After this I am not just a happy customer, I am a raving fan. It is so important to go above and beyond for customers and deliver that outstanding customer service. Leave them walking away raving about the experience they had with you and the business. I know I certainly have and recommend Bunnings to anyone and everyone. Just to finish I thought I would quote the book and this is certainly now always in my mind when talking to clients – “The key to success is to create raving fans.”

Have you had any experiences that turned you into a “Raving Fan”?

• Keep it clear and concise. Unless you're doing it for a reason, try to keep navigation text unambiguous. If you're using a style in the wording you choose, keep that consistent too.
• Make the navigation easy to get to. Don't make a user scroll and hit a few buttons to get to a page.
• If you're using hierarchical navigation, keep the levels to a maximum of three. Two is even better, but if you go beyond three your users will get frustrated very quickly.
• Provide an easy way to get back to the home page, don't just link to it from your sites logo.
• Look at similar websites to the one you are designing and include any common links you identify. If you're designing a site for a web agency, you wouldn't want to leave out a portfolio or about us in the main navigation, as users will be looking for it.
• Icons can help users identify pages they want to get back to quickly, but they can clutter up your navigation if you have too many.
• If your navigation has animated elements or is hierarchical, provide visual hints of how it will work. For example, a small arrow next to items with a sub menu, pointing in the direction that the menu will appear.
• Break up your navigation if it's too crowded, but make sure you use visual elements and contrast to draw the eye to the most important navigation first.
• Help a user keep track of where they are on the site. A good way to do this is by styling the navigation item of the page or section they are currently at differently.
• If you're designing a content heavy site, consider adding another level of navigation that is local to that page, like a list of links to similar pages.
  
  

If you keep these things in mind when you next design some navigation, your users will be able to find what they what, and that means they won't go somewhere else to find it.

Drupal has a massive amount of power and functionality, and the Administration area is the control hub to access and control it all, which can be a little overwhelming for some users, especially when you build a complex Drupal website and hand it over to a client. The aim is to make it as easy and less confusing as possible for the client to navigate and use their website.

A good suggestion I can give that I believe improves the look and functionality of the Drupal Administration area is the Admin module and a dedicated administration theme. The standard Drupal install comes with the Garland Theme, this is a really basic theme but doesn't really look like a nice Admin interface. I strongly suggest installing the Admin module and the rubik theme to go along with it.

The Admin module provides UI improvements to the standard Drupal Admin interface. It uses a nice Admin header that can collapse and expand from either the left or top positions of your website. The Admin header can also be added to your own theme which is helpful if you are not in the Administration area of your site but still would like to easily access Admin sections. I would suggest doing this as it provides better usability to the site for your clients.

A handy feature of the Admin module is the ability to add your own blocks to the Admin header. This can come in very handy for adding extra functionality to the Admin header that would benefit you or your client. You could create a custom view with a block display and show it in your Admin header, you could create your own quick links menu to link to important pages in the site, making it easier and quicker to navigate to.

I also suggest that you set the Administration theme to be used for content editing. This gives a nice consistent and easy to use content editing page for you/your client. An advantage of this is that your website design may not be suitable for content editing and may actually involve additional work in getting the content edit page to function and look usable. It also presents you with the action buttons to the right of the content (as well as at the bottom) which makes it very convenient to save the page, as you no longer need to scroll all the way to the bottom.

Another handy module is the Vertical Tabs module. This provides features like Vertical tabifying all node forms, content type forms and block forms. I've only just starting using it but it is already improving the usability, especially for example, when editing a node. It groups all the fieldsets of the node edit page into vertical tabs, so the page is far shorter and you are not bombarded with information you may not need to see. It displays it in easy to use tabs so you just select and edit what you need and move on.

In addition, I have heard a lot of people asking if anyone has or knows how to set up the Drupal admin section to be more like WordPress Dashboard. Providing more useful information for the user relating the their website and content. People have suggested trying to use Panels and the Drupal 7 User Experience Project is helping addressing this issue. This is something I have been wanting to try and do for awhile, and I'll hopefully play around with it soon, so I will post anything here I may come up with.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve the Drupal Administration area, feel free to post some links or suggestions below.

