Internet Strategy SEO & Web Developement

Bruce Lawson from Opera is right, the gap between web worker working on “traditionnal” agency and on the edge consultant isn’t going to narrow anytime soon. Web workers need to really get their hand (and their directors and the upper management team) on accessibility.

Web Accessibility and Web Standards are good for SEO

You need to get those upper managment people that web standars and accessibility are good for their business. Name it whatever you want but get the CEO buy-in as he’s going to push it down afer for you. Web standars and accessibility aren’t only a geeky dream about a better web, they are real asset for entreprise. As a UK financial services company learned from a web site redesign with accessibility in mind, you get great business benefits :

• huge increase in traffic
• doubled conversion rates and online revenues
• all ROI in 5 months

Some accessibility is better than nothing

The Web Accessibility fanatical advocates are too often blocking the progess in suit and ties corporate environment as this can be see as been only for the IT and techy people. Of course the change won’t be made without those upper managment buy-in, so for all of you as much as I personnaly need to refrain my fanboyism and better get some real key benefits for businesses. Money always talk.

Greg Wolejko wrote a post giving reasons why to jump in the Microformats wagon for entrepreneurs and business owner. Some really good reason and I’m more than happy to see more conversations going on about Microformats in a business way. Its too often only geeky stuff.

Better markup - more meaningful markup allowing more semantic info to be added, enhancing quality of your site.

Saves time - Microformats are standardized ways of adding markup to a specific kinds of informations (events, contact information, blog posts) and therefore remove the need of coming up with own markup thus saving time.

Staying ahead of competition - the whole Semantic Web thing just gains momentum so using Microformats is the new cool thing to do (look at BBC or Yahoo or even last.fm).

Provide value - easy to use as changes are only done in the presentation layer (read: HTML markup) but benefits go beyond adding enhanced markup.

I will also add that Microformats and Web Semantic help you build future proof websites, which is for any company with already an aging website a concern.

A quick post about some of the new features coming out the #2 Digg Town hall and my personal thought :

• Announcement of a more integrated Facebook feature, integrated friends.
• They are currently working on a new comment system. What? another redesign, I found the current one really usable.
• Digg may implement a new system to manage micro communities inside the digg website, to more reflect the digg diversity. Thats the feature I’m personally looking too, I’m eager to see any Mixx community functionality.
• They say that they are not working on word or url specific that user may filter, but they are working on a NSFW filter.
• The upcoming section will have major improvements to boost the usability in the next few months, right now there’s too much submissions to go through. It will display more targeted submissions based on your and your friends activity. Again this kind of feature can boost micro community.
• They are testing a new version for the anti dupe detector. Will detect dupes before you even fill the form for the title and description. Great feature. So they will crawl your url .. can be extend to some anti spam features too maybe with DOM inspection…
• They are working for podcast and videos sections integration. Great! podcast are just dying right now, sadly.

That’s it : )

edit : the new comment system is up since few days and its blazing fast, great improvements in speed. All the highlights on the Digg Blog.