Obsessing about preventing bad things from happening also prevents good things from happening, or sometimes prevents anything from happening at all.
— Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants
On apples design culture
“It’s actually the engineering culture, and the way the organization is structured to appreciate and support design,” Kawano said. “Everybody there is thinking about UX and design, not just the designers. And that’s what makes everything about the product so much better…much more than any individual designer or design team.”
When SEO becomes Information Architecture
Algorithms change the game every day and it is harder to use little tricks and game the engines these days. At some point we all have to put on our white hat and dig in. We want innovations based on relevant content, efficient CMS and great link relationships. Innovations like this come from information architecture enhancements.
This is how Wikipedia defines the role of Information Architecture (IA):
…it involves the categorization of information into a coherent structure, preferably one that the intended audience can understand quickly, if not inherently, and then easily retrieve the information for which they are searching.
Its a new set of jargon but onsite SEO is information architecture optimization.
Just like many large scale sites struggle with SEO they are also struggling with IA. Most aren’t aware of it either. This struggle is know as the IA iceberg problem. Read More…
The ultimate gift idea for your social media team
Samsung released info about a new camera today that is perfect for social media gurus.
In a recent article by Samsung, “The Samsung Galaxy Camera™ combines high-performance photography with Android™ 4.1, Jelly Bean, and wireless cellular internet connectivity, creating a powerful camera with a familiar, intuitive user interface and access to all your favorite apps from the Google Play™ market. Coming soon…“
History of the Olympic Logo
The ManMade blog recently posted a neat article covering the Olympic Logos over the last 50+ years. Check it out.
Google Content Experiments replaces Content Optimizer, and its Better!
This looks like great news for users of Google Analytics. Web testing has always been on the nerdy side of marketing. In my experience the tools that allow content testing have been either too general or too complicated for most peoples needs.
Read More…
China Censors Google.HK searches
Warning: this video is slow with lots of waiting time on the errors. View the video and original post by Michel Wester at State of Search.
The new AllHotels goes live!
After working on this site for nearly 6 months (1 Yr for some), its finally live. We launched 20+ ccTLD’s, 6 languages and a mind boggling amount of content. We have worked with some great teams to get AllHotels up and fluid for future development. Its only the beginning. Big thanks to Evolving Web ( a Drupal Development group) and EpicOne (Web Analytics Consultants). Not to mention the many coworkers that have wrangled this beast of a site into production.
How to Create Sitemaps for Millions of URL’s
Creating sitemaps for millions of URL’s can be a daunting task. There are a few ways to do this.
- You can run a crawler tool on your site to pull millions of URL’s which will take loads of time.
- Create a script that will generate the sitemaps for you provided you have logical page names and parameters.
A guide to create your sitemap:
- Define all the page types and URL parameters.
- Read all about sitemaps.org protocols.
- Use multiple sitemaps and group them into relevant categories such as media type, country or product type.
- Make sure the URL’s are non sequential. Google is not a fan of ABC and 123 order so mix it up.
- Find a way to prioritize your URL’s. What pages are most important?
- Use sitemaps index files.
- Stay within 50K max urls in a sitemap or sitemap index file.
- Compress the files with gZip.
- Load them to your site and submit them to the search engines.
A sitemap for millions of URL’s can be over 10MB+ in size. Compressing the files and finding a way to create dynamic Sitemaps will help you use less space. It can get tricky but remember it CAN be done.