For too long, webmasters have thought of search engine optimization as if it were nothing more than a form of advertising, and usability as if it were nothing more than accessibility. SEO became a set of clever techniques to get visitors to your site, and usability became a set of rules that might be reluctantly followed.

Now things are changing. The old SEO techniques aren’t working as well or as long. To get high rankings for many competitive keywords, the most important “technique” seems to be, “Have pages that people want to link to.” As far as usability, it turns out that pages that are hard for the disabled to use are probably hard for everybody else to use. Not only are they not accessible, they’re not very usable.

These problems with websites – people can’t find us, people can’t use us – can easily get masked. Most webmasters reason to themselves, “We have visitors, we must be doing something right.” But it’s difficult to know how many more visitors you would have had – how much longer they would have stayed, and how much more they would have recommended your site to others – if you had done things differently. If your site pleases you and your boss, you may hear no complaints. But your potential visitors are not you or your boss. They haven’t even visited yet. You may not know much about your potential visitors at all.

Both findability and usability have a bad name in some circles. People see web pages where the keywords limit the writers, and where usability rules limit the designers. We need to go beyond that. Content that isn’t interesting or natural, or design that isn’t attractive or even bearable – that’s not usable. That’s not optimized. Not if visitors can’t stand to use it. As Stephen P. Anderson notes, researchers have found that attractive things work better.

Instead of findability or usability, let’s try another word – hospitality. Our visitors are truly our guests. Our websites need to say, “Howdy! Glad you’re here. Can I get you anything? Are you finding everything you need?”

Excellent library of usability articles from Jared Spool and others at http://www.uie.com/articles/

Bonfire Remembrance and Memorial site goes live

Just a quick note to say that we just launched a new Bonfire Remembrance site at bonfire.tamu.edu. The site takes the old Bonfire site that was launched shortly after the collapse in 1999 to keep people updated and then left as a kind of online remembrance and merges it with the Bonfire Memorial site that we inherited. In both cases, time and broken links had caught up with both sites.

But with the 10th anniversary of the collapse and the 100th year of Bonfire, the activities and need for a better web presence was needed. But for this to happen as quickly as possible, we needed help. And we got some great help.

Big shout outs to David Swanson and the folks at the MSC who offered up the old bonfire.tamu.edu URL, and Shawn and the DoIT folks who helped us get a site up in Drupal. The Bonfire Remembrance Committee provided me text for pages and Bryan and Trent in our Division knew where the right photos were.

Now that the site is live and in the DoIT system, it can be maintained much easier by folks on the Traditions Council, the MSC, the Bonfire Remembrance Committee (since most if not all of those groups have access to/already use DoIT’s Drupal instance).

Ultimately, this isn’t really about the site but the fact that so many people pitched in to help. These are the kinds of projects I always enjoy , and again my thanks to everyone who offered time, support, insight and assistance.

We’re stuck in the middle of several large projects.  Since posting that “we’re now moving from stage 4 to stage 5 of projext X” doesn’t make for the most interesting of reading, blog posts might become a little sparse for a while.  Don’t let that discourage you, know that we’re busy, just that we’re stuck inside of larger projects.

We are continuing to make progress on the mobile site.  It is going a bit slow because we want to get it right and make sure that you have a good experience no matter which device you use.  We are also working on recreating the TAMU News site.  It will become much more dynamic and hopefully have more content that interests a broader range of people.  We have already rolled out the Aggie Clips (sorry, only available on campus) portion, and hope to have the rest by the end of the holidays.

We are talking to GIS about a new version of the campus map. They have unimaginable data sources and the technology to build a map that will really rock.  We will be cooperating with them, making sure the features and interface match what users expect.  We are also taking up their idea of panaramas to start thinking about how campus virtual tours might work.

There are a few other things that we have going on that we will release shortly.  In the meantime, we’ll try to make up for any lack of blog posts by being more diligent with our tweets.  They might be more mundane, but they’ll also give a better insight into what we do on a day-to-day basis.

We have continued working on the overall project platform as well as the underlying mobile apps.  If you haven’t been following along on  the dev site, we are looking at release 1 consisting of:

• Campus Events
• Texas A&M News
• Bus Routes
• University Google Search
• Library
• Contact Phone Numbers

Other elements for possible inclusion later down the road:

• Athletics
• Directory Search
• Videos/YouTube
• Campus Maps
• Courses
• Campus Tours
• Dining Services
• University website

Again, if you have any special requests please send them our way.

As Erick mentioned, we are diligently working on a solution that is friendly to the entire spectrum of mobile devices. The difficulty in developing web sites and applications targeted at mobile devices is that each device has its own preferences: which markup it can render and which technologies it supports. These capabilities vary from support for JavaScript to support for bold text. JavaScript is obviously on the cutting edge for mobile browsers, whereas bold text is something developers and designers take for granted.

To help mitigate the differences, we spent time researching how others were dealing with this problem. We eventually found ourselves on the homepage of the Wireless Abstraction Library (WALL) for PHP. After some enjoyable integration work (that’s developer-speak for “difficult hacking”), we have a functional integration between the WALL4PHP library and the Zend Framework-powered back end of Texas A&M’s mobile site.

I’ll save the intricate details of how the libraries work together for another day, but I wanted to talk about how this benefits you. You are most likely intimately familiar with what your mobile device does well, and where it can improve on your experience with websites. However, because each device is designed for a particular subset of one of the popular markup languages for mobile devices—WML (WAP 1.0), cHTML, or XHTML MP (WAP 2.0)—most websites are not capable of rendering in your device’s native markup language, if you will. This is why you have a (possibly) growing list of web sites you refuse to visit from your mobile device.

