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Data from internal site search queries performed by your users is a gold mine of information. This information can be used to guide site improvements related to design, information architecture, content, and more.

Site search analytics (SSA) is an emerging form of site analytics that studies search query data to discover patterns in site use.

In this interview, we discuss site search analytics with information architect consultant Louis Rosenfeld, a groundbreaking persona in the field of SSA, whose list of accolades include the authoring of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web published by O’Reilly and, most recently, Search Analytics for Your Site under Rosenfeld Media.

What is site search analytics in a nutshell?

Louis Rosenfeld (LR): Your users are telling you what they want from your site — in their own words — when they use your site’s search engine. Are you giving them what they want? SSA is simply a set of tools and methods to help you harvest users’ queries, test and measure how well they’re performing, and actually see how well you’re serving users. That’s it in a nutshell.

How is site search analytics different from SEO?

LR: In SEO, you’re looking to learn from the web queries that direct — or ought to direct — users to your site. In site search analytics, you study what users search once they reach your site. At that point, their queries are far more qualified and relevant to your organization and your content, so you’ll learn a lot about how to serve users better once they’re at your site.

What are some things a site owner can learn from analyzing search queries on her website?

LR: Here’s just one example: she can learn that her site is completely failing to provide users with critical content — even if the content is already there on the site.

She’d do that by identifying and analyzing the common search queries that retrieve zero results, then determining if the content was indeed there or not. If it was, then she’d be in a position to see if the problem was with the search engine’s configuration, or with the content being jargon-y, poorly written, or poorly tagged.

As you can see, SSA is a good diagnostic tool. The site owner could then fix the problems or, in a large organization, wield the data as a highly persuasive tool for cajoling unruly IT staff and content owners to do the Right Thing and fix whatever problems she’d identified.

There are many other forms of diagnostics covered in the book, all of which can help you fix and improve your site’s content and navigation, as well as search performance. Additionally, site owners can use SSA to develop search-related metrics. Those come in especially handy when you want to benchmark, monitor, and optimize your site’s findability.

How can site search analytics drive design decisions?

LR: SSA can help site owners determine which content should be given the most prominence. For example, in the book I show how analyzing query data can expose the seasonal nature of users’ information needs. When you know which content matters when, you can feature content on your main page to match those seasonal needs.

Another example: most sites suck at supporting contextual navigation within and across their deep content. If you analyze the queries that originate from deep content, you’ll get a sense of the "desire lines" you should support — in other words, the navigational paths users wish were there.

What are some counter-intuitive results and patterns you’ve derived from studying search queries?

LR: Most of what we learn isn’t so much counter-intuitive. Like all forms of user research, it’s simply stuff that wouldn’t have occurred to us if we hadn’t looked at the data.

For example, the Financial Times noticed that many queries included dates. Assuming that users wanted articles that were published on or near particular dates, FT simply made sure that chronological sorting and filtering of their search results worked well.

FT also noticed that many queries were for the names of people and companies. So they configured their system to allow users to filter by names as well.

These are simple features that provide a lot of value. But, like a lot of simple, good things, sometimes you don’t think of them unless you explore and analyze data. Or, if you’ve got a boss or colleagues to convince, sometimes you need evidence to support you. SSA is hard — and very convincing — data.

What tools can be used to gather data for search analytics?

LR: This doesn’t have to be a complex or expensive proposition. A free tool like Google Analytics can do some basic SSA reporting (most people don’t know this; it takes a little bit of configuration to get it to work with your site’s search engine). More importantly, you can then grab the data and drop it into a spreadsheet for more customized analysis (here’s an Excel spreadsheet you can use for analyzing queries).

Why should a site owner invest time/resources in site search analytics?

LR: What’s important to remember is that even an hour per week doing even the most basic analysis will teach you something of value. Here’s why: let’s say you only have time to analyze and test, say, your top 25 queries. Well, if you map queries out from most frequent to least frequent, they look like this:

Source: SSA009: Figure 2.4.

This is called the Zipf Distribution — and it’s pretty much true for everyone’s site: a few queries handle a large portion of the traffic. The rest — the "long tail" — are fairly esoteric.

Here’s another way to look at this data:

Source: SSA010: Table 2.1.

This table shows how, in this particular example, the most frequent 14 (of tens of thousands of) unique queries accounts for 10% of the site’s search traffic. To get to 20%, you only need to analyze 42 queries. To get to 30%, only 98.

So your efforts are quite scalable, and a little analysis can go a long, long way.

If I wanted to start analyzing search queries, what’s the best way to get going?

LR: Cheaply. Set up Google Analytics (free) on your site. Teach it how to parse out your search engine’s queries. Use GA’s standard reports, but be sure to download the data into your favorite spreadsheet application and… play!

More on Louis Rosenfeld

If you’re interested in learning more about site search analytics, get your copy of Louis Rosenfeld’s new book, Search Analytics for Your Site.

Also, check out Rosenfeld Media’s other books, such as Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design. Rosenfeld Media will be releasing 13 new titles by 2012, so make sure to stay tuned!

Louis Rosenfeld’s blog is at www.louisrosenfeld.com. Follow him on Twitter @ louisrosenfeld (and @RosenfeldMedia).

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About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and also a book author. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

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Web Designer and Illustrator Brad Colbow is like the Deion Sanders of the design industry: he can create killer user interfaces, and then turn around and craft witty webcomics about his experiences.

