w.y.s.i…WTF?

One of my last posts was about someone else ripping off one of my company’s sites and that at least this one may go somewhere. So the powers-that-be want some documentation.

So we decided to give them print outs of all the site pages and a copy on disc of the site.

For “downloading” the offending company’s website, we needed to use a auto-download program (becuase doing it by hand would have just been a colossal waste of time). Plus whomever ripped off the site in the first place probably did the same thing (though I really hope they weren’t that smart and spent a ridiculous amount of time doing it manually).

After trying several Firefox extensions and some other trial-crippled software packages, I landed with HTTrack Website Copier, a free open-source application that allows you to input the URL of a website and it will spider the site and download the pages and images, retainign the linking structure of the site, so that you have a navigable (is that a word?) version stored locally. Worked like a champ. There are Windows, Linux and Mac versions available.

It also works with dynamic sites, so if you ever have a client that wants to have their dynamic database driven PHP site stored on a CD so they can brows it locally at a tradeshow, desert island, Iditarod dog race in Alaska or some other place that doesn’t have internet access. (But of course it may also really help to have a static version if your database ever craps out on you and you still want a functional site).

Now for the print-outs issue, that would take a while, so here was my workaround:

1. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to return a list of pages* it had in it’s index and use the “Export to TSV” option usually found at the bottom right of the results page. This will give you a full list of the pages for that site that has indexed, rather than just the 1st 10 links in the paginated results.
2. Open the TSV file in Excel and save it as HTML
3. Open the HTML file in Internet Explorer (I prefer Firefox, but IE is what makes the next step possible)
4. Choose to print that one page with all the links and in the print options look for “print linked documents“
5. Kick back and reload your paper and toner as necessary

This was just a hack for getting this done and I am sure there are other, better options. I am sure there is a Firefox extension I am not aware of that woudl have really helped with this. If you know of one, I would love to know and link to it.

*Since I was depending on Yahoo’s index of the site, it is a possibility I may have missed some pages, but it gave me more than enough to show what we needed. Just a disclaimer.

Hope this helps anyone who might find themselves in the same boat.

P.S.
There may be some Mac folks out there thinking “An Automator workflow would have been able to take care of all that” and you may be right, but the 3-4 hours I spent with it never seemed to be able to connect the steps correctly, even after trying the very promising “Download URLs as PDFs” action. Automator was the one of the coolest features I had seen in an OS and it made me quite interested in moving to Mac, but so far for me, it has been nothing but a big tease- it looks like it can do almost anything and makes it seem easy, but the pieces never really fit together the way I need them too. But I’ll keep trying.

Great tool to share today.

Ran across this website XML-Sitemaps.com that does exactly what you would want it to do.

You enter the website you want it to crawl and generate the XML sitemap for and a few minutes later it provides links to XML (compressed and uncompressed), text and HTML sitemaps for easy use.

It also allows you to specify the frequency, priority and created dates.

There is a 500 page cap on the service, but they also offer a PHP script version for about $20 bucks that you can install on your own server to generate sitemaps for unlimited pages.

Check them out and save yourself some time.

XML-sitemaps.com :  Free Online Google Sitemap generator

Just got back from the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose and had a fantastic time. It was my first one and I am definitely going back next year. Tons of great info and lots of great people. But there are a few things I wish I had known before I went, so I thought I would share for anyone else who may be thinking of going next year.

1. The Dress Code.
   I over packed - big time. The only tradeshows I had been to before, were our own industry events (salon and spa) as a booth monkey where I wore a suit (no tie luckily) and the HOW Design Conference. While graphic designers could be considered somewhat close to search engine optimizers in some sense, I just wasn’t sure. So I packed casual and business because I didn’t want to stick out. Big Mistake. Unless you are planning on doing some hardcore power-broker Fortune 500 wheeling and dealing, leave the suit at home. Not to say a nice jacket won’t go great with some jeans, but had I showed up in suit I would have been both physically and socially uncomfortable. If you are a speaker, though, it can help with credibility. But it won’t necessarily take away from credibility either. Bill Macaitis from Fox Interactive (you know, they run a little website called MySpace among others) was pretty dressed down while still being a great speaker (great positive vibe).
2. Not much free time.
   I thought I would have more free time. I was wrong. The decision to go to the conference was really a last-minute one. My boss decided to send me the Thursday before the show. I already had work on my schedule with due dates. Not that much, but some jobs that needed wrapping up, that given a few hours here and there wouldn’t have been an issue. But alas, that was not the case, so here I am this weekend playing catch up. No big deal, but had I known, I would have rather re-assigned the jobs before the new work list was created. Lesson for next time.
3. The airport is close and small.
   This has it’s pros and cons. In my case it was a con. I left the conference on Monday morning after only one session to make sure I had enough time to check out of the hotel, get to the airport, check in, get screened and get on the flight. I left my hotel at 11:50 and was checked in and wandering the terminal at 12:20; my flight was leaving at 2:30. Since it is a smaller airport (not like Dallas or Houston that I connected in on the way in and out), there wasn’t a whole lot to do. On that part of the terminal there was a Starbucks, a Burger King, a generic Burrito joint and a nondescript Chinese place so not much to do. I would have much rather gone to another session than eating an airport cheeseburger just for something to do.
4. The People.
   All the “major players” are walking around the conference with the rest of the “unwashed masses” because they are just like the rest of us. Plus there are some really great people from all around who have either already mastered what you might be struggling with that could give you some pointers and there are others who you could probably offer some help to. I was speaking with Andreas Ramos, an SEO consultant and book author who knows a lot more about PPC advertising than I probably ever will and he gave me some great pointers, yet I was able to help him by telling him about search-engine friendly URL rewriting using “mod_rewrite” and “.htaccess” files. I wish I had been more active in SEO-related blogs and discussion forums before hand as I didn’t really know until I went and have followed up on the post-conference coverage just how much of a community it actually is.

