Happy New Year Everyone!

Greetings to all for a terrific 2017.

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Keywords - Outdated or Still Critical?

WebmasterWorld Members discuss keywords: Are they still critical to your SEO success or are they deprecated?

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Vivaldi Browser Adds a Series of Tab-Related Improvements

Vivaldi 1.6 for Mac, Windows and Linux add tab-related management and notification features.

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Firefox Support Windows XP and Vista Ends September 2017

Mozilla has drawn a line in the sand for the end of Firefox support on Windows XP and Vista.

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Are Search Results Being Throttled?

WebmasterWorld Members discuss the possibility of search results being throttled for traffic.

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Learning from Lego: A Step Forward in Modular Web Design

Methbot: Video-Watching Botnet Steals Millions of Dollars a Day

Ad watching bot shows signs of "engagement" fooling advertisers it's legitimate users on sites.

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Good Old Fashion Checklist SEO for 2017

Here is a new SEO checklist to help you rank in 2017.

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Bing Webmaster Tools Design Update

Bing has tweaked its Webmaster Tools UI with some improvements.

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This week's sponsor: ZARGET

ZARGET: Analytics Tool for designers. Capture exactly how users experience your website. Settle design debates with data.

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Facebook Experiments With Solutions to Hoaxes and Fake News

Facebook says it's still experimenting with ways to address the issue of fake news and hoaxes on its site.

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Demystifying Public Speaking

Yahoo New Hack: 1 Billion Accounts Including Names, Emails, Telephone and Birth Dates

Yahoo was hit with another hack in August 2013 of over 1 billion accounts.

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Microsoft Announces Cortana Skills Kit and Cortana Devices SDK

Microsoft announced the Cortana Skills Kit and Cortana Devices SDK for Developers and OEMs.

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The Next Phase of Mobile Dominance is Just Starting

WebmasterWorld Members discuss where next, and how to capitalise on the power of a smartphone.

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Managing Ego

A note from the editors: This is Part 2 of the series entitled, “Defeating Workplace Drama with Emotional Intelligence”.

We’re in an industry where we regularly hear that our ideas are bad. We can get yelled at for overlooking something, even if we didn’t know about it, and we frequently encounter threats to our ego that can turn any one of us into an anxious and irrational coworker.

Minimizing our exposure to ego-damaging situations can be valuable in preventing anxiety, but that’s sometimes beyond our control. Unfortunately, when threats can’t be controlled, confidence is the next thing to take a hit. Professional and personal self-worth may seem vulnerable, but they can also be reinforced and strengthened far in advance.

Client drama, ground zero

I shrunk in my chair as a client technical contact listed off everything he hated about the site I had just built. The list was not short, nor was it constructive. When it came time for him to make his recommendations, I went on the offensive and launched into my own opinions on how terrible and impossible his ideas were. By the end of the phone call, everyone was on edge and I was left with one desperate question: What just happened?

I found out the next day that the website I built was originally supposed to be an internal initiative, handled by the technical contact who had berated me. In short, his ego was bruised—and by the end of the phone call, my ego was bruised too. This brought out the worst in each of us. The result was a phone call full of drama that shall live on in infamy.

There were a few things wrong with that conversation. First, the technical contact clearly felt threatened by my website. But my history with this guy showed me that he felt threatened by most ideas we brought to him, so we also had to give some thought to where to draw the line with validating him on this. We should have employed a long-term strategy for strengthening that relationship by validating him at other times. Lastly, there are things I could have done to guard myself against irrationality and drama when that conversation turned south.

In short, everything went wrong in this scenario. That’s bad for me, but good for you, because it means we can learn a lot from looking at it. Let’s dig in.

Validating self esteem to prevent anxiety

Everyone responds to external feedback and affirmation—some more than others. So how do we tailor our feedback to avoid causing undue anxiety?

When you notice someone suddenly get worked up about something, go over what just happened. You probably introduced a threat. Did you propose a new idea? Did you point out a flaw in their idea? (Ideas are tied very closely to self esteem.) What was the idea? You’ve just pinpointed where their self esteem comes from.

Just like web professionals usually draw self esteem from the things that got them the job in the first place, marketing and account people do the same thing. Marketing people may prize their own creative ideas in a campaign, or their analytical skills when critiquing a campaign; account people often value their communication skills and ability to read people. When these skills are called into question, it produces anxiety, which can quickly lead to drama.

Think about that marketing person who can’t accept any creative idea as-is—who feels the need to make revisions to any idea that comes in. Creativity is the source of this person’s self esteem, so pushing back on those ideas without first validating them will introduce threat and result in anxiety.

What about that developer who won’t accept other people’s suggestions, and shoots down others’ ideas as impossible or too impractical? Problem solving and technical know-how are the sources of this person’s self esteem, and self esteem must be boosted by validating those strengths to get anywhere in a discussion of the merits of said ideas.

Ok, great, so we know where their self esteem is coming from. How do we validate these traits to prevent drama?

Consider the conversation I had with the client’s technical contact. When the technical contact began listing everything he hated about my site, I should have noticed that his own ideas were invalidated by the proposal of my ideas, which were being presented in the site I designed and built.

Rather than immediately protest (producing more threat), I should have asked questions related to his expertise with the client brand and business goals. I could have asked for help and affirmed his problem-solving ability (boosting self esteem and lowering threat) before re-asserting my own ideas. Had I taken this approach, there’s a good chance I could have learned something about the client in addition to calming down their technical contact.

Simply acknowledging others’ ideas and the thought that went into them can go a long way in validating sources of self esteem and quelling anxiety in the workplace.

When validation is not enough

There are times when there is such an emotional deficit created by a blow to the ego (possibly to an already-low self esteem) that no amount of validation will fix it. Dealing with a vulnerable or shattered self esteem can be difficult, and fixing it can be impossible. In those cases, no level of threat is tolerable and no level of self esteem boosting is sufficient.

Going back to my conversation with the client technical contact, what if he remained unsatisfied until he had the project back on his plate? Obviously, this is not a solution that’s good for either the agency, who needs the work, or the client, who determined that the agency was a better fit than their internal team.

In these situations, preventing or calming anxiety may be impossible because the problem is likely much bigger than the conversation at hand. It’s hard to apply a short-term solution to a long-term problem. In those cases, there are two things to do: minimize damage, and employ a long-term strategy to strengthen the relationship.

Minimizing damage means avoiding triggers and being as understanding as you can to the other person’s plight without sacrificing the project. If the other party feels that their ideas are being invalidated, it’s a sign that they feel that others aren’t taking their contributions seriously. (It may or may not be true in reality, but that’s how they feel.) That’s a pretty rough place to be no matter who you are. In that case, treat their contributions respectfully and be understanding when they get defensive about them.