Listen in as he reveals his thoughts on The Brads, designers blindly following Photoshop tutorials, killing IE6, and using CSS3.

Which The Brads installment is your favorite?

I love the comic I did about the Digg bar. It was the first comic I ever wrote about a current event, which was something I always wanted to do with the comic but had a hard time figuring out how to pull off in a funny way. I also love it because it’s also a joke that only works as a comic strip.

You’ve recently been doing infocomics–informational/instructional comics–in various places on the web: is this the future content type for blogs?

Creating a long form comic like that takes a really long time, so probably not. I have a couple in production right now and I would love to see other people take a shot at it.

It’s becoming harder and harder for web design blogs to distinguish themselves from each other so I think the ones that will thrive in the future are the ones that have their own personality and offer something that nobody else can. I would love design blogs to have more design elements in the posts, like custom infographics or more attention to the design of each post like Jason Santa Maria and David Desandro.

Let’s talk business; what will $50 dollars get me?

Haha, 41.5 minutes of my time.

As a freelancer I like larger projects because they are easier to estimate. If I spend more time than expected on the logo then I can design the site so that it will take less time to do the markup. That way I can stay within the client’s budget.

When you take on smaller jobs where you only have a few hours budgeted you don’t have that flexibility. My business is built on quality and any designer can tell you that the more time that you can spend thinking through the problems and understanding the brand the better the end product is going to be.

The comments on the Misunderstanding Markup comic you did for Smashing Magazine got rather heated, what do you make of the controversy of the XHTML 2 cancellation?

I think the commenters made some great points, one that really stuck out to me was the idea that browser makers should be responsible for backwards compatibility not the W3C. HTML 5 does seem to be muddying the waters by having an all inclusive philosophy.

When I’m working with Brad Dielman (the other Brad in the comic) I know how he writes his markup and I can easily make tweaks in the stylesheet. There is a learning curve to picking up other people’s style, nobody likes poking around an unfamiliar document to make a simple change. If I was trying to fix a bug, mixed syntax is just one more variable you have to take into account when working on a team.

I think what’s really important to keep in mind about this discussion is that 90% of the people who design websites don’t really follow the inner workings of the W3C. I’m one of those web designers. When I first heard about the cancelation through Jeffery Zeldman’s post XHTML DOA WTF, I wasn’t sure what to make of it.  Since I don’t follow these things closely, a million questions flew through my head and by looking at the comments on Jeffrey’s post I wasn’t alone. When I saw Jeremy Keith’s response a few days later it was really eye opening. It didn’t answer all my questions but filled in a lot of gaps.

I also loved how Jeremy wrote the post in such a laid back easy to read style. By the time I got to the part about hamsters I just kept thinking about what a great comic this post would make. I’m really glad he agreed to be a part of it.

At the end of the day I don’t really care how my pages are marked up as long as it doesn’t adversely effect the experience of the site’s users and doesn’t end up bloating the budget of the project.

How will HTML 5 change the web?

That’s a good question and I’m not sure I know the answer to that, but it is really fun to watch the web evolve. When you change the basic rules of what can be done on the web you can’t really tell what the long term consequences will be.

Take the @font-face attribute. It seems pretty straight forward, we want to use more fonts on the web. This has already set off a lot of worry about copyright infringement which in turn has give birth to initiatives like Typekit. Who knows, this could turn out to be a really good revenue stream for type foundries. If there is more money in making new fonts that could lead to a renaissance in typography as we know it.

What’s it like to be a designer/illustrator living in the Cleveland area, how’s business treating you over there?

Business is going pretty well, even in this sluggish economy. When I first went solo two years ago I joined a couple local organizations to network and get my name out there. I thought that was how I would get new clients. Turns out most of the work I do is outside of Cleveland, I work with developers and agencies all over the United States. I’ve gotten almost all my work wither through my portfolio website or through the comic’s site, I haven’t had to do much promotion or advertising.

What design trend are you sick and tired of seeing?

I can’t think of any trends off hand that I’m tired of seeing. I think even the most overused effects can still be used in clever and interesting ways. 

What does bother me are designers who take a hodgepodge of tutorials and trends and slap them together and call them an effective design. A friend sent me a site a few weeks ago that looks an awful lot like my site (see image below) but is not a totally ripoff. I exchanged a series of email with the designer in which he explained his design process and how he came up with the site. It wasn’t his intention to rip me off, but I don’t think he had any idea what he was doing either.

When you are hired to design anything (website, logo or brochure) the client is looking for something unique, something that will separate them from every other sites out there. If they wanted a site that just looked professional they would use a template or buy a theme. You were hired to do something special, to make them better.

What’s your take on this whole kill IE6 debate?

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage over the last year making comics about how bad IE6 is so I’m hoping it hangs on for a few more years. Just kidding, I would love to stop supporting IE6 and on some sites I have. At this point anyone one still on EI6 is either stuck on a work computer or won’t upgrade until they buy a new PC. Unless I’m building a site geared to one of those two groups I’m not going to support it and if the client needs me to it’s going to be added to the quote to cover the extra time.

CSS3: use it now or wait until W3C releases its final recommendation specs?

Use it now! Progressive enhancements FTW! What really matter is if the browsers support it. If Safari lets you make rounded corners then go ahead and make rounded corners as long as it looks good in other browsers.

