good form design requires well defined steps

I was reinstalling windows this weekend, and just as I was getting to my first restart I realized that Microsoft had completely and utterly failed at providing a good user experience during the installation process. You get about 40 minutes in, the computer restarts, and prompts you to enter some ancillary information, in a four step process. The first three steps are easy, you get them all done quickly (??), are ready to go and then... another 20-40 minutes of installation.

The problem is that Microsoft never let us know what we were getting into. They don't tell you the steps until you've already invested half an hour, then they provide a four part installation process, but the data needed and the time taken on each of those steps lead to false expectations for the last step.

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search better

Our American readers may not be aware of this, but today is Canada day (that's like our Independence Day, only 90 years later and with far fewer "bombs bursting in air" and what not). And as such our SEO team is whiling away their hours in the great out doors, instead of slaving fiendishly to the beat of the blog. As such, no SEO Mistakes post today (in retrospect I probably shouldn't have posted the revised schedule this week), instead we're presenting seven advanced search tips for July.

You may remember a long time ago I posted a list of ways to use smart bookmarks to achieve many of the same effects as the SEO toolbars out there. Today I'm looking at the same topic from the opposite side: instead of ways to improve your browser with bookmarks, I'm going to go over a few ways you can use search terms to find and do neat things.

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changes to the blog this week

Updates to blog scheduling this week. Tuesday will remain Email/Copywriting/Etc., Wednesday is now home to our new SEO Mistakes section, Thursday Remains Usability (and some times Copywriting when Michael wants to), and Friday is now Brian Katz Advanced Analytics.

Great stuff this week, a great one from Avinash on Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, Content restrictions in Canada, alternates to nofollow now that nofollow doesn't work, and more.

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so much SEO knowledge,
so little SEO

Introduction

This is the first part of a new ongoing series on our blog: SEO missed opportunities. We've noticed that despite lots of information being out there, few web sites adhere to SEO best practices, and many are under-performing for valuable search terms. Oddly we find that this is especially common amidst large companies with strong real world business—the exact companies that you think would build strong web presences, given their high authority. Fortunately these companies provide fantastic real world examples of common mistakes. This week we're looking at a company favourite: Futureshop.ca.

The Opportunity

I live in Vancouver, Canada. One day I searched for a laptop mouse in google.ca - typed "buy laptop mouse" and selected option to show "pages from Canada". It surprised me that I did not see Futureshop.ca (BestBuy's brother here in Canada) in the first page of the results. Finally, after a quick look I found it on a sixth page. It is very unusual to see such poor search engine ranking performance for a big brand with powerful authority. I've done a couple of other searches and didn't find Futurseshop.ca anywhere close to the first page in Google.

We've looked at the Futureshop.ca website in the past to show some web usability problems.

Let's take a look at this website www.futureshop.ca in terms of SEO to find out any reasons for such bad performance in natural search results. After a quick review I put together a list of top 6 obvious problems.

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Oh come on... let me in!

Jakob Nielsen has officially come out against password masking, arguing that (in most cases at least) the usability issues it creates outweigh the overstated security issues.

Since passwords (especially when masked) are a personal pet peeve, my first reaction was "YES!" But after thinking about it a while, and discussing it with colleagues, there appear to be at least two problems with presenting passwords in clear type.

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A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to go to Seattle and attend SMX Advanced. I sat in on all the PPC sessions and couldn't wait to learn something new. Unfortunately there were only a few bits of information worth blogging about, the rest was general knowledge, ranting or shameless promotion. That being said, listed here are the top 3 PPC tips from SMX Advanced: how you can control ad copy impression share; reset your quality score; and use dynamic keyword insertions for all-caps titles.

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No more Bing headlines, I swear! (at lest until Microsoft does something stupid again—so likely next week!)

This week we have a new GA site design, the geometry of social media, twitter user statistics, tyhe FTC monitoring blogs, and of course Firefox 3.5rc2.

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In our office today we noticed a strange occurrence. While signing up for a new gmail account we were told that in order to verify the account we need to give Google a mobile phone number, so that they could send us an SMS verification. Aghast we tried again.

On further attempts the message vanished. Sign up proceeded as usual.

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Hey, it was just a blog post!

On Tuesday, Kent Clark posted about copywriting. He cautioned against following grammatical rules too religiously. His post reminded me of an article I wrote almost two years ago. Its theme was similar, but dealt with design rather than copywriting:

Website Usability... Without the Dogma

Before you brand me a usability heretic, know that almost three years ago, I presented the flipside of the argument. See my article on "why rules matter":

Usability Checklists: Just Dogma?

Does this make me a flip-flopper (which is even worse than a heretic)? Not really. It's easy enough to reconcile the two sides of this issue: To excel in any field – to truly stand out – you must break some rules. But to break the rules judiciously, you first have to understand them.

no, not that OTHER kind of quickie

Continued below…

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