Novamedia blog

According to web analytics company StatCounter, usage of Internet Explorer 6 has fallen below 5%. Its decline has been dramatic from 11.5% a year ago to its current level of 4.7%.

That's great news for us beleaguered web designers. Especially when you hear comments like this from Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter: "At these levels web developers now have valid justification not to support IE6 in the future,". According to the report, a number of sites including YouTube have already withdrawn support for IE6.

So it means we no longer have to spend hours of our valuable (and frankly unchargeable) time making sites work in IE6. That's a big fat hooray in anyone's book!

There are still differences between the more up-to-date browsers out there but these are small in comparison to the differences between IE6 and the rest of the bunch including IE6's younger siblings, 7 and 8.

So it's goodbye and good riddance to IE6 which can join Netscape Navigator 4.0 in the webmasters' Hall of Infamy.

So I had been meaning to write this blog post on usability for some time and, as is usual in business, other things got in the way – like work. And I thought to myself tonight, as I sat down to write this, "wouldn't it be typical if Billy Connolly had had his site redesigned in between me thinking of expressing my considered assessment of it and actually getting round to doing it."

I took a look tonight to make sure that he had not had it re-designed and, to my initial horror, he had! It was all different and I thought that was the end of this blog post. Then, as I looked at the site, it became clear that this man is a serial offender when it comes to usability.

Billy Connolly is a funny man, but his website isn't funny.

It's at www.billyconnolly.com and, whilst you could say that it is slightly better than the previous incarnation that I was preparing to have a pop at, that's not really saying much.

Now why, I hear you ask, are you picking on that nice Mr Connolly. Well, firstly and quite frankly, he should know better (or at least the people who are advising him should) and secondly, maybe he'll ring up and ask Novamedia to completely re-design it for him. OK, I won't hold my breath; he's probably more likely to call me and tell me to... (let's not go there).

What is wrong with the site? Firstly, it has no fixed menu and, if you want to find anything, you have to roll your mouse over the various elements on the home page until you come across what you want.

When you have clicked on an item, you are taken to the page and then there is no way to then go off to another page without clicking the back link to get back to the annoying home page.

The pages are all designed differently as though a bunch of amateur web designers was each given the job of designing one page with no communication between each designer.

The whole thing is just chaotic and anarchic. You could say that it reflects Billy Connolly's personality but, to me, web usability is too important an issue to treat in such a cavalier fashion. Being original doesn't mean making something unusable. You wouldn't design a chair with a hole instead of a seat because people would fall through when they sat on it and it wouldn't be usable. You wouldn't design a hot water bottle made out of tissue paper because you would be sued by people with scalded feet.

So Mr Connolly, what should you do to make your site usable? Here are a few tips to start with:

• Design an easy-to-use, clear navigation system
• Keep your navigation consistent – same place on all pages
• Have a clear link to the home page
• Don't overuse Flash. (Why do all comedians do this?)
• If the site is large, have a search box so users can easily find content
• If the site navigation is complex, use a breadcrumb link to tell users where they are

Anyway, that's enough ranting for the time being. It's getting late and I'm going to sit down and put on a Billy Connolly DVD to watch him doing what he does best – making people laugh.

Client to me: "I want my site to be number one in Google".

Me to client: "It already is".

Cue one of various reactions ranging from disbelief through scepticism to temporary misplaced delight at the thought that their site is at the top of the search results. And then the inevitable question: "What do you mean, it already is? When I look for it, it's nowhere to be seen. If you can show me my site at the top of the search listings I'll happily dine out on this fine Trilby".

This fictional exchange would, I'll wager, end up with the client feeling nauseous, forlornly looking down at half a hat.

To be fair, I wouldn't call in my winnings. Firstly, forcing a client to eat a hat is a guaranteed way of losing said client. Secondly, I did cheat just a little bit.

With the obvious caveat that your site has to have been submitted to and indexed by Google, you can see it at number one in the search engine by taking a unique phrase from the site and typing it in to the search box.

Take an example from the Novamedia website. Type into Google the following, including the inverted commas:

"Design and production of websites, from simple informational sites to database-driven content management systems"

You see. A page from the Novamedia website is the top result. (In fact when I tried, it was the only result but that's neither here nor there). Try it for your site and see how you get on.

Having demonstrated this, the hypothetical client then points out, of course, that they want to be number one in Google for a particular meaningful key word or phrase and not a sentence that no-one ever has, or ever will, type into a search engine and if you think they are going to munch on headwear following that tame demonstration then you've got another think coming. And it is usually at this point that we go from one extreme to another.

"I want to be on the first page in Google for 'restaurant'".

Well, you will certainly be somewhere in the 288 million results that Google helpfully tells you it can supply. (Did you know that if you decided you had nothing better to do than to scan through all of these results one page at a time and allowing 15 seconds per page, it would take nearly 137 years!).

Anyway, I would then suggest that maybe we ought to narrow it down a bit. So the client suggests 'italian restaurant'. Wow, that has really helped. You are now in the top 60 million results and, even with the best search engine optimisation in the world, you are never going to be on the front page or anywhere near it.

So we need to narrow it down a bit more. How about aiming for a top result based on the location of the restaurant? For example, 'italian restaurant petts wood'. Now that's given us more of a fighting chance – 6,350 results, nearly 1,000 times fewer than our last search, and the top two results are, strangely enough, Italian restaurants in Petts Wood, (my home town) and jolly nice eateries they are too.

What it comes down to is aiming for search phrases that are more targeted towards your business. It could be argued that the example above is to some extent spurious in that no-one is actually going to search simply for the word 'restaurant' on its own, but it makes the point.

What you want is quality traffic and not quantity. Think about what you do, where you do it, how you do it and who you do it for and aim to get traffic to your site based on the key words you come up with.

• I am a web designer in Bromley (target the key words web design bromley).
• I am a PR consultant specialising in healthcare communications in Central London (target the key words pr consultancy healthcare london).
• I have an online shop selling aquatics products and we sell Eheim internal filters for aquariums with free delivery (target the keywords eheim aquarium internal filters free delivery for one of the product pages).

That third example is actually a real-life one. Try it in Google and you should see a result for Pace Aquatics (http://www.pace-aquatics.co.uk/product_detail.cfm?ProductID=10) very near the top of the search results. It's a site we produced and we worked carefully on our search optimisation.

Anyway, all that talk of restaurants has made me peckish. More later. In the meantime, why not follow us on Twitter to keep you updated on our blog posts.