1. Page URLs should be descriptive and not contain query strings (http://domain.com/?page=127 as opposed to http://domain.com/descriptive-page-title-here/). Generally this should match the page title too.
2. Every page should have a unique page title that is descriptive of the page content
3. Every page should have unique keywords in the “keywords” tag; the description should also be descriptive and convey meaning for the page
4. Each page should have a title and primary heading that ideally match up or are shorter and longer versions of each other
5. Page headings should use the h1 html tag
6. Logo images should link to the site root / domain
7. If an image is used in the page body, it should be named for a person searching, not randomly, and it should use the “this-is-an-image” naming format
8. Links should have description “title” text; images should have descriptive “alt” text
9. Each page should ideally link to 2 to 5 internal pages, within the body copy
10. Each page should ideally link to a few external pages in the body copy
11. Page copy should be unique from other pages on the site
12. Page code (markup) should be semantic and should use semantic tags < strong >for bold instead of < p class="bold">
13. Old or invalid links should be permanently redirected to current pages using a 301 redirect
14. If at all possible, all content should be served from one domain (http://domain.com/ instead of http://domain.com/ & http://blog.domain.com for example) to infer search and PageRank benefits across content
15. Page URLs should be consistent; and for better visibility in Search Engine Results Pages, should not have a date format before the name of the page (http://domain.com/page-name-here/ ; instead of http://domain.com/2010/05/11/page-name-here/) which makes reading the URL harder
16. Page URLs and associated content should be written for Search, not reading. For example “Company Name restructuring results in benefits to XYZ stakeholders” is a better bet than “Restructuring results in benefits to stakeholders”. People search for names, so it’s important to write online copy for search and not a headline in a publication. This should give you an idea of search volumes: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Whilst this list is not exhaustive, it’s a good rule of thumb guide, and if all the points above are implemented, then you’re probably already a lot further than most business websites out there today.

Enjoy

The event, organised by Technovated, will bring international experience and perspective to the African continent and provide a rare opportunity to learn first hand from local and international speakers about the role that emerging and Web technologies have to play in African business and development.

Shirky is one of the world’s most sought-after speakers on topics related to the Web, social media and the Internet. He has spoken at events such as TED Global, SXSW, the Web 2.0 expo in New York and San Francisco, SES San Jose, the Adobe Learning Summit, New York Tech Meetup and the Aspen Ideas Festival.

He currently divides his time between teaching, consulting and writing. He teaches New Media as an associate teacher at New York University’s (NYU) graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

His consulting practice focuses on the rise of decentralised technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterises the Web. Shirky consults for clients such as Nokia, the Library of Congress and the BBC.

He has written and been interviewed extensively about the Internet and his columns and writings have appeared in Business 2.0, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired. Shirky is also the author of Here Comes Everybody, which explores the effects of open networks, collaboration and user created and disseminated content on organisations and industries. He is especially well known for using the phrase “the Internet runs on love” and for his advocacy of crowdsourcing and collaborative efforts online.

Says Gareth Knight, MD of Technovated: “We’re excited to have drawn a speaker of Clay Shirky’s calibre to this event. By attracting such a strong line-up of African and international speakers to this conference, we hope to inspire a generation of Africans to go and do extraordinary things with the Web and other emerging technologies.

It is an excellent learning opportunity for any person or organisation with an interest in the African Web – whether as an end-user of the technology, as a technologist working with the technology, or as an entrepreneur or investor active in the African market.”

Shirky joins a stellar line-up of international speakers – including leaders from organisations such as Twitter, Mozilla, WordPress and Yahoo! – and African technologists from companies such as PesaPal, Ushahidi, Obami and many more.

The event runs from 12-13 August 2010 at The Forum in Bryanston. Workshops will be held on 10-11 August. The event is targeted at business professionals and technologists from businesses of all sizes, from entrepreneurs and start-up owners through to professionals working at large organisations.

Registration for the event is open and there are 300 early bird tickets available.

For further information or to register, visit http://tech4africa.com, email hello@tech4africa.com or call +44 (0) 207 788 1023.

About Clay Shirky
Shirky’s writings can be found online at:
http://www.shirky.com/

His blog about his book, Here Comes Everybody, can be found at:
http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/

His talk at the Web 2.0 Expo can be found on YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyoNHIl-QLQ

His talk on TED Global can be found on YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_iN_QubRs0

About Technovated
Technovated is a leading Web 2.0 provider in South Africa and London. Technovated enables content management, delivers e-commerce stores and search engine marketing, provides social media management and stimulates growth for foreign markets through authentic user engagement. http://www.technovated.com/

About Gareth Knight
Gareth is a digital maven and open source evangelist. Educated as a zoologist, he is a veteran of two dot com crashes in London, one web 2.0 acquisition, and runs Technovated.