Employing a my-way-or-the-highway authoritarian approach is the opposite of what we’re going for. This approach increases threat and can lead to a lot of ugly politics, with people going behind your back to gain support for their cause because they feel that any ideas brought to you are being invalidated. There are some situations where this is the only way forward, but those situations are few and far between—as well as rough and aggravating. Only go this route if you’ve exhausted all other options.

Read on for a long-term strategy to strengthen the relationship.

Using self esteem to build long-term relationships

As web professionals, we’re in the idea business—but so are the marketing people we often deal with. Those marketing folks will probably react poorly when their self esteem is threatened by conflicting and challenging ideas; but they usually react well when treated with deference and asked to explain their ideas and contribute their strengths. While this can be done on a case-by-case basis to prevent anxiety, it can also be done proactively to build better relationships with clients, coworkers, and others.

Once you’ve identified the source of a person’s self esteem, start deferring to them on that subject. Treat them as an expert on that subject. (In many cases, they probably are an expert on that subject.) Be open to their ideas and suggestions, and willing to integrate them into your own.

This process can take time, depending on the emotional deficit they begin with and your flexibility in welcoming their ideas. But over time, the beneficiary of your emotional toil will begin to see you as an ally and partner. This is a very good spot to be in.

They keyword here is intentionality. This process cannot happen on a happy accident—it takes work with planning and strategy. Obviously, the mental energy required for this means you won’t be able to do it for everyone you work with. Give some thought to which of your working relationships have the most strategic importance and which could most benefit from additional trust and respect. Chances are a few will pop out at you.

Being intentional about boosting the self esteem of your coworkers and clients not only makes them easier to work with, but creates relational equity that can be cashed in at a later time for deference, respect, and allegiance. Remember, the less you challenge things in a relationship, the more the other person will listen when you do. Though it takes time, it will make your job way easier in the long run.

Guarding yourself against anxiety

I wish I could say I didn’t personally need the advice in this section—but I do. There are times when we all do. Let’s be honest: we’ve all been that angry client technical contact at some point, and it certainly doesn’t help our careers. The two things we apply to others can also be applied to ourselves to prevent anxiety: we can reduce threat, and we can boost self esteem.

At first glance, it may seem impossible to reduce threat coming from others. We can’t just ask everyone to be nicer to our egos. But some perspective can go a long way in reducing perceived threat.

In the example above, I reacted poorly because the client’s technical contact got mad at me on the phone. He challenged all of my ideas and was doing all he could to dismiss them entirely. What I didn’t realize until much later was that he wasn’t mad at me, or my ideas—he was mad at an unstated problem. Maybe he had been burned by another agency’s incompetent development team in the past. Maybe he had major concerns that weren’t being heeded by his company’s marketing team. Ultimately, I don’t know what the problem was, but I realize now that he probably would have been mad no matter what or who we put in front of him.

What I find is that angry people aren’t always mad at me—many times, they’re mad at the problem. They’re challenging my ideas not because they doubt them, but because they want to make sure that they’re the best solution to the problem. When viewed this way, it’s a lot easier to avoid being defensive, because it’s not me versus you—it’s me and you versus the problem. It’s not easy to counteract that fight-or-flight response that gets triggered when people start challenging your ideas, but forcing yourself to do so usually goes a long way in helping to solve the problem without escalating into drama.

Having a healthy view of yourself and your capabilities can also guard against anxiety. It’s very important to have a self-image independent of anything else going on around you. There’s one big difference between healthy self esteem and unhealthy pride: social comparison. Healthy self esteem is knowing that you’re good at something and being content with that; unhealthy pride is knowing that you’re better than someone else.

Being better than someone else is actually a rather tenuous place to be. Comparing yourself to a moving target—which may be moving past you—usually results in you trying to hammer the target down into a place where you can move past it, either by putting the other person down or filling yourself with false confidence in your own ability. This is never a good thing.

If a discussion on how to solve a problem devolves into a binary battle of opinions with a winner and a loser, there are no winners because the original problem becomes the loser. It doesn’t matter if you beat the other guy if the solution suffers for it. Instead of seeking to be a winner, you should seek to be a problem-solver. In the web industry, ideas don’t mean anything unless they solve real-world problems. It is always worth giving up some or even all of your idea if it means improving the solution.

Recognizing the roots of anxiety

Workplace drama and the anxiety beneath its surface, far from being unpredictable and random occurrences, are often the result of deeply held fears and insecurities. Avoiding an unmitigated drama disaster means dealing with underlying issues like self esteem. It can be difficult to navigate these waters, and even more so to turn the tides and produce happier relationships—but the benefits far outweigh the costs.

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Googl;e AdSense: User Experiments to Reduce Accidental Clicks

WebmasterWorld members experiment with ad margins to help reduce accidental clicks.

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Microsoft Outlines its Immediate Plans for LinkedIn Now Acquisition Gets Regulatory Clearance

Microsoft's CEO, Sataya Nadella, outlines some of the immediate plans for LinkedIn.

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Google Removes "In The News" From Desktop Search over "Fake News" Criticism Renames it "Top Stories"

Google renames "In the News" to "Top Stories"

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US Congress passes legislation over ticket-grabbing bots

The U.S. Congress has passed legislation to "crack down" on those using bots to snatch tickets.

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Google AdSense: Is it Doing Enough to Stop Spam Ads

WebmasterWorld members discuss the challenge of dealing with spammy ads in the review center.

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Google Updates and SERP Changes - December 2016

WebmasterWorld's monthly look at Google's SERPs changes.

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Accessibility Whack-A-Mole

This week's sponsor: ENVATO ELEMENTS

ENVATO ELEMENTS, the only subscription made with designers in mind. 9000+ quality fonts, graphics, templates and more. Get started today.

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Should We Still be Concerned About "Bad" Links?

WebmasterWorld members discuss whether "bad" links should be a concern, and how to better develop linking strategies.

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This week's sponsor: ENVATO ELEMENTS

ENVATO ELEMENTS, the only subscription made with designers in mind. 9000+ quality fonts, graphics, templates and more. Get started today.

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Phishing Botnet Taken Down and 800,000 Domains Seized

"largest-ever use of sinkholing to combat botnet infrastructures..."

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Firefox Zero-Day Exploit Reveals Tor Users' Identity

The vulnerability is being used to reveal the identity of Tor users'.

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This week's sponsor: O’REILLY DESIGN CONFERENCE

O’REILLY DESIGN CONFERENCE - get the skills and insights you need to design the products of the future. Save 20% with code ALIST

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Amazon Deletes 500,000 "Incentivized" Reviews

In a little over a month the company has made good and is doing more than prohibiting, it's deleting "incentivized" reviews.

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E.U. Proposals For Ecommerce Payments Will Require Extra Security Checks

The European Union's "Payment Services Directive 2" proposal includes making consumers go through additional security measures.

