It seems Google are really on a mission to uncover the invisible web with new announcements of algorithm tweaks here and there to improve their coverage and search engine results.

Today, Google announce the ability to begin indexing Flash files. Pretty big news really, and with the promises of executing JavaScript in the near future one wonders why you should even optimise your website? At this rate, you might as well just sit back and wait for Google to solve your current issues, knowing the way some companies work this might actually be a more efficient strategy.

But it’s not quite perfect yet, there are a few issues that we still need to think about when using Flash on our websites.

First the limitations of Google

Google still can’t execute JavaScript, and when they do it will most likely be clunky, inline event handlers rather than sophisticated, external onload functions. So any Flash implemented using JavaScript and you’re out of luck.

Google only includes content embedded in the original Flash file, not external movies or text (including HTML or XML) so again, you are probably out of luck if you are pulling in your content externally. Edit: External files are indexed by Google, but as individual files not related to the parent Flash file, similar to how iframes are indexed.

Google is trawling through your Flash file looking for anything that makes sense and grabbing it from the Flash file. This may also apply for HTML websites when built incorrectly, but you can bet they can work out an HTML website (semantics, basic information architecture, etc) much more easily than a messy Flash file with the odd URL and text snippet here and there.

Then, the limitations from our side

Flash isn’t always accessible. Most Flash developers are still unaware of accessibility options available through the new Flash working environments.

Flash is still a pain when you need to update content. You have to republish the movie unless you are working with convenient external date (eg. XML, HTML) and it’s being pulled in by the movie. But hold on, now you aren’t getting indexed by Google anymore…

Flash is still overused. Just because we can use it, doesn’t mean we should. It needs to be the right tool for the job but I fear I can hear another splash page being built in the distance because, “Google indexes Flash!”

I think Google are doing some interesting work while trying to uncover more and more information on the web, despite it’s current state. Soon HTML forms, JavaScript and embedded media (including Flash and video) may be semantically parsed and interpreted. We are far away from this being perfect, but I really see Google stepping up in this area lately.

I do find it entertaining though, that every enhancement that Google makes in uncovering the invisible web, we as web developers lose a bit more of the argument arsenal we carry around in the name of web standards.

I do hope this is just a transitional, experimental stage of exploring the web. I would like to see Google uncover content that can’t be spidered, but then move onto the next stage and continue to promote best practice accessibility, information architecture, web design and development.

Let’s cross our fingers and just watch how it all unfolds.

Waking up at the crack of noon and stinking of stale beer, random memories flash through my head and I wonder how I even made it home last night. It all seemed harmless at first, leaving drinks at the local pub, but soon enough it was trays of shots, long clingy hugs goodbye and an assumed cab ride home into the night.

The end just seemed to happen; all very anti-climactic and surreal after four years working 9 to 5 with great people, great bosses (I worked in three teams during this time) and a job I really couldn’t complain about too much but still did all the time.

My name is Scott and I am a web developer / designer - that is, if you need a solid title to define what I do. Like many in our industry I am multi-disciplined and find it hard to confine my skill set to one limiting and often hierarchical definition of a role.

I am off to start a web design agency. Nothing fancy, my wife and I working from our home and trying to drum up enough business to make ends meet. Something different from what we are used to and something we are both craving for similar and sometimes different reasons.

This will be my final weekend of my final corporate week. As of Monday morning it’s no steady income, no steady clients and no real idea of what I am supposed to do next on my own time, which is kind of nice in slightly terrifying kind of way.

The Catalyst

Why would I do this to myself when all seemed to be going so well? There are a few reasons:

Groundhog Day

I was seeing the same thing over and over; often incredulous about how I could be caught in these same meetings with people saying the same things about the same problems over and over. Life in a big company can change; it just does it very slowly.

Mental Stimulation

I was not being challenged and felt I should be learning new things – the online industry is about constant growth and change and I felt like my skills were stagnating where I was.

Old Routine

Arrive at work at 8:30, coffee at 8:35am, say good morning to the same people, back at the desk for 8:55am, Google Reader until I finish my coffee now for a bit of checking emails… I began to love my creature comforts and some would say these are the enemy of innovation.

Jaded

Four years is a long time in this industry… even though I liked my job after all that time it just felt like it was time to move on. New people come in with great ideas that I had seen many times before and I ceased to be as opened minded and eager as I had been in the past. We all know what happens to these old crusty detectives when they get partnered up with the new kid on the force in the movies…

So now it’s a life of doing whatever I want, whenever I want. Everyone seems to have advice or opinions when you mention that you are going freelance and I find it encouraging seeing who would actually volunteer that advice. From the CEO of the company that “did his own thing” for over 9 years to the current freelancers in the office that were just struggling to make ends meet yet had a passion that couldn’t help but shine through.

