The Switch

The practical switch was much easier than the psychological switch. I set the home page and default search engine to Bing and with a couple of clicks I was set. Nevertheless Google has been my unthinking default since the late 90s. Opening a browser window and seeing something other than the multicolored logo and search box, over a white background felt weird for the first week. The Bing homepage is a testament to good content presentation. Most of the screen is dominated by a large, high-res image of some usually random, interesting thing. Today it was a hanging monastery in China and it changes daily. Directly below it is a footer with links related to the main image followed by breaking news and trending topics. To the left are links to the now traditional image, video, shopping, news, maps and travel searches, directly under the Bing logo and search box. There’s a bunch of other navigation pieces but they’re all well tucked-away in their respective areas.

The Search

First thing I noticed after the switch is that I seldom use search engines. I’ve been on the internet so long that I usually know exactly where to go for most pieces of information, leaving the search box as a last resort when my usual sources fail me (they usually don’t). The times I did have to rely on Bing for finding information it shone very brightly. The search results screen innovates very little but in case you need it there’s tons more meta-data about your search than a Google result usually brings. Searching the Beatles for example produced the same basic set of results: beatles.com, the Beatles Wikipedia entry, lyrics, fan pages, etc. Bing’s results were organized with subsections such as Beatles Songs, Beatles Lyrics, Beatles Albums, etc. Each sub-category was represented on a new navigation in the left side column over related searches and my recent search history. Each result entry had additional hover-over functionality with content preview and some links from the site’s internal navigation. Images were displayed on top of the main results and video results at the bottom of the page.

The Experience

Microsoft is evidently putting a lot of importance into making this the best search solution. Every results page comes with a feedback button locked to the bottom right of the window where you can rate and comment the results of your search as well as the general Bing experience. The entire experience is very dynamic, ajaxy and generally Web 2.0. Everything that can be done asynchronously is done asynchronously. Hover over an image and a larger preview image comes up as a tooltip with some of the image’s metadata, it’s source, a feedback link and a similar images link (this feature works particularly well). Hover over a video thumb and a preview starts playing right there with sound and all. All searches can be refined. Images can be refined by size, proportions, color, style, and people. This last refinement is particularly cool as it lets you search for faces, upper body or images with no people at all. These tools are very powerful letting a user find some very specific results with just a few clicks, like this page that includes only Wallpaper sized images of red Ferraris on plain backgrounds. Sure, the further you go down the more blue and black Ferraris slip in as well as other backdrops, but the first couple dozen images fit my search perfectly and most of the times you just need one good red Ferrari.

The Conclusion

My relationship with Google as my homepage has been long and fruitful, but I think I’ve finally found a real contender for this space. I’m going to stick with Bing for the foreseeable future and I’m glad that I decided to give it a chance. It’s about time Microsoft put some real effort into it’s search division. True, it copies all the best that Google has to offer, but copying the competition is nothing new for Microsoft, and at least this time they’ve managed to provide a better product with considerable differences that really put it a good couple of feet ahead of the pack.

This is our kitchen. Yes, our kitchen runs on Ubuntu.

We called a roofer to look at the roof because that’s what roofers do. He told us that although roofing problems where common they could be avoided with close to no maintenance to the roof. He was hired, and now pictures of the kitchen look like the one above.

Your office/business is where all your cookin’ gets done. In this economic downturn it’s easy to blame the “leaks” on the general state of things, but maybe, now that things have slowed down a bit it’s the best time to take a long hard look at what the underlying problems are and do something about it.

We, as web developers, have noticed that businesses in Puerto Rico think of their website in much the same way as I think of my roof: as long as it’s there, it’s doing its job. The reality though is much different, both need a little maintenance. Not a lot, not even frequently, but in many cases a website can do a lot more, with simple yearly revisions.

One of the best ways to expand outside the standard market and look for additional revenues is through the web. As web developers our favorite type of projects are the ones where we’re able to sit down with the client and create solutions that generate revenue in clear and measurable ways.