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Alexa Retires Top 1 Million Sites List

Alexa quietly retired the top 1 million sites list.

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Google Extends Rich Cards to Include Local Restaurants and Online Courses

Google adds two new verticals to the Rich Cards.

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Insisting on Core Development Principles

The web community talks a lot about best practices in design and development: methodologies that are key to reaching and retaining users, considerate design habits, and areas that we as a community should focus on.

But let’s be honest—there are a lot of areas to focus on. We need to put users first, content first, and mobile first. We need to design for accessibility, performance, and empathy. We need to tune and test our work across many devices and browsers. Our content needs to grab user attention, speak inclusively, and employ appropriate keywords for SEO optimization. We should write semantic markup and comment our code for the developers who come after us.

Along with the web landscape, the expectations for our work have matured significantly over the last couple of decades. It’s a lot to keep track of, whether you’ve been working on the web for 20 years or only 20 months.

If those expectations feel daunting to those of us who live and breathe web development every day, imagine how foreign all of these concepts are for the clients who hire us to build a site or an app. They rely on us to be the experts who prioritize these best practices. But time and again, we fail our clients.

I’ve been working closely with development vendor partners and other industry professionals for a number of years. As I speak with development shops and ask about their code standards, workflows, and methods for maintaining consistency and best practices across distributed development teams, I’m continually astonished to hear that often, most of the best practices I listed in the first paragraph are not part of any development project unless the client specifically asks for them.

Think about that.

Development shops are relying on the communications team at a finance agency to know that they should request their code be optimized for performance or accessibility. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that shouldn’t be the client’s job. We’re the experts; we understand web strategy and best practices—and it’s time we act like it. It’s time for us to stop talking about each of these principles in a blue-sky way and start implementing them as our core practices. Every time. By default.

Whether you work in an internal dev shop or for outside clients, you likely have clients whose focus is on achieving business goals. Clients come to you, the technical expert, to help them achieve their business goals in the best possible way. They may know a bit of web jargon that they can use to get the conversation started, but often they will focus on the superficial elements of the project. Just about every client will worry more about their hero images and color palette than about any other piece of their project. That’s not going to change. That’s okay. It’s okay because they are not the web experts. That’s not their job. That’s your job.

If I want to build a house, I’m going to hire experts to design and build that house. I will have to rely on architects, builders, and contractors to know what material to use for the foundation, where to construct load-bearing walls, and where to put the plumbing and electricity. I don’t know the building codes and requirements to ensure that my house will withstand a storm. I don’t even know what questions I would need to ask to find out. I need to rely on experts to design and build a structure that won’t fall down—and then I’ll spend my time picking out paint colors and finding a rug to tie the room together.

This analogy applies perfectly to web professionals. When our clients hire us, they count on us to architect something stable that meets industry standards and best practices. Our business clients won’t know what questions to ask or how to look into the code to confirm that it adheres to best practices. It’s up to us as web professionals to uphold design and development principles that will have a strong impact on the final product, yet are invisible to our clients. It’s those elements that our clients expect us to prioritize, and they don’t even know it. Just as we rely on architects and builders to construct houses on a solid foundation with a firm structure, so should we design our sites on a solid foundation of code.

If our work doesn’t follow these principles by default, we fail our clients

So what do we prioritize, and how do we get there? If everything is critical, then nothing is. While our clients concentrate on colors and images (and, if we’re lucky, content), we need to concentrate on building a solid foundation that will deliver that content to end users beautifully, reliably, and efficiently. How should we go about developing that solid foundation? Our best bet is to prioritize a foundation of code that will help our message reach the broadest audience, across the majority of use cases. To get to the crux of a user-first development philosophy, we need to find the principles that have the most impact, but aren’t yet implicit in our process.

At a minimum, all code written for general audiences should be:

• responsive
• accessible
• performant

More specifically, it’s not enough to pay lip service to those catch phrases to present yourself as a “serious” dev shop and stop there. Our responsive designs shouldn’t simply adjust the flow and size of elements depending on device width—they also need to consider loading different image sizes and background variants based on device needs. Accessible coding standards should be based on the more recent WCAG 2.0 (Level AA) standards, with the understanding that coding for universal access benefits all users, not just a small percentage (coupled with the understanding that companies whose sites don’t meet those standards are being sued for noncompliance). Performance optimization should think about how image sizes, scripts, and caching can improve page-load speed and decrease the total file size downloaded in every interaction.

Do each of these take time? Sure they do. Development teams may even need additional training, and large teams will need to be prescriptive about how that can be integrated into established workflows. But the more these principles are built into the core functions of all of our products, the less time they will take, and the better all of our services will be.

How do we get there?

In the long run, we need to adjust our workflows so that both front-end and backend developers build these best practices into their default coding processes and methodologies. They should be part of our company cultures, our interview screenings, our value statements, our QA testing scripts, and our code validations. Just like no one would think of building a website layout using tables and 1px spacer images anymore (shout out to all the old-school webmasters out there), we should reach a point where it’s laughable to think of designing a fixed-width website, or creating an image upload prompt without an alt text field.

If you’re a freelance developer or a small agency, this change in philosophy or focus should be easier to achieve than if you are part of a larger agency. As with any time you and your team expand and mature your skillsets, you will want to evaluate how many extra hours you need to build into the initial learning curves of new practices. But again, each of these principles becomes faster and easier to achieve once they’re built into the workflow.

There is a wealth of books, blogs, checklists, and how-tos you can turn to for reference on designing responsively, making sites accessible, and tuning for performance. Existing responsive frameworks can act as a starting point for responsive development. After developing the overarching layout and flow, the main speed bumps for responsive content arise in the treatment of tables, images, and multimedia elements. You will need to plan to review and think through how your layouts will be presented at different breakpoints. A tool like embedresponsively.com can speed the process for external content embeds.

Many accessibility gaps can be filled by using semantic markup instead of making every element a div or a span. None of the accessible code requirements should be time hogs once a developer becomes familiar with them. The a11y Project’s Web Accessibility Checklist provides an easy way for front-end developers to review their overall code style and learn how to adjust it to be more accessible by default. In fact, writing truly semantic markup should speed CSS design time when it’s easier to target the elements you’re truly focused on.

The more you focus on meeting each of these principles in the early stages of new projects, the faster they will become your default way of developing, and the time spent on them will become a default part of the process.

Maintaining focus

It’s one thing to tell your team that you want all the code they develop to be responsive, accessible, and performant. It’s another thing entirely to make sure it gets there. Whether you’re a solo developer or manage a team of developers, you will need systems in place to maintain focus. Make sure your developers have the knowledge required to implement the code and techniques that address these needs, and supplement with training when they don’t.