Why did they come back? How was it when they were actually freelancing or running these businesses and was it considered a failure (or just a change) to come back to the corporate lifestyle after leaving it? I am intrigued and fascinated with this new lifestyle that many talk of, the lifestyle I am about to plunge into headfirst.

I will see firsthand and experience all of these realities and myths soon enough. The goods, the bads and the mediocre of a lifestyle I ultimately have control over.

The Good

So what are the benefits I have heard from those wishing me well?

Freedom

You can make your own hours and essentially do whatever you want. If you want to take the entire day off or knock off early to go to the beach there is nobody stopping you.

Variety

You can choose your own work. If you don’t want a job then simply turn it down and wait for the next great opportunity, there is plenty of great work out there.

Against the Grain

No commuting and fighting others for seats on buses, ferries or trains. A big plus to lower general stress levels and you gain an hour or two per day by cutting this out of the equation.

Money

Say you are off to be a freelancer to your co-workers and you get that “pursed lips drawing breath inwards” nodding from people that says you are doing the right thing. “So we will see you back in here soon eh? Making 3 times the amount”, they chuckle walking off to the vending machine.

The Bad

It can’t all be good though, so what are the drawbacks?

You Can’t Turn Off

You have to make your own hours. Is discipline a problem for you? Well say goodbye to relaxing weekends and weeknights when you can’t shut your mind (or laptop) down as you are stressing about deadlines and projects on your own time.

Cabin Fever

You will soon crave social attention (not including your cat or the local barista) which means bugging your corporate friends all of the time and asking if you can come to drinks with them on Friday without looking desperate and lonely.

Money

The big money doesn’t mean anything (is it really big though?) when it’s sitting in a client’s accounts payable inbox, waiting its turn behind many, many others invoices that need to be paid. Meanwhile, finance are throwing their quarterly pub catch-up (all free) and might get to your invoice sometime next week.

Other Stuff

Finances, invoices, customer relations and finding new work are just some of the things that will cause you to miss out on what you really want to do, and more importantly, on billable hours.

The Ugly?

The good and the bad, there you have it. Plenty to keep me awake late at night staring at the ceiling and wondering where my next pay check is going to come from or what somebody will think of my existing skill set now that I don’t have a fancy title or a talented team to back me up.

These are the things that have plagued and excited me over the last few months while I have lost sleep and pondered whether I am making the right decision or not. Whether to take that plunge and to remove myself from the comfort zone and have a go and just see what happens.

These are the diaries of a freelancer…

I am currently doing some SEO work for a personal project, more specifically I am populating the description meta-data for this project.

For this, I am making sure each page description is unique and presents an accurate description of what each page is about if a user were to click on a search result.

Now this is no secret, descriptions do work and are still useful today, yet I am still amazed at some of the great companies and developers out there that neglect this area of development (although some might argue this point, more on that later).

An Observation

Doing some research into current states of descriptions on a few local and international agency websites this is the sort of descriptions I have seen:

Web Agency #1

Great description of the home page, not trying to be too specific but it gives you an idea of what Digital Studios do and if you want to know more you will go ahead and click this link.

About page is also a good summary of what you might encounter when you click this link, more importantly it’s different than the index page description.

Web Agency #2

This description is a good example, much like the first agency I have detailed above.

The about page is what lacks here, it’s the same as the index page which means many pages probably repeat this meta-data. You are allowed two results per URL on the search results page, so you are not helping users with redundant descriptions.

Web Agency #3

If you don’t supply description meta-data, then each search engine will populate it using it’s own method. Google will often use text from your website. These commonly end up being navigation, footer links and copyright information or other jibberish. Not helpful at all…

Who’s problem is it anyway?

Who is responsible for filling this out anyway? The front-end developer? The copy writer? Do you even have a copy writer? I worked for an online media company and have seldom seen a copy writer come in for any projects.

From my past experience, the problem with incomplete description meta-data is that it just falls through the cracks. As a developer, I never put up my hand to populate this because that’s what the back-end guys are for…

… the back-end guys build this functionality but they aren’t in charge of what actually goes in there, that’s up to the producer or the project manager.

Even the SEO guy is passing the buck as he is to busy with ’strategy’ and can’t possibly be concerning himself with manually typing out descriptions for hundreds of pages. Fair enough.

The Cliffhanger

Descriptions have to be done and it has to be part of the road map before a project starts, or at least be integrated into the everyday process of how you build websites in your organisation.

These things can be done by quite a few people, but these people need to be designated from the start and have to be aware of the tasks that must be complete when a website goes live.

For part 2 of this post, let’s discuss some of the ways to make this a bit easier to accomplish for all your projects. It’s better to plan for this part of the job, rather than avoid it and have to fix it up again later once everyone has moved on to something else.

I was asked to speak recently at Web Directions Government in Canberra. The topic I chose to speak about was Real World Web Standards where I discussed my past experience with larger projects at my ex-employer News Digital Media.

