Graceful degradation is when a system can still operate if degraded, albeit at a lesser capacity, but some operational capability is better than none. What this means in relation to web design is that if your progressively enhanced content (which you can learn more about over at Eric Peterson’s blog) is no longer functional for some reason, getting JavaScript or images turned off in the browser settings, then the page is still functional and gets its message across.

Why is this important? Well, if you have a site that’s very image dependent and that’s your only way of getting your message across and someone discovers your site with images turned off, then that user doesn’t get the full experience. This can be detrimental to your site because you’ve just lost one potential visitor because you didn’t structure your content properly and who knows how many other users have experienced the same thing (well, you’d know if you used some form of traffic analysis :P).

This is just one example, but problems like this arise for primarily Flash sites and sites that use a lot of JavaScript, but don’t actually check to see what the page looks like when degraded.

There are many ways to make sure your page gracefully degrades, such as SWFObject for Flash sites, but for the most part, you just have to make sure to check how your site functions with these features turned off/deactivated in the browser.

Instead of going through sites and indexing what is normally in the content section, Omgili looks at what people are saying about your chosen topic in forums, discussion boards, and product reviews. You get to see what peoples’ opinions are of a certain subject/product and you can actually look at their discussions about it.

What’s more is that if you’re actually looking for product reviews of a particular product, they have a link dedicated to that. It takes you to a page with images of the top products relating to your search. What’s really amazing about this page is that it shows how many reviews this particular product has gotten from all over the web and has a product rating slider on the right. It has five colors, red for miserable reviews, orange for bad reviews, yellow for moderate reviews, light green for good reviews, and dark green for excellent reviews. Another great feature about this slider is that if you click on the triangular, color-coded sliders, you can bring up a page that has all of the reviews of that rating and links to the review itself and the entire discussion, replies and all.

Another great feature of Omgili is the Search Aid. When you search for something in the Search Aid section you get Omgili’s top hits for that subject, but you also get an option to see what Google and Yahoo have as results for that subject.

Whenever you search for something with Omgili, it not only displays the results, but also provides a line graph of daily chatter for that same subject over a given period of time. You can look at the past 3 days, 7 days, or month for when that term was searched the most.

Omgili is also great for web designers. I say this because it’s great for keyword discovery. Omgili searches sites that have discussions about what people are actually saying about a particular subject. It lets you know what keywords people are using to discuss this subject with other people. That’s invaluable.

What kind of human being could possibly make sense out of that? Truth be told, not many. The great thing is that these convoluted url’s can be fixed quite easily with a bit of code. You might be wondering what the purpose of going through all this extra effort and coding writing is for.

A few reasons would be: 1) It makes more sense to the user 2) It makes it easier for the user to predict navigation patterns 3) Sites with url’s that have GET variables or query strings (the stuff after the ?) don’t get indexed by search engines properly. In fact, these pages rendered with GET variables are often ignored entirely by search engines. This is why rewriting the url is essential, so your pages can get indexed properly and your page rank won’t suffer in search engines.

Should this happen to a user browsing your site, that’s bad news for you. Often times the user would end up staying if only given proper direction when getting lost on a site. Thankfully, there are ways to avoid that bland, ugly 404 page and keep the users at your site. You can custom design it!

There are actually a good many things you can do to a 404 page to make it functional for your site. Obviously, you want to make sure it ends up looking like the rest of your site so the user only feels like he/she merely took a wrong turn rather than getting completely lost in a foreign land.

Other good practices include:

• Have a clear message to the user that states the problem and what happened and offer suggestions/solutions.
• No technical talk about the 404 Error. It doesn’t mean anything to most users.
• Including a search box is very handy so the user can go directly to where they were originally intending to go.
• A link to the home page.
• A link to the site map that in turn links to all the main sections of the site.
• Never redirect a user automatically to the home page. The user will not understand how they ended up at the home page because they never actually got an error. Rather than assisting the user, you would just end up confusing him/her more.
• Of course, there’s an opportunity to have some fun with the 404 page. You can include some humor or something interesting for the user to see when they get to the 404 page. This way, the user doesn’t get so annoyed. Rather than feeling like they got lost, they instead feel like the discovered something new, a kind of hidden treasure if you will.

You can check out my 404 page. I took the humorous route with mine and included a rather hilarious image.

First of all, let’s give a little explanation about what page hits really are. People often think that a page hit is an individual paying a visit to the site. Well, sorry to say this, but that’s just plain wrong. Page hits are simply the number of files that have been requested from a server. This means that if a page has an external stylesheet, external JavaScript, or images on it, then all of them get counted as hits (and let’s not forget the hit for the HTML page itself). Thus, a single visitor can generated many hits, not just one.

