The DMA office will be closed from Thursday 5 April and will reopen on Tuesday 10 April after the Easter public holidays.

We wish all of our customers a relaxing, safe and happy break!

Responsive Design is the new buzz-word for 2012, let’s look at what it is all about.

First some background. In December 2011, Jon posted a digital marketing review of 2011, one of the key points in that round up was the amount of mobile traffic received by web sites is on the increase.

The classification of mobile traffic in the Australian Bureau of Statistics review included smart phones, tablet computers and mobile broadband.

Gone are the days when you can build your web site, test it on your computer monitor and be satisfied that you’ve seen what your user is going to see. Chances are that between 25% and 50% of your visitors are going to be arriving on a device other than a traditional computer.

It’s certainly true of some of our client web sites right now.

Mobile Stats - click me to view larger image

Take a look at this example, stats from a client’s site from February 2011 to February 2012.

The blue is overall traffic, then the green is mobile traffic while the orange is normal PC traffic.

The below chart is of the same period and spells it out in black and white, in 12 months more than 25% of the traffic was mobile.

Click to view larger

What does all this mean?

Well in the words of the Matrix’s Agent Smith, “…that Mr Anderson is the sound of inevitability” – you just have to accept that your visitors are going to viewing your site on something other than a PC.

This is where Responsive Design comes into play. In a nutshell it’s the ability for a design to reconfigure itself to match the browser width of the device that is viewing the site.

So on a PC you can expect the usual kind of layout but as the screen size gets smaller, elements of the site move or even disappear so that the site works on the smaller screen.

Here’s an example a site we built in January this year, one screen shot is from a normal browser the other an iPhone. The site’s main menu, images and content resize themselves to fit on the smaller screen.

Want to see it for yourself?

Visit MichaelAnderson.com.au on your desktop computer, then visit the same address on your iPad or iPhone.

And all of this done with none other than WordPress - Cool huh?

Website design briefs come in all shapes and sizes. At TheDMA, we have seen every manner of brief from formal structured requests for tender from government agencies to more informal phone calls! A good brief is often the starting point of any work. For us the process is:

• Website design brief (covering the issues in the template below),
• Written agreement on work, payment terms, project management etc,
• Commence design and build.

For an intangible service such as building a website, we believe that a good clear written understanding of requirements is an essential starting point for getting a good result. From a client’s point of view, it helps to clarify and summarise thinking around issues. From the agency’s point of view, it provides a clear instruction on what is to be done. For both parties, it outlines how the results will be measured.

For some jobs, the website design brief can be more informal, and done through discussion of requirements. So the website design brief templates will be specific to your requirements. If you are an individual or organisation putting this together before requesting proposals, you may want to include a number of questions about project management, timelines and resources which will help you decide between competing agencies. If you are an agency – you may wish to add questions related to how you build websites, the technology you use, and your services.

We have decided to provide a generic website design brief template that can be used by people thinking about working with us, organisations looking to have a website built, and by agencies looking for a good starting point to improve their website design brief template.

We are releasing this under the Creative Commons Attribute License, which means you are free to use and reproduce this, just please attribute TheDMA as original author, and link back to this post!

<<Website Design Brief Template.doc>>

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), as we know it, is dead. The changes to the Google Privacy policy which take effect on 1 March 2012, build on the Google search algorithm changes known as “Panda”.  These together have mauled the Search Engine Optimisation industry and will forever change SEO.

You won’t hear this from the Search Engine Optimisation industry. But you do hear it from Google themselves!

Google has announced their privacy policies are changing as of 1 March 2012. And in this announcement is the obituary for the Search Engine Optimisation industry. Google says:

Tailored for you

If you’re signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you’ve expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube. We’ll better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you’re searching for and get you those results faster.

Quoted from Google’s Privacy Policy Overview. In the full preview of their new policy, they are even more direct:

How we use information we collect

We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads.

“Tailored search results” and “more relevant search results” mean that each person will see a different page of search results in Google, depending on where they are located, what they have searched for and clicked on in the past, what Pages they follow in Google+, and sites they regularly visit. There is no longer any point in crafting your marketing strategy around “being on page one of Google”, because there is no longer a single, universal page one. Google’s aim is to provide a unique set of results “tailored” to your requirements.

As an example, let’s search for in Google for “smash repairs”. Let’s start with the default settings – I’m signed into my Google Account, and it knows I’m in Sydney:

Now, do the same search again, not signed into Google:

What now ?

Expect and plan for the fact that these changes will progressively get stronger, as Google has clearly stated that their aim is to provide tailored, individual search results. By planning and implementing some simple strategies now, you can get in front of these changes and ensure that your site remains relevant and visible in the search results.

• Focus on continuing to generate great content.
• Maintain your keyword focus and consistency – page title, URL, meta-descriptions, and keep each page focused on small set of trophy keywords.
• Link building is still important, and now quality is more important than quantity. Use content rich anchor text, links from relevant pages.
• Use a smart tool like Google Analytics Tracking for Forms, which adds Google Analytics data to each enquiry, telling you what search engine, search terms, and campaign the specific enquiry came from.
• Monitor your analytics, webmaster tools to keep an eye on traffic sources and keywords that are generating traffic.
• If you really want to guarantee being on page one of Google, budget to run an effective AdWords campaign.