Write value statements. Post lists. Ask at every stage what can be added to the process to make sure these core principles are considered. When you hire new talent, you can add questions into the interview process to make sure your new team members are already up to speed and have the same values and commitment to quality from day one.

Include checkpoints within each stage of the design and development process to ensure your work continues to build toward a fully responsive, accessible, and performant end product. For example, you can adjust the design process to start with mobile wireframes to change team mindsets away from designing for desktop and then trying to backfill mobile and tablet layouts. Another checkpoint should be added when determining color palettes to test foreground and background color sets for accessible color contrast. Add in a step to run image files through a compressor before uploading any graphic assets. Ask designers to use webfonts responsibly, not reflexively. Set a performance budget, and build in steps for performance checks along the way. Soon, your team will simply “know” which features or practices tend to be performance hogs and which are lean. You will need to make sure testing and code reviews look for these things, too.

Nothing worth doing happens by accident. Every time we overlook our responsibilities as designers and developers because it’s faster to cut corners, our products suffer and our industry as a whole suffers. As web professionals, how we work and what we prioritize when no one’s looking make a difference in thousands of little ways to thousands of people we will never meet. Remember that. Our clients and our users are counting on us.

 

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Facebook Winds Down Ad Serving on Atlas

Facebook's Atlas ad serving is to be wound down over the coming months.

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Australian AdSense Login Problem

AdSense log in problem for Australian publishers.

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The Coming Revolution in Email Design

Facebook to Fix Metrics Bugs in Insights

Facebook has said the Page Insights metrics had a bug in the system since May 2016.

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Microsoft Takes Platinum Membership at The Linux Foundation

Microsoft is joining The Linux Foundation with Platinum membership.

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Google Cloud Joins .NET Foundation

Google is joining the Technical Steering Group of the .NET Foundation.

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Google to Ban AdSense Publishers With Fake News Sites

The new policy will go into effect "imminently."

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Twitter Now Lets You "Mute" Keywords and Phrases

Twitter is rolling out a new addition which means you can now mute keywords and phrases, or conversations.

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WhatsApp Adds Video Calling

WhatsApp adds video calling and is rolling it out world-wide.

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New Form of AdSense Abuse and Spam Attack

WebmasterWorld Members discuss a new observation of sites appearing to use AdSense code resulting in skewing page view statistics.

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This week's sponsor: ADOBE XD

ADOBE XD BETA, the only all-in-one solution for designing, prototyping, and sharing experiences for websites and mobile apps.

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Best Practices for Indexable Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

Comprehensive guide detailing both best practice and a series of do's and don'ts.

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Facebook Messenger 1.3 Now Allows Sponsored Messages

Sponsored messages coming to Facebook Messenger.

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Google Safe Browsing "Repeat Offenders" Locked Out For 30-Days

Repeat offenders of Google's safe browsing will be locked out from review for 30-days.

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Browser Plug-In Found Selling User Browsing Histories

The plug in has now been removed from the browsers.

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Google Announces Mobile-First Indexing Experiments

"To make our results more useful, we've begun experiments to make our index mobile-first."

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Google Updates and SERP Changes - November 2016

WebmasterWorld's monthly look at Google's SERPs changes.

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MySQL Exploit Gives Root Access to Server: Update Your Systems

Site administrators should apply patches immediately.

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Facebook Q3, 2016 Reports Revenue $7.01 Billion

Facebook says its monthly active users reaches 1.79 billion, which is a 16pct increase, year on year.

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Reviews of The Latest Google AdSense User Interface

WebmasterWorld Members review and discuss the most recent update to the Google AdSense user interface.

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Awaken the Champion A/B Tester Within

Let Emotion Be Your Guide

We were sitting in a market research room in the midst of a long day of customer interviews. Across from us, a young mother was telling us about her experience bringing her daughter into the ER during a severe asthma attack. We had been interviewing people about their healthcare journeys for a large hospital group, but we’d been running into a few problems.

First, the end-goal of the interviews was to develop a strategy for the hospital group’s website. But what we’d discovered, within the first morning of interviews aimed at creating a customer journey map, was that hospital websites were part of no one’s journey. This wasn’t wildly surprising to us—in fact it was part of the reason we’d recommended doing customer journey mapping in the first place. The hospital had a lot of disease content on their site, and we wanted to see whether people ever thought to access that content in the course of researching a condition. The answer had been a resounding no. Some people said things like, “Hmm, I’d never think to go to a hospital website. That’s an interesting idea.” Others didn’t even know that hospitals had websites. And even though we’d anticipated this response, the overwhelming consistency on this point was starting to freak out our client a little—in particular it started to freak out the person whose job it was to redesign the site.

The second issue was that our interviews were falling a little flat. People were answering our questions but there was no passion behind their responses, which made it difficult to determine where their interactions with the hospital fell short of expectations. Some of this was to be expected. Not every customer journey is a thrill ride, after all. Some people’s stories were about mundane conditions. I had this weird thing on my hand, and my wife was bugging me to get it checked out, so I did. The doctor gave me cream, and it went away, was one story. Another was from someone with strep throat. We didn’t expect much excitement from a story about strep throat, and we didn’t get it. But mixed in with the mundane experiences were people who had chronic conditions, or were caregivers for children, spouses, or parents with debilitating diseases, or people who had been diagnosed with cancer. And these people had been fairly flat as well.

We were struggling with two problems that we needed to solve simultaneously. First: what to do with the three remaining days of interviews we had lined up, when we’d already discovered on the morning of day one that no one went to hospital websites. And second: how to get information that our client could really use. We thought that if we could just dig a little deeper underneath people’s individual stories, we could produce something truly meaningful for not only our client, but the people sitting with us in the interview rooms.

We’d been following the standard protocol for journey mapping: prompting users to tell us about a specific healthcare experience they’d had recently, and then asking them at each step what they did, how they were feeling and what they were thinking. But the young mother telling us about her daughter’s chronic asthma made us change our approach.

“How were you feeling when you got to the ER?” we asked.

“I was terrified,” she said. “I thought my daughter was going to die.” And then, she began to cry. As user experience professionals we’re constantly reminding ourselves that we are not our users; but we are both parents and in that moment, we knew exactly what the woman in front of us meant. The entire chemistry of the room shifted. The interview subject in front of us was no longer an interview subject. She was a mother telling us about the worst day of her entire life. We all grabbed for the tissue box, and the three of us dabbed at our eyes together.

And from that point on, she didn’t just tell us her story as though we were three people sitting in front of a two-way mirror.  She told us her story the way she might tell her best friend.

We realized, in that interview, that this was not just another project. We’ve both had long careers in user research and user experience, but we’d never worked on a project that involved the worst day of people’s lives. There might be emotion involved in using a frustrating tool at work or shopping for the perfect gift, but nothing compares to the day you find yourself rushing to the emergency room with your child.

