Ideas & Insights

Page Copy Optimization and the Value of Keywords

What does good website content look like? Is it tailored to reach to your audience by speaking in a specific voice? What about optimized content for search engines? What about concise content that effectively communicates your message in directly?

This may surprise you, but ultimately the best search engine optimized content is all three. Search engines like content that is readable, effective, and focused. There is a lingering myth that search engine optimized text is inherently shady or “black hat” because most people equate SEO with cheap, keyword-stuffed copy (mostly popularized by ugly micro sites laden with Google ads).

Posted on September 19th, 2008 at 4:50 PM

Quick Tips for Managing Navigation on Your Website

Have you ever visited a website only to be completely overloaded with navigational options? Maybe there have been 20 to 25 links in the main navigation. When you visited this website what did you do? Did you try and find the appropriate navigational link or did you resort to searching the site for what you needed?

On any website, we want to avoid what designers call “information overload”. This concept describes the feeling a patron gets when there is too much information and too little hierarchy to make sense of it. Good navigational hierarchy will help your patrons complete their task, not hinder them on the road there.

Posted on October 17th, 2007 at 3:32 AM

Planning your Arts Site:
Creating Navigation with Lasting Value

As an information architect on the User Experience Team at POP, I am part of the team tasked with giving a website its structure. Every website has structure, and visitors will form their first and most lasting impressions of that structure by looking at the website’s navigation. Our goal is to establish a navigational structure that makes it easy for visitors to understand what they can do and where they can go. Concurrently, our aim is to meet the business and site maintenance requirements of the client by creating a navigational structure that balances both client and user needs over time.

Posted on August 16th, 2007 at 6:30 PM