Now, the real stuff one should be paying attention to when analyzing traffic is bounce rate, number of unique visitors, return visitors, page views, and referrers. You might be asking yourself, ‘How am I supposed to find out all this stuff?’. Well, there are many tools that are wonderful for this such as, Google Analytics, Mint, and CrazyEgg. I’m not going to go in depth about these tools. I’m just merely recommending a few tools that make traffic analysis easier.

Bounce Rate

Bouncing is when someone visits a site and leaves immediately or shortly thereafter. It’s important to analyze this because if you have a high bounce rate (a bounce rate of 50% is average and actually pretty good) that means that the pages people are getting referred to when they first visit the site don’t have enough to grab the users attention or the content isn’t interesting and engaging enough.

Unique Visitors

The number of different visitors to a site. Another important bit to monitor because it gives you an indication as to how far and wide your message is getting spread.

Return Visitors

Visitors that keep coming back to the site. This is equally as important as unique visitors because it lets you know if your content is interesting or relevant enough for that particular visitor to keep coming back for more.

Page Views

The amount of times a particular page gets viewed. This is good to pay close attention to because this statistic lets you know what portions of your site are getting the most attention. This could encourage you to start writing more content about that particular subject.

Referrers

Tells what sites are referring users to your site. This is useful because it lets you know how well your marketing campaigns are working. Also, it lets you know what inbound links and search terms end up netting you the most page views.

These are just some of the fundamental aspects of traffic analysis that can help determine the success of your site. There is so much more that you can analyze to further improve your site’s success. The tools I listed above are great because they help you with all this and more.

Some solutions came about for this problem, such as z-index layering. This was done by using z-index to place the Flash movie on top and placing all of the content behind the Flash movie, completely unnoticeable, but if Flash were turned off, there would still be content there.

However, the best solution was yet to come about. That solution was SWFObject. Created by Geoff Sterns, SWFObject offers a fantastic way to embed Flash content into HTML pages. It has a similar approach to the aforementioned z-index layering in that the target tag can contain content that’s keyword rich for search engines to hunt for. This will dramatically increase your search rankings and when users go to view your site, thinking it will simply be another ordinary site, they get slapped in the face (pleasantly, of course) with an awesome Flash movie.

If you’re still not convinced, you can take a look at the Google documentation for SWFObject2.

• solve a specific problem
• start as simple as possible
• design for humans first, machines second
• reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
• modularity / embeddability
• enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services

Thanks to this article about Microformats Recycling, they pointed out that these look very much like the Three R’s of Environmentalism: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Their analogies were as follows:

• Reduce
  • solve a specific problem
  • start as simple as possible
• Reuse
  • design for humans first, machines second
  • reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
• Recycle
  • modularity / embeddability
  • enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services

Now, the whole purpose of microformats is to simplify a problem, reuse existing standards and redeploy former approaches that have yielded successful results. These guys have discovered quite an interesting, and more importantly, effective, analogy for talking about microformats and their development.

How are they doing this? Well, Corporations are being more responsive with their customers, they’re actually giving authentic responses. What’s more is that many Corporations are being encouraged (if not demanded) to get involved with Online Social tools/sites, such as Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Facebook.

Granted, while it’s fantastic that Corporations are getting involved with these social networking sites, it’s no easy task for them. However, the benefits are just too great to pass up. One of the most effective ways for anything to spread is through word of mouth and sites such as the aforementioned ones are the primary way to achieve that.

These SEO tips detail some concepts that you probably already knew, some you didn’t, and, of course, the few that some people occasionally don’t agree with. All in all though, I found these tips to be rather useful and made perfect sense in most instances. I won’t go over all 55 SEO tips personally, but I’ll detail the ones that I found to be the most interesting:

• Tip #7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.
• Tip #10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name. (We students have been beaten over the head with this throughout our entire school careers in this degree, but it still stands firm as one of the most essential things for SEO and Accessibility purposes).
• Tip #17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.
• Tip #25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.
• Tip #37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.
• Tip #45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.
• Tip #51. Add viral components to your web site or blog - reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

There are also a few I disagree with. One that really annoyed me to the point of developing a rather lengthy eye twitch was:

• Tip #27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

This is one thing we’ve been taught never to do, for good reason. If the navigation is below the fold, users get confused and/or lost because they can’t immediately find the navigation and that can be a rather detrimental user experience for your page. Do NOT do this!

As I stated before, these are some pretty useful tips, but there are some that can be a little misleading. Give it a read through and see for yourself if they open your eyes to new ideas. If not, it’s never a bad thing to get the really important aspects of SEO optimization further driven into your skull