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.

Polarizing Effects of Technology

Ignorance of technology will be the downfall of many people in the near future. Those that have failed to keep up with technology, and I don’t mean end-user functionality, will be at the mercy of those that do. It is not enough to have access to the web and know how to use a search engine, these are activities that are guided by the technology; you are just going through the flow chart. The people that can guide the technology instead of being guided by it, creating and altering the flow chart, will be polarize us all into two groups; strangely enough there are already names for the groups: white hats and black hats.

If you collect stray animals, give the homeless your spare change, and want to do your part to bring a little peace and understanding to the world by being a good example, then you fall into the first category of those that want to help. I’m not against helping people, as you might assume from my somewhat derogatory depiction. But rather, I find it to be an over whelming, frustrating job. Trying to educate people enough to make them the least bit secure while online is just about futile. If you turn off all the wonderful bells and whistles that web sites offer, the web becomes a rather boring flat place for average people. We have become accustomed to the conveniences of automated processes. Time needs to be spent on tasks that most computer users find a ‘waste’ of time, since they don’t notice anything wrong in the first place. They only complain when their browser homepage is mysteriously reset or their screen is covered with pop-ups. Software helps, but it costs money and is in no way leak-proof. I have learned that people are going to do what they want, especially when they don’t understand and can’t perceive the consequences.

People don’t believe there are sharks in the water until they have been bitten, and by then, it is way too late to start complaining.

Those that belong in the later group know who you are. You know that 99% of the population have no idea what you do, how you do it, or that you are doing it at all. If society can’t conceive of what you do, how can they tell you’ve done something wrong, never-the-less prove it in a court of law filled with people that can barely email? Other than that, all I have to say is no comment.

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.