Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

I started playing about with it and was quite impressed. I put in the RSS feed for this site and my delicious bookmarks.

andrewjaswa.com

ajaswa’s delicious

They way Wordle displays the collected words is rather interesting. More so then just a straight tag cloud. Now to create something like this on the fly and embed it on a site…

I’m going to take a look at this from the stance of building and designing websites for people (rather then robots), since that is what Google has always said.

So before I ramble on…

1. Create unique, accurate page titles

   No problem here. It only makes sense to have unique, accurate page titles. Would you want a page title to say “Fish Market” when the page was really about coffee? I didn’t think so. As for the uniqueness of a title make sure you don’t have two pages with the same title. With the page title you are telling your users where they are with a quick glance.

2. Make use of the “description” meta tag

   Well fancy that. Google telling us to use one of the meta tags. I know some people that are going to be a little upset about this one. Google makes it pretty clear how this helps users. They (sometimes) take the description meta tag and use it in the search results. Helpful? Maybe… Though it is another place to give a little bit more information about the page/site.

3. Improve the structure of your URLs

   Google says to make your URLs make sense. That is to make your URLs have human readable words in them so that people can understand where they are. Not much to say here…

4. Make your site easier to navigate

   Hrmm they suggest adding sitemaps and Sitemaps to your site to make it easy. That is one way of doing it, though having a good navigation on all your pages would seem like a better choice for your users. They do start to talk about that a little bit seem to rely on Sitemaps a little too much I think.

5. Offer quality content and services

   Well Duh… “Users know good content when they see it…” I beg to differ. There are some places that users would not know good content if it walked up and slapped them in the face. But they did hit this one right on the head. Good content/services will bring users back.

6. Write better anchor text

   Yup. No more “click here“. But alas people still do it.

7. Use heading tags appropriately

   I think this section should really be about writing good markup. It would go far if Google started saying that good clean HTML meant something to them. Using markup how it was meant to be used should always be done.

8. Optimize your use of images

   Ahh Google I love you. You used “alt” attribute and not “alt” tag. Good for you. Remember kids use your attributes wisely. Not only will they help people who can’t see images figure out what is they but they will also save lives!

9. Make effective use of robots.txt

   Robots.txt is for robots and not users. There’s no other way to put it. Though in a round about way users use Google to to find your site and if you have a directory hidden then the users won’t see it in the search results. Err umm… yea I say we start a standard called humans.txt for use by humans… yea… that’s it.

10. Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links

    Again rel=”nofollow” is for robots. Unless you want to look at the source code of a site most people won’t even know its there. Also in this section they mention using CAPTCHAs for spam… NO! Damnit Google I thought you were better then that. W3C has been saying since 2005 (or longer) that CAPTCHAs are in-accessible. Bad Google bad bad bad…

11. Promote your website in the right ways

    Not much to say here other then: Google can you give us examples of the wrong ways to promote our sites? I mean are there any?

12. Make use of free webmaster tools, Take advantage of web analytics services, Helpful resources for webmasters

    “Oh hey there, I’m Google, I hope you enjoyed this guide of mine. I’m going to sell my products to you under the guise of an SEO guide. I make a lot of products that you should use. So I’m going to put ALL my links at the end of this SEO Guide so that you’ll click on them. YAY!” said Google over enthusiastically.

Well kids that’s pretty much it. I hoped you enjoyed my “review” of Google’s SEO Guide.

Some that relate to web and design:

• istwitterdown.com
• isgraphicdesignart.com
• dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com
• ismakingwebsiteseasy.com
• makemylogobiggercream.com
• totaleclipseofthecroft.info
• isgmaildown.com

Special Characters? Yup. They are so damn special they get their own websites.

• www.raquo.net
• www.laquo.net
• www.rsaquo.net
• www.lsaquo.net

Then we have our political ones:

• isbarackobamamuslim.com
• isbarackobamamuslin.com
• ismccainpresident.com
• ispalinpresident.com
• isobamapresident.com

And strange ones:

• www.thingsididlastnight.com

Helpful ones?

• yesnomaybe.info

It makes me wonder: If I got that wrong, how many others did too? A colleague and friend of mine, Jon Zuck said that he didn’t like Eric’s method because it was like taking a shotgun to the styles. I’ve also had other conversations with people ranging to loving what Eric has done and to hating it.

After much thought I’ve created my own starting point. It covers most of the common elements I use in nearly every site I build. It is what I use as a base for a new site I create, though I end up changing it more often then not. I’ve uploaded a CSS and a XHTML file as examples of what I’ve done.

We don’t have any set titles and roles inside our industry. At my company we don’t even have consistent titles among employees that have the same roles. It ranges from HTML programmer to UI Developer to Web Developer. Which adds to the confusion inside the company let alone with the rest of the world. When I go up to a co-worker and ask them what they do, I really need to ask them what their roles are rather then their titles. Only after that I can really get a sense of what they do. Shouldn’t it be as easy as asking: what is your title?

One of the points that Zeldman touched on was respect. He said that we do not get much respect as a community because we have very diverse job titles and roles. Job standards would go far to rectify this, however there are a few issues that hinder the development of job standards. The first being: different situations require a different set of skills. One thing we can say about this is that a number of us have roles that would fall outside of the titles of the same names held by others. A Web Developer at a University might have the role of wire-frame guru while a Web Developer at a large company might have the role of a programmer. Yet they still have the same job titles.

Different roles same titles. Are there enough titles to go around for all the different role combinations? Then we also run into the problem of many titles for one role as is the case with my company. So we are left with the question: who are we?

We design, build and implement websites. That is who we are.

I’m frequently asked what I do for a living. If I was a doctor, I’d say as much, I might also go into a little about my chosen concentration. If I was a lawyer, I’d talk about a bit about what kind of law I practice. I, however build websites. My title is Web Developer. But what does this mean to the lay person? They hear “web” and “developer” but do they know what it means? My answer is simply: I build web sites. I try to explain more if they are interested. The reason for this is because most people don’t really know what I do or care and if they do know they probably also know the mess that our industry is in regarding titles and roles. To the many lay persons I’ve met I can’t say they understand the Internet, it can’t be hard, can it? I can’t stress enough why I want to be able to tell people I’m a Web Developer and for them to understand what it is I do like a doctor or a lawyer. I want to be in a respected profession…

So what does this all mean to us? Why should we care if our titles and roles are mismatched? I care because I don’t want to be lumped with the 13 year old who makes websites in his parents basement with Frontpage.