What’s the perfect design gig?

I love collaborating with really talented and interesting people. Also, I’ve been learning more and more about user research and information architecture over the last year. Any project where there is a lot of research or a good creative brief is always fun. When you’re working with a really good plan it gets you and the client on the same page and shifts the focus away from what we want and onto what the user wants.

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We interviewed top designer and blogger, Chris Spooner, to find out about managing weblogs on top of being a professional creative. Here’s what he has to say…

1. What are benefits and disadvantages of blogging as a designer?

There are countless benefits from blogging as a designer, a few that spring to mind include the hugely increased exposure to both your work and name as well as the source of exciting design projects from around the world.

As a blogger it’s important to be part of the community and read fellow design blogs, this also helps a designer keep up to date with industry changes, and is a constant source of inspiration.

There’s also the good excuse to experiment with new techniques and create a bunch of personal designs, as they all help out when putting together new blog posts and tutorials. There have been plenty of designs I’ve had plenty of fun creating, which have been purely for tutorial purposes on Blog.SpoonGraphics.

This is all without mentioning the advertising income blogs can provide, which all comes in handy in supporting your personal life.

For me, setting up my blog has proved to have been an invaluable decision, which has really given a boost to my design career.

With all this in mind it’s pretty difficult to come up with any disadvantages. I suppose there is the initial time investment that can prove troublesome, as it can take a while for a blog to reach a stage where the benefits outweigh the necessary input.

2. You have several websites, blogs, and you also do freelance work: what are some tips you can share with us to manage time effectively and deal with such a work-heavy schedule?

Blog.SpoonGraphics was initially worked on during my spare time in the evenings and weekends, leaving the usual time during the day for work commitments, because during this period of my life I was working 9-5 at a local design studio.  It wasn’t until I headed out on my own that I started spending more quality time during the day on creating new articles and keeping it up to date. Now, I tend to see blogging as an important project that is slotted into my daily routine.

As the site generates its own income it allows more time to be spent on blogging, and less on freelance work. Meaning that I can often avoid the ‘bread and butter’ jobs and focus on more exciting projects.

3. How does your work play into the role of coming up with posts to publish on your blogs?

Client related projects often help develop my skills and sharpen my knowledge, and usually help drum up post ideas based on certain techniques that are used, or problems that need solving. If I come across something I think would prove useful to other designers, chances are it would work well as a blog post or tutorial.

There’s also the option of being able to document a design as a project walkthrough on the blog. In the past these have proved quite popular, with readers enjoying the insight into the thoughts behind a particular design.

It also works the other way around too, blogging also helps provide ideas and inspiration that can be put into practice in client work.

4. Can you share some instances where your blogs have helped you get more projects?

There has been quite a range of scenarios where projects have evolved from blogging or blog related activities. The Vivid Ways logo project was generated from a referral from Jon Phillips of Spyre Studios, he was working on the site design at the time. I had the opportunity to create a skateboard deck and a couple of t-shirt designs for a merchandising company on behalf of Fall Out Boy after a guy from the company stumbled across a post based on skate deck design.

Another example is from a client following through from an online interview (just like this!), checking out my work and deciding to get in touch.

John Campbell from DesignBump got in touch to help out with his recent redesign, he had simply become acquainted with me and my work through following my blog.
All in all I see my blogging shenanigans as a hugely important part of my life, with almost every design project being sourced from blogging in one way or another. It’s basically like traditional networking and marketing on steroids!

5. What is the future of blogging, specifically for design blogs?

I guess it’s a hard one to predict as there’s not much of a history to base ideas on. However I reckon the quality of posts and the amount of information they give away will continue to increase. I think the bar has definitely raised for design tutorials, with hugely in-depth articles springing up everywhere.

I find it great that designers and web developers can completely learn a new topic or coding language through following the articles of fellow bloggers. I hope to see this sharing of knowledge and advice continue into the future.

6. Can you share some tips to designers who would like to start a blog? What are things to keep in mind and what’s the best way to go about establishing a weblog?

My main tip would be to make sure you’re passionate about the subject. Setting up a blog, especially in the early stages can be a huge time investment, with hardly any return.

However if you enjoy what you’re doing, keep it up and sooner or later things will start to pick up.

It’s also handy to live the lifestyle and become active on social networks, Twitter, and to subscribe to a mass of RSS feeds in your niche. This keeps you up to date with the industry and helps feed back inspiration for your own blog development.

About Chris Spooner

Chris Spooner is a top designer and blogger. He’s the mastermind behind the sites, Blog.SpoonGraphics and Line25, where he covers the topic of graphic and web design. Check out his personal site, Chris Spooner. Connect with him via Twitter, @chrisspooner.

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Tony Chester is the man behind OnWired – a successful, progressive, award-winning web design and web development firm responsible for making stunning and captivating web solutions for clients in various industries.

Tony Chester, along with the OnWired Team, also runs Your Web Job, a newly-released hub for job-seeking web professionals that’s steadily gaining popularity and Please Critique Me, a site where designers can seek free critiques and advice on their designs.

Tony’s known for pushing the envelope and never settling on the status-quo, and it has allowed him to not only garner top clients, but also some of the best and well-regarded designers and developers in the industry.

In this interview, Tony Chester answers questions about his experience running a successful design and development firm. He offers pointers, insights and encouragement for those of us thinking about entering the competitive but rewarding business of establishing a creative agency.