It may be that while checking the air on your company’s tires you find that your web efforts are good and sufficient, but in case you want a second opinion feel free to give us a call.

As web standards have changed, browsers gotten better and people’s interactions with the internet become something else entirely; 20% of Internet users insist in keeping an 8 year old browser. Do you remember what websites were like 8 years ago? Here’s Microsoft’s own from the Wayback Machine’s archive. No video, no Javascript, no CSS, basically nothing of what makes a modern site.

As developers we have to work, often tens of hours longer, to replicate the experience that works on every other browser, on IE6. And it’s not just us, here at ML. The development community has had to create workarounds and exceptions to mold our carefully designed product to IE6’s shortcomings, and lack of W3 standards compliance.

With that in mind we are ecstatic that Google decided to raise the visibility of our cause by marking IE6 as an unsupported browser for Gmail and various other Google products, and recommending instead many other free options that will better serve the user. Sure they might have ulterior motives, such as advertising their own Chrome browser, but by coming out against this seriously outdated program they help to raise the industry as a whole.

We have not followed Google’s route in that we will continue to support IE6 as long as it is used by more than 15% of Internet users, but we would like you to help us in our plight by dropping this antiquated relic and upgrading to some of the various (much better) options available in the market. Even more, here are some links to help get you started:

Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 8

Yeah, you guys read that last one right, IE is up to its eighth version, which is leaps and bounds better than its predecessors.

So there you are, links, options and all. If you’d like a recommendation, personally I like Firefox and Chrome for the PC, Firefox for the Mac and Linux, and Opera 9.5 beta for my phone. You no longer have an excuse, upgrade today.

EDIT: IE6 finally has dropped below 15% and we have stopped supporting it for regular projects. We will nevertheless keep supporting IE6 in projects that specifically require it for an additional fee.

At first it seemed to me like a very elaborate joke, I bet similar thoughts came to their minds initially. But they have developed and designed it to a point of exquisite interaction and fun factor.

Some of the things you can do with the app are shake “maracas”, scratch “Güiros”, slap “panderetas” and hit two “palitos”. If that doesn’t seem like a blast, you can tag along other parranderos (virtual ones) and have them yell:

• ¡Asalto!
• Weeepa
• Trucuta trucuta
• ¡Felicidades!

…amongst other favorites. The app is having great acceptance in the Apple Store with clients from all over the world including Japan, India, Spain, and France. You can reach it via this link.

I hope this will be the beginning of new exciting apps for the iPhone from Puerto Rican developers.

Here’s a look at the actual app:

EDIT: Google now crawls flash content more efficiently. However you should still take this post into consideration as the Google bot still does not index dynamically generated xml data.

There’s a hot debate amongst web developers over Flash. Some swear by it others would rather see it disappear. We as usual live in the middle of the debate understanding that there are situations in which it is both necessary and appropriate, and others where it is just a distraction. In most cases, as with our own website, we mix both forms to complement each other in the manner that best suits the particular project. Nevertheless we’d like to put an end to the myth that serves as one of the main talking points for those against Flash.

You can’t SEO a Flash site.

A small point before I keep going. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a branch of web development focused on raising a site’s visibility in search engines, following a set of best practices guidelines. Now back to our article.

The main problem behind Flash SEO is that most search engine bots can’t go into an SWF file to extract textual content. Google has recently made inroads towards reading Flash content, but results are still unpredictable. Which is why we need to get around the current search engine limitations to provide easily indexable content that can be ranked according to its quality. For the following we will be talking about Flash only sites, in the case of HTML sites with Flash elements, traditional SEO methods can be used, as long as Flash is used prudently to complement the content and not replace it.

Alt Content

The W3 has always strongly expressed the need to provide alternative content for multimedia in a web site. In the days when plain text browsers were still quite common (and they still are amongst visually impaired users, more on that in another post) this rule was put in place referring to image content, so text browsers could get a textual representation of the image that would be otherwise shown. The rule has persisted and expanded into Video, Audio and Flash.

