Aarron Walter

2009 is shaping up to be a busy year for me. I’m going to be speaking at a number of conferences around the United States, and I hope to meet you at one of them to share a beer and conversation about our craft. 

Here’s where I’ll be speaking:

free findability strategy cheat sheet [PDF 200k]

When I was researching my book, I asked a group of my students at The Art Institute of Atlanta what sorts of content they’d hope to find in a book exploring findability and SEO through web standards. Thinking like students with limited time to work on their projects, they all agreed that “the book should include coverage of what needs to be prioritized, and what can be done later if you run out of time”. Brilliant idea! I never would have thought of that. Well it’s covered in chapter 9 thanks to them.

As I was running through my table of contents with them, they pointed out that it’s all useful info, but it would be nice if there were a quick reference that you could just print out and keep nearby as you start new projects. That way you don’t miss any of the important stuff you should be doing to make your site findable.

I’ve created what I think is a pretty comprehensive findability strategy cheat sheet that will guide you through all of the stuff you should be doing when creating new websites or even redesign existing ones. All of the advice follows industry best practices and web standards, and have references to the places in my book or in the 5 free online chapters where you’ll find detailed explanation and examples of how to do this stuff.

I hope you find it useful!

download free findability strategy cheatsheet [PDF 200k]

A List Apart recently published an article I wrote entitled Findability, the Orphan of the Web Design Industry. It’s a story of a sadly neglected little boy named Findability whose siblings―Information Architecture, Usability, Project Management, Design, and Development― all garner ample attention from folks in a web design agency while he remains unnoticed despite his essential role to the success of all projects.

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I recently ran across a wonderful video on YouTube in which Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Wold Wide Web,speaks about the idea of the Semantic Web. It’s a simple, yet elegant concept that has yet to come to fruition asBerners-Lee had originally dreamed.

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To celebrate the release of my new book Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond, I’m giving away an autographed copy to one lucky winner.

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