1. What were the steps you took in establishing a design firm? Walk us through your path from conception to OnWired at its current state.

I started OnWired back in 2001 as a side gig to release some inner angst and to create some job security. You see, I was working for a big corporation at the time. I was stuck using the same color blue and the same boring fonts day after day, and it was driving me insane. I pulled together a couple of my peers who were in the same boat, brainstormed company names for a few weeks, and then gave birth to OnWired.

The two guys I recruited got cold feet and jumped ship, but I’m quite persistent, so I started moonlighting and kept things going. At the same time, layoffs were happening left and right, and I saw the writing on the wall.

Three years later, I finally received my walking papers. They gave me a hefty severance package, so I told my wife we would give OnWired a go for a year and see what happened. As luck would have it, I boosted my organic search rankings with some good old fashioned SEO and leads started rolling in. Since OnWired was a one man shop at the time, I was constantly outsourcing the heavy lifting, so I needed to find a reliable local developer. Long story short, I went through a couple of partnerships but eventually landed back on my own in late 2006.

Enter Jon Norris. Jon and I had worked together at the aforementioned big corporation. I knew his design skills were superior to mine, so I was constantly in his ear about helping out. His responses were always the same: “Stop bugging me — I’m busy.” He eventually got tired of his mundane job, so we teamed up and changed the direction of the business.

After a few months of working in a coffee shop, we moved into an extravagant 600 square foot, 30 year old dungeon. We hired a couple of developers, and we quickly learned that jumping from Joomla to Smarty to .NET to Rails wasn’t doing us any favors.  We settled on some standards (things like ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter, and PHP) and stopped taking on any and every project that was thrown at us. This helped us to focus and become experts at a core group of technologies.

In November of 2007, we launched our redesigned website, submitted it to a few galleries, and watched our traffic shoot through the roof. The site was a big hit and really put us on the map. Since then, we’ve continued to grow the business as our workload increases. We now have a team of 9.

2. What traits do you look for when you’re hiring an employee?

First impressions are key. If you can wow me with your wit and writing skills in your cover letter, you’ve got my attention. If you’re just copying and pasting a boring generic cover letter, it goes right in the circular file.

Second, before getting in the door, you need to be able to demonstrate your ability to design and/or develop usable websites. If you’re a “web designer” with only print work to show, that’s a problem. If you’re a “developer” who only does all-Flash sites, that’s a problem too. We want to see a solid portfolio, and we look for bad habits as well as the good.

Once you make it in for a chat, I want to see how well your personality fits in with our group (no cocky rockstars, please), how you interact, what you do in your free time, and how you stay current on industry trends. Quick note on our interview process: we typically gather around the TV on couches and bean bag chairs and just talk shop. We definitely don’t do hardcore interviews with hundreds of useless hypothetical questions.

3. How did you first start getting clients and what tips can you share for people struggling to find clients?

Honestly, I’m not sure how I landed my first client. I was trying all sorts of things to get some exposure. My site wasn’t ranking organically at the time, so I started running some pay-per-click ads. Unfortunately, those ads resulted in me getting a lot of resumes.

Around the same time, I joined the local chamber of commerce, mailed out 500 postcards to their members, sat back, and waited for the calls. Eight years later, I’m still waiting to see results from that.

I thought I was going to have to start cold-calling companies and offering to do spec work, but luckily, I landed a few clients from word of mouth referrals. They referred a few more people and work started to flow. Once my SEO efforts kicked in and I was on the first page of Google for my preferred keywords, the leads started rolling in.

For any business, getting clients is the million dollar question. What’s the answer? Do great work. Don’t cut corners. Don’t send slick sales reps to meet with clients; they appreciate the fact that they are speaking with the people who will be doing the work. Share your passion when speaking with clients, because that is your best sales tool. I’m no salesman, but I’ve landed quite a few deals just by sharing my knowledge and passion.

4. What are the things you know now that you wished you knew when you just started OnWired?

First off, I think learning more about how taxes work for Sole Proprietorships vs. LLCs vs. S-Corporations would have been great. That is one of the most confusing things to wrap your head around. I strongly suggest getting a great accountant and good legal help up front because it will save you a lot of headaches down the road.

Second, I wish I had known that clients will try everything they can to get their way, including getting free work, forcing major scope creep, and paying invoices late. They may not intend to do this, but they will definitely do so if you let them get away with it. The more you educate your client up front on how you work, the better you’ll be.

Finally, I would have been more selective in my business partners. You need to really sit down and discuss your visions and goals, especially how you expect to get there. I was a bit too naive and teamed up too quickly with people I didn’t really mesh with.

5. What are some of the crucial technologies and software applications OnWired uses, and why?

Let’s see. Our developers are keen on Coda. No…wait…now they like TextMate. Wait a minute…not any more. Oh well, they’re developers. What can I say?