Page Title Tag

Not only do Page Titles present an opportunity to include important keywords that are relevant to the content of the page, but it is very often the Page Title that appears in the Search results and is the first “touch point” with visitors to your site.  A keyword rich, descriptive, and enticing Page Title can go a long way to getting someone to click on the SERP link and bring them to your site.

Traditionally, Google (and other search engines) have been using Page Title tags as the source for the Title link that they provide in their search results (they also often use the description tag for the snippet), so optimising Titles and Tags has long been a simple method that website owners (and SEOs) can use to influence how their pages appear in the SERPs. If you’d like to learn a bit more about  the structure of Google search results see Matt Cutts explain an anatomy of a search snippet - it is circa 2007 but still mostly relevant.

Are Your Page Titles Optimised?

Most well optimised websites will have unique, keyword rich and enticing Title and Description Tags for each page. However, in the real world, Page Titles are often not as good as they could or should be.

Frustratingly, many websites still seem to be launched with generic Page Titles – having the same title used across every single page on the site. Sometimes this is because of lazy or ignorant web developers, sometimes it is because the client simply doesn’t “get” the importance of unique Page Titles, or is not prepared to pay for individual Titles and Tags to be written and implemented.

Normally, in Google’s Search Results (SERPs) the Title link to a page would be taken directly from the pages Title tag.  If there is no Page Title defined, the SERP Title may even have been left blank.  However, I’ve started to notice over the last couple of months or so, SERP Titles that are different to the pages Title tag and appear to have been automatically generated by Google – often incorporating keywords from the page itself.

Site Wide Titles

This seems to be occurring mostly in cases where the same Title tag has been used across all pages in the site, and Google has been pre-pending the generic Title with text apparently taken from the H1 tag. 

For example, on a site which uses a generic title tag of “XYZ Widgets and Wodgets” across all pages, the SERPS may list titles such as “About – XYZ Widgets and Wodgets” or “Contact Us –XYZ Widgets and Wodgets”. 

Google's SERP Title generation process seems a bit smarter than just pre-pending the H1 tag, as this is not always done.  Common phrases such as “Contact”, “About”,  Services” or “Maintenance” appear to be used, but more unusual H1 tags (such as people’s names) do not.

Here are some real life examples.  Click a link below to see all pages indexed by Google for that particular site.  Take a look at the SERP Titles, and click on some of them to view the actual pages, so you can see the real Page Title and H tags.

• Plane Sales 
• Good Grounds
• Stretch it Out

(note: above examples were correct as at time of publication but are likely to change if the owner reads this post and optimises their page titles )

Is this a Google Experiment?

It’s not clear how wide-spread this effect is. I am noticing it regularly for Australian sites, but it is certainly not occurring (yet) for all websites with site wide titles. It is likely that this is yet another Google experiment (they are constantly trying out different functionality and features in their products) and if it is not already widely applied – may be soon. 

Why would Google be doing this? Certainly not to help out ignorant web designers or lazy website owners, but to enhance the user experience and improve the service that they offer.  By providing more descriptive SERP Titles, they are likely to make it easier for users to find the information they are seeking.

What Should You Do?

What does this mean for Web Developers and SEOs?  It should make no difference at all, as they should already be developing sites that include unique, keyword rich and descriptive Page Titles anyway, but at the budget end of the scale, where owners may pay for a basic website with generic titles, it could make the use of keyword rich H tags even more important.

If you are a website owner, check with your developer to make sure that you have optimised titles and tags.  If not, you should seriously consider having them applied.  If you already use an SEO service and don’t already have unique (and optimised) page titles – then sack them and look for a professional search engine optimiser.

If you’ve come across this effect (and like me) scratched you head and wondered what the heck was going on, I hope this post has clarified it for you.  I’d love to get a feel for how widespread this is, so if you come across other sites that appear in the SERPs with modified Titles, please leave a comment.

Understandably, the original announcement caused significant interest, speculation and even concern amongst the SEO community and webmasters in general - which has remained fairly constant ever since.  Well yesterday, Google announced that Caffeine has finally been released across all data centres worldwide (yes, including Australia).

