great handbook for web managers - it explains many best practices and recommendations for websites - but it’s not an ultimate guide to SEO (and doesn’t claim to be!)

Is hiding text with CSS to improve accessibility bad for SEO?

Will you get into trouble with Google if you do the right thing accessability wise? Basically, no. If you create valid code, your SERPs are safe…

7 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 35-36, 2010)

Finding the Balance: Users’ Needs Vs. Clients’ Wants

A another look at the classic user v client dilemma. One of the key things to finding a good balance is stakeholder buy-in and inclusion.

Surprise, surprise! Having no secure icon on a page increased conversions by 400%

An split testing case where removing a green “secure” icon from the page made a vast improvement - their conclusion: “Make each page designed to get the user to do one thing, and try to focus all of their attention on that one thing”.

Putting people at the centre: social staff directories

Alex Manchester in this article from Step Two explores the potential of people search and staff profiles and their role as the very heart of intranet. He also gives examples of people-related concepts in use within organisations today.

Facebook As A Company Intranet Is A Nightmare Waiting To Happen

Building your entire intranet using Facebook would be an utter nightmare! But let’s not forget the relevance of Facebook as part of internal communication and collaboration. Colleagues who are friends with each other will almost certainly use it to communicate in some way at some point – even if it’s just a “running late for 9am meeting” or “working from home today”. Organisations should consider ways to take advantage of that.

New guidelines for (Swedish) public bodies and companies who want to be present on Facebook

Swedish guidelines published by The Swedish Data Inspection Board recommending how you should deal with communication channels with user generated content, such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube in order to be compliant with Swedish law.

WordPress Fat-Loss Diet to Speed Up & Ease Load

If you are using wordpress for a business site you might want to consider some of the following tweaks - or bring someone in to do them for you.

Google Instant – a Reminder that Google is not equal to SEO

reality check from Jesper. Yes Google is really important, but it’s not the whole picture. YouTube, Facebook, Intranets, on-site search - Search is a lot more than Google, but it’s all about serving up what people want when they want it.

6 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 34, 2010)

The business case for social intranets

To quote Oscar: “Most people will come to understand that a social intranet is not just about adding features such as blogs, wikis, activity feeds & micro-blogging on top of a traditional intranet; it’s about rethinking the purpose of intranets with the intention of bringing the paradigm shift in how we communicate & collaborate that is taking place on the web to the very core of how enterprises are operated & managed.”

10 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 29-31, 2010)

BBC News website’s content management and publishing systems

The BBC Internet blog often produces some really good in-depth insights into how things work at the BBC. This time, in connection with the recent redesign of BBC News, they take a look at web management, web standards & their in-house CMS

Search-engine friendly country site select boxes

Design often has the final say in a redesign project - or at best, a very powerful voice - which isn’t always a good, or acceptable, situation.

Recently I was part of a project where I needed to preserve an aspect of the old design for SEO reasons. The new design had included a select box, but I needed those “options” to be real links that would pass link-love. So, I offered this search-engine friendly solution.

Country links

To give a bit more background, the old site had a footer that contained links to every single country site within the organisation. This was about 26 links. On every page of the site. Most of those country sites had a similar footer, making most of the links reciprocal. That’s quite an international network of inter-linked international top level domains.

I obviously wanted to maintain that network of links after the redesign. It clearly wasn’t going to help the position of any of the sites in SERPs by removing them.

Country select box

The design that was produced had “simplified” the list of countries in the footer to be a select box drop down menu. Although this is not unusual for companies with multiple country sites, it’s not always a good thing for usability (I like populating the select box using geolocation as a solution - but that would be another blog post!) and it’s really not a good thing for search engines.

No link-love for select boxes

Although Google has indexed text in select boxes for a number of years, and also indexes (new) URLs that is discovers within those lists, it doesn’t pass any pagerank to those links. Neither does it attribute the anchor text (or more correctly in this case: option text) to the destination link.

This obviously meant that the international network of inter-linked top level domains would come crashing down to the ground. Not really something that was on the list of requirements…

So in order to preserve the link network, and to honour the design decision, I decided to re-introduce the <a> link list of countries, and in order to not make this visible to (most) end-users, I set it to “display:none”.

Now hold on I can hear you say. Doesn’t Google (and other search engines) consider adding “display:none” to things as cloaking? Well, not necessarily. The key is whether there is a mechanism for making the content visible to visitors or not.

So in order to keep both the search engines and users happy what I did was add the “display:none” only if javascript is enabled. That way we are always serving the same HTML content to all visitors and search-engines, but making parts of it invisible when viewed in the browser by most visitors. Importantly, we are letting the search engines see and index all the links to the countries.

Adding a class

Add a js class to the country link list, or whatever element of the page you want to be hidden when javascript is enabled.

<div class="js">

Include an external js file

Add a link to an external script directly after your CSS styles (you may already have such an external file already)

<script type="text/javascript" src="/script/functions.js">

</script>

Document.write

in that script add a document write to write the additional css style link

document.write('<link rel="stylesheet" 

href="/styles/js-enabled.css" 

type="text/css" media="screen" />');

Display:none

Finally, your js css file. Add the “js” class styling with display:none there.

.js {
	display: none;
}

There are other ways you could achieve the same result; especially if you’re already using an Ajax library such as jquery, but I thought it was good to share with you an example that didn’t force the introduction of that overhead.

Cloaking

Yes, you could argue that this is technically cloaking, but it is better to say that we are offering enhanced content to those with javascript disabled. By doing this we are cloaking in a way that is helping Google and visitors who find long lists within select boxes difficult to use.