The Government California Website Critique

Critique

First Impressions Count

For my website critique I drew the government of California website (http://www.ca.gov) to evaluate. My first impression of the website was that it was cluttered, unorganized and a bit distracting. I really do not like the main banner that scrolls through various images. I find it unpleasant because it doesn’t always work consistently. I also notice that the site is just poorly thought out, there are many links and it is a bit overwhelming. For my computer screen’s size I find the site overpowering and large, it’s on the brink of having to scroll to the right which is always irritating. At first glance I get from this site I feel it’s more geared to be an entertainment website over an official looking government website.

Audience and Purpose

For the Government of California website I would assume that most of the audience base would be citizens. This applies this site as a G2C site which stands for government to citizen. The purpose of this site would to be promote the state of California to people that may be interested in living there. It could also apply to businesses that perhaps are thinking of moving there to set up a location. The site offers three links in the middle of the page for its most likely audiences, Living in CA, Working in CA, and Visiting CA. These links cover your basics, the cititzens, the businesses and employees, and tourists. In all probability anyone coming to California will fall under one of those categories. The true purpose of this website is to promote the state of California to the world. I feel that this site has failed miserably by the lack of organization and the overload of blocky elements used in the websites overall layout.

Information Architecture/Navigation

Upon landing on the this site I feel bombarded by an overload of pictures, links, and the entire layout. My eye does not know where to look first to find any specific piece of information. The site is almost like a treasure hunt to find anything of value. There is a row of links along the top of the page below the main banner that reads “Ca.Gov State of California.” It is suggested that a site keep its categories of links to seven and below; however this site utilizes eight. Within these link categories there are many links subcategorized. Personally I find the site confusing and disorienting, I do not like how many “options” the site gives for the user to click on. The sub pages of the site are less cluttered and more easily navigated. There is no doubt that Ca.gov is full of information and not missing any vital pieces of information. You can find just about anything you want to know about California in this site. I just believe that the information could have been presented in a cleaner more efficient way.

Usability

I gave my friend a task to find out how to find contacts for community, health, and disaster information on the Government of California website.

I logged her onto the main homepage (http://www.ca.gov) and she immediately scrolled down looking for the right link. She finally found the links along the top of page instead of scrolling down. And clicked on “Health” (which was the wrong link to get to the information I was asking her to find). She found the navigation “slippery” and hard to control, it was easy to fall off the link and onto another category, bringing up the wrong information. She ended up clicking on the Public Health link which was still the wrong link to get to what I was asking her to find. We went back to the landing page and I reminded her that I was looking for contacts, then which we went to “About CA” which was finally in the right direction. She hit “contact us” and then found the link to community, health, and disaster information. So the overall task took way longer then necessary. She also commented numerous times on how she disliked the narrow horizontal navigation bar and that it was hard to use because you could repeatedly slip off the link into another section.

Construction & Design

Upon looking at the site’s initial first page’s coding the site is your average XHTML 1.0 Transitional page. They have used quite a bit of java scripting for the fancy moving images in the middle of the page to breathe life into the site. The creator of the site was good at using comments as there are a lot embedded in the site’s code. All the navigation of the site are based on stylized list (

) elements. It is easily noticed in this site that it was graphically heavy. There are many images used within the site. Bright colourful images of happy looking people are hopefully attractive to people, basically these images are saying “look these people are happy; you will be too if you live/visit

California!” As you can probably tell so far, I am not a fan of this site. I find the look and feel of the site is not professional enough, it doesn’t feel like a government site. It feels more like a tourist or entertainment site than anything else. The images have a commercialized feel. The colours, for a sun-filled state are actually bland, but that helps in aiding to look more governmental. The typography is tasteful and not obtrusive. I find the overall layout of the elements on the homepage easy to get lost in. The large amount of clutter and the number of boxes make it hard to focus on any one item. They could improve their site greatly by cutting the clutter and assuming a sleeker design.

