As people who work in the ‘webasphere’ we have a responsibility to know who’s who in our industry. The problem is there are so many influential designers, developers, thinkers, authors and commentators that it’s difficult to condense it all into a single blog. Given that, I’m not even going to try. What I am going to do is highlight a few leading exponents that have influenced me directly or I have heard about through my work colleagues. It’s by no means a comprehensive list of leading web exponents, but it’s a start and they’re certainly people worth mentioning and looking up. So here goes, in no particular order of importance . . .

Christian Heilmann
Christian Heilmann is a developer evangelist living and working in London. He’s been a professional web developer for about eleven years and worked his way through several agencies up to Yahoo where he delivered Yahoo Maps Europe and Yahoo Answers. He’s written two and contributed to three books on JavaScript, web development and accessibility, and released dozens of online articles and hundreds of blog posts in the last few years. He’s been nominated standards champion of the year 2008 by .net magazine in the UK and currently sports the fashionable job title “International Developer Evangelist”. He spends his time going to conferences and universities to train people on systems provided by Yahoo and other web companies that want to make “this web thing work well for everybody”, (in his own words).

Jeffrey Zeldman
Jeffrey Zeldman has been there from the beginning of time (well, ‘web-time’ anyway). A former art director and copywriter he began publishing widely-read tutorials on methods and principles of web design. In 1998 he co-founded The Web Standards Project, a grassroots coalition that persuaded Microsoft and Netscape to support the same technologies in their browsers. That same year he began publishing A List Apart “for people who make websites.” It has become one of the most respected and influential magazines in the field. He has written many articles and two books, notably Designing With Web Standards (now in its second edition), and is a favourite of lecture audiences around the world.

Eric Meyer
Eric Meyer has been working with the Web since late 1993 and is an internationally recognized expert on the subjects of HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). He is the principal consultant for Complex Spiral Consulting and coordinated the authoring and creation of the W3C’s CSS Test Suite. Eric speaks at a variety of conferences on the subject of standards, CSS use, and Web design. His resume consists of a number of published pieces on the subject of CSS including ‘CSS: The Definitive Guide’ and ‘Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design’.

John Resig
Based in Boston, John Resig is a programmer and entrepreneur and has been developing web applications for over eight years. Having primarily focused on back-end development for most of that time using Perl and MySQL, John changed his focus toward implementing usable web front ends. He holds a degree in computer science from Rochester Institute of Technology and has published several papers on data mining instant messaging networks. He is author of ‘Pro Javascript Techniques‘ and is also the founder and lead developer of the jQuery Javascript library.

Mark Boulton
I met Mark once at a web conference in London and as a follower of his doctrine regarding grid systems, I can safely say he did not disappoint! He’s a graphic designer living in Wales and runs a small design studio, Mark Boulton Design, where he works with clients such as ESPN, Warner Bros, BBC, British Energy and Drupal. He’s also worked for the BBC and Agency.com designing wonderful experiences for all manner of clients and people across the world. Marks’ blog ‘The Personal Disquiet of Mark Boulton’ is full of interesting, design related articles on the subject of typography, the use of white space and grid systems, which I have found to be particularly useful in my professional life.

Steve Krug
Where would the world be without Steve Krug? After a decade writing computer manuals, in 1989 Steve Krug, moved up the food chain to usability testing and interface design so he could fix the problems instead of explaining them. Since then, he’s evaluated and improved interfaces for a wide variety of clients, primarily in online services and the Web, including Apple, AOL, Netscape and many more. He currently runs a consulting firm Advanced Common Sense, and spends most of his time reviewing existing sites and designs for new sites, conducting usability workshops, and helping clients resolve thorny interface problems. He is author of ‘Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability’, which has sold over 250,000 copies since its release in 2000. He also runs seminars and workshops related to web usability, which I have been privileged enough to attend once. It was most enlightening.

