There’s been a lot of redecorating going on in my life at the moment – the living room and the blog. The living room is nearer finished than the blog and the latest thing completed gave me pause for thought.
I spent yesterday making (altering to be exact) the curtains for the living room, because they need to be exactly the right length to sit on the windowsill and are ivory (yellow according to @winebuff, but he’s colour challenged!) I took a great deal of care over them. They were finally finished mid-evening and duly hung, and even if I say so myself, bar a little tweaking of the header tapes, they look pretty good.
- Image by sparklerawk via Flickr
You may wonder where I am going with this, but bear with me. We had already put up blinds so there was no need for curtains from a privacy, or even a warmth point of view but they look nice, and they do give a little extra privacy and warmth. I was reminded of the phrase ‘dressing a window’ which is how we always used to refer to hanging curtains.
It made me think, and when I think it almost invariably turns to something web based. When we ‘decorate’ our websites we put all the essentials in place to make the Search Engines happy. We contemplate keywords and their density. We ponder over descriptions and tags. The time spent debating the merits of ‘follow’ and ‘no follow’ is endless. Robots.txt and .htaccess and checked and double checked to please the spiders, delicious food is laid before them. In other word, we put up the blinds – they do the job very well indeed.
But what about the users, how often do we put as much effort into putting up the curtains and dressing the windows? It strikes me as I wander the web that the answer to that is ‘Not very much’. I’m not talking about single action squeeze pages that are aimed to get you to do just one thing, I am talking about those money sites, or the big sites that you spend blood, sweat and tears tuning for the search engines. How easy are they for your users to navigate? How clear are they? How well do they fulfil the needs of the average user?
We forget that we are not the average user, we know how to tease out the information we want from a site. Imagine that your site is the very first website your visitor has ever seen, would they be able to get around it? Would they be able to find what they need easily? Does it look inviting? Put your blinds up but make your curtains pretty and dress your window well, after all – search engine spiders don’t have wallets, users do.
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