So we decided to throw out the focus on the hospital website, concentrate on where emotion was taking us, and trust that we would be able to reconcile our findings with our client’s needs. We, as human beings, wanted to hear other human beings tell us about the difficulties of caring for a mother with Alzheimer’s disease. We wanted to know what it felt like to receive a cancer diagnosis after a long journey to many doctors across a spectrum of specialties. We wanted to understand what we could do, in any small way, to help make these Worst Days minutely less horrible, less terrifying, and less out-of-control. We knew that the client was behind the two-way mirror, concerned about the website navigation, but we also knew that we were going to get to someplace much more important and meaningful by following wherever these stories took us.

We also realized that not all customer journeys are equal. We still wanted to understand what people’s journeys with strep throat and weird hand rashes looked like, because those were important too. Those journeys told us about the routine issues that we all experience whenever we come into contact with the medical establishment—the frustration of waiting endlessly at urgent care, the annoyance of finding someone who can see you at a time when you can take off from work, the importance of a doctor who listens. But we also wanted to get to the impassioned stories where the stakes and emotions were much higher, so we adjusted our questioning style accordingly. We stuck to our standard protocol for the routine medical stories. And for the high-stakes journeys, the ones that could leave us near tears or taking deep breaths at the end of the interview, we proceeded more slowly. We gave our interview subjects room to pause, sigh, and cry. We let there be silence in the room. We tried to make it not feel weird for people to share their most painful moments with two strangers.

When we completed our interviews at the end of the week, we had an incredibly rich number of stories to draw from—so many, in fact, that we were able to craft a digital strategy that went far beyond what the hospital website would do. (Website? We kept saying to ourselves. Who cares about the website?) We realized that in many ways, we were limiting ourselves by thinking about a website strategy, or even a digital strategy. By connecting with the emotional content of the conversations, we started to think about a customer strategy—one that would be medium-agnostic.

In Designing for Emotion, Aarron Walter encourages us to “think of our designs not as a façade for interaction, but as people with whom our audience can have an inspired conversation.” As we moved into making strategic recommendations, we thought a lot about how the hospital (like most hospitals) interacted with their patients as a bureaucratic, depersonalized entity. It was as though patients were spilling over with a hundred different needs, and the hospital group was simply silent. We also thought about what a helpful human would do at various stages of the journey, and found that there were multiple points where pushing information out to customers could make a world of difference.

We heard from people diagnosed with cancer who said, “After I heard the word ‘cancer’ I didn’t hear anything else, so then I went home and Googled it and completely panicked.” So we recommended that the day after someone gets a devastating diagnosis like that, there is a follow-up email with more information, reliable information resources, and videos of other people who experienced the same thing and what it was like for them.

We heard from people who spent the entire day waiting for their loved ones to get out of surgery, not knowing how much longer it would take, and worried that if they stepped out for a coffee, they would miss the crucial announcement over the loudspeaker. As a result, we proposed that relatives receive text message updates such as, “Your daughter is just starting her surgery. We expect that it will take about an hour and a half. We will text you again when she is moved to the recovery room.”

The stories were so strong that we believed they would help our client refocus their attention away from the website and toward the million other touchpoints and opportunities we saw to help make the worst day of people’s lives a little less horrible.

And for the most part, that is what happened. We picked a few journeys that we thought provided a window on the range of stories we’d been hearing. As we talked through some of the more heart-rending journeys there were audible gasps in the room: the story of a doctor who had refused to see a patient after she’d brought in her own research on her daughter’s condition; a woman with a worsening disease who had visited multiple doctors to try to get a diagnosis; a man who was caring for his mother-in-law, who was so debilitated by Alzheimer’s that she routinely tried to climb out the second floor bedroom window.

In Design for Real Life, Sarah Wachter-Boettcher and Eric Meyer note that “the more users have opened up to you in the research phase” the more realistic your personas can be. More realistic personas, in turn, make it easier to imagine crisis points. And this was exactly what began to unfold as we shared our user journeys. As we told these stories, we felt a shift in the room. The clients started to share their own unforgettable healthcare experiences. One woman pulled out her phone and showed us pictures of her tiny premature infant, wearing her husband’s wedding ring around her wrist as she lay there in an incubator, surrounded by tubes and wires. When we took a break we overheard a number of people on the client side talking over the details of these stories and coming up with ideas for how they could help that went so beyond the hospital website it was hard to believe that had been our starting point. One person pointed out that a number of journeys started in Urgent Care and suggested that perhaps the company should look at expanding into urgent care facilities.

In the end, the research changed the company’s approach to the site.

“We talked about the stories throughout the course of the project,” one of our client contacts told me. “There was so much raw humanity to them.” A year after the project wrapped up (even though due to organizational changes at the hospital group our strategy recommendations have yet to be implemented), our client quickly rattled off the names of a few of our customer types. It is worth noting, too, that while our recommendations went much farther than the original scope of the project, the client appreciated being able to make informed strategic decisions about the path forward. Their immediate need was a revamped website, but once they understood that this need paled in comparison to all of the other places they could have an impact on their customers’ lives, they began talking excitedly about how to make this vision a reality down the road.

For us, this project changed the way we conceptualize projects, and illustrated that the framework of a website strategy or even “digital” strategy isn’t always meaningful. Because as the digital world increasingly melds with the IRL world, as customers spend their days shifting between websites, apps, texting, and face-to-face interactions, it becomes increasingly important for designers and researchers to drop the distinctions we’ve drawn around where an interaction happens, or where emotion spikes.

Before jumping in however, it is important to prep the team about how, and most importantly, why your interview questions probe into how customers are feeling. When you get into the interview room, coaxing out these emotional stories requires establishing emotional rapport quickly, and making it a safe place for participants to express themselves.

Being able to establish this rapport has changed our approach to other projects as well—we’ve seen that emotion can play into customer journeys in the unlikeliest of places. On a recent project for a client who sells enterprise software, we interviewed a customer who had recently gone through a system upgrade experience which affected tens of thousands of users. It did not go well and he was shaken by the experience. “The pressure on our team was incredible. I am never doing that ever again,” he said. Even for this highly technical product, fear, frustration, anger, and trust were significant elements of the customer journey. This is a journey where a customer has ten thousand people angry at him if the product he bought does not perform well, and he could even be out of a job if it gets bad enough. So while the enterprise software industry doesn’t exactly scream “worst day of my life” in the same way that hospitals do, emotion can run high there as well.

We sometimes forget that customers are human beings and human beings are driven by emotion, especially during critical life events. Prior to walking into the interview room we’d thought we might unearth some hidden problems around parking at the ER, navigating the hospital, and, of course, issues with the website content. But those issues were so eclipsed by all of the emotions surrounding a hospital visit that they came to seem irrelevant. Not being able to find parking at the ER is annoying, but more important was not knowing what you were supposed to do next because you’d just been told you have cancer, or because you feared for your child’s life. By digging deeper into this core insight, we were able to provide recommendations that went beyond websites, and instead took the entire human experience into account.