If you’re running a full flash site, as we have in projects such as WiFiwyg.com, and Licor43, the best route is usually to provide a full alternative HTML site, for crawlers to go through.

By using, swfobject() a Javascript function used to detect if the Flash player is installed, the developer can present alternate content when there is no Flash capability. In this case we can switch to an HTML site, which can be freely browsed and indexed by search engine bots.

Developing an entire alternative site in HTML, might sound like a costly SEO method but most developers will include it in their optimization price, taking into consideration that most of the design, structure and content for the alt version of the site was already prepared for the Flash version.

Providing alternative HTML content in this manner is generally a good idea as it provides relevant content to users without a Flash capable browser which is a quickly growing segment as more users surf from their phones. Nevertheless. due to past abuse of this method, it is very important that the content be the same as the content presented in the Flash site at the risk of being fully delisted. In some cases this might prove a tricky endeavor, but most savvy developers should be able to accommodate the Flash content on an HTML page sacrificing little functionality and none of the message.

One important point missed by many developers is the importance of including the swfobject() function in every HTML page, tied directly to the scene in the Flash movie that pertains to that particular page. Most search engines will index content from all browsable pages, not just the home page, and since each page for the site is SEO’d individually for its particular content, other pages in the site will probably appear along with the home page for most searches. In the case of some keywords the home page might not appear at all. Since the primary user experience is still the Flash version of the site it is important that each indexable page include the function so the user will be taken to the right content in the right context.

SIFR

There’s another method but it only applies to very particular cases that based on our own development preferences we have not stumbled across. I’m going to quote Jonathan Hochman of Hochman Consultants who has also written on this very same topic, and amongst others, helped inspire this article:

If you are only using Flash to enhance headings, quotes, or callout text, a method called Scalable Inman Flash Replacement is an excellent choice. SIFR automatically pulls text from an HTML document and modifies the Document Object Model to replace the text with a Flash rendering of the appropriate font. SIFR makes it easy to modify the text, and ensures that your Flash text always matches your HTML text, reducing the risk of abuse.

The drawback of SIFR is that it only handles the presentation of simple text. Complex Flash animations, such as menus, slide shows, and interactive presentations can not be programmed easily with SIFR. For these types of Flash, SWFOBJECT and UFO are more effective.

I hope this article has been useful I know it got a bit more technical than usual but more needs to be written on this.

Since this article was published, Google has made changes on the way flash sites are crawled you can read about it here: Flash SEO- A seriously needed How To

When we relaunched our new ML Studio site we payed very close attention to the SEO (Search Engine Optimization), particularly the keywords used in the site’s content. We are still waiting for correct submissions in search engines but have had time to stop and think on the keywords we prioritized on.

We think that what diferentiates our company from the rest in PR is our focus on web development and RIAs (Rich internet applications) specificaly flash based ones; so we focused our content on this. However out of curiosity, we wanted to see which keywords were being used on sites in our industry.

We had to:

• Create a robot that would crawl web design & development sites in Puerto Rico
• Store their titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, and content keywords in a database table
• Organize those keywords in an array that stored the times each was used.

And these were the results:

1. web (59)
2. design (44)
3. rico (41)
4. puerto (38)
5. website (21)
6. template (19)
7. hosting (15)
8. internet (15)
9. solutions (15)
10. marketing (14)
11. diseño (13)
12. paginas (10)
13. development (10)
14. ecommerce (8)
15. flash (8)
16. domain (8)
17. advertising (8)
18. designer (6)
19. business (6)
20. caribbean (6)

Our notes on the keywords found were:

• Other companies give priority to design over development (good for us)
• We were disgusted about finding “template” at #6 (odd)
• “Rico” is used more than “Puerto”, meaning “Rico” was used in another context than “Puerto Rico” (funny)

We now plan to include this analysis as part of our clients SEO strategy. So we might be asking some of you for your competitors websites; we found this to be a very fun practice.

If you wish us to make this analysis for you write us a comment and we’ll be happy to do it.