Content Quality/Appropriateness of Writing

The writing on the site is thin on the homepage beyond the links and headers. All of which are self-explanatory and normal. The bulk of the content is within the sub pages as it should be. On the sub pages they provide a list of links on the left hand side bar that pertain to the page’s topic, for example: Under employment when you view the page it says on the left side bar: I need to… : Find a job, File for unemployment, Report Fraud etc. When you click on any of these links they continue onto another part of the site where you can find vast amounts of information on the subject. This site is content rich and they display it fairly well. The writing on the site is well done and professional. There are few spelling/grammar errors and the typography for readability is great. They have chosen a good sized font as well as a sans serif font for best screen readability.

The Big Picture

All in all this site, I would rate on a 1 to 10 (10 being best) around a 5. Its not my favourite website, there are a number of improvements that could be done (such as cutting clutter, removing access boxes, making it more streamlined) but it does get the job done. I find that the page that bothers me the most is the homepage; the sub pages are more governmental and professional in comparison to the land page. I find the landing page to be too touristy and entertainment like. I also think that because the site is for the state of California they should have chosen a warmer colour scheme throughout the site, the dark blue and white is really quite drab, when I think California I think yellows and oranges. The site gets the job done but I would prefer to see the above changes made. I am a little disappointed with well the coding works for the moving image element; there have been a couple times I’ve been on the site when it doesn’t work properly. For a government website, I would expect the site to function well and not have little errors such as this. I enjoyed critiquing this site because it could use a facelift, perhaps one day they will hire me?

No one is Safe!

In the virtual world we need to be as careful as we are in the physical one. Online predators are a real threat to anyone who participates on online activities. Hackers are prominent on sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. Hackers are particularly attracted to social sites that display a lot of personal information that places like Facebook show. View these two great news articles to read more!
Click here
Click here

The Generations and Social Websites

Its interesting to see who is actually using social websites. This great news article outlines which generations are using which social networking sites. Please click here to view the article.

Keywords

Assignment 3 - Keywords

I wanted to find out the top five keywords I have on my blog. So after using a keyword analyzing tool (http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/) I was able to find out the top five keywords on my blog.

The top five keywords found on my blog are as follows:

1. Blog - appears 45 times in my blog and has a density within my blog of 3.40%
2. Word - appears 43 times in my blog and has a density within my blog of 3.25%
3. Post - appears 43 times in my blog and has a density within my blog of 3.25%
4. Content appears 37 times in my blog and has a density within my blog of 2.79%
5. Wordpress appears 32 times in my blog and has as density within my blog 2.42%

Upon looking at the keywords I am not surprised by the results I got. It only makes sense “blog” would appear so many times but I was hoping that the keyword “social” would have shown higher up in the list. I am glad that “content” appeared in my top five results. I really liked the tool and I found it worked well and was simple to use. All in all it did a fantastic job.

After getting all my keywords I went to https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox and entered my top five keywords, I then selected the all the countries as my best market and added a budget of $20. For the keywords on my blog I ended up with the receiving the data and getting these results:

After inspecting my results my estimated average CPC (Cost per Click) on each of my keywords was as follows:

1. Blog - $1.46 - $2.19

2. Content - $1.76 - $2.64

3. Post - $0.84 - $1.26

4. Word - $0.68 - $0.92

5. Wordpress - $0.68 - $0.89

Based on the results and having a $20 budget per day the estimated clicks per day for each keyword are as follows:

1. Blog – 2-3 (clicks)

2. Content – 0-1 (clicks)

3. Post - 4-7 (clicks)

4. Word – 3-5 (clicks)

5. Wordpress – 0-1 (clicks)

If each of the keywords above were clicked 22 times per month it would result in total cost and a budget of approximately $177.11.

1. Blog - $2.19 X 22 = $48.18

2. Content - $2.64 X 22 = $58.08

3. Post - $0.84 X 22 = $27.72

4. Word - $0.92 X 22 = $20.24

5. Wordpress - $0.89 X 22 = $22.89

Total: $177.11

If I changed by Cost per Click (CPC) to $1.50 my Adword rankings would affect my results by making the estimated cost per day lower, raise the cost per click and the estimated click per day will increase.

