February 2008

ProBlogger Darren Rowse says he’s got a contest going for people to win a copy of Web Design for ROI, a book that he’s been enjoying in the past few weeks.

The book is called Web Design for ROI, and I have not read it, but I know that there’s plenty of research out there showing that web (and blog) design can have very significant impact on your ROI. I would be surprised if this book turned out to be a waste of time.

The funny sound bite that turns up most often on this subject is “the uglier your site, the more money you make.” Often this can be true, and while it’s a bit baffling at time, I chalk up a lot of the revenue to mis-clicked PPC ads. If you’re not paying for your site with AdSense, you might want to look a little bit further.

When I’m sitting down to sketch out a new blog or web site layout, I always ask myself two questions before I start, and the answers guide the layout and structure of the page. I suggest you do the same with your web site, and it might just improve your ROI:

1. Where is the user most likely to arrive at my domain?
2. What is the most important thing for them to see on my site?

In a lot of cases the answers will be, respectively: individual blog pages, and google ads. That’s what gives rise to “ugly” sites (permalink pages plastered with ads). But in your case the answers might be “Users land on FAQ answer pages and I want them to see our accessories store.”

That right there informs your web design. Check your pages - do they make a sensible path for the user?

The contest at ProBlogger is pretty easy to enter - just go leave a comment on that post letting him know what your favorite blog design is and why. Give it a shot.

One of the truly brilliant aspects of blogging is the ability to put humans into a place where previously no humans existed. I bet that if you ask practically any average traveler today whether or not there are actual humans working at the TSA, most of them will say “probably not.”

In several months, that number will be lower. Jake McKee, an outstanding community guy and a speaker at our last Web Community Forum conference, posted about the TSA blog’s launch today.

He has some good advice for the budding bloggers over at the TSA:

Introduce the team and the objective

A blog is a conversation and the first step in a conversation is an introduction. Before you jump into the content, introduce the concept of the blog, introduce the team members we’ll be hearing from. What do they do? Where do they work? What’s their background? Why is the blog titled “Evolution of Security”?

This is a really good point. I think that a lot of what the TSA is trying to do with this blog is get some sort of a human connection between travelers and what has traditionally been a faceless government entity with terrible marketing.

In order to accomplish that, they’re going to need to make sure we know who’s blogging. Some of that should certainly be some introductory posts.

I disagree with Jake about jumping into the content - I generally don’t think there’s any reason to hold out on good content if you’ve got it ready to go, but there’s no reason you can’t sprinkle the blog with some self-reflection.

A blog isn’t going to fix everything of course - people are still going to have bad experiences at the airport, and not every TSA employee is going to be nice to every passenger, but if the blog helps travelers walk into the security line with a more tolerant attitude, it could make things go more smoothly for everyone.

In any case, it’s good that the TSA is blogging. I’m sure they’ll learn quickly.

The news is out today that Google has launched a Social Graph API - basically an open tool for charting social connections on the open web. They say it best themselves:

We currently index the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.

What this means, in short, is that XFN matters now. Google launched with some example tools that let you map out what link relationships they’ve found with your blog and other web sites. Your report looks something like this:

I’m assuming this list will grow as you all start adding relationship metadata to your blogrolls. I’m going to go start filling in ours.

This type of link data has existed for a while, and if you’re using WordPress, you may have already put it in. The big holdup has really been that until now there hasn’t been much use for that metadata—if you bothered to fill in all the information about how you’re connected to the people you link to, nobody cared. So why bother?

Well now Google is trying to pull the kind of relationship superdata that people are generating in Social Networks like Facebook (which, incidentally, Google can’t crawl like it can crawl the open web) out into blogs and web sites.

In all honesty, I can’t say I’m too upset about the idea. I’ve always thought that there’s so much more to linking than just links, and this is a cool way to start quantifying that information.

In WordPress, if you want to start adding the XFN metadata, just go to your blogroll tab, then edit any one of the links, and expand the “Link Relationship” tab. Looks like this: