Here’s where I’ll be speaking:

February 3, 2009: Web Directions North at Denver, CO 

March 16th, 2009: No Web Professional Left Behind at SxSW Interactive

April 28th, 2009: Social CMS at Voices That Matter: Web Design

May 5th, 2009: Findability Bliss Through Web Standards at An Event Apart Seattle

June 23th, 2009: Findability Bliss Through Web Standards at An Event Apart Boston

It’s a tongue in cheek piece with a sense of humor that attempts to bring our attention back to what’s most important in our work―connecting with our audience. That’s what findability is all about. Using the many techniques explained in my book we can plan, design, and build more findable websites. For findability to be done well it requires buy in from all involved in the project life cycle, which is the premise of the article.

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 as Berners-Lee had originally dreamed.

The Semantic Web is all about expressing the meaning of our content through standardized markup, which is the mantra of any standardista. It’s more than communicating information hierarchy with heading tags. Semantics help us communicate the logic, context, and relationships of our data to computers so they can automate tasks or find important patterns that humans may have missed. On the Semantic Web a simple program could help employers locate the right talent for a project by search keywords in resumes of people near the company. It would also make it possible to automate the coordination of a complex event like a family reunion. If data such as personal schedules, contact information, and venue locations are presented in a standardized way, a program could read the data to identify the best date and location for the event then handle all of the invitations and RSPVs.

Beyond simplifying basic tasks, The Semantic Web could one day save millions of lives. Imagine a search spider that crawls the Web discovering medical ailments that are marked up in a standardized format. Common symptoms in a particular location could be identified and reported to medical experts who could immediately determine if the pattern is actually a dangerous pandemic. It would make it possible to irradiate deadly diseases before they spreads. The same technology could be turned on poverty, violence, genocide, and most any other major issue that plagues humanity.

It’s tragic that Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a Semantic Web is still so far off. The vast majority of content that is published online lacks structure or meaning, which makes it very difficult to find and even more difficult to elicit its meaning. Achieving the goal requires massive buy in from individuals, organizations, governments, and corporations. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s actually quite easy to publish your content semantically, and the idea is gaining some momentum. To learn more about the big ideas of the Semantic Web and what you can do to make your content semantically meaningful to computers check out this brilliant video: Intro to the Semantic Web.

To enter simply head on over to Facebook and join the Building Findable Websites group. Once you’ve joined post your favorite ideas, tips, and/or tricks to making websites findable in the discussion thread entitled “The one thing you can do to help the findability of your site is … ”.

If you’re not the Facebook type then post your findability ideas as a comment on this blog post and you’ll be added to the drawing. A winner will be selected at random on April 7th, 2008 so get your entry in beforehand. I’ll announce the winner right here and will ship the book directly to the lucky devil’s doorstep.

Good luck and may the force be with you!

Now that the manuscript has been transformed into a glossy cover-wrapped volume, I thought I’d share with you my experience. I’ve often wondered what it’s like to devote yourself to a single topic for such an extended period of time, and how the publishing process works. It’s something that is often romanticized as an extended, solitary expedition into deep, meaningful thoughts. Although there’s a bit of romance in the writing process, there’s also a lot of research, attention to form and continuity, second guessing of yourself, and old fashioned hard work along the way.

As a teacher for nearly a decade, I’ve become accustomed to reading my student’s faces to determine whether or not I’m making any sense. Writing doesn’t afford this luxury. For months on end I wrote and wrote sometimes wondering if my extensive passages would provide enough information to the reader to help them grasp my point, or maybe I was getting too detailed which could be patronizing and slow. Of course, my editors Jeff Riley, and Jonathan Snook helped me answer these internal questions along the way, but the feedback loop is a lot different than explaining something in person and changing tack immediately when you see your message isn’t hitting its mark. Somewhere along the way I got over the second guessing and plowed ahead. After chapter 3 I felt like I had found my stride, and the overall structure of the book started to become more apparent.

The Process of Publishing and the People Involved

There were a lot of people involved in the publishing process – a whole team, in fact. As the acquisitions editor, Michael Nolan received my written proposal for the book and a sample chapter then presented it to a board of publishing gurus at Peachpit who evaluated its relevance to the target audience, looked at other books that already explored similar topics, and made a final decision on whether or not to publish it. This was a pretty slow process. I submitted the proposal in April then bit my nails until late July when the official green light was handed down. The writing process didn’t start until August of 2007 -six months after my initial conversation with Michael. After the proposal was accepted Michael acted as the project manager for the book, coordinating the entire team.

Jeff Riley was my development editor. His job was to provide feedback on the form and structure of my writing. He evaluated all formatting for consistency, passed each chapter on to Jonathan Snook the technical editor who evaluated all code and techy concepts, then passed the combined edits and feedback to me. I then made the requested changes or decided to stick to my guns at times and leave things as they were. My changes went back to Jeff for another pass and prep for the production team who handled the formatting and layout.

While I was writing, the design team was working on the page layout and various elements that would be included in each chapter. They used a sample chapter to design the treatments for tables, figures, captions, tips, and various sidebar elements. This was shared with me for feedback, and revised one more time before placing the manuscript into the page templates.Kate Reber – the production editor – coordinated all of the pre-press production of the book. Once she had all of the content into the design we went through each chapter three times to tweak the layout and catch any oversights. A proof reader also went through the entire book a few times again checking for errata and inconsistencies. I’m not sure how many times we all read the book, but I think I read through each page about 8 to 10 times. I think I could now recite it from cove to cover.

A Little Overzealous – Too Many Chapters

I had a lot to say on the subject of findability, so much so that I wrote 5 chapters too many to fit in the book. I started to get nervous about the length in October, and by December we realized that there was roughly 106 pages too many. I felt like I was lopping limbs off of my first born as we excised chapters to make the target length, but luckily all of this content is published on the book’s companion website http://buildingfindablewebsites.com as free PDF downloads. Although these chapters aren’t in print, they’re not lost.

It’s extremely satisfying to wrap up such a long, intense process and hold the final product in your hands. I hope this book achieves my original goal – to create a better awareness of findability and its close relationship to web standards best practices. You can join the findability discussion in the Facebok group.

If you are going to be at SXSW this year or any of the other conferences where I’ll be speaking, please do introduce yourself. I’d love to hear your perspective on the book.

What is findability? How does it relate to SEO, and what is the web standards connection?

You can read my response on the An Event Apart blog.

An Event Apart New Orleans will be held at the posh Hilton Riverside April 24 – 25. The list of speakers and topics covered is fantastic:

• Andy Clarke, author of Transcending CSS, presenting “Underpants Over My Trousers”
• Aaron Gustafson, co-author of AdvancED DOM Scripting, presenting “Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript”
• Robert Hoekman Jr., author of Designing the Obvious, conducting “On-the-Spot Usability Reviews”
• Cameron Moll, author of Mobile Web Design, presenting “Good vs. Great Design”
• Brian Oberkirch, Publisher of Like It Matters, presenting “Kick it Like Pelé”
• Jason Santa Maria, designer at Happy Cog, presenting “Good Design Ain’t Easy”
• Dave Shea, co-author of Zen of CSS Design, presenting “Living, Breathing Design”
• Stephanie Sullivan, co-author of Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3, presenting “Design Challenges, Standards Solutions”
• Jeff Veen, design manager at Google, presenting “Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps”
• Aarron Walter, author of Building Findable Web Sites, presenting “Findability Bliss Through Web Standards SEO”

Plus our hosts Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer will be speaking too.

• Eric Meyer, author of CSS: The Definitive Guide, presenting both “The Lessons of CSS Frameworks” and “Debug / Reboot”
• Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing With Web Standards, presenting both “Understanding Web Design” and “Web Standards: The Return of the King”

Registration for the conference is now open. I do hope you can join us for what’s sure to be a battery charging, mind opening, biegnets chomping good time in the Big Easy.