To advertise this blog further using Adwords I would continue to use all of the top five keywords that I have discovered (blog, content, post, word, Wordpress) to get more leads. To get the traffic going to this blog and to get the page hits building I would have to invest some sort of monthly budget. It would depend if I was serious about the blog but I would probably be able to put aside around $200 for a monthly budget. This would increase my leads enough to get the site receiving a decent number of clicks per day which is equal to leads.

Not all Fun and Games

As social websites grab the attention of the world its hard to not to allow the customers that make trouble in. Twitter one of the fastest growing social networks is having to deal with scammers and spammers. These people make the social network experience for those who want to use it for the better good tainted. Read on below through the link to see what Twitter is having to battle. Click here

Building a Findable Blog - Part 3

Using Categories to Archive by Topic

Wordpress allows you to display your posts by categories or a chronological archive. A topic-ordered archive is better because it contains keywords and is better suited for a user.

Each post you write in Wordpress can be assigned to categories, defined by you. For more info, http://www.codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_categories

Summarizing Posts to Direct Traffic Better

To funnel traffic through your blog and to keep content all in one place create a summary of each post on your homepage.

Refer to page. 141 of Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walker for the code snippet.

In the Wordpress admin control panel in the “Write” section there is a field “Optional Excerpt” there you can summarize your post in your own words and have it displayed on the homepage.

Displaying Your Most Popular Posts

In Wordpress, Alex King’s Popularity Content plugin (http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/readme?project-popularity-contest) will keep track of your post, archive, categorize views, trackbacks, and comments. This helps you determine which posts are most popular. Continue on with similar content as your most popular posts to gain more traffic. See page 142 in Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walker for code snippets.

Displaying Your Most Recent Posts

To help repeat visitors determine what posts are new since their last visit is a great way to show them new content quickly. See code snippet on page 143 of Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walker.

Promoting and Tracking RSS Subscriptions with FeedBurner

Your Wordpress publishes RSS feeds by default but allowing FeedBurner to distribute your feeds gives you more features. FB offers Subscription tracking, automatic update service notification, and advertising.

Encouraging Social Exchanges of Your Content

Social bookmarking and news system like Delicious, Digg, and Magnolia help to build site traffic. Another Wordpress plugin called Sociable (http://push.cx/sociable ), encourages users to bookmark or digg your site. Another plugin called Socialist (http://johnlawrence.net/index.php/2007/02/12/socialist-for-wordpress ) will tell you how many people are book marking or Digging your site.

Displaying Related Posts

Showing posts related to other posts on your blog is a great way to keep users on your blog longer and stops old posts from disappearing into your archives. A good plugin for this is called Similar Post (http://marsh.com/plugins/similar-post/).

Automatically Generating an XML Sitemap

Google, Yahoo, and MSN have collaborated on the development of a standard XML sitemap format (http://sitemaps.org). There are tools that can either build an XML sitemap for your or you can do it yourself. An XML sitemap will help communicate the structure of their blog or site to search engines for fast and complete indexing. Google Sitemap Generator (http://arnebrachold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final) is creates the sitemap for you and even pings Google with the location of the file that has been updated.

Other Handy SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Plugins for Wordpress

Most SEO plugins change your title tags or meta tags they can also change the content in your http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack) features meta tags for your home, archive, categories and permalink pages.

Care must be taken not to rely solely on the meta keywords as they have little weight in SEO.

Tagging Your Posts

A tag is a keyword that serves as meta data used to describe blog posts or other website content. The more description put into the meta data the easier it is to be found. The more you tag the more convenient it is for users to explore large amounts of content by topic and get an understanding for what content you blog may contain. A tag cloud is a collection of all the tags throughout the site, each tag’s popularity is shown by the word’s text size. The bigger the more popular and smaller the least.