Seriously though, we have settled on the following (no Dreamweaver here):

• Time Tracking: Harvest – has a great feature set, easy to use, and price is palatable
• Invoicing: Quickbooks – it’s what the accountant likes and I don’t play in that ball park
• Project Management: Basecamp – Doesn’t everybody use Basecamp?
• Internal Communication: Various chat applications to keep the office noise down
• Design: Entire Adobe Suite – Is there anything else?
• Version Control: Git and Subversion because that’s what the nerds across the office from me insist on
• Coding: TextMate, Vim, Aptana - it changes from week to week
• Troubleshooting: Firebug hands down – It has so many cool features that have greatly simplified life for the front end folks as well as the heavy lifters
• Frameworks: CodeIgniter, Kohana, CakePHP, and Rails
• Hardware: We are an all-Apple shop. It saves us money down the road, very reliable, and extremely developer friendly. Plus, it’s what all the cool kids use.

And now for some input from the developers themselves…

Brett Buddin on Vim:

"I use Vim (specifically MacVim) for three reasons: 
- I interact with many different workstations and servers, and having my primary editor everywhere is a huge plus. 
- It’s highly extensible, powerful and fast.
- I hardly ever have to touch my mouse."

And Brett on version control:

"Since I started using version control in college, I’ve always had a hard time fitting it into how I think and code. With Subversion, I’d always second guess my commits since they were pretty much final. Git takes all of the commit ceremony away. It fits right into my workflow and actually HELPS me get my work done. With Git, you can make sure your commits are clean and orderly before pushing them off for the public — and your team — to see. Also, branching and stashing help me put a formal lasso around some of the stray thoughts I tend to have while coding."

Troy Thompson on Aptana and Subversion:

"I use Aptana because it is open source, cross platform, integrated version control, extensibility (plugins), and supports every programming language I use. I use subversion for version control, nothing too unique about it. I could just as easily use git over it and I do for shared projects as it is easier to collaborate with git."

6. What encouragement can you offer towards those wanting to start a design firm?

Running a design firm is full of peaks and valleys, just like any other business. At the end of the day though, the payoff usually outweighs the hassles. There is quite a bit of competition in this field, but the camaraderie amongst our industry peers is out of this world. I can’t think of any other industries where people freely share their tips and tricks.

Occasionally I’ll look around at people from other businesses outside in their suits and ties taking their 15-minute breaks. It excites me to offer and encourage a relaxed work environment without all the corporate rules that bog down creativity.

There is great pride in watching the team you put together create wonderful work. The recognition that comes with it is quite an ego booster.

More Tony Chester

Connect with Tony on Twitter (@tonychester) or LinkedIn.

He also wanted to share some thoughts on his other web projects and about OnWired so that you can learn a little bit more about how OnWired works.

Your Web Job

During OnWired’s quest to hire a project manager, we visited a lot of the "big" creative job websites, assuming they’d help us connect to some applicants. What we found on these sites surprised us: there were designers, developers, design-developers, and more designers and developers. Those project managers we sought after? Apparently they weren’t invited to the wasteland.

Your Web Job is a creative job-hub for everybody — project managers, copywriters, SEO experts, social marketers, etc. (and, yes, even designers and developers). Your Web Job tries not to single anybody out or put too much emphasis on a particular occupation, because, in our opinion, all web jobs should be created equal.

Call us good samaritans if you’d like — somebody has to help those project managers and copywriters. Who better than us?

Please Critique Me

Designers are always trying to get a one-up on their work. Oftentimes they seek out other fellow creatives to critique and oversee their progress.

Please Critique Me started after countless DM’s on Twitter inquiring about design reviews. We decided to dabble in the idea, offering critique-seekers the opportunity to get their work reviewed by industry leaders. It didn’t matter if it was web, identity or print — we’d search the world over to find critics to cover all forms of design.

By giving honest, helpful feedback to the design community, we feel like we’re doing our part in promoting the industry we love. 

Our Location
OnWired is located in Cary, North Carolina, right outside of the Raleigh/Durham, also known as the Research Triangle Park. I’d like to link off to our Vimeo video here as an intro to our staff and office.

Liked this interview? Share it on Twitter and have a chance to win a Wacom Tablet.

It was a pleasure to conduct this interview with Tony and it was a long process. We met here through Six Revisions, and he was one of the people who encouraged me to sign up on Twitter.

We both share a fondness for Twitter, so as a gift to you, Six Revisions and OnWired is giving away a Wacom Intuos3 via Amazon.

What do you have to do? It’s simple, share this interview via Twitter by clicking on the following:

• Tweet this interview!

At the end of the week, we’re going to randomly select one winner using the Twitter API and announce it on Twitter. We’ll get in touch with you, and then ship you your very own Wacom Intuos3 Wacom Tablet!

Thank you Tony for this wonderful and inspiring interview!

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Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson are designers and digital artists as well as lecturers in interactive design at the University of Ulster at Belfast. In addition, they co-authored the newly-released book HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas’ Approach. They are passionately and actively promoting web standards in education and through their own practice and are now commonly referred to as the Web Standardistas.

[Chris Wallace]: With web standards being embraced by today’s web professional, it seems like universities are still lagging behind with incorporating web standards into their curriculum. Where do you see the biggest advancements being made with universities teaching web standards-based design?

[Christopher Murphy / Nicklas Persson]: Although the web standards movement has been active for over a decade, there’s a frustrating tendency for universities – which should be at the forefront of advancing standards and innovating – to lag behind industry in championing and incorporating best practice into the curriculum. Although there are many universities advancing web standards based curricula, sadly, there aren’t enough.

We’re working within a rapidly advancing industry, an industry that changes year on year (sometimes month on month, and even week on week), and the only way to keep university curricula current is to develop rolling programs of learning that keep pace with current and emerging developments.

