Update (again): I had initially uploaded a jQuery based fix to get this selector working in IE6, but Emil Bjorklund pointed out that Dean Edwards’ IE7.js also fixes the issue, so I would recommend using that script to get the selector to work in IE6.

Recently, we’ve been making substantial use of a CSS selector that I stumbled on almost accidentally in the w3c docs: the “~=” selector, which can more compatibly be written simply by separating class names with a dot (and no spaces) . It’s certainly no secret, but I haven’t seen it in use much, and that’s a shame because it lends itself to some really clever and intuitive CSS. Here’s the definition for the selector:

Matches any E element whose “foo” attribute value is a list of space-separated values, one of which is exactly equal to “warning”.

It doesn’t sound too interesting, but what we’ve found is that it lets us use very intuitive, almost straight English syntax for our css classes by daisy chaining class names in a logical order.

Consider the situation where your template has a main content area, sometimes with a sidebar, sometimes without. There are plenty of ways to handle this fairly simple problem in CSS, but I’m finding the most elegant solution to be the following:

.main_column {
    min-height: 300px;
}

div.main_column.with_sidebar {
    float:left;
    width: 690px;

}

Now, when our main column needs a sidebar, we can do:

<div class="main_column with_sidebar">

<!-- Content here will be floated left -->

</div>

Why is this better than just defining “.with_sidebar”? Because it may be the case that two different classes (maybe “main_column” and “page_content”) both support a “with_sidebar” version that applies different width & floats depending on which class it’s being applied to. (“main_column .with_sidebar” won’t work because “with_sidebar” is not a descendant class of main_column.)

Taking it a step further, let’s add a green background:

div.main_column.and_green_background {

background-color: green;

}

now, how about:

<div class="main_column with_sidebar and_green_background">

<!-- Content here will be floated left with a green background -->

</div>

Again, there’s nothing here that can’t be solved in other ways, but I just wanted to introduce other people to this oft overlooked selector which, in my opinion, allows for very clever, elegant CSS.

I’d like to start this article by stating that I have nothing against John Dvorak, but I was surprised to see PC Magazine run his editorial, “SEO Fiascoes: The Trouble with Search Engine Optimization“, because of its striking ignorance with regard to search engine optimization. I’m going to break down the article and explain why it’s simply way off base. Sorry John!

“Search engine optimization (SEO) has turned into a big business, and from what I can tell it’s the modern version of snake oil. The unproven nonsense spewed by so-called “SEO experts” simply doesn’t work. And worse, it’s screwing up the elegance of the Web.”

John is right in pointing out that many SEO companies are in fact selling “snake oil”. Oftentimes, SEO firms claim to have an advanced knowledge of the optimization process when actually they are just exploiting the fact that most customers have little or no understanding of SEO, so they don’t know the right questions to ask or what kinds of results to expect. However, saying that SEO “simply doesn’t work” just because some companies provide poor SEO service is equivalent to saying that because a 1985 Yugo is a bad car, it’s not worth owning a car at all. As for the “screwing up the elegance of the web”, I don’t think you can make a reasonable argument to support this statement. Proper SEO ensures that sites have standards-compliant code, CSS based navigation, logical information architecture, and useful content. All of those things enhance the web and increase elegance, so I’m not sure what John was getting at here.

( John then goes on to talk about how integrating verbose URLs – “/2008/02/14/this-is-a-blog-post.html” vs. “blog/?id=300″ – actually decreased site traffic on his blog. He describes verbose URLs as “crap and stupid“ )

It’s possible that implementing a new URL scheme did in fact hurt the traffic on John’s blog. Any changes to the URL scheme need to be planned and properly implemented, with 301 redirects being added to make sure that legacy links remain working. Additionally, it’s not impossible that John’s readers are, for some reason, less inclined to share a long link than a short one. However, John’s single isolated case provides no credible evidence for the argument that verbose URLs as a whole are detrimental to site traffic. He had no control metrics for the experiment, and doesn’t consider many other factors (maybe some old links were giving 404s after the change?) that may have affected his traffic. Finally, he seems to suggest that SEO relies very heavily on the URL architecture, because people he had spoken about SEO seemed to focus heavily on static vs. dynamic links. It’s true that when optimizing a site, the URL structure needs to be such that page content does not rely on dynamic variables passed via the URL, because those variables may not be present when a search engine crawler visits the page. However, URL structure is one very small part of the SEO process, but John doesn’t touch on the most important aspects of SEO.

This brings me to another SEO gambit, this one promoted by the “social media is everything” crowd in alliance with the “semantic Web is the future” dingbats. And this is the oh-so-important tag. Tags, stored as such, are the modern equivalent of the metatags once used on crude HTML pages. They don’t work and are a stupid exercise in futility. And if they ever do work it won’t be for long, because despite what idealists believe, Web site owners will attempt to cheat the system.