These strategies will ensure that your site stays relevant, even in the new world of personalised search results.

Update: We’ve filled this position

At TheDMA we create a lot of WordPress web sites.

We are looking for a contractor to join our team to help us produce brilliant web sites for our clients.

Our current team consists of graphic designers and developers and now we’re looking for an experienced producer to sit in between these groups. This is a hands on role, we need someone who’ll role their sleeves up and jump right in. We have developed a tight project management style so that our team can be as efficient as possible but you’ll need to be able to cope with a lot of balls in the air, our focus is delivering jobs on time for our clients.

Experience with WordPress as a publishing platform is very highly regarded but if you’re brilliant in every other way we’ll train you to master WordPress.

In a nut shell when the site design is done, the coding is complete it is the producer’s job to load up the content, configure WordPress to present the client’s material and liaise with the team to finalise any outstanding items and get the site live.

Ideally you live in Sydney and you can get to our main office in North Narrabeen (Northern Beaches), however, our team is already distributed so it’s not a requirement to be physically in the office every day.

You don’t have to be coder or a photoshop god – perhaps you’ve got a background in marketing, writing or blogging?

If you’re interested please complete the form below to get in touch.

There are a lot of factors that go into a successful SEO strategy that can enable your website to gain additional traffic through good ranking on search engines.

With over 360,000,000 image search queries performed per month across the major search engines, the process of optimising your images for the web should not be ignored.

Below are a few tips for optimising your images in order to improve your overall website’s performance for search.

Optimise image file names for best SEO results

It is important that you make the name of the image file keyword rich and that the words are relevant to the content of your page. Use hyphens (-), instead of underscores (_) in your file names to separate words.

Example:

An image may be originally named “DSCF1473.jpg” and so does not do anything to boost SEO. It should be renamed to “optimising-images-search-engines.jpg” (obviously keywords relevant to your content!)

Optimise image file size for best SEO results

Use good quality pictures, ensuring that your images are literal and connected to the content of the page, such as a photo of a product. It is also recommended saving your images in .jpeg format for photos, .gif for animations and .png for logos and buttons.

Ensure that your images don’t adversely effect your website page’s fast load times, make the image file size as small as possible (without sacrificing image quality). Utilise the “save for web” feature that is found in PhotoShop to reduce the KB size to 50 to 75% quality (compression) and set the dpi to 72.

If you don’t have PhotoShop installed on your computer, there are free image resizing tools such as Picnik, which are available online.

Please note: The image file size should not be confused with the dimensional size you see on your screen. You can display a 900px wide image across your page and it may only be 25kb in actual file size.

Use the image ‘title’ attribute

The title of the image should include your keywords and be relevant as possible to the image and content on the web page. We recommend maintaining shorter title, approximately four to six words will suffice. See below for how to enter title tags in WordPress.

Use the image ‘alt’ attribute

Make sure that you use the alt attribute of the image tag as this also is understood by the search engines. Again, the alt attribute should contain a relevant description of the image, again with keywords relevant to your content.

The WordPress image editor is found by clicking on the Upload/Insert media icon just above the content box within each page or post. To edit an image using the image editor  after you have inserted it into a page/post, simply hover over the image within the content box and click on the Edit icon on the top left side of the image.

The screen shot above shows this screen from WordPress and highlights where to enter the various things mentioned in this article.

The aforementioned tips take little time and can easily be implemented into your website’s ongoing SEO strategy, thus enabling your images for maximum search engine benefit.

While we all know the benefits of SEO and maintaining fresh and engaging content on your website, you may not be aware of some important on page factors which can greatly increase your rankings in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS). We have covered these fundamental components that determine how your website is displayed on search engine result pages specifically for the WordPress Thesis framework in a previous post.

Outlined here are specifics when you’re using the WordPress Genesis theme framework.

A. Title tags for SEO

The fields “Custom Document Title” is where you control the title of the web page. Title tags are one the most important elements on your page for SEO purposes. It’s the first opportunity to to tell search engines what your page is about, search engines weigh this particular tag heavily when indexing and ranking web pages.

B. Use the Keyphrase in your Meta Description tags

The field “Custom Post/Page Meta Description” is the field to enter your description to match the content of the web page. When people search on Google for a specific keyword that you have included in your meta description field, Google bolds the keyphrase in the search results. So, while it may not boost your rankings, from a users perspective, it will call more attention to your searh result and entice people to click through to your website.

Ultimately, you’re writing the meta description to entice people to click through to your website.

C. Custom Post/Page Meta Keywords

In 2009 Google announced that they do not support use the keyword meta tag in its web search ranking and therefore this field will have no influence in your search engine ranking.

It is however useful for other search engines to include 3-5 keywords in total, separated by commas.

D. Custom Canonical URL

Duplicate content can arise from the search engine spiders treating your web pages as two different urls, ie. www.example.com and example.com when in fact they are actually the same page of content. The canonical field gives you a way to help resolve duplicate content issues by telling the search engine the preferred URL.

