The last web related Crain’s forum I went to was three years ago.  It was content light and my primary memory of it is having been irritated.  Yesterday’s presentation was different, and the speakers were the reason.  There were four, but the two who really stood out for me were Jason Fried of 37 Signals and Lauren Freeman of The E-Tailing Group.  If you see either of these two on a panel, you will have a lively discussion.  I would go so far as to say you should seek Jason out.  The other two presenters were Sue Kramer of the IVAA and Keith Schacht of Kancept.com.

A few good points:

Keep things simple.  Simple sites are easier to understand, easier to navigate, easier to use and are more effective.  The moderator summed this up by saying, “So, less is more.”  Jason stepped in: “No—Less is less.  Less is more implies that more is better.”  And it’s not.

Make sure there is a human touch to the website.  For example, if there is a customer service email address, make sure there is a person responding to in bound emails.  Example number two, communicate—heavily—with your customers about all kinds of things, not just how great your product is.  Jason related his strategy with 37 Signals as one of “out teaching” their competition.  Lauren recommended shopping your own website to see what your experience was on it.

Good content makes the difference.  Not only should the content be informative and topical, it needs to be well written.  Jason’s idea was to only hire people that can write well.  Lauren’s input: get a good editor.  Either way, make sure the content is usable.

Some fun quotes:

Lauren: Men are “Surgical shoppers”.  (I’d never heard the term.)

Jason: “Hire the right customers.”

Jason: “No one really cares about Dell.”

Jason: (on blogs) “Write something that’s obviously human.”

Keith: [Blogs are] “a way to connect to your most passionate customers.”

Jason: The biggest cancer on the web is bad content.

Keith: (on site usability): “Test over the shoulder with someone who your site is [or should be] optimized for.”

We’ve been seeing an increase in Safari and other Mac browser users lately so I decided it was time to invest in a machine to help in prerelease testing. An iMac 17-inch 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo should be here the middle of next week. Hooray!

John and I will be attending the Chicago An Event Apart in June. It’s a website design and development seminar put on by some industry thought leaders. In addition to the technical components, this seminar includes content devlopment and SEO topics. It should be a good opportunity to “sharpen the saw” while also meeting some interesting people.

Jakob Neilsen has produced a great new article on how users read web pages. The result? Somewhat like an “F”. Two horizontal scans followed by the left hand vertical scan. Very interesting. Read more at his site.

We get a lot of requests for SEO of some type or another. I usually respond with something to the effect that sure, we can help with that, but mostly we encourage you to create good content and let the search engines do the rest.

But does that make any sense?

Yes, and here’s a recent experience to illustrate it. I have a blog where I write about this and that. Last month, I wrote about a Century 21 ad that irritated me. Just a short post–nothing exciting. It became the number one listing on Google for the ad so when Slate and NPR did a report on the ad, lots of people started looking for it. They typed all kinds of different things, and then the search engine did it’s job and forwarded them to my page.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the list of things they entered:

All things considered (no NPR pun intended), I’m pretty amazed that this stuff works, but it does. Consistently. So focus on good content that focuses on what you customers are interested in. The SEO will largely take care of itself.