Often this means rewriting aspects of course content on a year by year basis which we work hard to do, to ensure that what we deliver is relevant to today’s (and tomorrow’s) industry.

We see the biggest advancements being made through collaboration with industry. Over the last few years we’ve worked hard to establish ongoing partnerships with industry partners, both nationally and internationally, to ensure that we deliver an innovative and thought-provoking programme. We’ve also worked hard to nurture an ongoing relationship with alumni, ensuring successful graduates return to inspire our current students.

One exciting move towards connecting education and industry is the WaSP’s InterAct Curriculum, a living, open web standards curriculum which looks extremely promising.

[Chris Wallace]: What areas are still lacking?

[Christopher Murphy / Nicklas Persson]: If universities are to take the lead in developing contemporary, web standards based curricula, there needs to be much tighter integration between industry and academia.

There’s no question that the partnership between industry and academia needs work. It’s easy for those in industry to criticise shortcomings within academia, however, a more effective, and constructive approach is for industry to get involved with academia and shape curricula and develop dynamic and innovative learning experiences.

Many of our biggest successes has been through partnering with industrial colleagues to, amongst other initiatives: deliver live briefs, to give students a taste of live project work with real deliverables; provide student feedback, most recently using Campfire to undertake group critiques online; and to have national and international practitioners present work that is contemporary, client-focused and inspiring.

We’ve also worked hard to develop a very successful International Guest Lecture Programme, inviting inspirational speakers from all over the world to present their work in Belfast. We’ve been fortunate to have been supported by an all-star cast of designers, sharing their creativity with both students and industry as part of the programme.

Most recently we welcomed Nicholas Felton to Belfast for an extremely inspiring presentation on his work. We’ve also, amongst others, enjoyed presentations by Nicholas Roope of Poke and Hulger, Andy Stevens of Graphic Thought Facility and design critic Adrian Shaughnessy. Future speakers lined up include Elliot Jay Stocks and Paul Farrington of Studio Tonne.

[Chris Wallace]: You’ve been instrumental in the education of some talented young designers. What is your approach to teaching young designers who haven’t been tainted by tables for layout and CSS hacks for ancient browsers?

[Christopher Murphy / Nicklas Persson]: We start with the basics (which often involves firmly encouraging the occasional over-eager student to slow down, trust our approach and learn to walk before they run). Before we even cover (X)HTML and CSS we cover the principles of design, introducing fundamentals including: typography, information hierarchy, narrative, composition, grid systems… the usual suspects.

We firmly encourage a content out approach, stressing the importance of using semantic markup and making markup meaningful.

In our second year design modules we introduce this through the systematic analysis of set texts, encouraging students to mark up content using the full range of elements at their disposal. We spend a considerable amount of time ensuring students are aware that a well-structured document is a part of the design process and that meaningful markup is as important as CSS.

Only once we’ve covered well-formed markup do we move onto CSS which we, again, introduce in a systematic manner comprehensively covering typography and grid systems.

Throughout the process we encourage an understanding of the importance of accessibility, ensuring students are aware of contemporary accessibility guidelines and the importance of a clear document structure.

Of equal importance to the fundamentals, we work hard to encourage our students to develop an inquiring mind. We graduated before web development was taught (or even existed) and we’re fully self-taught. As a consequence of this we try to nurture a culture of creative investigation amongst our students, signposting to interesting developments and encouraging students to experiment creatively.

[Chris Wallace]: You have a number of talented young designers (such as Lee Munroe and Chris Colhoun), emerging from your courses. Who’s worth watching?

[Christopher Murphy / Nicklas Persson]: We’ve been fortunate to teach many young, emerging designers who share our passion for web standards. There are too many to mention here, but a few are worth singling out.

Lee Munroe, a graduate of our MA Multidisciplinary Design course (and our undergraduate Interactive Design course), is rapidly establishing himself as an internationally respected web designer and developer. In addition to his collaboration with Paddy Donnelly on The Big Word Project, he is currently developing Lookaly, a beautifully designed business directory.

Paddy Donnelly, another graduate from our MA Multidisciplinary Design course (who also studied on our undergraduate Interactive Design course), is now working as a Creative Strategist for Nascom in Brussels. His Twitter interviews with Tim O’Reilly, Guy Kawasaki and Paul Boag amongst others, have really helped to establish him as a thought-leader on the power of social networks (and Twitter) as a marketing tool.

David Henderson, the winner of our 2008 Design Prize (a prize we sponsor every year through Web Standardistas), is establishing a successful freelance design practice. In no small part due to his excellent final year project The Best of Belfast, an extremely accomplished piece of work.

Chris Colhoun is currently approaching the end of his undergraduate study with us and looks set to embark on a successful career. With interviews for posts at some very well-known web design and development firms recently completed, watch this space…

[Chris Wallace]: With exciting things like CSS3 and HTML5 slowly creeping into the picture, what’s your approach to teaching new ideas and concepts, even though the specs aren’t yet finalized or consistently implemented in major browsers?

[Christopher Murphy / Nicklas Persson]: It’s an exciting time to be both working in this medium and teaching it, and we’re constantly maintaining our skill sets through ongoing learning. We encourage our students to embrace a similar model of self-motivated learning, nurturing an inquisitive approach.

