Lots of people out there claim to know all about SEO. The fact is, it isn’t an exact art. However, there are some fundamental rules which have to be followed if you’re ever going to achieve good optimisation, and not end up with a big bag of oops. I’m not saying it’s easy to follow the rules – my early web projects certainly didn’t – but there are few excuses for professional front-end developers nowadays.

If you’re interested in good SEO (and if you’re a developer, account handler, website manager or company owner you should be), a good place to start reading is the Opera Web Standards Curriculum.

This could end up sounding like I don’t know what I’m doing and that I’m desperately trying to catch up on my knowledge. OK, so a little. There’s actually a lot of stuff I already know in there, because I’ve taken the time to try and learn standards as I’ve gone along.

However, there are some things I didn’t know, or knew about but didn’t know why they were so (like DDT’s for example).

I would recommend reading through the course for anyone interested in building or designing websites – even if you’ve been doing web design for a number of years.

Not necessarily the real thing, but this could be very cool.

I just read a PC World blog by Brennon Slattery about various Apple gizmo rumours.

The thing that really interests me is the potential of the tablet (pictured). I’m writing this on my MacBook, which has a similar sized screen. I can imagine prodding around on the monitor, pushing stuff around and navigating menus with my old fashioned finger-like device. I can promise you this will be a stupendous thing. I’ll probably buy one.

It led me to think about the challenges ahead for usability. Up to now we’ve only had to worry about a mouse and keyboard as input devises (other than a minority of accessibility devises and the basic iPhone interface). We’re surely now going to have to think about totally new browsing methods based on pointing and pressing around larger touch-based interfaces.

For a devise like the Apple tablet, the way we group links might change to be ergonomic – so a right handed person can flick something in the top right with their little finger whilst hovering or interacting in the middle. When you start thinking about the possibilities, the word ‘wow’ pops up often.

Obviously, this means we’ve yet another type of devise to roll our content out to – as if ‘the mobile internet’ wasn’t giving us enough to do. Perhaps this is the technical challenge to replace the browser wars. At least this time, devs and designers should be happy with the challenge.

There’s far too much to talk about here – and I’m sure the Econsultancy dudes would perfer you to hear it from one of their crew. However, there are a couple of points worth making if you’re a webbie like me.

Content is pretty important and don’t let them tell you otherwise
It’s no good just building a website. I can make a site that looks fantastic, has brilliant navigation and is poised and ready for Google et al to fall over themselves to index. But it’s all a complete waste of time – and a client’s money – if the content hasn’t been well planned and optimised.

If you don’t really get the value of copywriting, or have clients who say ‘I’ll write the website because I know our business inside out and I’ve an O-Level in English lit.”, I’d very much recommend Relly Annett-Baker’s interview with Paul Boag on Boagword.

Basically, if your content’s rubbish then Google will consider your site a waste of time and anyone lucky enough to find it another way is unlikely to hang about long enough to buy something.

Use all the tools that work but don’t expect them to turn themselves
There are loads of tools out there that promise to get your site noticed but none of them will do it for you. It takes a certain amount of hard work and dedication. The good news is that the ROI (return on investment) is probably a lot lower than taking out a TV ad. Although ITV are desperate for revenues, so it might be worth a call.

All in all, I’m quite excited about the stuff that the PR team and I heard today. Will be great to see how we can use the new knowledge to boost ours and our clients’ online presence.

In fact, no, I hope for all people (techies and non-techies alike), this makes perfect sense. Today I figured out how to ModRewrite. What TF is that, some of you cry. Well…

I wanted to have dynamic URLs which databases like, instead of static folders which search engine bots like. I did the usual Google search to start and found that I needed to add a ModRewrite line to my .htaccess file. Thing is, I couldn’t really find anyone who’d written clearly how to do it. Oh, yeah, there were a lot of people talking about it, and with some pretty useful ideas. But none could actually make it simple. OK, so I’m a pseudo-developer, but I’m also a human being.

Now I get that there’s a lot of jargon here for anyone who doesn’t do developing. And I’m not about to start explaining it. So, what’s the point of what I’m writing.

The point is that loads of people write on developer sites how to do this, and do that. Loads of people who can’t write English properly. People who can’t explain things in words. People who are probably brilliant at doing, but not quite so good at teaching. It all makes figuring stuff out that little bit harder. For me today it meant reading and amalgamating five separate posts and a considerable amount of guesswork to achieve what I wanted.

If only this were possible: ModRewrite /[plain English]/? /gibbering.html?jargon=$1

I now, however, have much more sensitivity to the needs of users and can say (with at least a little authority) that users don’t really give a monkeys about whizzy stuff.

That’s not to say they don’t like whizzy stuff and that you should get the old eraser tool onto it. The point is that, the user must come first. If the information you’re presenting gets lost behind some fantastic effect or creative idea your user will switch off. Moreover, if you’ve gone to a whole load of trouble to get someone to visit your site and then they can’t easily find the information you promised, they’ll be doubly miffed.

Creatively, this doesn’t mean everything has to be dull. It just means that we have to show our clients a different approach which is more appropriate. We could then call it a ‘whizzbangiworks’ website.

I’ve been listening intently recently to the Boagworld podcast by Paul Boag and Marcus Lillington (from agency Headscape). Their weekly cast is entertaining (if you like that sort of thing) and very informative for anyone involved in webbie stuff. They also do an RSS-/blog-based transcript for anyone eccentric enough not to own an iPod.

I very much recommend subscribing and giving it a go.

Now, I know this isn’t a PR blog. I do, however, work in a PR agency and can appreciate the challenges and opportunities the changes are providing. And, as the only webbie in the business, the related post ’14 reasons to have a web guru on your team’ makes for very interesting reading.

I’m designing a website for my Mum, who makes dresses for a living. She’s an incredibly talented woman, but needs to do more than inch-square text-only ads in the local paper.

Anyhow, I’d laid-out the key parts of the homepage and thought back to my splurge about instinct. I also remembered the cool Golden Ratio Calculator OSX Widget I found last week.

So, I measured the width of my layout – which seemed to me to be pretty well balanced – and put ’800′ into the calculator. It came out with 494/306px for the two columns. Turns out my columns were 495/305px.

I smugly rest my case.

But all of that learning is no substitute for instinct. Nor is instinct much use without the learning. It really does take both to be a great designer. But instinct is where things come alive and the subtle beauty of a design can be found.

For example, we can all learn the rules of the golden ratio. We can all study grid systems. What we can’t all do, however, is look a page that is designed to follow these rules and know whether or not it ‘balances’.

Feeling the balance is almost like putting the page on the end of your finger and seeing which way it tips. Which side has more objects than it ought to. Which has more colour, or a stronger tone. All of these – and more – add to the imagined weight of the page.

Unfortunately for those who’d like to learn, there isn’t really a formula to understanding the weight difference between a 100mm/pixel square block of cyan and a picture of a singing camel. Only instinct and imagination can make decisions like that.

There is, however, some hope for those who want to learn. I’m personally certain that my instinct would be utterly useless – even non-existent – if it were not for the effort I’ve put into learning over the years.

If I didn’t continually push myself, or choose to start again if a design wasn’t working, or be genuinely gutted when good work was rejected, there’s no way I’d know where to put the camel today. And in there is a lesson for everyone.