Louis Rosenfeld
Lou Rosenfeld is an independent information architecture consultant, and founder and publisher of Rosenfeld Media, a publishing house focused on user experience books. He has been instrumental in helping establish the fields of information architecture and user experience, and in articulating the role and value of librarianship within those fields. He helped create the profession of information architecture, co-authored its leading text, and was president of its best-known consulting firm for seven years. Lou has presented and moderated at dozens of professional and academic events, and has taught popular tutorials for the Nielsen Norman Group. Each year since 2002, Lou has embarked on a six-city speaking tour with usability expert Steve Krug; Lou also teaches in-house seminars. He’s also a personal friend of my direct line manager!

Well there you have it, some prolific exponents in our field. As the title of this blog suggests, there may be more to come (Part 2).

Winning is still associated by many, as a cheesy corporate American, in-your-face term used to rally the troops, instil the right attitude, and all those good things. I am a convert and use the term to align behaviours within the team, to achieve the intended result.

Winning is not subtle, and hence not actively used in our conservative and PC British society; clearly this is reflective in the way many projects are conceived, planned and delivered, especially in the public sector.

I recently participated in a conference to discuss “Commercial Challenges for Public Sector Engagements in UK”. The conference was chaired by senior members from the public sector and attended by a few in the ICT service provider community. It was encouraging to see senior stakeholders, be open about their shortcomings and solicit feedback. It is this behaviour that will encourage all of us to win more!

The discussion covered the following topics:

• Commercial awareness, creativity and business acumen
• Smarter and faster procurement (especially in today’s economic environment)
• Open, honest and regular communication for effective execution
• Overall IT strategy for the Public Sector

The success of an engagement was paralleled to a marriage, and that the real work is not in a big wedding, it is in the time that follows. It is this attitude that will drive the right behaviours, for us to work as partners, with transparent, shared and aligned measures of success.

We ended with discussing a couple of initiatives the public sector teams were working on i.e.:

• Establishing a comprehensive set of best commercial practice and standard approaches
• Establishing a Performance Assessment Framework

So what …

I have always believed that public sector engagements can fall into the trap of being planned to fail safely, and (in line with a recent and successful political campaign) it is time for change! We all know that attitudes, behaviours and old habits die hard, but I would encourage my teams and my clients to use some of the tools being developed, which we can leverage to ensure alignment and ultimately winning!

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of getting a website to work better with search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK. There are a number of Search engine optimisation (SEO) principles which we observe when designing and building websites. The following checklist describes some of these high level principles and techniques:

1. Provide good Content

First rule for any website is to provide good content. Sounds obvious, but many websites struggle because they have poorly written content. Provide frequently updated content that people want to read. Incoming links are key and if you can provide content that people will read and get something out of, there is a good chance they will link to that content.

2. Write good HTML markup

There is more to content than just the keywords. The markup and code underneath can make your content even more attractive to search engines and help your visitors find what they are looking for faster. The general rule of thumb is to use the appropriate tags for the different types of information:

Semantic markup
Semantic markup just means “adding meaning to your content with tags.” For example, instead of formatting a headline with the <b> tag to make it bold, use a heading tag like <h2>, typically browsers and search engines can recognize headings <h1> through <h6>, and usually they expect them to appear in a logical order.

Meta data
Meta tags have never been a guaranteed way to gain a top ranking on crawler-based search engines. Today, the most valuable feature they offer the web site owner is the ability to control to some degree how their web pages are described by some search engines.

Meta Description tags, this should be a short concise description describing what the Page is about. Meta keyword tags, should list 4 or 5 individual keywords related to the Page you have created.

Example:

<head>

<meta content=”SEO, search engines, browsing, optimisation” />

<meta content=”Everything you wanted to know about SEO, but were afraid to ask” />

<title>The truth about SEO</title>

</head>

It’s important to create your web site with keywords and key phrases in mind and to put them in place as you develop the pages and content.

Single keywords are much more commonly entered by web users, which make them more difficult to target effectively than multi-word key phrases. Unless the single keywords are highly unique, your best results will be achieved using key phrases.