Google has also provided a much clearer description than ever before about what Caffeine is (and what it isn't) and also what impact this very significant change is likely to have on your website.

So what is Caffeine exactly?

Caffeine is a change to Google's indexing engine, and will not have any direct affect on rankings.  

Previously Google spiders crawled websites in batches, and at the completion of the crawl, sent all the collected data off to be processed and indexed. It was not until this indexing was complete that the page would become available via search, so it could be a matter of hours (or even days) from when a page was crawled to when it appeared in the index.

Caffeine allows the indexing to be carried out much more quickly. Now, as soon as a page is crawled the data is passed on to be indexed - so pages may appear in search results, indexed within minutes or even seconds of being crawled for the first time.  This means that brand new pages can theoretically be indexed almost as soon as they are published, and changes to already indexed pages are likely to be picked up (and affect rankings) much faster as well.

Remember though, that not all pages on your site will be crawled (and therefore indexed) every day. Google's spider (Googlebot) tends to crawl a subset of your site each time it visits. Larger sites with lots of regularly updated content, and lots of backlinks are likely to be crawled much more regularly (and thoroughly) than small sites that are not updated very often.

What about Rankings?

Whilst Google have been at pains to declare that Caffeine will not directly affect Rankings, they have also announced that they can now start to accumulate extra data about your web pages, and this data will be used to help provide better search results. 

As a part of the existing indexing process, Google already keeps track of such things as backlinks and anchor text. The new types of data they may start tracking is not clear, however, Caffeine provides Google with a lot more flexibility in what information they can start to associate with your site, so we can expect this to affect rankings over time.

In the short term, Caffeine will probably not affect your sites rankings at all. However, I expect that as they start to associate more data with your web pages, this could start to have a significant impact on rankings in the future.

That's a whole LOT of Data!

Caffeine lets Google index web pages on an unprecedented scale. In fact, every second Caffeine is now processing hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. Caffeine already takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in a single database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.

What do I need to do NOW?

As long as you are pro-active in managing your site, the good news is that you probably don't need to do much differently. However, anything that you can do to help increase the crawl rate of your website is going to help with your indexing, and ultimately, the more pages you have indexed (and the faster you can get them crawled), the more likely you are to be found via search. Therefore:

• It is more important than ever to get Links - Google relies on links to find new sites/pages and new content to crawl.  Getting backlinks from authority sites and having a good internal link structure is very important.
• It is more important than ever to create new, fresh content - Googlebot loves nothing more than fresh, original, content.  Regularly adding new content to your site is the best way to tempt Googlebot back (and to have it keep coming back).  If you've not already considered it, adding a blog to your website, is one of the quickest and easiest ways for you to create new content (and Googlebot LOVES Blogs).
• It is more important than ever to have (and update) a sitemap - Googlebot uses your sitemap.xml file to help navigate your site.  If you regularly update you sitemap, Googlebot knows what is new, what has been changed, and finds it easier to crawl and index your site.
  

If you are currently NOT doing any of these things, then you need to start an SEO Campaign as soon as possible.  Caffeine is likely to give sites that are actively being optimised for search (SEO) an added advantage over those that are not.

Crawl Rate Optimisation

Although the activities associated with optimising the crawl rate of your site are similar to optimisation strategies associated with general SEO, there are some specific additional actions that can help you to better understand how search engines crawl your site - and take steps to improving your crawl rate, and with this latest Caffeine release, anything you can do to improve your crawl rate simply has to have a positive impact on how your site is indexed and ranked.

Please feel free to contact me if you'd like to find out more about how the crawl rate of your website could be better optimised.

When I did finally open the statement I kind of skimmed over it with disinterest.. that is until I got to the very end of the statement and that last little bit that said “from the start of your next statement period your interest rate will increase by 2%.” Really? Well that’s not very fun is it? I wonder how long it would’ve taken for me to notice if I hadn’t opened the statement.

As I was whinging out loud, I was reminded that a friend had recently switched his credit card to a new provider with a much lower normal rate and 0% on balance transfers. “Why not change to another credit card with a better deal?” It was a great question. I actually had considered it briefly before, but that’s about as far as I got.

