Tag: essay

I Don’t Write For Search Engines (And Neither Should You)

I see a lot of posts where people talk about how to make your site better for search engines, and how to write a post for a search engine. I can honestly tell you that I have never sat down with that as my goal for anything I’ve written. Just like I don’t advocate designing your site for search engines, I would never suggest you customize your content for them. The web is for humans.(At least until our robot overlords take over.)

At the risk of being repetitive, I will reiterate that you are not making your site in order to be ranked number one in search engines. You are making your site for people to read. If you’re making a site just to be number one, you’re doing it wrong.

No matter what your topic, no matter your product, your goal is to make it something people value. So why is it a search for “how to write for search engines” has so many hits? A large number of those hits are for spam sites, who over-sell advertising and promise you hundreds of hits a day. Others, however, offer the same advice I’m telling you. Don’t write for search engines.

Yes, if you get highly ranked on search engines, you’ll attract more people, but it’s not all about getting them to your site. Once you get someone in the door, you have to keep them. If you’ve ever been to a store where you know you need a salesman and they all ignore you, then you know exactly what it’s like to go to a website that’s all SEO and no content of merit.

The part that confounds me is that all the SEO advice is drivel anyway, as it’s stuff you’re already doing. Also, they confuse the idea of writing for SEO benefit and writing SEO friendly content. There are tips and tricks you making your post layout be friendlier to search engines, while simultaneously making them easier for people to read.

Coincidentally enough, Jane Wells (aka JaneForShort, aka if you don’t know who she is, you probably aren’t a WordPress fan) came up with the above comic (with permission from Randall Monroe of XKCD) and I felt it clearly and hilariously made my points for me. (True confession, I actually wrote this post in early July, but not until Jane’s comic did I finish it. Yes, I’m taking advantage of the timing.) In both sides of the argument, the panelists are ignorant of their absolute truth: together, with a good tool and good writing, you become king.

Just recently Andy Stratton spoke at WordCamp Chicago (You can see a copy of his presentation, which he also used at WC Raleigh, at DIET PILLS, SEO, THEME FRAMEWORKS – There are no magic bullets.) and said “If content is king: context is queen […] Content is king, Backlinks are the Emperor.” For years I’ve espoused ‘contextual links.’ I will, rarely, put up a list of links, but when I do, it’s to organize them contextually. A link on it’s own is meaningless for the user who reads it and the site you’re linking to. If no one follows that link, it doesn’t matter how much ‘link juice’ you’re sending them, because no one’s clicking it.

Don’t write for SEO, don’t make links for links sake. Listen to what your teachers said: write clearly, write well. Link with context, and people will see the effects of your work and link back. Write for the humans. We’re the ones reading.

4 August, 2011
You’ll Never Take My Freedom!

I am an adherent to GPL.

This means I understand what it means, what it protects, and what it does not. So when in the beginning of August I saw a guy selling 200 free WordPress plugins for $9, I really don’t mind. I mean, I, personally, think that selling the plugins is the wrong way to go about it.

I will defend your right to resell MY plugin

Look, I may think it’s a total dick move, and I may personally find it distasteful, but what I don’t find it is illegal. Morality is something else. I am legally permitted to take a plugin from another site, a paid plugin, and if it’s GPL, I can give it away, sell it, or do what I, as a user, want to do with it. Would I? Actually, yes. I have. It’s called forking a plugin. But I always attribute the authors, thank them, and point out what I did to make this plugin different.

In fact, it’s not the reselling at all that fired up my blood. It was this one line where he says you can’t resell the plugin compilation for less, and you can’t give it away.

It’s highly possible what he meant was ‘This set is a set, don’t steal my shit!’ And to that, yes, don’t take his hard work and steal it, that’s uncool. But where he looses his right to say that is when he tries to revoke freedoms clearly laid out in GPL, notably, I have the right to take a GPL licensed plugin and do what I want. You just can’t have it both ways.

Don’t worry! This can be fixed!

Otto pointed out that, as he’s also using images and other possibly non-GPL items in his product, that in a way, this is okay. Well, that’s nice, but he still can’t take away my GPL freedoms. He can do a pseudo-split license, and say “These products are GPL, and as such, all GPL freedoms remain intact. THESE products, however, are not GPL, and fall under the following provisos.” That’s a lot of work, I know, but suddenly he’s GPL-compliant! Yay!

Of course, that assumes he had the right to use those non-GPL items in the first place. And we already knows he’s buzz-worded some BS.

1. I have Full Master Resale Rights and Each One of the Plugins Listed Above Has Resale Privileges attached to them.

2. Because of the Master Rights, I have the each developers expressed permission to offer Private Label Rights to All Who Purchase WP Million Dollar Plugins.

3. Being That these are Unique & Rare Resell Rights Plugins You Have a Two-fold Benefit,
a) The Personal Use of the WP Million Dollar Plugin
b) The Ability to Offer This Unique/Profitable Package to Your Customers.

