Archive: July, 2008

Earnest Hemingway is considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century for good reason. Hemingway had the uncanny ability to boil his sentences to the barest of bones and use as few words as possible to express a point. Where Faulkner could use eight paragraphs to describe the hue, weight and consistency of a door, Hemingway would say it was made of heavy dark wood. Hemingway’s novels were structured so simply yet his stories unraveled with considered meaning. Serious writers get starry eyed in wonder just thinking about the sparse beauty of his prose. The good ones aspire to write like him. A six year old could read Hemingway and walk away understanding at least part of what was written.

Search engine spiders are like six year olds. The same qualities that make Hemingway’s work read so well are essential for search engine friendly site design and structure. Simple beats complex every time.

When envisioning a new website or re-working an existing website, try to keep the structure of the site as basic as possible. Imagining the site as an information tree, if you’ve gone more than three or four levels into the tree, the site is getting too complicated.

Important Update: Rogers Caves to Consumer Demand, July 9, 2008

You are an Olympian, at least for the purposes of the following paragraphs…

Imagine being expected to compete in the Olympics with substandard training and equipment. While you might qualify to stand at the starting line with the fastest and strongest representatives of other nations, you know your own chances are, at best, slim.

You’ve watched with fear-fed jealousy as other competitors trained in state-of-the-art facilities and with the best equipment their supporters and sponsors could acquire. Though you too could access these materials, they are priced far beyond your financial range. Having spent most of your life preparing to be tested against the best the world has to offer, you see your opportunity fade due to disinterest, neglect and social short-sightedness.

Such is the fate of many Olympic athletes. It is something we can all understand and commiserate with. While we love our best and brightest, we tend not to support them with sufficient infrastructure, financial backing or properly funded training. The result, athletes from other nations, many not as wealthy or advanced as Canada win the personal glory and national recognition we all wish would come to Canada and its athletes.