Zappos.com has some pretty cool shoes, and let’s be honest, one of the most positive company brand’s to work for since Google. I’ve always been impressed with their business practices: They pay employees to quit. So how do you hire someone who’s a complete web nerd? Put your job application in custom header variables of your website assets:
X-Core-Value: 10. Be Humble X-Recruiting: If you're reading this, maybe you should be working at Zappos instead. Check out jobs.zappos.com
Who else but Zappos would recruit inside custom header tags?
At first my funny bone was broken because I caught this out of context. I love the part about requesting free design work. Because everyone should do some work for free, right?
I’ll preface by saying this is something I sent around in an email within work acouple years back so it was never formatted for the web. I have recently neededto reference it when talking to a few clients so I’ve put it up here for othersas well. I will come back and format it better later on but for now this will haveto do. I’ll also continue to update it and add new links as I see fit.
Websites shouldn’t ever disable the back button (Flash/AJAX/Frames)
Since 60% of users employ the back button as a primary means of navigation, disablingit can prevent 60% of your users from finding information they want or frustratingthem into not using your website.
Flash, Frames and AJAX havethe potential to disable users back buttons (the 2nd most used feature on the webnext to clicking on links)
AJAX is technology that allows for the website to effectively refresh and shownew content without actually refreshing the entire page
Flash is compiled code run by a plugin called appropriately: Flash. The entireflash object needs to be loaded before it can be viewed and used. Flash can be usedto create an entire video game to something as simple as making a picture fade inand out on the screen.
Frames are a form of coding a website so that parts of the website are loadedin “frames” like windows in a house.
Both Flash and Ajax should be served by the website’s content and not the otherway around. Meaning Flash and Ajax should not serve main content. An easy way totell if this is occurring properly is to look up at the URL bar of your browserand if you expect to be able to copy/paste that link to someone and have them seethe page you’re looking at then the page is working properly. If you copy and pastethat link and then when clicked on, it takes you to a different page than what you’relooking at, AJAX/Flash is operating incorrectly.
If you navigate to a location on maps.google.com and then copy the link in theurl to someone, they will not see the location you have navigated too. This is anincorrect implementation of AJAX. Google tried to solve this problem by providinga link on the page that you should copy and paste to a friend, but in my opinionthat doesn’t solve the problem correctly.
Employing these methods also disables the ability to bookmark a site
Printing the webpage can have problems
Search engine’s don’t crawl the content properly or won’t find it — this is killingour client’s pageranks
Sites should embrace the medium they are using to present material. Web pagesscroll, don’t fight the medium — don’t fear the fold
Flash should not be used as a content delivery tool as it can’t scroll with thebrowser and in turn fights the medium and instead tries to redefine what a web pageis. We should not be doing this.
While hard to show fonts properly, what are you telling your user when you don’tallow the browser to search that font, and aren’t allowing them to change the sizeetc. Again, this is NOT what a web page is.
Make sure you provide the information users are looking for behind navigationthat makes sense.
Don’t make your users sit through intro movies, or click past intro pages in orderto get to the content they came to your site to see.
Homepages should act as portals into the content the website has to offer, displayingthe most important and often used at the forefront.
Flash is usually bad, it has very poor usability, doesn’t play well with searchengines and makes the over all user experience frustrating if implemented incorrectly.There are ways to implement it correctly, but these are usually very cost/time inefficient.
Websites should strive to have as much information accessible to users in theleast amount of clicks possible
This can be achieved with clear and concise navigation, well organized content,and an easy to use interface
Usually a large multi million dollar website will go through a few months of IAwork before it even gets to design. Wire frames will be made, all the informationwill be organized thoroughly and tests are run on individuals to see how fast theycan find information. The wire frames are tuned and eventually released to designfor compositions to be made for the end website.
It should also be noted that Intro Pages and Flash movies put in front of contentis a bit no-no because of the findings of Information Architecture. Meaning youdon’t want to frustrate the user by making them click more times than they needto in order to get to the content they want to see.
Search engines see websites only as the raw code; this means they can’t “read”the text on images, flash modules, or any type of included file format. They ONLYread raw HTML text.
Search Engine Optimization is in itself its own beast, meaning making a websitecontinue to rank well in search engines requires a constant attention to the websitein keywords and content structure as well as marketing. It’s not something thatcan occur overnight or only once. It’s a very time intensive and expensive endeavor.
Site ranking occurs from 3 main areas:
Number of other quality sites linking to content on your site
Amount of relevant content on your site
meaning content that matches or has something to do with the keywords on yoursite as well as the links on your site
Good Code – Keywords, Clean Content (no content in flash/active x) and Valid HTMLmarkup on your site
Make sure you don’t try and cheat search engines – they will ban your site/blacklist it and then there’s pretty much no coming back after that
Users form an opinion about the website in 1/20th of a second
Losing creditability will make users leave your website and thus not fill outforms
Experts in the area the website focuses on are much more interested in the content,where as people who are not experts (your average user) are much more willing totrust a website based on looks alone.
Due to the rising threat of identity theft, users will only fill out forms ofwebsites they TRULY trust and will only fill out fields that pertain to the overallgoal of the form.