I’m really not great with change. I live quite a habitual existence in many ways; I do things in a particular order, and even some at a certain time of the day. Just a few weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon (when I always do grocery shopping) I was out at the birthday party of a friend’s little boy. The party was a fair drive away from home and I was planning to shop straight after it had finished. On the way home, I realised I wasn’t quite going to get to my normal Woolworths in time to shop before they closed (!), so I conceded to go to the Coles that’s a little closer instead.

I thought it was going to be a complete disaster! The aisles were all over the place, I didn’t know where anything was, the fruit and vegie section was backwards and I had no idea where the bakery section even was.. in the end, I did get my shopping done fairly successfully, it was actually kind of fun cruising the aisles (I love grocery shopping) and seeing different brands and versions of things, and the worst thing that happened was that my mandarins were pretty horrible.

So, why do I not like change? It’s not uncommon – lots of people stay in situations that are average, bad or even horrific, all because we fear change and the unknown. We stay in bad relationships and in unfulfilling careers, we continue to live in areas that experience bad weather and where we feel unsafe due to crime and violence, we keep going to schools that don’t teach us anything, we continue shopping with outlets that are too cheap/expensive, we keep buying from providers who supply poor quality goods and services. We stay with Banks and Credit Card issuers that charge too much interest.

As consumers, we need to change. We do the same as we always have, we purchase from the same suppliers, we buy the same things yet we complain when the outcome remains the same. What are you not getting a result from that you need to change? What are you missing out on? If you change and it doesn’t work out how you hope will it really be the end of the world? Do some research, ask some questions and see what you find. You just might end up saving time, money and/or your sanity.

A couple of years ago, in weekly staff meetings, Darryl would read us sections of this book and introduced the concept to us that we are all in the business of customer service whether we have customer-facing roles or not. It is an important lesson, and one that I try to bear in mind in all my work. What that means for me as a web programmer is that I constantly strive to produce the best software that I can in terms of performance, functionality, reliability and maintainability. I think that if I can make the software I write even a little bit better than the customer is expecting then I have done a good job.

Since being introduced to the book I have also become more aware of customer service as a consumer, and I find myself noticing more and more the businesses that go the extra mile, and those who are happy just to drift along in a sea of mediocrity. They don't do anything wrong by me as a consumer but they don't do anything to stand out and make me want to go back either. Then there are businesses who have the processes in place to create raving fans but have obviously not educated their staff as to the importance of these processes.

One obvious example of this for me is the local outlet of a well known coffee chain. Often, when ordering a coffee in a coffee shop, they ask your name, the reason that they give for this is so that they can let you know when your coffee is ready. The real reason that they ask for your name is that addressing a person by name makes that person feel warm and fuzzy inside. Trust me, it's true. You can test this out for yourself the next time you are buying the groceries; when you get to the register, you will notice that the person serving you has a name tag, use their name when you speak to them and watch their attitude towards you change. I'm sure you'll find that they become much more attentive.

Anyway, back to my coffee shop. I visit this particular coffee shop on the way to taking the kids to school and there is usually one of two girls working there. The blonde girl asks for my name and, when my coffee is ready, calls me by name to let me know. I put some sugar in, put a lid on the coffee and then, as I'm walking out of the store, the girl says "see you later Blair". It's such a small thing for her to do but it really puts a spring in my step.

The other girl who works at the same coffee shop doesn't ask my name. I am usually the only customer in there at the time and, to be honest, there is no need to get my name to let me know when the coffee is ready so she doesn't. I still go there and buy my coffee but as I walk out she doesn't say anything and I don't have the same spring in my step.

Now you might be thinking that since I buy the coffee anyway it doesn't really matter. But if I noticed after a while that the blonde girl didn't work there anymore would I continue going there? There are other coffee shops nearby and all coffee tastes pretty much the same to me so what is the incentive to choose one over the other?