Displaying Post Tags

In Wordpress you can tag your posts directly as you create them but there are other coding strategies to do the same thing. Learn more about this at http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_tags

Showing a tag cloud offers a visual look at what tags are more popular by the size of the text. To help you create a tag cloud go to http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_tag_cloud

Optimizing Content Delivery with Caching

If perhaps you suddenly get a high volume of traffic on your blog Wordpress can help your site not “go down” and become unavailable by using this plugin called WP-Cache (http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2) Before installing this plugin you must disable another that is default by Wordpress called Gzip Compression, go to Options à Reading. Upload and install WP-Cache then go to Options à and select WP-Cache you will be guided the rest of the way.

Building a Findable Blog - Part 2

Wordpress

- Working with Wordpress

Wordpress is one of the most popular blogging systems online today. It offers easy to use blog setup and maintenance that even the greenest of bloggers can understand and use. Wordpress offers extensive plugins that can be installed onto your blog to increase traffic and make your blog easily found. Most of the things discussed in the post below can be addressed by installing a Wordpress plugin.

Setting up Wordpress is ridiculously fast. You also have two options, you can either host your blog on their server (http://wordpress.com) or download the PHP/MySQL application and upload to your own server (http://wordpress.org/download and install http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress ).The later option gives you more advanced control of the overall blog. For help with Wordpress try http://codex.wordpress.org and for forums http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

Installing WordPress Plugins

Most Wordpress plugins can be installed following a few simple steps:

1. Download and unzip the desired plugin
2. Upload the plugin to the plugins directory
3. In the Wordpress admin control panel go to section named “plugins”
4. Click “activate” besides the plugin you want to install.

To help you out plugins often come with a read-me file offering instructions before installing. Once installed the plugin will have its own preference panel so you can play with the settings.

Create Your Own Themes

With the help of PHP files, Wordpress can be skinned using themes. It is good blog practice to create your own theme instead of the pre-installed ones. This way you are able to create an identity and get the chance to optimize your code for search engines. For more on themes go to http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development

Making Your Wordpress Blog More Findable

By simply modifying your configuration on your Wordpress blog you can easily make your blog more findable.

Defining Update Services

The first step to findability with a Wordpress blog is to extend the number of update services at get “pinged” when you generate content. Wordpress sends a message, dubbed a ping, to services such as Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com) or Technorati (http://technorati.com) and they then update their indices with your content.

1. Go to Admin control panel, then options, and select writing. There you will see a text box named “Update Services.” To find a list of update services go to http://www.codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services
2. Copy the entire list of URLs and paste them into your update services text box.

Using FeedBurner as an Update Service

Another option is FeedBurner to publish your RSS feeds. (http://www.feedburner.com) . FB is a service that will take your RSS Feeds into new content formats and enhances them with quick subscribe buttons, podcast support, and advertising.

To use you can create a FB account and give them the URL to your Wordpress RSS Feed and they will give you a URL for the same RSS content that has been optimized for a number of different formats such as desktop, web, or mobile devices. Through this service all traffic is tracked. Another service called PingShot (http://feedburner.com/fb/a/publishers/pingshot) is similar to Wordpress’s update services and are useful in handling Podcasts.

Remapping Your Permalinks URLs

Your site’s URLs play a huge role in how well search engines crawl through your site. Wordpress has helpful options to automatically create URLs in your blog that are very search engine friendly. To get Wordpress URL remapping to work using an FTP client visit their helpful tutorial here http://www.codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions

If your using the Wordpress admin control panel go to Options -> Permalinks.

A Permalink is a permanent URL for a blog post. Your content on the blog can fall into many different categories with many different links, it is important to have one uniform location for each post.

For example some URLs generated look like this: http://example.com/?p=25

This contains no keywords, can be confusing to the user, and can cause indexing problems for search engines. The best way to change this is to used the “date and named based” URL structure. Http://example.com/2009/06/18/post-title/

You can also create your own custom URL in the “Customized Permalink Structure” in the Wordpress admin. For more information, http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

Building a Findable Blog - Part 1

Blogs are a new and powerful content-delivery platform. A blog’s biggest concern to keeping traffic is content. By keeping fresh and relative content that is most suited to your general audience you will find your blog gaining success. A way to know if your content is of interest to your users there are many traffic analysis tools available. Blogs are great for creating discussion, such as debates or comments. By following the simple practices below you can ensure your blog receives as much traffic possible.