Previously, Gareth served in London as Director of Product Management for MyHeritage.com, a global family genealogy company based in Tel Aviv.

Before joining MyHeritage, Gareth landed seed funding from London’s top early stage investors to co-found Kindo.com, a global family social network with an international team spread around the world. He then led the Product team in London to roll out a localised version of Kindo in 17 languages within 6 months, as well as an aggressive search engine campaign, both of which resulted in users from circa 220 countries and an enviable growth rate.

Kindo was voted one of the top 3 most promising Internet companies in the UK for 2008, and was later acquired by MyHeritage in August that year.

Press Contacts

Ian Rodney
Account Manager
Emerging Media Communications
(011) 792 4706
ian@emergingmedia.co.za

Gareth Knight
Managing Director
Technovated
gareth.knight@technovated.com

The event, organised by Technovated, will bring international experience and perspective to the African continent and at the same time expose what Africans are doing with the Web, mobile and other emerging technologies. Tech4Africa is the premier conference and workshop for anyone who wants to understand where technology in Africa is moving.

One of the world’s top thinkers in the Internet space will be giving the keynote speech at the event. Further details will be released shortly. Other confirmed speakers for the event so far include the following:

· Dustin Diaz, a user interface engineer at Twitter and author of JavaScript Design Patterns.

· Joe Stump, the former lead architect of digg in San Francisco and co-founder of SimpleGeo

· Matthew Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software that runs millions of Web sites around the world.

· John Resig, creator of the popular javascript library jQuery, a JavaScript tool developer for the Mozilla Corporation, and the author of the book Pro JavaScript Techniques

· Alex Hunter, former Head of Online Marketing for the Virgin Group, and now an independent digital ninja, brand consultant, company adviser, and micro-venture capital investor

· Jonathan Snook, a veteran Canadian web designer and developer, currently working for Yahoo!

· Andy Budd, an internationally renowned interaction and usability expert

· Steve Vosloo, the 21st Century Learning Fellow for the Shuttleworth Foundation

· Barbara Mallinson, founder of Obami, a web-based communication and collaboration platform for use within, and between schools

· Agosta Liko, founder of PesaPal, a mobile payments company in Nairobi, Kenya

· Erik Hersman, the co-founder of Ushahidi, a web application created to map the reported incidents of violence happening during the post-election crisis in Kenya

The conference runs from 12-13 August 2010 at The Forum in Bryanston and pre-event workshops will be held on 10-11 August 2010. The event is targeted at business professionals and technologists from across Africa, from entrepreneurs and start-up owners through to professionals working at large organisations.

Attendees will gain practical, first-hand knowledge about the funding landscape in Africa; what cloud computing, Web 2.0, the mobile Internet and other emerging technologies mean for their businesses and societies; how the most successful African technology and Web businesses are leveraging technology to succeed; which new Web and technology-related business opportunities are emerging in Africa and the rest of the world; and how the Web can help African societies to succeed.

Says Gareth Knight, MD of Technovated: “This is the first conference in South Africa to bring together so many international and local speakers of such high calibre. It is an excellent learning opportunity for any person or organisation with an interest in the African Web – whether as an end-user of the technology, as a technologist working with the technology, or as an entrepreneur or investor active in the African market. An event of this nature has previously only been available to those who could afford to travel to international conferences.”

Registration for the event is open and there are 300 early bird tickets available.

For further information or to register, visit http://tech4africa.com, email hello@tech4africa.com or call +44 (0) 207 788 1023.

About Technovated

Technovated is a leading Web 2.0 provider in South Africa and London. Technovated enables content management, delivers e-commerce stores and search engine marketing, provides social media management and stimulates growth for foreign markets through authentic user engagement.

