website graders – that’s a joke, right?

My peeve is with sites like websitegrader.com, which, while they can supply you with some valid information and advice, are not able to tell you the ‘marketing success’ or ‘ marketing limitations’ of your site.  There are gobs of information out there about your site – if you know where to look.  And yes, most of the information can and is used when judging how well a site markets.  But key factors that are not available to the general public that have a great influence on the effectiveness of a site are either 1) not available to machines or 2) cannot be assessed by machines.  

Don't put your brain in a jar.

You can have the best ‘grade’ for a site, but if it’s so ugly or so user unfriendly that no one wants to be there, it doesn’t matter.  Likewise, if your site is beautiful, but has no SEO or SEM, it won’t get many looks because no one knows it’s there.  

Machines also make mistakes that humans would not normally make.  Websitegrader.com didn’t ‘find’ my contact form, even though it is linked through menus, content and a sitemap, with no mystery meat involved.  Therefore, it dinged my grade.  Even if it did find my contact form, how would it know if it were being used, and being used by humans, not just spam bots?  It wouldn’t.  Only the human looking at the form output would be able to say with accuracy that true conversions are coming in via the form.  Further more, to know if you are getting a ROI, it would need to know what you invested in the site and what you’ve invested in marketing, along with the calculated returns from the site.  I hope this information is not available on the Internet – it shouldn’t be.

My synopsis is that these sites like websitegrader. com offer a non-service service.  The real goal is for them to get you to buy their marketing services.  Kinda like an auto mechanic that offers free engine checks – and invariably finds things to fix.

Is your social-media-life scattered all over the web?

Organizing and keeping track of all the sites you belong to, calendars, lists, information on visited sites, blogs you write, and other sites you frequent is becoming increasingly difficult with the web 2.0 craze in full swing.

Before it all goes spiraling out of control,  try

SuprGlu

Use it to create one place for others to find all your stuff.  I use SuprGlu by adding all my personal feeds to make one Supr RSS feed of all my stuff.  Or use it to create one place to gather all your favorite feeds.  The feeds don’t have to be yours – you can create a Supr feed of your favorite tech sites, or maybe your favorite recipe sites, it’s up to you to conglomerate the feed into what you want it to deliver.

Then there’s

Scrybe You can’t get into this, the beta is closed, but see the video here.

Stoopid Tests

I am usually good at tests; I don’t know why. But nothing is quite as annoying as knowing what you know, and having questions posed so poorly as to be almost unanswerable. It is completely possible that I ‘read into’ questions too much. And it’s also possible that posing questions to test someone’s knowledge or skill level is a skill of its own. I have noticed poor test questions on a couple fronts: matters of context, analogies and antiquation. There are things that are simply a matter of context and personal preference. For example, who decides what browser cache setting is best? I don’t like to cache my pages at all, since it saves me the trouble of hitting the refresh button to preview changes I make. But for the average person, page caching can improve their browsing experience. So questions posed as “What is the optimal browser cache setting?” is totally dependent on the context the browser is used in. One of my favorite questions starts like this “Which is the best method to ______.” Then there’s the analogy question. Analogy questions should come with a level of accuracy that tells you exactly how precise they are trying to be. One case this crops up in is the difference between a LAN and WAN. My favorite question in this category is true or false (yeah, thanks for all the options) “The Internet is like a WAN.” Well, that depends on how technically accurate you are trying to be. In the end, if you look close enough, nothing is like anything else! <L> But best of all, I can’t stand having to learn about antiquated methods such as FRAMES. It’s been years since I have used frames, and I don’t plan of starting again anytime soon. My newest peeve in this ring of the circus is having to learn the menus and settings for Outlook Express and Netscape Navigator.

I’m sorry, Netscape Who??  Why, in the year 2008, would I want to learn anything about Netscape Navigator? I didn’t know this was a technology history test…

Or better yet, how to sign up for a hotmail account. Yikes, if someone can’t just figure out that on-the-fly, don’t go into the technology field, please. You could make an entire test just on how to sign up for every web service out there. (Please, no one actually do that!)

Then there are items that make you wonder about the entire course and its validity.  The one I found today was “Twisted pair is unsuitable to bend around corners.”  Please tell me why I am taking this certification test again?  What really matters is that the test I am taking is considered by the business community at large to be reputable.

Visual Search a Design Nightmare

With visual search engines like Redzee appearing on the horizon, the nature of search will be changed. Right now, in regular search results, your site is represented as text consisting of the same alphabet as everyone else. Searchers have to read the description of your site to figure out if they would like to go there. By contrast, a visual search displays a screenshot of the resulting sites, giving the impression that you can tell which sites are better by looking at an image of the site that is reduced to 35% of it’s original size. It is true that if you had been to a site before, but couldn’t remember the exact URL and didn’t bookmark it, you would be able to pick it out easier and faster than a regular search.

But visual search is a marketing bonanza that will be a design nightmare. Design changes will be requested to make the screenshot look more appealing at a reduced size. Pages will take on a more ad-like appearance, since getting people to look at your page is a desired effect, and just placing in the results will get eyes on your site. And if the screenshot is done in a certain manner, just ranking will get your advertising seen.

And how long will it take before pages are optimized to rank for a popular query just to splash spam in your face while you search? The problem is that an image is whatever you tell the machine it is. If you have an image of your product or service and tag it as ‘free ip tv’ then the machine has no recourse than to resort to your designation of what that image is. This is one reason why I don’t trust it when any search engine says they are p*rn free. As long as the machines cannot tell that they are being lied to, people will lie to them.