The rampant abuse of capitalization aside, items number 1 and 2 there doesn’t make a lick of sense to me. First, I know that at least one plugin dev didn’t give any ‘extra’ permissions outside of what GPL already provides. So if we know this guy didn’t ask permission, what ‘master right’ does he have? Not a one, that I can come up with.

GPL freedoms don’t require asking permission to reuse them, they don’t permit ‘private label rights’ (which actually is just marketing speak, and means nothing at all legally) or any rights that further restrict your freedoms.

Another easy way to fix this is to not include the plugins, but instead sell it as a $10 book: The 200 best plugins for your site, how to find them, which ones to use, and why they’re great! Imagine a book that could help you get started by breaking down the best plugins for what you’re trying to do? A lot of newbies would kill for that. So sell THAT. Sell your own work. If you’ve done the research, sell it. But unless you make the plugin, or are going to support it, you’re nothing more than a hotdog vendor.

Free is better, right?

In the end, peer pressure reverted this $9.95 deal into a ‘free’ download by the end of the day, which I did not try (since the amount of layers to download looked like a rip off to me, and lead to a $950 … thing). No one ‘won’ anything, though. I’m sure the guy feels blasted by the people who descended upon the forums (as well as the ones who private messaged him). It’s fairly clear the forum regulars were not pleased by the onslaught nor their attitude.

A lot of agony could have been avoided if research had been done in the beginning. If more time had been spent looking up what was being sold, and why, instead of slapping marketing speak (much of which has been removed). When selling becomes more important than doing the right thing for the product and the users, you’ve lost something. Make good things, make that important, and not making money and selling them. If that’s all you care about, I’ll make sure to avoid your product.

By the way… It’s WordPress, with a capital P.

2 August, 2011
Istanbul (Not Constantinople) Will Confuse Your Users

If you’ve never heard The Four Lads (or They Might Be Giants) sing “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” you’re missing out on a great swing song. The lyrics basically dance around the fact that Constantinople was renamed Istanbul, but also how even New York was once New Amsterdam, saying things like “People just liked it better that way.” and “It’s nobody’s business but the Turks.”

Eventually you’re going to look at your website and think that you need to redesign it. In ages past, I would say things like ‘What would Amazon do?’ to indicate how people generally should not redesign their entire site. But those ages are long past and now, if you want to redesign your website, it’s an accepted standard of life. Both the code running your site and the look and feel of it have to be updated more than with just a slap of fresh paint.

Now that everyone’s accepted the fact that sites will update and change, the trick is how to make a change without forcing people to wonder why Constantinople got the works!(See? The song title had a point.) You can’t just assume your user-base is going to magically divine how everything works and know where to go to do things, after all.

Obviously you can make a blog post that explains where everything went, but eventually that will fall off your front page. So you could also make a new ‘page’ for your site features, and hope people saw that. Toss in some customization on your 404 page (and maybe some clever .htaccess redirects to send people to the right place), and you should be okay.

Should is the key-word there.

Science has proven to us that people like what they like, and changing it is a sure-fire way to cause problems. And once people make a decision that they like something, they will grow to actively dislike anything else. That’s why you get rabid Apple vs Windows fanboys. (Read The science of fanboyism by The Tech Report.)

At its crux, that is why bigwigs tell you not to redesign your site. Not because new layouts are bad, but because people are used to your site and, probably, like it the way it is. That tells me that when you make a change, and you will, you need to do it in a way that looks similar enough that while things have changed, the ‘feel’ remains the same.

The feel of a site is a terribly nebulous thing. The ‘feel’ has to be right for you, because if you don’t like your own site, you’ll never use it. The ‘feel’ has to be right for your target audience or they’ll never use it. Anyone who tells you they know all the answers, by the way, is lying. There’s a reason big companies hire folks to do tons of studies before changing the UX (User eXperience) of a site, after all. Generally speaking, as Matt Mullenweg said recently, “The software is wrong, not the people.”

Have you ever felt like a fool because you can’t remember the 16 special clicks and drags to get MS Word to do something? It’s not you, it’s the product. Your website is your product, and if even one person complains and says ‘This isn’t right!’ you need to stop and think about it. I’m not saying you have to change it, but I am saying you have to consider their point of view. Get out of your monkey house.

What it all comes down to is simple. If your site isn’t easy for your intended audience to use and understand, they won’t. If you change your site to something new and different and they don’t like it, they’ll leave. You need to understand what makes your users tick, and cater to them without kowtowing to their every whim. Sometimes learning that balance will make you take the wrong path. That’s okay. Mistakes are things to learn from, so don’t fear them.

On the subject of ‘big’ changes, there is a time and a place for them. When you look at how Amazon, Apple and Microsoft looked in 1999 and compare them to 2011, you feel like they’re the same sites, only grown up.