For researchers and designers tasked with improving experiences, it is essential to have an understanding of the customer journey in its full, messy, emotional agglomeration. Regardless of the touchpoint your customer is interacting with, the emotional ride is often what ties it all together, particularly in high-stakes subject matter. Are your client’s customers likely to be frustrated, or are they likely to be having the worst day of their lives? In the latter types of situations, recognize that you will get much more impactful insights when you address the emotions head-on.

And when appropriate, don’t be afraid to cry.

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Microsoft Flow - Create automated workflows between your favorite apps

Microsoft Flow is a cloud-based service that makes it simple to automate common tasks and business processes across your applications and services

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Do You Still Believe in 200 Rank Factors, and Santa Claus

Do you still believe there are 200 ranking factors?

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Publishers Give Google AMP Mixed Reviews

Some publishers are unhappy with the performance of their ad revenues with Google AMP.

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Twitter Q3 Beats Expectations: Revenue $616 million, Cuts Jobs by 9pct

It seems twitter's Q3 performance was better than expected, at $616 million in revenue...

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Liminal Thinking

Network Access: Finding and Working with Creative Communities

WiGig Super-Fast Wireless Certified By WiFi Alliance

Super-fast wireless technology based upon the 802.11ad standard, dubbed WiGig, has been certified by the WiFi Alliance.

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DDoS Attack Brings Down Sites - Twitter, Github, Reddit

Widespread outage, many top sites hit with DDoS disrupting services

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Linux "Dirty Cow" Exploit: Patch Your Systems Now

This bug has been around for nine years.

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Going Font-Less

WebmasterWorld Members discuss going font-less, and the pitfalls of doing so.

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JavaScript for Web Designers: DOM Scripting

Google Mobile-Only Search Index Coming Within Months

Announced at Pubcon, Google's Gary Illyes said Google has plans to release a separate mobile search index.

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New and Less Common Webmaster Technologies and Software

WebmasterWorld Members discuss some of the newer or less common technologies and software.

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WebmasterWorld's Brett Tabke Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

WebmasterWorld's Brett Tabke was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at a ceremony in Las Vegas on 12 October, 2016

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Server Farms - Update

This is where we report data center IP ranges as they are discovered or change in the rapidly evolving assigned IP landscape.

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Google Updates and SERP Changes - October 2016

WebmasterWorld's monthly look at Google's SERPs changes.

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Using CSS Mod Queries with Range Selectors

Windows 7 Rebounds and Windows 10 Uptake Declines

Windows 7 has increased its market share now that the free Windows 10 uptake has reached its end.

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Facebook Launches Marketplace: Buying and Selling in Local Communities

Buying and selling in local communities is the aim of Facebook's new Marketplace.

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Blocking the IP of a Bot that is hogging resources

WebmasterWorld Members discuss how best to identify and block a bot wasting bandwidth and hogging resources.

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ICANN Now The Ultimate Overseer of Domain Name System

Some ask if the U.S. Government has given away the Internet?

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Apple to Start Selling App Store Search Ads October 5, 2016

Apple's App Store search ads are about to take off from October 5, 2016

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Twitter Rolling Out "Moments" For Everyone

Look out for "Moments" appearing on your menu.

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BlackBerry To Stop Making Phones

BlackBerry has said it is to give up making phones.

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Task Performance Indicator: A Management Metric for Customer Experience

Link Building Mistakes of the Professionals and Newbies

WebmasterWorld discuss today's link building mistakes.

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Penguin 4.0 Confirmation, is Now Part of Core Algorithm, and Realtime

Today, Google confirmed what many WebmasterWorld had known, that Penguin 4.0, confirmed today, is now part of Google's core algorithm, and it'll continue to run in real time.

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Yahoo Confirms 500 Million Accounts Hacked

A recent investigation by Yahoo! Inc. has confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the company's network in late 2014

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Massive Jumps in GSC Legacy Crawl Errors

WebmasterWorld Members discuss the massive jumps in legacy crawl errors in Search Console.

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ICANN To Change Cryptographic Key Pairs For The First Time

The cryptographic key switch-over will take around two years to complete.

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Bing Academic and Movie Search Intelligent Autocomplete

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Why We Should All Be Data Literate

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Facebook and Google in Coalition for Better Ads, Formed To Improve Consumer Experience

Major advertisers and businesses involved in the Internet, including Facebook and Google, IAB and IAB Europe, have formed Coalition for Better Ads to "improve consumers' experience with online advertising."

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Official recall of Samsung Note 7 phones

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is now stepping in on a formal recall

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Facebook Messenger to Allow Messages with Payments

Facebook made some Messenger announcements for developers, including the capability to send payments via Messenger.

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Ad Exchange Launched by Ad Block Company

Users with the Adblock Plus software installed will soon get ads, but, it's described as acceptable ads

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Designing Interface Animation: an Interview with Val Head

A note from the editors: To mark the publication of Designing Interface Animation, ALA managing editor Mica McPheeters and editor Caren Litherland reached out to Val Head via Google Hangouts and email for a freewheeling conversation about web animation. The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Animation is not new, of course, but its journey on the web has been rocky. For years, technological limitations compelled us to take sides: Should we design rich, captivating sites in Flash? Or should we build static, standards-compliant sites with HTML and CSS (and maybe a little JavaScript)?

Author Val Head describes herself as a “weirdo” who never wanted to choose between those two extremes—and, thanks to the tools at our disposal today, we no longer have to. Without compromising standards, we can now create complex animations natively in the browser: from subtle transitions using CSS to immersive, 3-D worlds with WebGL. Animation today is not just on the web, but of the web. And that, says Val, is a very big deal.

Caren Litherland: Are people intimidated by animation?

Val Head: There are definitely some web folks out there who are intimidated by the idea of using web animation in their work. For some, it’s such a new thing—very few of us have a formal background in motion design or animation—and it can be tough to know where to start or how to use it. I’ve noticed there’s some hesitation to embrace web animation due to the “skip intro” era of Flash sites. There seems to be a fear of recreating past mistakes. But it doesn’t have to be that way at all.

We’re in a new era of web animation right now. The fact that we can create animation with the same technologies we’ve always used to make websites—things like CSS and JavaScript—completely changes the landscape. Now that we can make animation that is properly “of the web” (to borrow a phrase from Jeremy Keith), not just tacked on top with a plug-in, we get to define what the new definition of web animation is with our work.

Right now, on the web, we can create beautiful, purposeful animation that is also accessible, progressively enhanced, and performant. No other medium can do that. Which is really exciting!

