Search is really just part of navigation. In many cases information found by running a search routine can also be found by just browsing through the pages. Which serves the visitor best? … is that also what serves the mission best?

Search needs words (also phrases) for searching. When visitors compose their own phrases, will those phrase be effective in searching the website? If not, then search terms should be offered as items in drop-down lists or some similar selection interface.

Next there is the question of what will be searched. A Google-like search can theoretically see every word in the public space of the website. Will this work OK? … will many irrelevant items be returned? … or should that type of “free word” search be used, but restricted to parts of the space with relevant content?

Another approach uses either “free word” input or “selected word” input to search only prepared fields in the database. This allows the web administrators to help or control the search results, but requires maintaining those fields of search phrases.

Many choices and variations are possible. Least expensive is installing one of the free search routines, one that can be limited to just the one website, as Google can. It has quick setup, little maintenance, is familiar to nearly everyone, but in a small website it can be quite imprecise and may often return empty lists.

I recommend a careful discussion with your website’s Information Designer.

Medical data will proliferate exponentially in the coming years. There are many drivers and patterns. Of special interest to the US data industry is the proliferation generated by mobile sensory devices.

The devices themselves are proliferating. While away from medical facilities, one may wear or be attached to devices that sense pulse, blood pressure, body temperature, blood flow rates, and many of the other vital indictors. These data can be generated and stored at high rates. In the US, increasingly the data are stored in private medical practice networks. Imagine a small, 4,000-patient group fitted with a device or two, each generating data 24 hours per day.

In its “The World in 2012” edition the Economist points out the high value obtained from such data by Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. They are able to closely monitor the benefits of new drugs and expensive treatments. There are studies showing the US value of such systems could be in the hundreds-of-billions range.

The data are accumulating, the value is becoming obvious, and the contracts to aggregate data from scattered systems will be many and huge. Nearly as demanding, will be the contracts to order the data so it may accessed by business intelligence systems.

Wanting to be as unbiased as possible, I have researched online several times and offer these two third-party views:
http://www.bivingsreport.com/2007/wordpress-vs-drupal/
http://www.quis.com/2009/06/01/drupal-vs-wordpress

Both articles try to be unbiased, and I think they succeed. Neither writes that WordPress and Drupal are on the same plane. They both assign WordPress to the simplest of websites and Drupal to the next echelon. This matches our considerable experience. WordPress provides an elegantly ease-to-use CMS. It is the appropriate choice for lightly featured blogs and very simple websites.

Here’s the experience of someone who “loves” WordPress (the language needs editing):
http://kevinjohngallagher.com/2012/01/wordpress-has-left-the-building/

The Drupal community is on a different track. Drupal is a machine for making interactive websites – newspapers, magazines, large corporate websites, online stores. In the spectrum of technology, Drupal picks up where WordPress leaves off, and takes us toward standard web applications. When the project no longer fits “standard things you do on a website,” it is a web application that requires a web application framework. GORGES will in that case recommend the appropriate framework, maybe Ruby on Rails, Yii, or .NET.

It should also be noted, that when a client is engaging GORGES to perform setup, to propose designs, to guide the process and provide training, the distinctions having to do with ease of setup, theme decisions, and ease of use become inconsequential. GORGES shoulders those.

The differences between WordPress and Drupal are finally differences in capability. What interactive features does your website need now and how likely are you to want significant visitor interaction in the future? Is the site to be a one-time undertaking, or is it likely to grow thought time? If these are not issues, WordPress might be just right.

There are several steps in planning.

• Needs Assessment
• Platform Analysis
• Information Analysis
• Wireframing
• Prototyping
• Work and Phase Planning
• Budget Planning

All of these save money and improve the quality of the product. As consultants we also know that involvement and review with the client is a critical part of each planning step.

One of my favorite steps is wireframing because this is where the idea first takes graphic form. There are many small apps for making wireframes.

The wireframing tools that we have used within our office, here are some we like:

Eclipse with a Wireframe Sketcher plug-in ($75 or $37.50 for students). We have a GORGES license, and there is a downloadable standalone version available (http://wireframesketcher.com). You can probably try before buying.

Omnigraffle Pro (Mac-only application). We have an office license, but since it is Mac-only only a few developers use it here.

Pencil (free Firefox Browser plug-in, http://pencil.evolus.vn). Feature-limited and sometimes awkward, but the price is right.

Balsamiq – online version; useful for working remotely. We used this a few years back when it was in free beta stage. http://www.balsamiq.com.

Microsoft Visio – my least-favorite tool because of cost and clunkiness, but perhaps the leading prototyping tool thanks to Microsoft’s influence.  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio/.

From 12:00 to 2:00 on the 15th, several of GORGES staff will attend the GORGES booth in the Statler Hotel Ballroom. This Technology, Business and Resource Expo is open to the public and an excellent opportunity to learn about the many GORGES projects developed for the Cornell Community.