It would not be prohibitively difficult to develop views for each of the three markup languages, except each device is permitted to support part of the full markup language specification, or the entire language. Giving markup to the device that it does not understand would land us right back where we started: a web site that is not properly rendered on your device.

Using markup elements defined by the WALL specification, it becomes a simple exercise to translate into the appropriate markup for a given device based on its capabilities. The WALL parsing library uses what is known as the Wireless Universal Resource File (WURFL)—a large XML database that contains information about device capabilities—to determine the proper markup for a device based on the device’s user agent. The end result is that a device that supports PNG image files will receive PNGs; a device that supports bold tags as <b> elements will receive them and <strong> elements for XHTML MP supporting devices; so on and so forth.

As webmasters, we hope that this technology will be able to help us provide a most enjoyable and useful mobile browsing experience to you. We really appreciate your feedback on what a mobile application can do for you. Keep the information coming.

When looking across the country and talking to folks at HighEdWeb, there is still no real concensus on how to tackle mobile web development.  Most of even the leading schools have turned it over to third party developers, who then build iPhone apps… exactly what I said last time that I didn’t want to do here.

I did, though, find one bright spot.  MIT has taken a similar approach and has Open Sourced their web kit, so I need to do more detailed research into their product.  They do browser sniffing and then compare the results to the wurfl project, which tracks the capabilities of phones on the market.  They then fork the code received by the phone based on its capabilities.  Features are progressively added so that base line machines get unstyled text content while smart phones get more and iPhones/iPod Touches get the full experience.

Whatever direction we ultimately go, you should be prepared for this to not be a straight-line process.  We will be rolling out the project with a few basic apps to begin with and adding a few more as we get them built and integrated.  As we do so the layout and features of the base will likely change as well.

We got a new student worker a few weeks ago.  When we first hired him, his primary focus of interest was building apps for the Blackberry and iPhone.  This was designed to fit in with and help promote the TAMUMobile iPhone apps that were published by Terribly Clever last month.  The more I thought about it, though, the more convinced I became that we were on the wrong track.  We shouldn’t be building one set of apps for each phone and then another for the next phone, we should be creating one mobile web view that is accessible from all (within reason anyway) smart phones.

We experimented with a few things for about two weeks prior to leaving for the HighEdWeb conference, and the biggest thing we learned was that developing for the phone is going to be as bad as the bad-0l-days of the browser wars.  There is no standard of how html, javascript, or CSS is supported.  Each phone renders the same code differently, and only a few correctly.

When going to the conference I purposefully left my laptop at home and tried to get around with only my Blackberry Curve.  Not an impossible situation – I have Opera Mini installed so I can see most sites — if I don’t mind one-word columns, missing blocks of content where a flash box is supposed to be, or arbitrary contend styled with CSS for the desktop which completely breaks the page when viewed from the phone.  Combine this with cellular-based download speeds and I’d rarely use the Internet if this was the only way I could connect.

I’m convinced that the future of the web is mobile, but I’m equally convinced that we have a long way to go to make it usable.  Follow along at http://m-test.tamu.edu/ as we try different techniques, technologies, and applications to bring the university web presence to the mobile device.  Feel free to send us comments and suggestions, I think this will be an ongoing initiative for easily the next several years.

After a being gone a week for the HighEdWeb09 conference, John and I returned to the office today to wade through the issues that have popped up and start reviewing our thoughts from the conference.

While there was plenty of great information in the conference tracks, the bulk of the value to me came from interaction with other schools, seeing how they deal with many of the same issues we deal with, and comparing how successful our methodologies are in comparison.  Overall I think we’re in pretty good shape.  We obviously don’t compare to the nation’s elite, but that’s only a matter of funding and support.  Several conversations confirmed that we’re on the right track with our projects, so look for us to continue fighting to do things right.

We do have some infrastructural projects to take care of, but look for us soon to give you an idea of where we’re looking at going.

Is web usability testing possible for less than $50, in less than 2 hours a week? That’s what Chas Grundy of the University of Notre Dame said in his eduweb conference session. So while John and Erick are at HighEdWeb, I’ll finish up with my own conference notes.

Usability testing can be as simple as sitting 3-5 users down in front of your website, and watching what they do. With screen capture software and/or a webcam, you can even record them.

Chas offered several suggestions and encouragements on web usability testing.

1. Focus on the big issues. Begin today.
2. Decide what to learn, how to learn, who from, when to test. Most users are similar. If high school students can’t find your “Contact Us” button, neither can rich elderly potential donors.
3. Explain to the users that there are no right/wrong answers. In fact, they’re not being tested at all – the web developers are.
4. Test early, test often. Don’t wait until the site is set in stone.
5. You can test using paper prototypes and mockups, even before your site is finished.
6. Test competitors’ websites too, to see if alternatives work better than what you’re doing.
7. When you test, give users tasks. Don’t leave it open-ended.
8. Encourage your users talk out loud over the tasks, but don’t offer any direction yourself.
9. If you ask about something, people will create opinions where they had none before.
10. What web users say is not always what they do. Ignore speculation.
11. Fix the obvious, do special testing on the hard parts, then retest.
12. Design once, increment forever.
13. Remember: everything we do could be wrong. We don’t know until we’ve tested it.

Chas suggested several usability testing software tools…

• Camtasia – currently available for $10 for the A&M community from https://software.tamu.edu/
• Silverback – another screen capture option
• Jing Pro – creates videos, including screen captures
• Optimal Sort – free online card sorting for usability/information architecture

…and several websites on usability and usability testing:

• sensible.com – The online home of Web usability consultant Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think.
• useit.com – For usability research, many turn to Dr. Jakob Nielsen’s website. For graphic design beauty, they usually look elsewhere.
• usability.gov – A one-stop source from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services on how to make websites more usable, useful, and accessible.