On Mondays I work in the office (I work from home on Tuesday and Wednesday) and at lunchtimes lately I have found myself bypassing the coffee shop right next door (who do a very nice toasted ham, cheese and tomato on turkish bread) in favour of walking an extra 500m to a burger joint up the road. The coffee shop is very good and the staff are very friendly, but I have been working for ireckon for 2.5 years now and they do not know my name. Because I visit the coffee shop regularly - I know the names of most of the staff, but they have never asked what mine is. Admittedly, I am not the most outgoing person so I am not likely to strike up a conversation with any of them but you would think that in all that time they would have taken the opportunity to learn my name and to use it and make me feel special.

On the other hand I have the burger place down the road that I've only been to a few times and they ask for my name when I place my order. They then use my name at least once or twice by the time I have paid for my meal. When they bring my meal to me they use my name again. By the time I have ordered my food, paid for it, waited for it to be cooked, eaten it and then left they have used my name at least three or four times. This makes me feel like they are taking an interest in me and it makes me want to go back even though their burgers are quite expensive (they are also very good).

I'm pretty sure that the staff and owners of this burger joint have read Raving Fans. But they have not just read it, they live and breathe it. And if their actions are not proof of this then the fact that they have the words "Raving Fans" written across the back of their t-shirts surely must be. I think I might have a burger for lunch today.

You can basically record any 'procedure' you do as an action in Photoshop and it will replicate that procedure on anything you like, as many times as you like. It can save you a lot of time and prevent you from repeating yourself over and over. You can apply an action to a group of images, files, or even just a few objects within your document.

Here is a great tutorial on setting up your own actions

I use actions for a multitude of things. When I have to optimise a bunch of images to upload to a gallery for example, I batch process them through on my own 'optimised for web' action.

Batch processing is simply a way you can apply your pre-made actions (or one of Photoshop's inbuilt actions) to a set of files or images within a folder. You can set it up to run on its own while you go and make a coffee (or get on to some other work)!

To use batch processing in Photoshop; you simply select 'File' / 'Automate' / 'Batch' and within the Batch screen select your actions and which folder you want to apply it to - and away you go!

Here are some helpful, free actions available online:

• Creating folder structures - This is a good idea, it helps you setup a nice framework of folders in your layers panel to keep your designs organised

• Nice framing actions - sets up a classy frame around your image with or without a caption ready to go

Some other interesting ones:

• Creating reflections - Creates a nice reflection effect on your images
• Bending photo corners - Creates a great 'realistic' photo or polaroid effect
• Rule of thirds - A nice little trick for cropping photos in an aesthetic way
• Black & White Conversion - Exactly what is says, a group of simple and effective black and white conversion actions

And if you're willing to put up the cash, there are tonnes of amazing actions available online for a fee. Some of my favourites are at Totally Rad Actions and Eye Candy Actions (I might be a bit biased as that is my talented cousin Sheye's action site). I highly recommend you check them out.

Layer styles are something you probably already use when you're designing in Photoshop, but one of the handier points to them is the Save function. If you have a set of styles you want to apply to a group of objects across the whole design, you can simply save that set of styles, and using the styles palette - apply them to any object within a layer. This is great for keeping your design consistent across your whole site.

If you need some inspiration for creating your own layer styles, just do a quick Google search and you can find hundreds of free quality layer styles to download. Here is a great collection of web 2.0 layer styles.

One more resource that is helpful for your design process is to use grid systems. Grid systems are basically template files with 'invisible' grid lines already set up to help you to keep your design aligned and much more organised. Here is a page with links to some of the most popular systems available free online: Grid systems.

If you start applying all these techniques to your design I think you will get a great workflow going.

Maybe you can go even further, like setting up your own keyboard shortcuts or finding handy plugins... The possibilities are endless!

Keira :)

<img src="<?= $_SERVER['HTTPS'] == 'on' ? $SSL_URL : '/' ?>images/global/logo.jpg" border="0" />

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/<?= $_SERVER['HTTPS'] == 'on' ? 'payments-' : '' ?>shop.css" />

RewriteRule ^css/payments-(.+)$ includes/css_rewrite.php?css_file=$1 [L,QSA]

$line = str_replace("url(images", "url(".$SSL_URL.'images', $line);

header('content-type:text/css');

echo $new_contents;