Doing More With Less

By Chris Butler, September 2009

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Doing More With Less

»	Doing More With Less
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3.	Investing in Your Site

The epitaph on Buckminster Fuller's tombstone reads, "CALL ME TRIMTAB." In life, he used the trim tab, a very small attachment to a boat's rudder that controls its speed and direction, as a metaphor for his own life- which he saw as an experiment to make the greatest impact on the world using the least amount of resources. What a wonderful idea! While he went on to invent many entirely new techniques and structures, I'd venture to guess that Bucky would have preferred to see if a small adjustment could be made to an existing process or device in order to increase its effectiveness and value before going back to the drawing board.

The same choice is possible with your website, in which you've probably already made a substantial investment of time and resources. Though you see plenty of room for improvement, you're not quite ready to start all over again- and why should you be? Your site is a work in progress.

This month, I'd like to review some simple changes you can make to your current website to get the most value out of it. Some of these suggestions are changes you can probably make today at no additional cost, while others will require some investment of time and money. But I assure you that those that do require additional investment will also bring additional value to your site that will far exceed their cost.

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Comments

Mark O\'Brien	September 30, 2009 10:40 AM I know I'm biased, but I have to say that this is a great newsletter, Chris. One thing that I find useful when crafting Meta Titles for my blog is the Google Keyword Research Tool. The tool let's you see how many searches are performed for the phrase in question, and is an excellent resource for refining your phrases. Of course, you always want to stay true to your content, but it is amazing how a subtle tweak in the wording or order of words in a phrase can affect the local and global search volume.
Alan	September 30, 2009 11:00 AM I'm intrigued by the advanced search tools. For a site that's already been built, wouldn't something like this require that the database be recreated? Otherwise, how would the tool know how to match your search with content?
Maggie B	September 30, 2009 11:49 AM Chris, this was a fun one to read. (I bet you've been waiting for a chance to lead in with a Fuller reference.) I also think it's smart to start with the free stuff.
Chris Butler	September 30, 2009 11:57 AM @Mark Thanks! Using the Google Keyword Research Tool is a great idea. The more content we add to our site, the more important it gets, too. After all, there are only so many combinations of the keywords that are best for the subjects we tend to write about... @Alan, Whether the database would need to be rebuilt or restructure would really depend upon the site. If a site had a database of products with an assortment of unique fields (categories, accessories, colors, etc.), then the new search tool could easily be configured to match them. This is how we built the Brahmin search tool- color is a specific field for a product, so if you type "red" in the search bar, it will immediately find all the red products. @Maggie B Thanks for the compliment. Yes, if I don't show restraint, I could easily mention Bucky in most of what I write. He's a hero of mine for sure.
Nolan	September 30, 2009 1:30 PM Another easy improvement is to use a service like FeedBurner to host your RSS feed. This is fairly simple to do and you gain a good amount of analytics data for your RSS feed, which, personally, is how I "visit" most of the websites I do. I'm consuming a lot of content from sites that I may never give a single page view to.
Andrew	September 30, 2009 3:14 PM Chris, once again I really like the images that accompany this article- made me much more interested in each page.
JT	September 30, 2009 3:29 PM #9 is spot on. I'm hoping to see more of this on the web. I'm surprised that there isn't more discussion online about Apple.com's design team. They definitely set the bar high and are often the first to implement UI details that become trends.
Jim	September 30, 2009 5:03 PM Chris, that article was extremely helpful. I took some time this afternoon to implement what you suggested. I optimized some of my tags using the google keyword tool, added a wufoo contact form, & added a "share this" widget to my blog. Good content. I'm going to go back and read the other newsletters when I have more time. Keep up the good work bro!
Caela	September 30, 2009 6:39 PM @JT Apple also hasn't had dropdown menus in forever. I think supermenus look cool for some sites, but I think the dropdown menu is passe.
Chris Butler	October 1, 2009 8:23 AM @Nolan, That's a good point. Without something like this, the amount of readers following you from RSS is a mystery. @Andrew, Thanks! That's definitely my goal. @JT, Good point. I wish I knew a bit more about when specific design changes happened and how Apple goes about making UI decisions. Do you know of any Apple UI team bloggers? @Jim, Glad to hear it! I'm also glad to see some of my Facebook friends checking this out ;-) @Caela, You may be right in that the dropdown menu could be less and less useful as search tools get better and more people become accustomed to using them. Until then, I think there is still a strong contingent of navigation-oriented web users.
Nevin Daryani	October 1, 2009 8:58 AM Chris, thank you for your insightful article. We are going to be redoing our website at work in January and will implement some of your suggestions. Luckily this is coming off my plate and we are going to get some professionals to redo it. I will be in touch.
Annie Smidt	October 1, 2009 3:04 PM Enjoyable article Chris! I love the parallel with Bucky -- the idea of making small changes that create big process improvements is one of my favorite themes. I really appreciate that your post spanned a breadth from simple things that anyone who knows about UX would think of to oh yeah...! ideas (like the search and email comments on threads) that one doesn't really think of. A nice roundup. With nice graphics. I'm going to twwweeeeeet it!
Chris Butler	October 1, 2009 3:09 PM @Nevin, Another Facebook friend! Thanks for reading, Nevin. I'm glad it was helpful and I hope your web project goes well. Feel free to ping me with any questions if you have any during the process. @Annie, Mine too. (You can't go wrong with Bucky- what a guy.) Thanks for reading and for tweeting!
Alex	October 8, 2009 11:09 PM Chris, been thining about this: the images you use- they do more with less by hinting at the example but not really showing one. Something about that makes each one so much more evocative than had you used a screenshot of a reallife example. Minimizing those as smaller thumbnails was the way to go to get someone to read all the way through. Not sure if you intended that?
Jessica Wolbert	November 10, 2009 2:24 PM thanks for the great article Chris. I agree very often that we're those of us in the webdesign world are too eager to 'redesign' from scratch what we could simply modify small portions by the way, your newsletter is sharp!
Chris Butler	November 10, 2009 4:19 PM @Alex, thanks for the compliment! I did intend to make sure that the idea was more important (for this article, anyway) than the implementation. Also, I figured that if I featured larger images of the implementation that readers might get sidetracked by clicking to view those sites. @Jessica Wolbert, Thanks for the compliment, too!