Alastair Revell's Blog

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Further Details about the 2007 RRS Prize
2007-08-09 00:04:00
Plymouth University has just published details about the award of the 2007 Revell Research Systems Prize to Darren Rees at http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/pages/view.asp? page=19863. More details about the prize are available at http://prize.rrs.co.uk. This weblog is produced by Revell Research Systems.
More About: General , Details , Tail , Tails

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
2007-08-02 12:26:00
Ever since I supervised a student on a post graduate industrial placement who was undertaking some research into what was later to be termed search engine optimisation for a marketing agency in Exeter in the mid-90s, I have been deeply sceptical about many of the claims made by SEO specialists. Do not get me wrong! Well-written copy intelligently presented using standards-compliant HTML can be successfully optimised and I do believe that huge placement differences exist between poor quality pages and those of a much higher standard. What I believe is that writing search engine optimised pages is part and parcel of good web design and not a black art to be practised by specialists. At the end of the day, a lot of SEO work comes down to writing good, crisp copy that balances the needs of the reader with those of the search engine. There really isn't much of a substitute for this. The copy must pay attention to what potential visitors might search for, so keyword analysi...
More About: Web Design , Search , Search Engine , Engine , Search Engine Optimisation

Navigational Structure
2007-07-29 14:54:00
I believe that web site navigation is extremely important and designers that ignore the navigational structure of their web sites severely reduce the usability of their sites. It surprises me how many people do not consider the likelihood of a visitor landing on anything but their site's home page. It seems obvious that the larger the site, the more likely this is to occur. Such people are also often very anxious about their site's positioning on major search engines, which implies that they at least appreciate that most visitors will probably stumble across their site via some form of search. Nonetheless, it does not seem to register with them that the first page visited is very unlikely to be their home page! For instance, I've often been told that just using backspace or the "back to" button is adequate to return to the home page and that no explicit link is required, but this assumes that the visitor started from there in the first place - which often simply isn...
More About: Web Design , Structure