Here is another excuse for you techies… when in a meeting and your boss is ripping you a new one about how you never got back to him/her on the TPS reports (he he he), simply tell him/her… “I receive hundreds of emails and I receive them on my phone. All my mobile email is truncated. I’m sure that was one of them.” You should hear the calming sounds of “Ohhhh. Ok. I’ll send it again.”

Sounds like the TPS reports that were due this week are not late - or at least not this week.

For you web people out there…

It’s 4:50pm, you get another order due by the end of the day. You are still finishing up coding and/or desigining your current order. Well, the 5 o’clock bell goes off, you head out to your corner bar (or home for the married few), yet to finish the order. Next morning, you get a call from your boss… “hey, I don’t see the update we needed yesterday on the website.” Your response, while in a cold sweat, “let me check on it and call you back.” You quickly slap this late order together and upload it. Afterwards, you call the person back (more than likely your boss) and tell them, “I did it. I don’t know why you don’t see it. Did you hit refresh? The page is probably cached on your machine.” The response, “no, I’ll do it now - OH - duh, I see it now - sorry.” Of course your following response, “no problem.”

As I am sure this has happened to all of us from time to time, I must thank Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla for the use of their cache and saving my job!

Is it always possible to balance your customers requests with a spider friendly website? In most cases, it is easy to make sure that a site has great navigation and flows well. Certain website features are known to cause problems with spiderability, but they can be the same features that customers insist on using. Splash pages, image maps, JavaScript effects, Ajax, and Flash elements are all very attractive. They might help a human visitor to stay tuned to a website longer, but those same things can prevent a spider from crawling your website properly.

There are ways to implement these features and technologies while keeping your website spider friendly that include text-based navigation menus and simple hyperlinks. If you must add a splash page that uses Flash, be sure to provide an alternate link just below the movie to enter the rest of the site. If you are using Ajax, the content that gets displayed is buried behind JavaScript or ECMAScript which spiders cannot see. If Ajax is used for navigation or a substantial portion of the pages content, add a direct link to the page without using Ajax. Provide an alternate page for the same content. This makes linking to the page as easy as adding a basic hypertext link… one that spiders can follow!

With a little effort, it is easy to turn non-spiderable web page elements into sources of potential content and search fodder. While it is better to avoid certain things for the sake of search engines, it is also possible to provide the “fun stuff” for the human visitors while keeping your site spider-friendly. This also serves to keep your pages accessible to users who can not use or view javascript, images, Flash or other advanced browser technologies, but that’s an entirely different post for a later time!

I caught this article on Firblitz the other day. Great stuff! This works great for building that homepage that has WAY too much content on it.

Selling ideas is not like selling products. With a product, customers can see what they’re buying. With an idea, there’s nothing to see except you, so unless you’re a plausible source, nobody’s going to buy. A CEO won’t take corporate strategy tips from mailroom clerks, no matter how brilliant their ideas might be. On the other hand, a top-performing district manager will likely get a fair hearing, even if he’s not part of the upper-management team. Read the rest of this entry »