Optimisation

When optimising your website it is often necessary to do so when it's live, feedback and statistics from actual visitors can provide invaluable insight.

A/B testing is usually performed to determine if one or another variation of content layout works best. Multivariate is simply a term to describe potentially limitless combinations, but it is a good idea to set up a framework for elements to be tested for their most effective positioning.

Different copy, layouts and media can produce dramatically different results, and by testing through a collection of them, it is possible to identify the elements that produce the greatest conversions.

Quality assurance is a vital step prior to the launch of any site. The last thing you want is to have your credibility and reputation undermined by seemingly trivial mistakes such as broken links and typos in the copy. Conventions and guidelines will help you to put your site through its paces and emerge on the other side with a site vetted through various rounds of testing.

Some examples of the conventions and guidelines for quality assurance:

1. Content

• spelling, grammar, mechanics.
• titles, headers, navigation labeled correctly

2. Documentation
3. Graphics & Layout

• image quality
• download time
• text layout
• alignment of elements

4. Browser Compatibility

• different platforms
• different browsers

5. User Preference Compatibility

• Font size
• link colours
• plug-ins
• window size

This is simply a technique where we evaluate sites and applications by testing it on users. Research can be done beforehand and theory applied throughout, but it's only in putting it in front of the people that will actually use your site that you get the insights you need to know before releasing to a larger audience.

Four main areas are investigated with user testers:

• Performance - how much time, and how many steps, are required for users to complete basic tasks?
• Accuracy - how many mistakes were made? Can they be remedied?
• Recall - how much do users remember after the experience?
• Emotional Response - how do users feel about the tasks being completed? Would they recommend?

It's essential to discover the ease of use of your products and services and adapt to the feedback where its necessary or at least feasible.

Accessibility is the degree to which your site is accessible by as many people as possible. It is often associated with people with disabilities and their rights to access, but it is really about making things as accessible as possible to all people, regardless of handicaps.

If a site is not intrinsically accessible to the widest possible audience, your site may be accessed indirectly through assistive technologies like screen readers.

It's important to make sure you have a web presence. SEO is a process by which we improve the volume and quality of traffic to your sites via organic, unpaid search results. A very proactive and holistic approach is vital; keyword metadata is only half the battle. The site's very architecture and layout all play a significant role in how friendly a site is to a search engine. Google's search results have come to dominate over the past decade, and results for image, local and video search can all be optimised as a path to your landing pages. Remember, every page is a potential landing page.

Flash, whilst an incredible tool for creating stunning user interfaces online, has had a bad rap for creating websites that actually show up in search results. Two years ago, We Are VI were the first to produce a Flash site as indexable by search engines as any other non-Flash site. Using a combination of HTML, CSS, Javascript, ActionScript3, AMF PHP and Drupal (and essentially any CMS), we created a way to make a Flash site as crawlable by the search engines as any other.

The few solutions offered elsewhere are inefficient and ineffective:

• Google and Adobe tried to remedy this by unlocking the textual data store in SWF files. However, without the context of tags found in HTML and other markup languages, and with jumbled phrases as a consequence of animations, there is little use to the data.
• Google also doesn't execute external Javascript calls, which many Flash-based sites rely on to launch their SWFs in the first place - meaning the crawlers might not even notice there is a Flash site to be searched.
• When using standard techniques from Adobe, the user is not able to set meta data, so if Google does find the SWF, there is no description of the file to indicate what it is. Therefore when the SWF lists in the engine,s there is no description as to what the file is.

VI's Flash sites clearly differentiate themselves in a crowded market of "Flash SEO" pretenders, and built at true cost, without the need for alternate non-Flash companions.