CL: I’ve always felt that there was something kind of ahistorical and ahistoricizing about the early web. As the web has matured, it seems to have taken a greater interest in the history and traditions that inform it. Web typography is a good example of this increased self-awareness. Can the same be said for animation?

VH: I think so! In the early days of the web, designers often looked down on it as a less capable medium. Before web type was a thing, a number of my designer friends would say that they could never design for the web because it wasn’t expressive enough as a medium. That the web couldn’t really do design. Then the web matured, web type came along, and that drastically changed how we designed for the web. Web animation is doing much the same thing. It’s another way we have now to be expressive with our design choices, to tell stories, to affect the experience in meaningful ways, and to make our sites unique.

With type, we turned to the long-standing craft of print typography for some direction and ideas, but the more we work with type on the web, the more web typography becomes its own thing. The same is true of web animation. We can look to things like the 12 classic principles of animation for reference, but we’re still defining exactly what web animation will be and the tools and technologies we use for it. Web animation adds another dimension to how we can design on the web and another avenue for reflecting on what the rich histories of design, animation, and film can teach us.

Mica McPheeters: Do you find that animation often gets tacked on at the end of projects? Why is that? Shouldn’t it be incorporated from the outset?

VH: Yes, it often does get left to the end of projects and almost treated as just the icing on top. That’s a big part of what can make animation seem like it’s too hard or ineffective. If you leave any thought of animation until the very end of a project, it’s pretty much doomed to fail or just be meaningless decoration.

Web animation can be so much more than just decoration, but only if we make it part of our design process. It can’t be a meaningful addition to the user experience if you don’t include it in the early conversations that define that experience.

Good web animation takes a whole team. You need input from all disciplines touching the design to make it work well. It can’t just be designed in a vacuum and tossed over the fence. That approach fails spectacularly well when it comes to animation.

Communicating animation ideas and making animation truly part of the process can be the biggest hurdle for teams to embrace animation. Change is hard! That’s why I dedicated two entire chapters of the book to how to get animation done in the real world. I focus on how to communicate animation ideas to teammates and stakeholders, as well as how to prototype those ideas efficiently so you can get to solutions without wasting time. I also cover how to represent animation in your design systems or documentation to empower everyone (no matter what their background is) to make good motion design decisions.

CL: Can you say more about the importance of a motion audit? Can it be carried out in tandem with a content audit? And how do content and animation tie in with each other?

VH: I find motion audits to be incredibly useful before creating a motion style guide or before embarking on new design efforts. It’s so helpful to know where animation is already being used, and to take an objective look at how effective it is both from a UX angle and a branding angle. If you have a team of any significant size, chances are you’ve probably got a lot of redundant, and maybe even conflicting, styles and uses of animation in your site. Motion audits give you a chance to see what you’re already doing, identify things that are working, as well as things that might be broken or just need a little work. They’re also a great way to identify places where animation could provide value but isn’t being used yet.

Looking at all your animation efforts at a high level gives you a chance to consolidate the design decisions behind them, and establish a cohesive approach to animation that will help tie the experience together across mediums and viewport sizes. You really need that high-level view of animation when creating a motion style guide or animation guidelines.

You could definitely collect the data for a motion audit in tandem with a content audit. You’ll likely be looking in all the same places, just collecting up more data as you go through your whole site.

There is a strong tie between content and animation. I’ve been finding this more and more as I work with my consulting clients. Both can be focused around having a strong message and communicating meaningfully. When you have a clear vision of what you want to say, you can say it with the motion you use just like you can say it with the words you choose.

Voice and tone documents can be a great place to start for deciding how your brand expresses itself in motion. I’ve leaned on these more than once in my consulting work. Those same words you use to describe how you’d like your content to feel can be a basis of how you aim to make the animation feel as well. When all your design choices—everything from content, color, type, animation—come from the same place, they create a powerful and cohesive message.

CL: One thing in your book that I found fascinating was your statement that animation “doesn’t have to include large movements or even include motion at all.” Can you talk more about that? And is there any sort of relationship between animation and so called calm technology?

VH: It’s true, animation doesn’t always mean movement. Motion and animation are really two different things, even though we tend to use the words interchangeably. Animation is a change in some property over time, and that property doesn’t have to be a change in position. It can be a change in opacity, or color, or blur. Those kinds of non-movement animation convey a different feel and message than animation with a lot of motion.

If you stick to animating only non-movement properties like opacity, color, and blur, your interface will likely have a more calm and stable feel than if it included a lot of movement. So if your goal is to design something that feels calm, animation can definitely be a part of how you convey that feeling.

Any time you use animation, it says something, there’s no getting around that. When you’re intentional with what you want it to say and how it fits in with the rest of your design effort, you can create animation that feels like it’s so much a part of the design that it’s almost invisible. That’s a magical place to be for design.

MM: Do we also need to be mindful of the potential of animation to cause harm?

VH: We do. Animation can help make interfaces more accessible by reducing cognitive load, helping to focus attention in the right place, or other ways. But it also has potential to cause harm, depending on how you use it. Being aware of how animation can potentially harm or help users leads us to make better decisions when designing it. I included a whole chapter in the book on animating responsibly because it’s an important consideration. I also wrote about how animation can affect people with vestibular disorders a little while back on A List Apart.

MM: Who today, in your opinion, is doing animation right/well/interestingly?

VH: I’m always on the lookout for great uses of animation on the web—in fact, I highlight noteworthy uses of web animation every week in the UI Animation Newsletter.

Stripe Checkout has been one of my favorites for how well it melds UI animation seamlessly into the design. It really achieves that invisible animation that is so well integrated that you don’t necessarily notice it at first. The smooth 3D, microinteraction animation, and sound design on the Sirin Labs product page are also really well done, but take a completely different approach to UI animation than Checkout.

Publications have been using animation in wonderful ways for dataviz and storytelling lately, too. The Wall Street Journal’s Hamilton algorithm piece was a recent data-based favorite of mine and the New York Times did some wonderful storytelling work with animation around the Olympics with their piece on Simone Biles. Also, I really love seeing editorial animation, like the Verge had on a story about Skype’s sound design. The animations they used really brought the story and the sounds they were discussing come to life.

I really love seeing web animation used in such a variety of ways. It makes me extra excited for the future of web animation!

MM: Any parting thoughts, Val?

VH: My best advice for folks who want to use more animation in their work is to start small and don’t be afraid to take risks as you get more comfortable working with animation. The more you animate, the better you’ll get at developing a sense for how to design it well. I wrote Designing Interface Animation to give web folks a solid foundation on animation to build from and I’m really excited to see how web animation will evolve in the near future.

For even more web animation tips and resources, join me and a great bunch of designers and developers on the UI Animation Newsletter for a weekly dose of animation knowledge.

