Chris Radcliffe

Search Engine Optimization Process and Design Tips

While crafting compelling and usable web copy helps improve the end-user experience, its not enough if you want to optimize your website for a search engine. The following process and design tips should help improve your search engine ranking in order to drive the 'right' kind of traffic to your website.

The Value of User Surveys, Usability Studies and Web Analytics

Over the years, many companies have shifted their focus away from using online surveys and focus groups to other tools and techniques like usability testing and web analytics to uncover the mysteries of the end-user...

I think its too bad that online surveys have a bad rap... My guess is that this is largly due to the fact that they've been so poorly implemented and can easily misintrepret the truth. While this may be true in some cases, I don't think they should be completely discarded from the bag of evaluation tools b/c they can be valuable if designed well and ask the right questions...

When you are evaluating a site or trying to learn about the end-users, its important to choose the right tools and techniques for the job and know the limitations of each.

If you are unsure of the difference in value gained through each of these methods, or want to hear my $0.02 on how a web survey could actually be useful, ...

Discover How Microsoft Office Has Evolved...

Microsoft has a new campaign to market its office products and information worker tools. Check out their new website to 'Experience the Microsoft Office System' - it includes an interactive area that explains the information worker productivity capabilities in Office 2003.

 

If you are curious about my experience and impression of the campaign, ...

CMS Conference - SF 2005

Came across the Gilbane Report Content Management conference today... Looks like there are some interesting discussions/debates worth checking out if you are into the 'mmm-space' CM/DM/RM/KM... The costs range, but for all-access it costs $1,495 US and they throw in an i-Pod mini:

• Keynote Debate: Microsoft & Sun: What is the Right XML Strategy for Information Interchange? (MS and Sun go head-to-head)
• CMS track: Planning strategies, stories (challenges), product alternatives and the future of CMS
• DMS/RMS track: State of the union, overview of compliance
• Enterprise Search & KM/Collaboration track: Wikis, blogs, rss, taxonomies, enterprise search and integration
• Post-conferences: CMS arch & products, XML ECM, search, taxonomies and meta-data

There's no doubt the neutral stance they take and wide-range of sponsors/exhibitors will result in a good cross-section of the market if you're looking to get informed quickly - get ready for your brain to hurt. 

Good to see they are giving attention to the emerging security and complaince requirements in Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA etc...