1999

2011

For the most part, color schemes are the same and so is layout. But if you were to jump from one to the other, it would feel like a big change. In reality, the move from 1999 to 2011 was all done in steps, slowly and carefully, so as not to jar the user too much out of their comfort zone.

This doesn’t just apply to site design. The GAP logo changed recently, and was universally panned. It was so bad that GAP actually had to change their logo back. Pepsi changed their logo and got more hate than Coke did for New Coke. (Actually I don’t know if anyone cared about the Pepsi logo. We drink Coke in my house.)

Some of the changes were pretty bold, and they all drive home the point that you do need to make changes. But they also remind us that the changes must be recognizable. “People just like it better that way.”

26 July, 2011
Get Out of The Monkey House

“I have this refrain about the monkey house at the zoo. When you first enter into the monkey house at the zoo, you think, ‘Oh my god this place stinks!’ And then after you’re there for 20 minutes you think, ‘it’s not so bad’ and after you’re there for an hour it doesn’t smell at all. And anyone entering the monkey house freshly thinks, ‘this stinks!’ You’ve been living in the monkey house.” (Quoth Tim Gunn, from the 2008 finale of Project Runway)

Bless Tim Gunn for saying it out loud. Sometimes you’re too deep in the monkey house to realize your idea stinks. This isn’t to say it’s a bad idea, but you’ve spent so long working on the project you lose your perspective, and can’t see how it looks to someone from the outside.

Being able to keep your mind open and see things from the perspective of the programmer as well as the end user is difficult, to put it mildly. When you write and design something, you know where you’re starting from and where you’re ending. You understand, instinctively, the journey it takes to get where you’re going.

This is true of webdesign as well as programming.

For me, I know how to navigate my sites and find what I’m looking for, because I know where to find everything! I have no problem popping around to where I need to be, to do what I need, because I built everything and I’m as familiar with it as I am my closet. Possibly more-so. So when someone mentioned, after I did a redesign, that they had just learned where everything was, and they would have to re-learn it all, I smacked my head and shouted, “Why is it always monkeys?”(That’s a Kim Possible joke.)

This sent me on a three day documentation binge, where I struggled to explain things about BuddyPress that I took for granted. Like how you edit your profile, what ‘activity’ was, and how you sent a PM. It doesn’t help me that BuddyPress and WordPress are in a weird in-between stage of their Admin Bar relationship (I’ve beta-tested Boone Gorges’s new code for it, and it looks lovely). But knowing well that I’ll implement it and be comfortable using it, regardless of my user base, drove me to sit down and explain.

It was in those explanations that I realized things were wrong. Things weren’t intuitive the way I’d designed them, not for someone new, and the layout could be better. It smelled bad, and by the way, did I forget to look at the site in FireFox? The only way to chase off those monkeys is to find a way to look at everything with fresh eyes. For me, I get there by documenting with pictures and explaining a process to someone with no basis. I get there by finding a specific error, bouncing between three browsers and wondering what the heck happened to my CSS?

I have to thank a teacher, Ms. Gallagher, who sat us down one day in Life Science class and asked this question: “Pretend an alien has come to earth and asks you ‘What does salt taste like?’ They have no concept of sweet and salt, they have never eaten any human food. How do you explain it?”

I was flummoxed then, and to a degree, I am now. The answer was that you cannot explain things without something to compare it to. The human mind, at least, needs an analogy, or a basis, to stand on and build their new concepts from. Even the greatest genius in the history of pyhsics said that explaining things in laymans terms was not simple at all, which when you think about, is a hell of a lesson to toss at a bunch of hormonal 12 year-old kids, but boy did that lesson stick!

Understanding the ‘why’ behind a website may not be as complicated as physics but the basic tenant, that a person is going to look at your website and ask ‘Why do I need to do that?’ and ‘How do I do this?’ we can accept as givens. Thankfully we don’t need to subscribe to the intense level of intellectual honesty that Richard Feynman does with science. We can say ‘BuddyPress groups are similar to FaceBook pages.’ We can assume that people have a basic concept of what a forum is. We can trust people know that when there is a text box for ‘Username’, people will fill in their user name.

And yet. These are all learned skills that we have developed over years of using the internet. Twitter makes perfect sense to some of use, while others need to read mom, this is how twitter works.

The deeper you get into your own work, be it a website, physics, or painting, you have to remember you are in your monkey house. Sometimes the house is clearly visible and understandable, sometimes the house locks you in. Be that as it may, get out.

18 July, 2011
How to Ask for Help

Imagine you’re at the coffee shop and you make your order. Plain coffee. The guy behind you jumps up, RIGHT as they’re making your order and shouts “I want the exact same thing, but a latte with no foam!” Then the guy behind him chimes in “I want an espresso!” and “I want a hot cocoa!”

