Findability was mentioned in A List Apart, a magazine aimed squarely at web designers, quite some time ago, and as mentioned in the previous post, there have been two great books written on the subject already.
Why is it findability so hot right now?
Because search engine marketing and social marketing can be combined with the web development accessibility techniques, web standards, and good user experience design practices we’ve been using behind the scenes all along.
Developers create search engine marketing goodness as soon as they register the site
Whether you’re a web developer or designer, you’ve dealt with choosing a domain name from your hosting company’s domain name search. And you know the frustration of trying to find a name that isn’t taken yet tells enough about your client’s product. If you’re a SEO, you probably know your domain name is the best place to start building your branding strategy online. Maybe you haven’t searched for domain names using a control panel like your developer has, but you want the ultimate domain name and you have some ideas about what names would work best.
Let’s work together
Get your marketing strategist and your developer together and bounce ideas. If the marketer doesn’t like to play with a domain name wizard, the developer can drive the mouse. If the developer has a hard time thinking up alternate domain names that will reflect your brand strategy, your marketer can easily give lots of permutations until you find one that works. Ideally you should have the marketer come up with some domain name suggestions in advance.
Where the manager or strategist comes in
The manager, strategist, or consultant, is not much more than the moderator here. If you’re familiar with Agile this blog post sounds like something you might already be doing. The consultant knows the basics of how domain name registration works and the basics of search engine optimization. He fills in data such and comments such as “that domain name has underscores in it – do you know Google doesn’t like underscores and works better with hyphens”.
Uh oh, there’s that Agile thing again
Agile techniques work outside the office or in your most casual get togethers. Hook your developer up with a marketer and get them talking. You’ll get the best advantages of each expertise, and the chance to get your developer on the cPanel while the marketer is brainstorming on paper. Ultimately the entire product is the better for combining the expertise of both roles, and everyone gets to do what they love.
Every UX designer knows, when we get to do what we love, we are highly productive. Just search for my entries on flow and the goals of user experience design.
In the meantime, get your marketer and your developers to chat about it – you’ll get the best results and each will do their best work without infringing on eachother’s different modes of working. That’s agile!
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