Create meaningful links in the markup
Use keywords in links to give them meaning. This is also good practice for increasing accessibility, especially where assistive technologies such as screen readers are concerned:

Example:

• Not good: Read more.
• Better: Read more about search engine optimisation.

Use the ‘TITLE’ tag in links
The ‘TITLE’ attribute is used to describe links, tables, table rows and other structural HTML elements. They’re more versatile than the ALT attribute and many search engine ranking algorithms read the text in TITLE attributes as regular page content.

Example:

<a href=”http://www.wtg.co.uk” title=”WTG is a leading technology consultancy and solutions provider to the UK Public Sector”>WTG a leading technology consultancy</a>

Use the ‘ALT’ tag for images
Always use the alt tag for images; additionally, ensure images are named well. This improves SEO as well as accessibility.

Example:

• Not good: <img src=”some-image.gif />
• Better: <img src=”seo_strategy_diagram.jpg” alt=”This Diagram represent an overview of the components of and SEO strategy: Content, Code, Community” title=”SEO Strategy Diagram” />

3. Don’t try and fool search engines

Whatever you do, don’t try to trick your way into generating more traffic. Duplicate pages, hidden links and other less-than-honest techniques can get you seriously penalised and ruin any positive work you’ve done. Search engines are quite clever!

4. Use obvious URL’s

An obvious URL is a great URL. If a user can look at the Address bar (or a pasted link) and make an accurate guess about the content of the page before ever reaching it, then you’re half way there. These URLs get pasted, shared, emailed, written down, and yes, even recognised by the engines. Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL, is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors.

5. Include sitemaps

Provide a website sitemap, and link to it from your homepage as well as all your other web pages. Sitemaps that link to your main pages will help search engines find your content, as well as being helpful to web site visitors. If your sitemap contains more than about one hundred links, though, break it logically into pages.

6. Submit your site to search engines

A good way to advance your SEO is to build links intelligently. For example, submitting your site to trusted directories such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. We encourage establishing links to authority websites and professional affiliations.

7. Start a blog

Search engines, Google especially, love blogs for the fresh content and highly-structured data. Beyond that, there’s no better way to join the conversations that are already taking place about your industry and/or company. Reading and commenting on other blogs can also increase your exposure and help you acquire new links.

8. Take advantage of social media

There are significant benefits from combining search engine optimisation and social media marketing tactics ranging from increased social network discovery via search to the ability to attract links for improved SEO. With any social media site you use, the first rule is, don’t spam! Be an active, contributing member of the site. The idea is to interact with potential customers, not annoy them.

This is a piece I wrote for an internal audience towards the tail end of last year. By popular request we’ve decided to put it out there for everyone.  – Richard 22/01.

The Future.
It is 2014, and raining. I still live in a house and I still go to work, I still cook and I am still disappointed when my team loses. Our lives are almost the same as they were 5 years ago, though these days I am better connected, and, amazingly I am more a part of the local community than ever before. I write this as I sit on the bus home. I have just finished browsing through the council’s website and commenting on the proposed new developments for a local park on my smartphone. The request for consultation popped up on my personal feed earlier in the day and I’m taking the opportunity to review it in a spare moment.

This week I’ve been busy on the bus. I posted pictures of some graffiti to the council using what we used to call Twitter in the days before Google wave. My phone took the picture and tagged it with the GPS coordinates so I didn’t even need to describe the location, just posted it with a #offensivegraffiti tag. A central computer pulled the posting and worked out which council needed to action it just from the geocode. It is almost the exact reverse of the police appeals system, they post incidents with geocodes and my feed picks up the ones within 500m of my home address. Just before I get off I see that the local bus company has responded to a thread in the “bring back bendy buses” campaign space and my local MP has finally joined in the debate. Rumours are that we’ll even be able to vote electronically in the next general election.