What happens to the people behind the counter who have just gotten a dozen different orders all at once?

You end up with a bad coffee, that’s what.

That’s why I tell people to make their own topics.

7 July, 2011
How (Not) To Ask For Help

I wrote about this once in I’m not a coder and I need help! It’s come up again.

I was a bit torn about posting this, given that it’s a guy acting like a real jerk in public, and I’m still pretty sure his problem is that he doesn’t understand what we’re saying. But. I think it’s good to have a concrete example of how you don’t ask for help on a forum.

The story so far: WordPress 3.2 was released on July 4th, and we knew there would be some minor issues. Most of them are related to the fact that WordPress no longer supports IE 6, PHP4 and MySQL 4. Before it was released, I decided to be proactive and take the lessons learned from 3.1 and make a Troubleshooting Master List. I posted to the forum mailing list and got advice from everyone there. As soon as 3.2 was let loose, I posted and started checking the forums.

Then I found this guy.

Yes, I did get really annoyed/upset with this guy. Full on anger. My face went hot and I felt myself typing furiously. And I deleted what I’d written at least a dozen times in order to keep as cool as I could. I knew I was mad, I knew I was writing in anger, and I backed away. That’s why my replies got shorter and shorter until, finally, I walked away and let the rest of the community hit him with a brick. I did come back the next morning and close the post, but only because it had become impossible to help the guy. And yes, I would have left it open to help him. It’s what I do.

So taking the cue from his post, let’s run down the ‘what NOT to dos.’

Cursing

The actual title of his post is Upgrade to V3.2 and my site is f**ked. Except he said ‘fucked’ but we modified that. The URL still says it. Just don’t do that. It’s rude. If I have to explain why it’s rude, you need more help than I can give. And I say this from the point of view of a foul mouthed tart. There is a time and place to swear, and the free support forums ain’t them.

Mouthing off

Even if you’re not swearing, there’s a huge difference between being polite and being a cretin. People are taking time out of their day to help you. Treating them like they’re worthless and insulting them is not a good thing to do. Being polite, even when you’re very angry and upset, is hard. I’m aware of this. But that doesn’t excuse your behavior. You’re the one who decided to show your fanny. It’s like what they say on Reality TV. The people being filmed will blame the editing, and the editors will point out ‘We didn’t MAKE you pee on Joe Bob there, you did that on your own.’ Yes, selective quoting and editing can make you look worse, but frankly, you’re the one who put it out there.

Not taking the time to read

I think this falls under ‘Not taking the time to think.’ We told the guy multiple times ‘You need to reset your plugins.’ We linked him, multiple times, to directions on how to do that when you can’t log into your back end. Three times he complained that he couldn’t get to the back end of his site before he finally up and said he wasn’t going to.

Most of the issue was that while we told him what to do, he was blinded by his own interpretation of what we meant. He would have been better served by simply saying ‘I don’t understand what you mean by FTP’ … except he did.

Not following directions

This is really simple. If you’re asking for help, you’re assuming the people who answer know more than you. If you refuse to follow their advice, you’re done. Seriously.

Getting derailed

You may have noticed how he started picking on my language (I used ‘seriously’ twice, and apparently that was too many times), my nationalism (I’m a dual-citizen as it happens), politics (Afghanistan), and so on and so forth. A lot of energy was wasted by his anger and the resulting attitude from it.

The entire reason I did not snap back and point out where his gross assumptions were wrong is because it was not productive. It would just make him madder (yeah, think about that for a second) and make the situation more volatile. Don’t feed the fire.

It’s NOT all about you

I cannot stress this enough, every single volunteer on the WP forums knows and understands exactly how important your site is to you. I have this problem in my day job too. I work with hundreds of very important people (they actually are – the office would come to a standstill if any one of them broke). They are all incapable of understanding that everyone is just as important as they are. I have been known to snap at people and point out that more than one VIP is having a problem, and I am working on the issue, but if you’d like to tell them that YOU are more important, go for it.

No one ever does. They usually shut up, which tells me that really they’re like a kid who fell down on his tush. He’s fine, just crying for effect. You may think that the squeaky wheel gets the oil, but you forget about the boy who cried wolf. At a certain point, we stop listening to you until you come in with a broken wheel.

What else?

Obviously this list can’t be exhaustive (I’d run out of internet before I ran out of examples). The real basic rule is ‘Don’t be a dick.’ Everything else is an extension of that.

If you’re helping someone who treats you like crap, you’re allowed to walk away. At work or at play, you don’t have to deal with it. Just walk away. Of course, at work, you need to tell your boss, and on the WP forums, I tend to email or ask people directly to step up for me please and thank you. In fact, watching the community get my back in that post was both pleasing and very sad. I was sad it had to happen, and I remain sad that he couldn’t be helped.

5 July, 2011