We’re committed to teaching students to become self-motivated and self-sufficient, equipping them with the skills to learn themselves in an ongoing manner after they have graduated and are working in industry.

It’s important to stress also that we’re primarily teaching principles and not software or specific frameworks. We see a web standards approach as a design methodology and, with the fundamentals in place, a solid foundation on which to build as new standards emerge.

[Chris Wallace]: Major browser versions and even new browsers (like Google’s Chrome) are seemingly being released every few months nowadays. Teaching web standards is nothing like teaching a math course where 1+1 always equals 2. How do you keep your students up-to-date on updates to major browsers and issues or bugs that are introduced (or fixed) in new browser versions?

[Christopher Murphy / Nicklas Persson]: Although educators, we’re both practicing designers and artists and maintain ongoing consultancy and client work in addition to exhibiting experimental works as artists, exhibiting internationally.

In order to effectively teach contemporary practice, we feel it’s essential for educators to maintain their practice "in the real world" and we regularly reference our client work and consultancy in our lectures through an ongoing, and open, ‘show and tell’ process. We believe in teaching by example, tying principles and theory into contemporary best practice.

To keep our students up-to-date with current and rapidly emerging developments, we use the long-established Japanese just-in-time principle (essentially re-writing almost all of our lectures the week before we deliver them!). We do this on a year-by-year basis to ensure our lecture content remains relevant. Although the principles are the same, we adjust the detail to reflect current developments and signpost emerging trends.

Although this results in a great deal of year-on-year revision of lecture content, we believe there’s no other way to teach a subject that is changing and evolving so rapidly.

[Chris Wallace]: You’re obviously very passionate about what you do. What led you to become authors, educators, and advocates for web standards?

We’ve both learned a great deal through experience and we’re both passionate about passing this learning on. Like many others, we’ve made mistakes as we’ve embarked on our careers and we’re more than happy to share our knowledge and experience (and honestly highlight the mistakes we might have made) if it helps our students moving forward.

We adopt a very open process to learning and share a great deal of the work on our hard drives with our students. We’re both passionate about web standards and we enjoy working with enthusiastic students. There’s a great deal of talent coming through and we’re happy to be contributing to that talent.

Our students are extremely loyal and we have a strong alumni programme with students maintaining contact years after they have graduated. We’re slowly, but surely helping to build a solid web design community in Belfast, a community that’s incredibly inspiring to be a part of. We’re happy to be helping to move that forward.

[Chris Wallace]: Who are some of your main influences?

[Christopher Murphy / Nicklas Persson]: The usual suspects.

People: Jeffrey Zeldmann, Dan Cederholm, Mark Boulton and John Gruber (we’re committed Markdown enthusiasts).

Resources: A List Apart, Design Observer, CSS Zen Garden and 37 Signals (Getting Real and Signal vs. Noise are both excellent reading).

Miscellaneous: You Look Nice Today, TED, The Wire and Lost.

As lecturers we’re also inspired by the work of our students. It’s refreshing to be working with talented students and their enthusiasm is inspiring. (They also help to keep us on our toes!)

[Chris Wallace]: I can’t go the whole interview without asking about the book you’ve released, HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas’ Approach. What was your approach when writing this book and what can readers expect to learn from it?

[Christopher Murphy / Nicklas Persson]: Our approach involved lots of late nights, the occasional reward of sushi and beer, and many, many, many long weekends.

There are a lot of excellent books that we point our students toward: Dan Cederholm’s inspiring Web Standards Solutions; Paul Haine’s meticulous HTML Mastery; and Andy Budd’s indispensable CSS Mastery, to name but a few. All are fantastic books, however, none of them seemed to cover everything our students needed to embark on a well-grounded, web standards–based approach in one package: namely, a solid foundation in well-structured XHTML coupled with a comprehensive introduction to CSS (all in one book).

Cue Web Standardistas.

Readers of the book can expect to learn how to build hand-crafted web pages using well-structured XHTML for content and CSS for presentation. In short, everything required to embark on a web standards approach to building future-proof web pages the right way, which forms a solid foundation on which to learn moving forward.

Although the book has only just been published, feedback on it has already been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve also been delighted by the response to the Web Standardistas’ web site which we’re developing to accompany the book.

The site, which features daily entries on web design and other, design-related topics, in addition to longer, monthly articles in our periodical has rapidly gathered a dedicated following and we’re looking forward to developing it as we move forward with other Web Standardistas’ projects.

For the latest news and for a daily dose of carefully chosen links, follow us on Twitter. We’re also interested in hearing from other educators. If you’re involved in education – especially at university level – get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.

We’d like to thank Christopher and Nicklas for taking the time to answer our questions. Make sure to pick up a copy of their book, HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas’ Approach.

Enjoyed this Interview?

If you enjoyed this interview, consider purchasing a copy of the Web Standardista’s book: HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas’ Approach. Editorial except from Amazon: This book will teach you how to build hand-crafted web pages the Web Standardistas’ way: using well-structured XHTML for content and CSS for presentation.

Related content

• Six Questions: Eric Meyer on CSS3

About the Author

Chris Wallace is a front-end developer and Principal Creative at Walmedia, a web design company. Chris offers free WordPress themes and writes about web design and development on his blog, Designer&Developer. He also runs a design and development job board, AllDevJobs.com and popular design job aggregator MashedJobs.com. Twitter: @chriswallace.