I think back to how all this became possible:

In 2009 the government realised that social networking was a phenomena that they couldn’t afford to ignore. Andrew Stott was appointed as the Director of Digital Engagement¹, a small appointment which only had ripples in fairly confined circles at the time. Part of his role was to work out how to leverage the phenomenal growth and uptake of the social nets. At the time Facebook (remember that!) was the king of the social network and had over 250million registered users². Twitter was still growing strongly and had over 44 million users³, they were both converging and it looked like just a matter for time before Facebook went asymmetric⁴. Maybe the key turning point of the social media revolution was when the government released the much derided “tweet manual” suggesting government agencies should be using twitter and how they might do so⁵.  Retrospectively, after the publication of this document suddenly the local councils had a precedent from central government and from then on every new site had to ‘integrate with social networks’. This spawned a rash of new consultancies reminiscent of the dot com bubble. These social media consultancies were considered niche at the time but the continued demand from eGovernment projects and switched on business saw many of them grow rapidly to usurp the old school CMS integrators.

As 2009 wore on social media in government got more and more air time. The labour party was in power at the time and appointed Kerry McCarthy as a ‘twitter tsar’ who was to lead the charge in the upcoming election (dubbed ‘the new media election’) ⁶. Another remarkable and yet under reported event in the rise of the social network was the ‘we love the NHS’ trending topic on Twitter. Thousands of users updated their profile images to show their support for the NHS after an attack by the conservative MEP Dan Hannan⁷. Unlike the twitter usage in the 2008 US elections⁸ and the June Iranian Presidential Elections⁹ this was an early example of popular pressure being applied through networks in the UK.  Later in the summer of 2009 the Metropolitan police began using twitter to reach out to climate change protesters amid much fanfare from the press¹⁰. It was considered a bold move at the time and one that required the MET to lean heavily on emerging consultancies to support them through their transition to social media.

The latter half of 2009 was a period of consolidation where businesses and government agencies alike caught up with the social media trend. The buzz around social media freed up money for projects as perception shifted from “we can’t afford to do this” round to “we can’t afford not to do this”. To give context you’ll remember that 2008/9 was the big recession triggered by the subprime market in the US.  Money was extremely tight but social media was considered to be that important.

Back to 2009

We are on the cusp of a very exciting period of social media uptake and usage by central and local government. Many of the technology tools are already in place. What is missing is organisational knowledge and vision to leverage them. Many councils, MPs, Police Forces and other agencies have started tentative experiments with social media. There are a lot of opportunities out there for innovative consultancies to get their bright ideas noticed, to support and guide these organisations to tap into the power of social media. These bodies are looking for cheaper more efficient solutions in light of recessionary budget constraints. Twitter and Facebook are part of the jigsaw puzzle but the final picture isn’t clear and is constantly changing.

You probably already use a social network and you certainly use council and government services. It is only a matter of time before you can access and interact with one through the other.

References
1 Cabinet Office: Cabinet Office names director of digital engagement. http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/newsroom/news_releases/2009/090513_digital.aspx

2 Wikipedia: Facebook. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook.

3 Techcrunch: Twitter reaches 44.5 Million people worldwide. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/03/twitter-reaches-445-million-people-worldwide-in-june-comscore/

4 Bokardo.com: Relationship Symmetry in social networks: http://bokardo.com/archives/relationship-symmetry-in-social-networks-why-facebook-will-go-fully-asymmetric/

5 Cabinet Office blogs: Neil Williams. http://blogs.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/digitalengagement/post/2009/07/21/Template-Twitter-strategy-for-Government-Departments.aspx

6 Guardian.co.uk: Labour appoints Twitter tsar ahead of election: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/16/labour-appoints-twitter-tsar

7 24dash.com:“We love NHS campaign” demonstrates the power of twitter: http://www.24dash.com/news/Health/2009-08-14-We-love-the-NHS-campaign-demonstrates-power-of-Twitter

8 politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com: Obama’s White House passes 1M followers on Twitter: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/08/23/obamas-white-house-passes-1m-followers-on-twitter/

9 Time.com: Iranian Protests: Twitter, the medium of the Movement: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html

10 Guardian.co.uk: Met police turns on charm ahead of Climate Protest: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/aug/18/met-police-climate-camp-twitter