Here, John is arguing that “tagging” posts have no effect on traffic. Again, I’m not sure that any reasonable SEO firm will focus too heavily on tagging, but I’ll address the issue anyway. If nothing else, tags provide automatic generation of landing pages that focus on a specific, important content category for a site. In fact, one of the most common entry pages for this blog is the “SEO” tag page, found here:  http://www.contextsolutions.net/blog/tag/seo/ . The tag page in this instance acts as a search-friendly sitemap for one area of a site, and it appears without any additional effort on the webmaster’s part.

I’d also like to point out that John describes “metatags” as being antiquated, and only in use on “crude HTML pages”. It is true that the meta “keywords” tag has much less significance than it once did, but an accurate, concise meta description tag (and a title tag) are still very important in describing content to search engines. The meta description tag is also the first place search engines look in order to provide a summary of the site content in the results list, so accurate, concise meta tags are still an important element of site structure.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying there’s nothing you can do to get more attention. Much of what you can control is structural. If you have a blog full of fancy AJAX code, it’s going to be difficult to index, for example. Making your Web site search-engine-friendly is one thing, in other words. But using stupid human tricks such as the long URL and tags to get more attention is folly-and bad advice, from what I can tell. Beware!

Here, John almost saves himself by mentioning that there are some truths to SEO, but it doesn’t nearly make up for the wild inaccuracies in the rest of the post. One of the biggest challenges faced by good SEO companies – and we are out here – is the “snake oil” that some SEO firms are selling. Clients may have had a bad experience with a bargain basement SEO, resulting in the opinion that the entire process is a scam (see my comparison to the Yugo above). John is only helping to perpetuate the notion that SEO is entirely undefined and useless, but the fact of the matter is that the right SEO company will provide measurable results via better positioning and increased conversions. The bottom line? SEO results can be calculated in dollars and cents if the right company is in the driver’s seat.

In rough economic times, businesses are looking for innovative ways to slash their budget without stifling forward momentum. In this article, I hope to make a compelling argument to suggest that now is the time to reevaluate and redevelop your web presence, and that marketing via the web is the most cost effective way to stay on budget while maintaining growth.

Cutting the Budget

Well, you’ve probably noticed that the economy has hit a bit of a rough spot. Companies are being forced to close their doors or lay off large parts of their workforce, and consumers are hesitant to spend any money on non-essentials. As a result, executives are focusing on their bottom line, and rightfully so.

It seems that, in many cases, one of the first departments to suffer massive cuts is the marketing team. Whether the company has an in-house marketing department or subcontracts to a separate firm, marketing has a way of ending up on the chopping block when it comes time to cut costs. While a strategy that involves slashing the marketing budget may be necessary in the short term, it can be detrimental to the long term viability of the company. An alternative, cost-effective plan for marketing and brand development needs to be implemented. This is where your web presence should come into play.

When compared to television, print ads, or other traditional PR and marketing efforts, the web not only offers the most exposure per dollar*, but it also lends itself to a level of customization and reporting that is simply unrivaled. Not only can you specifically target key demographics by geographic location, age, and interests, you can also fine tune your daily, weekly, and monthly ad budget as you see fit. Additionally, ad networks such as Google Adsense ensure that you only pay when a user actually clicks on your ad. Finally, you can report in realtime on how different ads are performing in terms of actual generated traffic, rather than simply releasing your ad campaign into the wild and never hearing from it again.

That being said, the key to a web presence development campaign doesn’t lie exclusively in online advertising. The goal is to install a sense of brand awareness in your potential customers, and recent innovations in web technology (“web 2.0″) have generated a slew of new, creative, and cost effective ways to meet that goal.

*originally I had outlined a real-numbers scenario of advertising in the NY Times website vs. print edition, but the article got too bogged down in numbers and started to run a bit off topic. I will provide the information if requested, or in another article.

Web Site vs. Web Presence

Typically, I tend to speak about a company’s “web presence” instead of their “web site”. The reason for this change in terminology is the following: simply having a website no longer affords you a competitive edge in your market – everyone has a website, and yours probably isn’t very special. In fact, it’s probably little more than an online business card or, at best, a brochure. And while the “business card” type of site worked well five or eight years ago, it is, to put it mildly, a suboptimal way of delivering your online presence in 2009.

The “web 2.0″ explosion of innovative, intuitive, and engaging websites marked a shift in the way people use the web, and how they view websites. Visitors have come to fundamentally expect clean, professional design, engaging content, and multimedia capabilities (especially video). Blogs, RSS feeds, and aggregate news and press release sites have made fresh, even up-to-the minute content the de facto standard across the Internet. Do you have a news section on your website? When is the last entry from? It’s 2009: stagnant content just doesn’t cut it anymore. And if your competitors have already caught on to the changing Internet, where does that leave you?