E. Custom Redirect URL

If you have moved your site to a new domain or moved a page of content to a new page, you can use the custom redirect url field to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page, making the transition as seamless as possible.

F. Robots Meta Settings

The Robot meta tags control how search engines index and rank your website. By specifying rules for the search engine’s indexing spiders you can control how your website is ranked on the web.

• noindex: prevents the page from being indexed and appearing in the SERPS
• nofollow: prevents the Google’s indexing spiders from following links from this page
• noarchive: prevents Google from showing the cached link for a page.

To allow search engines to index everything in your site, we recommend you leave these tick boxes unchecked.

Completing these fields for each page or post in your web site gives your content the best showing to Google and other search engines to index and rank your site well.

At TheDMA we encourage all of our clients to maintain a blog on their website as part of the business online marketing strategy. There are many benefits that enable you to create more opportunities, generate interest and increase income for your business.

Outlined below are some core reasons why an on going blogging strategy should be implemented on your website.

Blogging for SEO

Maintaining a blog allows you to regularly update  your website with fresh content which is indexed by the search engines. To enable your website to rank well on the search engines, it needs to have an abundance of freshly added content.

Each time you add a post, you increase the amount of content in your site. The more posts you have containing targeted and relevant keywords, along with fresh and up to date information, the more chance you have of ranking higher.

Establish Leadership Authority

A blog allows you to develop a voice for your business and gives you a way to share your experience. Sharing tips or advice and giving insight into the use of your products provides a way to let consumers know that you are a leader or expert in your field.

Blogs are a great way to speak to clients and customers and give them information beyond what is posted on your business website.

Blog Stucture

Often, you would like to keep your business website simple – a few pages describing what you do and how you do it. A blog provides a perfect arena to put all of the other information on your site without cluttering your main website pages.

Blogs give you the opportunity to organise the related information that may not be fully integrated into your existing website pages into organised categories, and archives. Adding a link from your website navigation to your blog will neatly place that information on your site for visitors to peruse.

Engage your Audiences

A business blog often tends to be more informal than the rest of the website. This can provide a great opportunity to engage potential customers and larger audiences through blog comments and links, allowing you to speak directly to your target audience.

Blogs are an affordable way to attract new users to your business website. A business can reach thousands and even millions of people through a blog creating new leads and opportunities for your business.

It takes time, a commitment and worthy material. You need to post regularly, provide information that’s valuable to your readers, and be willing to interact with and learn from your audience, and hence marketing your business more effectively as a result.

As the Christmas holidays approach and the year end gets closer, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our partners and clients for your valued patronage and for allowing us to be of service to you.

We wish all of you a relaxed and safe Christmas and New Year to be filled with much joy and happiness.

We look forward to working with you all in 2012 and the continued success of our partnerships.

TheDMA office will close on Wednesday 21st December at 2pm and will reopen on Monday 9th January 2012.

Yesterday the new 3.3 version of WordPress was released, read on for a quick summary of the changes.

Dashboard improvements

New Admin Bar

The Admin Bar was introduced in version 3.1 to give quick access to commonly used menu items, in both the administration area and when a logged in user is viewing the front end of a WordPress web site.

There’s a new version that fixes some sizing problems and changes the placement of of the menu items. It certainly does groups things together for a more condensed and useful menu.

Tool Tips

These will guide users through the core WordPress screens but they are also available to developers to provide more interactive help to users of their plugins and themes. Pictured here they sit on top of the interface to provide detailed help and tutorials.

At TheDMA we’re a keenly developing these new tool tips to be able to provide inline help for our customer web sites.

Admin Menus

The left hand menu has also been updated, featuring fly out menus the new layout aims to be more usable while still keeping all commonly used options easily accessible.

Media uploader

Apple is not the only one giving Flash the flick. The media uploader in WordPress 3.3 says goodbye to the Flash version and replaces it with an HTML 5 tool that features drag and drop of files, instant resizing of images and sort tools to sort the media library by file type.

The removal of flash will also mean better compatibility with mobile devices connecting to the WordPress administration.

Permanent widgets

This feature will certainly be popular with our team. Widgets often hold the content that is displayed in sidebars and footers. Until now they were tied to themes, so when you changed themes you would loose the contents of the widget. Now in 3.3 the widget content stays between theme changes.

Adaptive interface for WordPress Administration

With 3.3 comes an update of the familiar WordPress admin screens to make the interface more effective on a range of devices. This means that the interface will change to suit the device that you’re using to connect. So logging in to your administration screens on a device like an iPhone or iPad, you’ll find that it looks and behaves more consistently.

This is a work in progress, version 3.4 is slated to have a fully responsive interface that will take this concept to completion.

It’s true that there are apps for some devices like iPhone and iPad but not all of the functionality of the desk top version is not available in these apps. Now it should be possible to do everything on an iPad that you can do via a normal computer.

Get updated!

If you’re a customer on TheDMA Maintenance programme your site will be backed up and upgraded to WordPress 3.3 in the coming weeks, if not please contact us to organise an upgrade of your website installation.