Sitegeist: The Blog of Splat Productions

Monday, January 28th, 2013

Developing User-Friendly Forms: Get Validation

Designing User Friendly Forms Illustration

Developing user-friendly forms that look good in a variety of browsers is a thankless job. Form elements are notoriously inconsistent across browsers.  But getting the design right is only half of the battle. It’s equally important to make sure you’re getting the right information and providing a quality user experience that also satisfies business goals, making everyone happy.

What is a quality user experience with regard to web forms? Users like web forms that are forgiving. A form shouldn’t bark at you when you enter your phone number, say, with dots instead of dashes. It’s nice when forms give you a summary of the fields you need to correct rather than making you hunt around for the offending fields. Longer forms that are spread across multiple pages with breadcrumbs that allow you to go back are preferable to one big page that scrolls down endlessly. These kinds of design oversights make users unhappy because they expect more from web applications. On the other hand, some users will try to fill out as little as possible, and still others will spam you or try to hack your site, so it’s important to have validation in place.

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Tuesday, November 13th, 2012

What is Microdata? A detailed look at Schema.org and Other Structured Data Types



The world of web development and SEO has been using “structured data” to embed semantically rich information into web content for many years now. (If you missed my earlier post about Microdata, you can catch it here…) Prior to 2011 or so, formats such as Microformats and RDFa were the most commonly found types of structured data. However, in 2011, the major search engines in the US threw their weight behind the developing format known as Microdata, which is supported by a vocabulary maintained at Schema.org. HTML 5, as well, is including Microdata as an ‘official’ format for structured data. These two events ensure Microdata’s continued importance and are the impulse behind this more comprehensive post about ‘what Microdata is and how it relates to existing types of structured data.’

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Thursday, October 18th, 2012

Submit to Git: A Pragmatic Guide to Improving your Workflow with Git

Dog Submitting to Git

The first thing you need to know about Git is that it was hand-crafted by the guy that brought us Linux. Make no mistake, Git thrives in the realm of hard-core coding and is a favorite new toy among coding enthusiasts. The second thing you need to know is that Git is incredibly useful as a project management tool. I mention both Git’s usefulness and the context in which it was developed because Git can be esoteric and difficult. But once you’ve gotten over the learning curve, the benefits fairly leap out. This article aims to give you enough of an understanding so that you can get around Git’s basic features without being overwhelmed by the more complex things it can do.

Why you need version control

First, a rundown of the benefits, then the pain. Git is a Version Control System (VCS), which is essentially a file-sharing system tailored to manage the workflow of a team of developers. With a VCS in place you’ll never overwrite files you’re working on. Instead, each time you make significant changes you add them to a repository of code handled by the VCS. A detailed history of every change you’ve made to the project is maintained by the VCS, giving you the ability to revert back to previous versions of the project. On collaborative projects that undergo lots of iterations, this system can save your ass. Your collaborators can even work on the same code at the same time without creating conflicts. This is possible because each member of the team works on a unique local copy of the project that is in turn merged into the shared repository. For our purposes that shared repository lives on GitHub, an online service that fosters open source collaboration by providing free hosting for coding projects.

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Wednesday, October 10th, 2012

Cache Cow: Optimizing WordPress for Page Speed

Cheetah Stretching

Thanks to Dan Shurley, in our office, for penning this week’s post on WordPress and page speed…

“Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.” –Aldous Huxley

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.” –Mahatma Gandhi

Two years ago Google announced it would begin using page speed as a ranking factor. This decision caused lots of people in the blogosphere to speculate and, in the case of webmasters with slower loading sites, to panic. Retrospectively, the Google team has been clear and consistent about its decision to include page speed in its ranking algorithm. They’d like the rest of the web to be like them, lean and mean. And from their standpoint, this makes great sense. For every extra half-second of load time, Google experiences a 20% loss in traffic. They’d also like to make their job of crawling billions of web pages a day easier and more efficient. Of course Google’s job is to point us to content and stay out of the way, not make editorial decisions. Google may not approve of your decision to load a high resolution, 5MB background image of the last thing you ate, but they can’t punish you for it. They’ve insisted that page speed is only 1 of over 200 factors they deem “theoretically interesting” in determining a page’s rank, way down on the list after relevancy, reliability and accuracy. But if Google likes page speed, you probably wouldn’t mind making a little effort to be in their good graces. It is in this spirit that we chose to write a post specifically addressing the task of optimizing WordPress for page speed. Besides the SEO concerns, though, a website that loads quickly instills confidence. Users like page speed. Studies have shown this is especially true of online shoppers, who, on average, bounce after 4 seconds of page loading.

Still with me? The good news is that you’re probably not anticipating the billions of hits a day that Google or Amazon receives, so I’m going to cut you a little slack. This article is not about tweaking a mega-content provider or online retailer for better performance. Instead I’d like to demonstrate ways that even a small WordPress site can benefit from a little fine-tuning and more importantly, smart content optimization.

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Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

Dear SEO Client: Here’s the Truth OR ‘What Every SEO Client Should Know…’

Editors Note:Once again, I found a really nifty guest post for Sitegeist, which is likely to make you either laugh or frown (depending, I suspect on whether you’re a vendor or a client..) Today’s post is from Chris Walker, a local SEO specialist from St. Louis. Chris has some straightforward advice regarding what every SEO client should know…

Here’s Chris’s post…

This letter goes out to all the clients out there, current and potential. Just to let you know, we sometimes have a love/hate relationship with you.

Please Don’t Expect Results Overnight

Or in 2 weeks after you last spoke with us. Please don’t send me an email asking for a ranking report  and then ask me 2 weeks later how we can speed this thing up. The answer you will get is; increase your budget or just wait for the SERPS to change. You were given a conservative timeline for a reason. Good SEO is a building process and your business may not be the most exciting thing on the planet to write about. If you want overnight results then we will start a PPC campaign for you. But that’s going to cost you too. You’re going to need someone to manage that. So please…

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