Press Contacts

Ian Rodney
Account Manager
Emerging Media Communications +27 (011) 792 4706
ian@emergingmedia.co.za

Gareth Knight
Managing Director
Technovated
gareth.knight@technovated.com

Web building:

1. microsites for event / promotion / product launch / campaign
2. website / content management systems
3. brand / product / campaign blog
4. ecommerce system to sell products
5. above includes:
   1. information architecture
   2. usability
   3. copywriting
   4. site design (based on brand guidelines)
6. email deliverability (making sure emails get into inboxes)

Localising into foreign markets:

1. localise the above into foreign languages – experience with 17 key languages
2. making sure emails sent in different languages don’t break, and are delivered

Generating traffic:

1. PPC campaigns to drive traffic to a location – could be Google Adwords or other search properties
2. organic SEO campaigns to drive free traffic to a location
3. social media channel PPC campaigns – basically more traditional banner campaigns in target audience channels

Engaging:

1. setup, manage and engage with Twitter / any other social media channel (facebook, bebo, hi5 etc)
2. setup, manage and engage with YouTube / any other video channel (dailymotion etc)
3. setup, manage and engage on community forums / blogs / community sites
4. community engagement into local market through blogger and press outreach
5. conduct community engagement into foreign markets through blogger and press outreach, ties in with localisation efforts

Reporting:

1. tracking the following on site:
   1. visits
   2. returning visitors
   3. bounce rates
   4. time on site
   5. call to action conversion rates
   6. geographic stats
   7. browser stats
   8. best content stats
   9. advertising campaign success
   10. SEO/PPC campaign success
2. tracking the following for social media / engagement:
   1. blog posts / mentions
   2. brand / product twitter traffic
   3. most influential bloggers
   4. most influential social media users
   5. social media engagement stats
   6. social media geography stats

About us:
http://www.technovated.com/who-we-are/

About the position:
You’d be a category manager for an ecommerce project, or work on social media for other projects, but probably end up doing both if you’re ambitious.

This includes managing and delivering e-commerce content, really getting into a niche and understanding it, working with technical people to scale up our application, blogging, community PR, community outreach and creating, planning and realising additional marketing activities. Basically you get to grow and build something without having to fund it…

You:

1. Have a good working knowledge or experience (but at least genuine interest) of the Internet, ecommerce, social networking, web 2.0 and blogging
2. Are not afraid of keyboards – touch typing a major plus
3. Are interested in entrepreneurship (experience would be great)
4. Are fluent in English
5. Have great communications skills (written and oral)
6. Get get things done
7. Are accountable for the work you do
8. Have read this page

We offer:

1. A friendly, informal and creative environment with lots of opportunities for growth and more responsibility
2. Very little bureaucracy
3. Working with experienced people who have built, scaled and sold a global web application
4. A three month internship and the potential for growth into a full time position
5. An internship remuneration and additional bonus scheme based on achieving agreed targets

We are interested in what websites you have started, been involved in, designed or promoted or simply your favourite sites on the net.

Process and contact details are here.

We’d love to hear from you

XXXX XXXX, Dec 03 03:02 pm (PST):

Hi Stephen,

Dropbox quota is calculated based on the total contents of your Dropbox. A 2GB account cannot sync any more than 2GB, including space taken up by shared folders. This policy exists in order to prevent people from giving themselves unlimited space by stacking free accounts and shared folders.

We realize it’s inconvenient and we’re working to release a new plan that will allow better sharing of a quota pool, but that’s not available yet.

You can certainly share a single account between all your employees instead of sharing folders. We don’t restrict the number of users on an account. This solution does not work for everyone though, as sharing accounts means that the people you share with have full read/write access to every file in the account.

If you feel you were misled about this behavior, I will gladly issue you a refund. I’m sorry I can’t do more, and that the limits of our system have caused you problems. If there’s anything else you need, please let me know.

Best,
XXXX XXXX

What a great example of customer service too…

So the project looked as follows:

1. Review codebase
2. Review problems with mail delivery
3. Suggest improvements, scope and people needed to bring the project in under budget
4. Do interviews for technical people (ended up interviewing 6 people in a day for 2 roles)
5. Get all code under control, install code revision and management, get developers working on new version of project
6. Implement email fixes to get email into Inboxes
7. Project manage for weekly updates to client

One of the things that made the project manageable from my perspective was hiring the right people from the beginning, so that my work was limited to communication and prioritisation, which is how it should be. My general point of view is that if a product or project manager is spending more than 20% to 30% of their time on any one project, then something is wrong. Maybe 40% on the outside is acceptable for a really technical project, or one heavy in stakeholder communication, but then that’s really becoming an account director or similiar.