Before I outline solutions for these web presence woes, I’d like to briefly outline how companies have gotten into the habit of unknowingly stifling their web presence, and why it continues to happen.

An Antiquated Development Cycle

An all too common way of having a website developed is to find a web design firm, give them a general outline of what you want on the site, and have them provide a design idea. Quite often, the initial design is the final design, or is a very close approximation thereof. You provide some content, they build the site, and it launches.

What’s wrong with this picture?

For starters, the people who have developed your company brand (generally your marketing department/firm) had little involvement in what went on to deploy the site.  Oftentimes, the marketing team is involved in the periphery of the site development, but most of the decision making is ultimately done by the web design company – a company that most likely has only a passing understanding of your brand.

Second, what about this whole web 2.0 thing? Maybe you’ve heard about it, but don’t really have a grasp on what it means. Some people use “Web 2.0″ as an empty buzzword, but the fact of the matter is that whatever you call it, the Internet is a different entity than it was as recently as 1 or 2 years ago. Visitors expect engaging content. They expect multimedia, and they expect an opportunity to interact.

Finally, your web design company may have touched on SEO, or search engine optimization. Maybe they asked you for a few keywords for the meta tags to help your Google ranking, but it didn’t go much further than that. Now, there is crossover between SEO and site development, but ultimately SEO is an entirely separate process, and needs to be budgeted for and managed accordingly.

Bringing your Brand to the Web

The first thing to do when redeveloping your web presence is to put your marketing department (or outside marketing/branding firm) in the driver’s seat. Your web developers should take direction directly from the people who know your brand the best, and should work symbiotically to deliver something unique to your company, packed with engaging content and stable, robust functionality. When someone visits your website, you have an immediate opportunity to make an impression. All too often, companies view their own website from the perspective of someone who already knows who they are and what they do. However, what you really want is for your website to act not only as an informational resource, but as a marketing tool and a direct line from you to your potential customers.

Now, what about web 2.0? One of the flagship changes during the web 2.0 shift was the introduction of social & professional networking via sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Youtube. Even if none of those sites are a good fit your specific marketing campaign or business model, the concepts and opportunities introduced by the new “You”-oriented web are an essential part of modern brand development, and you need to use them to your advantage. Additionally, aggregate news and article sites such as Digg and  Reddit provide the realtime heartbeat of the web. These are the sites that keep the world up to date, and provide a direct line to the masses. Digg will receive half a million unique page views today, and you can rest assured that this article will be posted (for free no less). Where did you post your last press release?

Finally, let’s talk search engine optimization, or SEO. I previously posted an article that offered an introduction to SEO, which you can read by clicking here . In a nutshell, SEO is the process of making sure that your site appears high in the list of search results for specific keywords or phrases. I outlined the process in the other article, so here I would like to discuss another part of optimization that’s not necessarily “search engine” optimization, but is nevertheless an integral part of maintaining a healthy conversion rate.

The optimization I’m talking of can be referred to as site optimization, goal funneling, or conversion optimization. Either way, the idea is simple: whenever someone – anyone – visits your site, you have an ideal goal in mind as far as what you’d like them to do. For an online store, the goal is the sale of a product. For companies who don’t sell goods or services directly online, the goal may not be so cut and dry, but it can just as easily be identified and monetized. Despite the fact that the definition of a “conversion” may not simply be the sale of a product for many websites, we can still direct our visitors toward an end goal, assign monetary worth to actions on the site that direct them toward that goal, and ultimately report on the actual value of the company’s web presence in dollars and cents. For example, it may be the case that someone filling out a contact form to speak with a sales representative is your ideal endpoint for a site visit. You need to first make sure that your website is tailored so that people are properly directed (or “funneled”) into the end goal, then assign a value – again in dollars and cents – of what the sales lead is worth to you. At the end of the month, you can generate a report that will tell you what your web presence has done for your bottom line.

How does this relate to my current budget problems?

The processes I outlined above aren’t free, and can actually become quite expensive depending on the extent of the project. However, it is difficult to make a case for other avenues of marketing and brand development being more cost effective than web presence redevelopment. People are spending more time on the web than any other medium – IBM reported that 19% of Americans spend 6+ hours per day on the web, with only 9% spending that much time watching television. We are a Google culture. People go to Google first – not second or third – when they’re in need of a product or service. Search Engine Watch is currently reporting that Google performs 91 million searches per day. How many of those are for a service your company could be providing?

The economy will eventually get better, and when the dust settles, you don’t want to rub your eyes only to realize that economic panic has stifled your company’s growth beyond repair. Balance is the key – spending enough to keep forward momentum without breaking the bank – and the web is your ticket to finding that balance.