Of course GORGES is interested in Cornell University as a client, not to mention its family and friend connections. Beyond that, many GORGES clients are entrepreneurs. During the first three months of this year GORGES has entertained three requests from entrepreneurs to invest computer programming sweat equity in their start-ups. GORGES is already engaged in equity arrangements with other entrepreneurs.

The answer to my first inquiry did not clear it up. The presenter answered something about management policies and approvals for virtualization. Thinking it was just one of those security paranoia things, I let it rest.

But coming back to it I still wondered, why would something so quick, simple, and useful be expensive and management intensive? Then the little light came on, it’s because they were speaking in the world of Microsoft servers and each virtualized server needs a license.

In our shop the virtualization decision has been pushed down to project management level and on down to the developer level. A new application is often virtualized after completion, adjusted to be a production version, and then pushed to the cloud.

Developers treat virtualization as a handy “envelope”, a quick and useful place to put an untrustworthy current version of a new client’s application, or anything else that needs compartmentalization. Developers virtualize as needed. They do not need permission. They use Linux or Centos so there are no cost issues.

Once again. Open Source brings the productivity tool we all need at a price our clients can afford.

Google has kind of answered that question too; you google it. But, what do you get in the data return. “Mary Kay Smith” returns 2,160,000 records, most of the top ones being from services offering to help you find your own Mary Kay. Maybe this is a good start when on the open Internet, but what if Mary Kay Smith works in the Kansas City branch of your company, even with some filtering words like, Kansas City and your company’s name, the return is still going to be front-loaded with helpful services.

This type of search is called a “Free Word” search. It has exception value. Most of us use it more than daily. But, it is not the only way to search and it is often not the appropriate way.

Assuming your company has an employee database you could use an in-house search tool, maybe still a Free Word search tool accessing just that one database. The return would show you all the Mary Kays in your company. Assuming only a few, you quickly click the one showing the KC address and there is her phone and fax number.

We could save a click. Why not have a drop-down list of all the employees? Let’s assume a few thousand. Yeah, the drop-down is too long. So maybe we have instead two “controls”. One is a radio button set asking “First Name” or “Last Name”. The other is an alphabet list. So now we get all the Matts, Marys, Marthas, and so forth. Right, what if we add one more control to limit us to Kansas City. Now we have a “Structured Search”.

You have probably thought of a still better or different way to find Mary Kay using a Structured Search, or maybe even, a combination of Structured Search and Free Search. This is Information Design – the search aspect of Information Design.

Let’s ask a polar question, what is the essential difference between Free Search and Structured Search? Answer is Capital Cost. It will always cost less, even much less, to setup a Free Search. But what about Operational Cost. If employees are searching each other out all day, how much is saved by providing a quick and certain search method? How much is saved by shipping the printer to the right Mary Kay?

Structured Searches cost more upfront because someone has to imagine them, organize a database, setup strict methods for adding, editing, and deleting from the database, and provide a set of controls for making the search. Not all of these costs are avoided by choosing Free Search, but many are.

It’s finally a User Interface decision involving cost, scalability, and accuracy. This is a favorite subject of mine. Call me for quick discussion or to arrange analysis of your search needs.

So why am I inviting you into these inner circles? An information system known as the Internet has pushed its way into your space. You have a website and you may or may not be prepared to deal with anything called Information Design. Here is some help.

Tufte alone has written seven books touching this subject, so I will not presume to encapsulate it here. My goal is to alert you to the existence and depth of this field, while also providing the rudiments for evaluating Information Design in your business application, database application, or website.

Here are two websites by GORGES that show just what Information Design deals with. The first site, http://birdsandbayous.org, is so simple that information design is little more than not making basic mistakes or omissions. There are only a few “information points” and only a basic navigation is needed to reach these points and return from them. This information design is analogous to the chapter ordering in a very small book.

The Martha Stewart site, http://www.marthastewart.com, is on a different planet. Every graphic and text object on this home page is a link to something, and amazingly, it all makes sense. It is visually organized to lead the visitor comfortably through dense information.

Note further, that much of the home page information is layered on top of other information and the visitor is invited to interact with it – to engage.

So it is dense, multi-layered, diverse, and interactive.

Your website’s complexity probably lies somewhere between the Birds and Bayous website and Martha Stewart’s. What can you learn from these two sites to help you evaluate your website or work with your website designers? Here’s one thing:

Insist that when presenting a design to you the designer makes at least three systematic passes across the demo pages in some carefully ordered, slow-paced way.
• In the first pass you should be told both “how” and “why” the information design suits your information set.
• In the second pass you should be told both “how” and “why” the graphic design suits you information set, as well as “how” and “why” it is appropriate to your brand and your communication intention for each of the audiences you have identified.
• In the third pass the designer needs to explain how the graphic design and information designs reinforce each other.