1. Write Regularly on a Focused Topic
Define your topic, stick with it and its ok to have sub-topics but don’t get too side-tracked.

2. Link Often, and Link to Other Blog Posts to Generate Trackbacks
Fairly self-explainatory, the more you link the more people trust you as a good source of information, you may loose your user for a bit to explore other sites, however they will most likely come back to you.

3. Create Your Own Blog Template
Want to be taken seriously? Forget default templates for the look and feel of your blog, create your own. This gives you the opportunity to build an identity and to make your blog more search engine friendly.

4. Put Keywords in Your Post Titles
Make sure all your titles have prominent and relative keywords placed in them.
This will help search engines find your blog and communicate better with your users.

5. Archive by Topics
Most blogging systems will keep an archive for you. Do not organize your archive by date, users do not care when the post was made but what the content was, archive your posts with a search using keywords.

6. Summarize Posts to Direct Traffic Better
Direct your traffic better by supplying short summaries along with a prominent headline so that users can decide if its worth their time to continue reading.

7. Add a Popular Posts Section
Don’t let your best posts get buried in the archives, keep them available to users, if they were popular they were obviously good and useful to the viewers.

8. Add a Recent Posts Section
This is mostly specific to repeat visitors, make it obvious so that they can see what you have that’s new.

9. Tell People Who You Are and What your Blog is About
Adding a short introduction is a great way to let your user know who you are and what type of information they may get from you. It also allows the user to trust the blog owner more creating a deeper connection.

10. Promote Your RSS Feed
Feed your users information using an RSS Feed, turn visitors into subscribers. Place your RSS Feed icons on an obvious part of the page.

11. Cross Link to Circulate Traffic
Instead of linking just to other external websites link within you blog to old posts, or other content areas of your site.

12. Encourage Users to Share Your Content with Others
Many bloggers end their post with links to social networking sites such as Delicious, Digg, or Magnolia. Some blogging systems will install this for you. The places your site is shared the more users will view it.

13. Direct Users to Related Posts
This is a great method to keep users on your blog longer. When a user is done reading part of a post you can suggest related reading, it may make a user realize that there was more to your blog than they first thought, causing a possible revisit in the future.

14 About Duplicate Content Indexing
A common misconception is that search engines penalize the page rankings of sites that publish duplicate content. However it is almost impossible to not duplicate some information on your blog and unless done dishonestly is of no major concern.

Web Content Development - Assignment #1

The creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, imagined a place for people all over the globe to play, work, socialize, and share information. As the web grew there was a need for some sort of rulesin place to keep this fast growing network under control. Web pages needed to work for everyone; from hand-held devices to the most complicated work computers, otherwise why create them? All webpages need to be compatible with various browsers. So that is what a project called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has set out to do. It encourages people to validate their work to insure it will render properly in browsers so that they're content will be put out for the world to see. Web standards that are implemented by the W3C was created in 1994 and led by the creator of the web itself, Tim Berners- Lee.

The main advantage of web standards is accessibility. It means people with disabilities can get into a world that may have been impossible for them to experience (example a person that is blind). Another reason for keeping standards for web content development is because it will allow your site to have greater visibility to search engines, generating more page hits. This in turn will create better revenue and popularity. Web standards also insure that the web is more stable. Less broken code will result in a faster more efficient web. Technology changes fast in web and ultimately code will begin to degrade when newer versions are released. By keeping web standards, old and new code is kept compatible so that new browsers can still handle rendering the outdated and up and coming fresh.

1st Post

Hello!
Well this is my first post on my new blog. I have to maintain this blog for my Web Content class. My topic is Social Website Content, this includes sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. I will be exploring these sites and going deeper into the social aspects of the web.