So, once the tech people were bedded down and we’d established the priorities for the project, we moved into a nice agile routine which got the project done well under time, making the client happy. Principle lesson and take away – hire the right people from the beginning, and life is easy. Do the opposite, and projects can be hell

So deliverables for this short project were as follows:

1. Review systems and infrastructure
2. Review current search engine optimisation
3. Review site usability and user journeys
4. Deliver document which outlined improvements on all of the above, as well as wireframes for primary layout and pages

The good news is that the client team has been slowly chipping away at the list of suggestions, and they’re starting to make real progress and get search engine results, which is awesome! Take home for me was: persistent, consistent effort is often the only way things get done “in house” as there are often so many competing priorities that the only way to move forward is with a little sculptors hammer – it takes a long time, but you eventually get your masterpiece!

Not doing #agile is like walking thru molasses with your hands behind your back, with blindfolds on, covered in treacle

Note they’re not all the same thing:
Robust is code that doesn’t break, is easily tested, scales well, and where collaboration is easy.
Fast is what it says on the tin, literally releasing new code fast and often.
Agile means being able to change direction, or make changes, quickly.

In my experience, Agile software development is the best way to enable the above – it’s a compromise between speed, collaboration and real results.

So with this engagement, the brief was to review everything (tools, processes, infrastructure, code) and to come up with a document that includes analysis and recommendations. My observation from this experience is that there is a fine line between agile development and chaos, but that this line gets thicker the more you invest in the right systems, processes, tools and infrastructure, which all enable and support doing *stuff* fast.

For example, in no particular order:

1. Testing is harder than it needs to be if there are no testing environments, unit tests, documentation of code, testing scripts, user outcomes (there are many examples, these are just a few)
2. It’s difficult to estimate and prioritise for business priority, when your list of items to work on is not prioritised or you don’t know what dependancies are
3. If you ask people to step outside of their comfort zones, more often than not you’ll be met with resistance. Use tools that make people comfortable
4. If it takes a long time or is difficult, to release a version of your software, then you’ll release less often and make more mistakes
5. If everyone understands the processes involved, you’re more likely to become more efficient. If those processes are changing or non-existent, efficiency is hard to gain.
6. If you’re going in the wrong direction, you don’t want to get there faster. If your code doesn’t support quick changes, you’re not going to be able to change direction quickly

The above are just some examples that were pertininent, so you should get the general idea.

My hope is that with the right motivation, we’ll fix the issues holding things back by setting up the right infrastructure and processes to support the business goals, and end up creating an environment that does indeed foster robust, fast, agile development.

The previous company has left them in the lurch, and from what I can tell from reviewing everything, has left them with programmatically correct code, but not a holistic approach that touches the other elements necessary to make sales over the web. For example, the markup (client side code) used in the site executes the design well enough, but does not accommodate or take into account how search engines work, and most importantly fails on some user interface / usability fronts too. It’s not a product company that sells widgets, but one which relies on personal contact with a salesman to make revenue, but where the personal contact could be first initiated over the web.

If people can’t find you on the web, then whatever your site is, and however good it is, and however much it cost you, is nigh on useless. So these are things that we’re going to be working on – the objective is to improve the organic search funnel to get more people to the site without paying anything, and to increase conversion so that when people are on the site, it does what it is supposed to do. To coin another phrase to explain things, “we want our site to be like 3 salespeople”….

And so this is the high level project breakdown:

1. Setup infrastructure to work fast and make changes quickly
2. Move CRM system over to new server to remove old service provider dependancy
3. Setup Google Analytics and Google Adwords; make them efficient
4. Transfer previous (old) website search engine juice
5. Fix markup sitewide for organic SEO
6. Improve homepage usability and conversions
7. Move content from old website to new website
8. Setup blogging platforms for CEO and company
9. Setup social media funnels for engagement and credibility
10. Create content funnel sites for SEO, client education and acquisition

As you can see, the work varies from development, to online marketing, and with a bit of social media thrown in to make the client acquisition funnel wider.

I’m really enjoying working with a group of people that understand the importance (after a little education) of a holistic approach to what they do on the web, but more importantly the recognition that it is a process that needs to fit in with whatever is already there and is not something that can be rectified overnight (without a huge capital outlay).

The web is too much of an ecosystem now to ignore how people interact with different utilities (google, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube), and thus how they directly affect the number of visitors to your site. Making sure you optimise for the funnel (into the site), and the site itself (generally usability on the site) will stand you in good stead.

Another update: This has also now started encompassing social media and software as a service consulting and implementation -> “How do we use Twitter?” and “What’s this Google Calendar thing?”….