Here’s what these paragons of the Web industry are saying in support of the book:

Companies waste fortunes seeking a magic bullet for Search Engine Optimization. But the keys to honest, effective web findability are appropriate writing and semantic markup. Aarron Walter’s wonderfully lucid and informative book tells everything you need to know to get your web content (or your client’s) in front of as many appreciative readers as possible.

Information that’s hard to find will remain information that’s hardly found. In Building Findable Web Sites, Aarron Walter provides an invaluable guide to avoiding obscurity on today’s cluttered Web.

As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, I’m currently working on a book to be published by New Riders called Building Findable Web Sites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond. I’ve been teaching a course at The Art Institute of Atlanta called Findability, which teaches students practical solutions for creating findable web content that draws in viewers, and encourages repeat traffic. While researching and developing the course I realized that most of the conversation around the topic is either very theory focused with little practical advice or very SEO/marketing focused appealing to business-minded readers with little knowledge of the way web sites are planned and built.

My book is written for designers/developers who build web sites day in day out. It has three primary goals:

• Help people find your web site.
• Help people find what they are looking for once they arrive at your site.
• Bring your audience back to your web site.

All of the code solutions offered in the book follow web standards best practices, incorporate accessibility recommendations, and address the findability of some contemporary technologies such as Ajax, Microformats, and Flash to name just a few.As the title suggests, SEO is an important part of the book, but findability encompasses many other facets of the web project life cycle too. To give you a sneak peek at what you can expect to learn from the book here’s an abbreviated table of contents.

1. Introducing Findability
   • What is findability?
   • The development side of findability
   • The deepest desires of search engines
   • Beyond SEO
   • Get your team on board
   • Using your moral compass to guide your way
2. Markup Strategies
   • A web standards primer
   • Web standards and findability sitting in a tree …
   • Accessible content is findable content
   • The findability benefits of Microformats
3. Server-Side Strategies
   • Files and folders: the power of a name
   • Choosing and managing domain names
   • Building search engine friendly URLs
   • Getting users back on track with custom 404 pages
   • Moving pages with 301 redirets
   • Optimizing site performance for efficient indexing
   • Choosing a search engine friendly CMS or framework
4. Building Content that Drives Traffic
   • Creating content that sucks (users in)
   • Content karma
   • The mark of quality content
   • Content of many flavors
   • Targeting keywords in your content
   • Content development strategies (various RSS parsing examples)
5. Building a Findable Blog
   • Blogging best practices to improve findability
   • Making your WordPress blog more findable
6. Adding Search to Your Site
   • Using free search systems (Google CSE, Google Ajax Search API, Rollyo, etc.)
   • Using paid search systems
   • Building your own simple product search system
   • Adding OpenSearch to your site
7. Preventing Findability Roadblocks
   • Avoiding JavaScript pitfalls (progressive enhancement, scripted styles, scripted navigation, and Ajax content)
   • Findable Flash
   • Findable audio and video
8. Free Search Engine Tools and Services
   • Building and submitting sitemap.xml
   • Google Webmaster Central services
   • Getting info about your site with Yahoo! Site Explorer
9. Viral Marketing
   • A virus you’ll want to spread
   • Passing the virus to new hosts
   • Building a viral product
10. Places to Promote Your Site
11. Bringing Traffic Back with a Mailing List
12. Places to Promote Your Site
13. Spotting Traffic Trends with Web Analytics
14. Techniques to Avoid and How to Recover From Mistakes
15. Findability Strategy Checklist

These last few chapters are still under development, which is why I’ve only listed their title. There will be bonus chapters available for free on the companion site (once it’s built). The entire book is filled with practical code examples that could be used in any project to improve your site’s findabilty, and avoids the marketing speak typical of other books that address some of these topics.If you have suggestions of content you’d like to see included in the book, please comment on this post. although I can’t guarantee it will make it in the book, I can do my nest to make sure the info you want is available on the companion web site at the very least.