After all, if they’re seeking information, sometimes it’s easier for a user togo back to the search engine and find information that doesn’t require them to fillout a form and wait and or not even get information they want.
The majority of web users HATE being spammed, and anything that requires an emailaddress, phone number or some other form of contact information scares them andthey will seek immediate information elsewhere unless they’ve exhausted every otherresource.
Don’t ask for information that the user doesn’t have readily at their fingertips
Ask for the absolutely MINIMUM amount of information possible, no one likes tospend a ton of time filling out forms, and there’s plenty of websites on the web,one of them will most likely have a much easier to use form
Don’t force a user to input data in a format they don’t know. Make sure to tellthem (example: phone numbers ###-###-####)
Don’t give cryptic error messages
Always tell the user where they are in the process. If they have to fill out aform, make sure they know very well what will happen after they fill it out (willthere be another one? Will they get an email? Will they be added to an emailinglist?)
I recently saw your link over on Keith Byrd’s San Luis Obispo Real Estate website. I actually tried one of your pizza’s recently and was quite impressed. It was very good and although a bit more expensive than I’d like for a pizza different enough to warrant me buying a second one sometime soon. However this isn’t about your food, it’s about your website.I’d like to make you aware of some issues with an all Flash (that’s the animation and multimedia technology used to deliver your current website) website:
Having to “load” your website. Since the website is done entirely in Flash, I have to wait for the content to load. This is bad. Most users have a very brief attention span an making them wait for information they could just as easily get from another Mediterranean restaurant’s website is not a good idea. I’m on a pretty fast DSL connection and it took me about 40 seconds to load. As a website you have about 1/20th of a second to impress someone with your design, and about 4 seconds max for their attention span. That means that more than likely no one will ever wait for your website to load and will most likely go somewhere else to find the information they’re looking for.
Playing music in the background while relaxing in a restaurant is not kosher on a website. Let me explain why. As a potential customer on my computer I have probably found your website either by a referral (like Keith, me or Yelp) or by typing in your web address (petraslo.com). I likely have the ability to listen to my own music and for the sake of this example we’ll say it’s Andy McKee (because it is at the moment). I’m listening to my music, bobbing my head and enjoying it thoroughly… Until I come to your website. My once melodic and relaxing Andy McKee has now been mixed inadvertently and without my permission with your background music embedded in Flash. I’m surprised, confused and a bit frustrated and now scrambling to either turn off my music (something I’m not happy about doing) or trying to figure out where this new music is coming from. I realize it’s coming from your website and immediately am a bit irked that someone would force their music on me. I finally find the pause button on the website and stop your music. I might even do one of the following things: close the website and vow never to eat at your store again, be mildly ticked and still search for your phone number or address, or if you’re lucky I didn’t have any music playing and I enjoy your music and happily browse your menu and order something. I’d like to ask you as a business owner: Is it worth the first two scenario’s to have a few of the third?
Not being able to link to your menu. Since the website is done in Flash and does not utilize HTML to link to different pages I cannot (and neither can search engines) link to any of your interior pages. Nor can they most likely read any of them. If I want to send my friend the menu page, or your contact information my friend will need to sit through your flash introduction and then I’ll talk them through which buttons to click and how to turn off your music before they can get to the information I want to share with them. Not good business. It should be very easy and second nature for me to use and share your website, not painful. This is also true for search engines.
Minimal search engine indexing. Flash isn’t as easily indexed as HTML and is much harder to optimize for search engines thus as a web site built entirely in Flash you aren’t as visible or highly ranked as you probably should be. Being found in search engines is like free business referrals, why are you making this more difficult for yourself?
Not playing well with browsers. This might sound odd but Flash is not inherently installed on browsers and isn’t supported by them as standard HTML is. An example will probably clear this up a bit: Try right clicking on this page. You’ll get your standard right click menu from a website including possibly the options to go back, view source, copy, paste, etc. This is what you expect, right? Try right clicking on any Flash website. You will not be prompted to copy or paste, or go back, or anything else you are used too. Instead you can most likely “play” or “loop”. This is because your website is essentially one big movie that has hot spots that can be clicked on to play other “movies”. It’s not content, it’s a movie. Do you play your menu’s as movies for customers when they come into your store? Probably not because it would be frustrating for them to pause, rewind or wait to read the menu or point out things to their friends. It would also be very expensive to “print” them to put in your shop. So why do it on the web?
The back button is now broken. Yes, your website has effectively broken my back button on my browser. If I click on any menu item and then hit the back button I actually leave your website. Not a good thing.
It’s in your best interest to make things very simple and easy for your users and give them exactly what they want from a restaurant website: A menu, a phone number, an address and possibly a nice logo and easy to read text. You don’t really need anything else. If you have any questions give me a call or better yet contact your web designer and get this all sorted out. Ask for a simple one page informational website. It will help your business rather than hurt it. You’ll thank me later.
And stop torturing your customers! I know you’re one of the most personable restaurants I’ve ever had the joy of eating in, that should show up in spades through your website too.