Much to my dismay, it seems that some people still believe that opening external links in new windows “keeps users on your site.”

We have a part-timer who just spent her internship with us and now that school is back in session she is taking a web class and was asking some questions some of us about links. One of the things that came up is whether to link to other sites by opening in a new window. I am a big usability fan and see that practice as a negative experience for site users. And I have been hard-pressed to find any one other than clients who seem to think it is a good idea.

Until today that is.

Remarkably, one of the web designers (we’ll call him “Brett”) repeated this tired old line practically word for word. The most astounding thing is that when I said that it is pretty much accepted nowadays that it is for bad user experience and that if you are going to do it, at least let the user know with a little new window icon or some text, Brett wanted to know where I had read that.

Try an article and book dating back to 1999.

Not that Jakob Nielsen is the end all expert on all things (and he has been known to overstate things), but in this case there are hardly any real legitimate points to argue against it.

Which was what amazed me about the designer’s defense of the practice. See Brett’s only other full-time web job had been when he worked for a company that did well in the first dot-com heyday and his defense was that their company’s philosophy was that external links in new windows “kept users on the site”. What Brett couldn’t really defend when it was pointed out to him was that if the intent was to keep a user on the site, why in the hell would you link to another site in the first place? And that’s really what it boils down to.

Back in the day, when sites were supported by advertising that would auto-refresh every minute or so and they charged advertisers by how many impressions were delivered, linking to sites in a new window was a freaking gravy train. The customer would go offsite and forget that your site was hiding in the background quietly collecting impressions while you surfed other sites. But of course that is not how things work now, it’s just annoying. People don’t like that kind of shit - that’s why AOL and Earthlink pimp out that they offer pop-up blockers.

Another thing that I haven’t (yet) run across in all the articles regarding this antiquated practice is how it will throw off any traffic analysis on a site that may deal with time spent on a site.

When I report on site traffic and visitor behavior for customers, one of the things I list is time spent on the site. It is a strong indicator of what a customer is doing. Under 30 seconds, not what they needed at all. Under 2 minutes, maybe what they were looking for but not quite or they needed something really quickly (phone number, etc). Of course anything over an hour, probably a fluke. But if you shoot someone off to a new link, you skew those results completely.

So to sum it all up, regarding opening links in new windows:

• If you have to do it, let your user know (icon or text notice)
• If you want to keep users on your site, don’t link to anyone else. If you do link to some other site, suck it up and just link dammit.
• It will break the user’s favorite navigational tool - the “back” button
• It will cause the visitor to forget your site anyway
• It skews your “time spent on site” site traffic info.

And now for the final cliche summary…..

If you love something, set it free… blah blah blah. you know the rest. And it still applies.

Now, if you will excuse me, I’m going to go smack Brett upside the head with my 1st edition of Designing Web Usability.

UPDATE: It looks like the standard method of linking to a site in a new window (”target=’_blank’”)  is deprecated and is not supported under XHTML strict. So find another way if you need to, like Javascript. But if Javascript is turned off, it will just link to the other site in the same window, so why waste the time with the extra coding in the first place?

If you are applying for a job with my company, I schedule an job interview with you at 10:30 and then you show up 30 minutes early at 10:00, that pisses me off. It pisses me off worse than if you showed up 10 minutes late.

When I schedule an interview I pick a time that works for me, so if you show up 30 or 45 minutes early, I don’t see that as “I’m on time and even 30 minutes early! I’m a great candidate!”. I see that as being inconsiderate of my time. So since you decided to show up early, I now have two choices: 1) rearrange what I had planned and see you early or 2) leave you hanging around waiting. Since my office is very small and the only place to wait is right in the middle of the busiest work area, if I make you wait, I now bother all my other co-workers, because they are distracted and uncomfortable with you just twiddling your thumbs in the middle of their workspace.

So don’t show up any more than 5-10 minutes early. Otherwise I might send you off and tell to come back at our scheduled time. And that’s not a good way to start things.