I had done this presentation before at a smaller conference last year but I decided to put a bit more work into it as I wasn’t quite happy with the delivery last time. Less preaching and more realistic solutions was my goal, so hopefully this message came through with my second edition.

The current slideshow is below:

| View | Upload your own

Soon enough, I will fix this slideshow up (there seems to be some slides converting strangely) and will create a slidecast once I get the podcast has been published of the presentation.

Thanks to the Canberra crowd for making the event an interesting one. It was great hearing some of the presentations from the government crowd as they deal with a whole separate set of issues from those of us in the private sector, many of which sound quite painful indeed.

It was great to have a mini Web Directions hit before the bigger and badder Web Directions South later this year. Looking forward to hearing the speaker line-up in the next few weeks!

It’s time to come out of hibernation, remove the tompian from my arse and have a look around for a good ol’ meal. My tummy is rumbling and the legs are a bit shaky, but dozing in a dark cave is getting a bit lonely and my mind needs a challenge again.

Standardzilla packed it in for a while and I haven’t posted anything new since the end of last year. There have been many reasons for this, including:

Site Design

The site is falling apart… I don’t mean visually but I kind of designed and developed this blog with no idea how I was going to use it or what kind of content I was going to publish. This means publishing a post is a painful hack of inline styles and fishing around for common code patterns I have found useful. A redesign is in order here to keep me sane.

Getting Hitched

I got married. I often thought this wouldn’t consume my life but it actually did as it was overseas and I was, well, quite into it. So a few things dropped in priorities and lots of that was web related.

Lacking Mojo

I lost it for a while there. I don’t know where it went or how it happened but the comedown from Web Directions South last year saw me getting a little sick of all things web-related. I had to just retreat and stop being consumed by this online lifestyle and lose myself in things non-web related and re-evaluate my passion for what I do for a living.

You will be glad to know it’s coming back slowly, with a new focus on what’s important and what I want to get from this industry and how I want to approach things, including this blog. Standardzilla 2008 season is open and there will be more to come (for those who haven’t ditched me from there readers yet).

Stay tuned for more details in the weeks and months to come, I just have to go out and get myself a snack… I haven’t eaten in months.

Recently, Google has announced a change in its treatment of subdomains and how they are represented in their search result pages.

In the past, subdomains such as:


example.com
phones.example.com
furniture.example.com
yoyos.example.com


have all been treated as separate hostnames. To explain why this might be an advantage to you the website owner, you need to know how Google have treated these separate hostnames in the past.

Subdomains vs. Subdirectories

When Google displays the results of a search query, it will only return a maximum of two relevant searches results per hostname. This behaviour is called ‘host crowding’ and it means the user will have exposure to more than a single website for a search term.

A subdirectory, or a folder, will be considered part of the top level domain so this additional content or categories will still only show two results per search term on the result page.

Subdomains however, get around this limitation because they are being treated as a unique hostname. This means one top level domain can potentially dominate search engine result pages with all of their own content, depending on how many subdomains they might have that are relevant to the search term.

What does this actually mean?

This is another great move by Google to enhance the usability of the search engine user by trying to eliminate people from gaming the system.

In many instances, websites with multiple subdomains are not actually causing a problem and apparently won’t be filtered by this new algorithm change. (these have been classed as ‘exceptions’ by Google).

Websites such as Ebay or About.com that are extremely large and categorise their content with the logical architecture of subdomains. These categories will not always compete for every search query, so they can potentially return relevant results for the user.

Who this will target is the SEOs and websites owners who have been on to this ‘white hat’ technique for years. Websites with URLs such as:


example.com
brand1.example.com
brand2.example.com
brand3.example.com


that produce duplicate or syndicated content across several subdomains will start to feel the filtering affects of this algorithm.

Using subdomains to distribute content that is not different or categorised in a logical manner will now cause you to have less control in the way that Google will display the results of your website to potential users.

Who benefits from this?

I think a few people will benefit from this and it’s a good move if implemented correctly and does not filter out relevant websites that use subdomains correctly.

Smaller websites have often been disadvantaged by the treatment of subdomains by Google. I have worked with many websites that didn’t have enough content to be splitting it up with subdomains, but were often bound by third party contracts or server configurations.

This change will mean that those websites that have been diluting their Page Rank for so long will have a bit more clout with the search engines as a single hostname for all of their content. These small websites might be able to think about using subdomains to retain simplicity and enhance branding without worrying about this Page Rank issue anymore.

The user also benefits from a more concise, accurate search result provided by Google who continues to impress me with concern for the individual search engine user. It’s a real pain for some SEOs and website owners whenever Google changes it’s algorithms like this, but I am still convinced it’s for a good reason.

As with anything SEO related, if you use subdomains strictly to create more visibility in the search engines for your website, then you are probably using them for the wrong reason.