For the best result, allow the designers to make the points above without interruption and then go through it all again in a question and answer format. Good designers seek good criticism.

Here’s one more information design evaluation thing:

Ask two or three innocents to do the “What do you see?” test. With the page hidden, tell them you are going to ask them what they see first. Show the page. Then ask what they see second. You will get variation from person to person, but not much. Do this for the home page and for several subordinate pages. Does the visual prioritizing match your message plan?

My next posting will be also about Information Design – searching for information.

This set of guidelines may be used for evaluating websites as they develop or for examining sites by others. It addresses Usability, User Interface, and Communication. There is more to UX, please see other posting by me and watch for new posting on the subject in the next few months.

While this article is not explicitly about SEO, applying the standards here will only be good for SEO.

Usability

Do the graphics communication or supplement the message and purpose of the page? What is the desired balance between the graphical message and the text message?

People scan web pages. They do not read them. So, layout should be rhythmic and language should be concise. Break up traditional paragraphs by using subheadings, bullet lists, and short paragraphs.

Do not over do the breaking up of the page text. If it is a bullet item, then it does not need to be indented. Use one method or the other.

Font styles, sizes, and alignment should be consistent, and generally controlled by the style sheet. Avoid in-line styles. Using more than three different fonts in one page requires very high design skill. Keep it simple.

Link text should contain clear, action words that indicate what the link points to. Avoid using “Click Here” and other test that refers to the document. Remember, the user should be aware of the message, not the website.

Links to non-web formats, such as PDFs, should be identified by noting the format in the link text.

Users associate underlined text with links. So, do not underline text that is not links, this includes headings, page and section identification, and titles in general.

Color for emphasis and differentiation is under used in web pages. The twentieth century used italics and bold to differentiate. The twenty-first century uses color.

Communication

The purpose of every page should be clear to the user. Good questions to ask when creating and reviewing pages include:
• Is it clear what this page is for?
• How is it different from other pages?
• Is this message necessary?
• What is the first thing I notice on this page and does that match what should be the first thing a user notices?
• Is there anything distracting me from the main purpose of this page?

The language of the site and any system messages should be written in clear terms familiar to most users. Avoid jargon and overly technical terms.

Do not invent syntax. Do you mean “or” or do you mean “and”? Do not write “and/or”. It is one or the other. More distracting yet is “inside/outside”.

Do not over use punctuation. Users are not generally computer programmers. The comma is understandable. “Jim ate rice, the brown kind.” Parenthesis have a purpose, but can be just distracting. “Jim ate rice (the brown kind).”

Strunk and Whites. The Elements of Style belongs on every proofreader’s desk.

All text should be proofread for spelling and grammar mistakes.

User Interface

Link text should contain clear, action words that indicate what the link points to. Avoid using “Click Here” and other test that refers to the document. Remember, the user should be aware of the message, not the website.

Links to non-web formats, such as PDFs, should be identified by noting the format in the link text.

Users associate underlined text with links. So, do not underline text that is not links, this includes headings, page and section identification, and titles in general.

Help user to avoid errors. For example, if data need to be entered in a specific format, provide clear instructions for doing so. Do this consistently. Examples:

Home Phone _________________ +1 (607) 555-1212
URL ________________________ http://www.mydomain.com

Does the text wrap around images correctly? Is it spaced away from borders and other graphical edges?

Did you use H1’s for page titles, H2’s for sub-headings, etc.?

Does each page have a unique <title> ? Does the title match the page content and purpose. Remember, these are the words displayed by search engine returns and the default words stored in bookmarks.

Strong passwords are essential to data security. Passwords are easy enough to produce, but they are not as effective as they should be because human foibles lead to compromises. Humans find strong passwords hard to remember so they write them down. They find them hard to say so they send them in email to coworkers.

These problems can be overcome and it can even be fun.

Make the strong password by making it along with a mnemonic. Like this:

Which bear ate up my donut holes
Wb8^mdOs

Now we can refer to this as the “donut” password without giving much away and it is memorable.

We can also make a family of passwords:

Bears do not care for those expensive holes
B!c4t$Os

Is it useful to have two related passwords that may be called “the bear question” and “the bear answer”? Say, for the admin password and the staff password?

Assigning words to the shift characters on the number keys is the trick here, but not too tricky. “^” is top or up or above. “@” is at or each. “$” is money or cash or dollars ……
You get it.

Now we have pass words that can be remembered without using word combinations, i.e., thefudge, or word bastardizations, i.e., es$enti@l, either of which is easily cracked.

Now we also have passwords that can be named even in the presence of strangers without giving them away, you could just say, “Try the bear answer.”

You may also use these ideas to make your own private passwords.

While you are thinking about this, it is also a great way to generate “family passwords.”

Jane never cared for asparagus
jnc4asparagus or jnc4agus

Have fun!