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Eric A. Meyer knows a thing or two about standards-based CSS and HTML development. He’s a distinguished expert on CSS and HTML, an author of numerous books on CSS, co-founder of An Event Apart, a coveted guest speaker, a member of the A List Apart crew, and  founder of Complex Spiral Consulting (I could go on – but I think you get the picture).

Eric Meyer was also a prominent invited expert for seven years in the CSS Working Group, the folks in charge of maintaining and developing CSS.

Needless to say, he’s a person you’d want to ask about the CSS3.

Today I ask Eric Meyer six questions on the topic of CSS3, and here’s what he has to say.

What do you think are the most exciting developments and extensions of CSS in CSS3?

[Eric Meyer]: This will confirm once and for all that I’m basically a big huge code nerd, but honestly, the advanced selectors.  Sure, sure, opacity and rounded corners and multiple background images and pretty things blah blah blah.  All very nice.  But the power to describe Web 2.0 designs in CSS is insignificant compared with the power to select every third table row starting with the fifth one.  Or being able to select the first paragraph within another element, even if it’s not the first child.  Or selecting any list item that’s the last item in the list.  Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.

Well, and Web Fonts are kind of cool too.  I’ll grant you that.

Let’s discuss the modularization of CSS specifications. The CSS specification for CSS3 is modularized (presumably after lessons learned in CSS2) – how has this affected the timeline, progression, and mainstream adoption of CSS3 specs?

[Eric Meyer]: It really means there is no such thing as "CSS3" the way there was a CSS2.  There’s no great big monolithic specification called CSS3. There’s just a bunch of parallel efforts, some of which move more quickly than others.

I don’t honestly know what it’s done to adoption.  We had a great big long pause in CSS advancement in the first half of this decade– I call it "the IEnterregnum"– and it’s only been recently that we’ve seen browsers pushing past the edges of CSS2 in any major way.

On the other hand, you could argue that the pause was good because it let vendors focus on fixing bugs and reaching consistency instead of running off in ten different directions.  Nor would I oppose that argument.  My real point is that because of how things have gone, it’s hard to measure CSS3 adoption against what came before.
I do think the split caused an overall slowdown in the development of the specifications.  No way to prove that, of course, but that’s the feeling I get.  It’s a big part of why I left the WG, and why I’ve been only peripherally involved in some of the other W3C’s efforts.

Just taking a peek at the proposed specs for new CSS selectors, it seems that a lot of complex object selection and targeting in the DOM will eventually be done with CSS instead of JavaScript.

For example, under the proposed specs, you’ll be able to select the first element of .some-class and give it a different style rule or accomplish zebra-striping tables without using JavaScript.

How has JavaScript influenced CSS3 (and vice versa) and what roles do you see each one taking in modern web development; do you see them being more distinct or more blended together than they are now?

[Eric Meyer]: From what I’ve seen, most of the influence has been on JS frameworks like jQuery, with that influence coming from CSS. However, there is some movement going back the other way– ideas like ‘:contains‘ that were first done in JS are starting to be considered by the CSS WG.

I think the much bigger influence on CSS by JS will be in people using JS to "silently" add advanced CSS to browsers.  I wrote about this recently, and I’m pretty sure it’s just a matter of time before it actually happens.  We’re already seeing things like using JS to natively turn browsers into speaking browsers, and to hack around ancient accessibility barriers.  Adding support for HTML5 elements and CSS3 features via JS is not far behind.

What resources should we check out if we want to learn more about CSS3?

[Eric Meyer]: http://css3.info/ is a good start.  There aren’t a ton of resources out there beyond that, I think mostly because so little of CSS3 is widely supported.

CSS is getting bigger and more complex, Do you think the status of CSS3 should be versioned every time major modules are completed (i.e. CSS3.1, CSS3.2), unlike CSS1 and CSS2?

[Eric Meyer]: Yes, I think that would be a good idea.  I just don’t expect it to happen because it’s not very practical.  You’d have to only capture those modules that are stable, and the odds of more than three modules being stable (as opposed to stagnant and abandoned) at any one time are pretty low.

What can we (as developers and designers) do to help with CSS3 development and mainstream adoption?

[Eric Meyer]: Write blog posts and tweets and forum posts about what you want to use now, but can’t. Find ways to simulate what you want and write about that.

Submit feature requests to browser teams.  File bugs you find on existing CSS3 features (like advanced selectors).

All that stuff is how we vote in our field, to the extent that we have a vote.

Further reading

By the way, if you need a quick refresher on CSS3, be sure to check out CSS3.info, a site dedicated to sharing everything there is to know about CSS3 or the Wikipedia entry on CSS3.

Also check out the CSS WG’s current work to see the latest schedules on CSS3 development.

More on Eric Meyer

Thank you very much for your time Eric! If you want to learn more about Eric Meyer, check out his personal website where you’ll find a variety of useful articles, blog posts, demos, and tools on standards-based CSS/HTML. You should also check one of his many books and consider picking one up if you haven’t already. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Additionally, be sure to check out An Event Apart, a web design conference co-founded by Eric Meyer (along with Jeffery Zeldman) held regularly (check out the schedule for next year) with top web professionals guest speaking as subject matter experts.

Credit: Picture of Eric Meyer in the lead image of this article, courtesy of Chris Jennings. Source image can be found here.