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Designing Interface Animation

This week's sponsor: HIRED

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Twitter Changes What Counts in 140 Characters, Making Longer Tweets Possible

In the coming months, Twitter has said it'll cut down on the content that counts towards your 140 character limit.

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Google: Spammy Widget Links Violate its Webmaster Guidelines

As if you didn't know this already, Google has now made it abundantly clear...

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Google Tests "Shop the Look" For Mobile

Clearly, Pinterest's success has caught Google's eye with this test of "Shop the Look."

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Webfonts on the Prairie

Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2016

WebmasterWorld's monthly look at Google's SERPs changes.

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Apple to Remove Abandoned Apps, and New App Names Limited to 50 Characters

Apple's new policy to clear up the App Store.

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Facebook Wants Advertisers to Improve Their Sites for Mobile Users

Facebook is keen for advertisers to improve their sites for a better mobile experience.

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This week's sponsor: ADOBE XD

ADOBE XD. Go from idea to prototype faster. Test drive the Adobe XD preview for Mac and tell us what you think.

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Help! We (Think We) Need to Hire a Content Strategist

Those of us working in content strategy know that it is a rich and complicated discipline. We understand, of course, that there are different types of content strategists. But we need to remember that outside of our content strategy bubble, the discipline is still pretty new to colleagues and clients. As the discipline matures and more companies are looking to hire for content strategy, how can companies educate themselves on how to use our specific skills?

I’ve recently been on the job market. And so I’ve spent a lot of time wading through content strategy job listings and meeting with hiring managers. My experience suggests that people beginning to actively hire content specialists frequently have little understanding of what their companies need beyond a title. I would even estimate that about half of my interviews over the past few months have consisted of talking through and refining job descriptions with those sitting across the table from me.

Hiring managers at agencies, brands, and startups would do well to hire based on the type of work they want to focus on—not on a price tag or a title. Like experience design (which content strategy is sometimes folded into), content strategy has subspecialties. Some strategists veer more toward the UX side: user research, content maps, content modeling. Others specialize in PR and native advertising (social media, influencer outreach, and content discovery); still others focus more on content management systems and governance.

Some content strategists even overlap with digital strategists (considering the audience, conversion, and the larger digital ecosystem), but then also do some of the more tactical, executional work to bring these digital ecosystems to life. Others may specialize in search and organic growth. Increasingly, former journalists have started to position themselves as content strategists, using their expertise with long-form and mid-length content to cash in on the boom in native advertising work and branded content creation.

And let’s not forget how industry and categories figure into the equation. For example, if you are an ecommerce brand hiring a content strategist for a website relaunch, you may want a content strategist with past experience in ecommerce working on your site, given your specific conversion challenges. Similarly, for highly regulated spaces like financial services, healthcare, or alcohol, a content strategist with past experience navigating these categories makes sense.

If you don’t practice content strategy, talk to someone who does

For any company trying to make their first content-strategy hire, the most logical place to start is talking with a real live content strategist. I don’t mean that you should reach out to a content strategist on the pretense that this is a position for them and then use an interview to pick their brain (and waste their time). For starters, that’s not very nice; furthermore, you don’t want anyone spreading the word that your company doesn’t know what it’s doing and may not be the best place to work.

No, I mean that you should formally engage a content strategist as a consultant. Have them talk to your team, take a look at your business, help write up an accurate job description, and even start recruiting through their network for the specific position you seek to fill. Chances are they know a lot of good people in their community who would be a perfect fit for the role.

Too often, I’ve seen job descriptions written by someone who is obviously not a content strategist and interviews conducted by people who don’t really understand the discipline. This is likely because, depending on the organization and the kind of content strategy work you do, your role could easily sit in Strategy, Creative, UX, Product, Communications, or PR. And if you’re a content strategist more focused on measurement and SEO, a case could even be made for Analytics. While I understand why this occurs, it ultimately means that the candidates won’t be as strong as they could be.

For companies that already have a content strategist or two on staff, it makes sense to engage them as well, even if they’re in a different location or less senior than the role for which you are currently hiring. I guarantee that the kind of feedback they give you will be invaluable.

Don’t look for “unicorns”

Banish the word “unicorn” from your vocabulary—along with, for that matter, “rock star,” “ninja,” and any other ridiculous buzzword of the moment. I’ve worked in the content sphere long enough to know my own strengths and weaknesses. For example, while I’ve certainly worked on content strategy projects that required information architecture, metadata, and taxonomy expertise, I know that my sweet spot lies more in editorial strategy. I’ve learned to position myself accordingly.

Unfortunately, today’s job market sometimes views such candor as a weakness. Ours is a culture that rewards confidence. Indeed, a survey of over 400,000 hiring professionals revealed that confidence is one of the top three traits that employers say they are looking for in new hires. This is particularly true in the tech space, where much has recently been made of the confidence gap and how it negatively impacts women. As a result, during the hiring process, people can feel pressured to claim that they can “do it all” just to nail down the job. And when a hiring manager doesn’t fully understand what they are hiring for, compulsory confidence can be especially problematic.

The thing is, as a hiring manager, you should be skeptical of anyone who claims to do it all. Someone with over five years of experience who says they can do both structural content strategy and editorial content strategy equally well is likely inflating the truth. And while there may be a tiny constellation of people out there who really can do everything, it probably won’t be for the $60 per hour you are offering. Be realistic when you hire. Remember, you aren’t hiring for sales or new business; you’re hiring to get a job done. Don’t fall for the slickest kid in the room—you may find yourself with a mess on your hands.

Ask to see deliverables

As you decide to move forward in the process with a candidate you’ve vetted, rather than giving them a test or a lengthy spec-work presentation, a great way to see if they’re up to the task is to request a package of some of their past deliverables. Here are some deliverables to look for based on the type of content strategist you are hiring for:

• Website relaunch: content audit, comparative audit, content matrix, editorial guidelines
• CMS redesign: taxonomy and metadata recommendations, content models, site maps, workflow recommendations
• Content strategist for an online magazine: editorial calendars, voice and tone outputs, content briefs
• Content strategist with social-media focus: social editorial calendars, examples of social content, measurement reports
• Content strategist with SEO and analytics expertise: SEO recommendations, analytics audit

Where do we go from here?

Knowing that you “need” content strategy at your company is one thing; hiring the right kind of content strategist to suit your needs and goals is another. Stop wasting your and your prospective hires’ time. Ask an expert for help, stay realistic about your hires, and request the appropriate deliverables. Making an informed decision about whom you bring on board will set you and your team up for success.

 

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Apple Ordered by EU to Repay $14.5 Billion in Irish Tax Breaks

EU says tax deal with Ireland allowed Apple to pay almost zero tax on European profits between 2003 and 2014

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Opera says its service for syncing web browser data was hacked

Opera sync servers hacked, usernames and passwords at risk

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The End Of Google Fiber?

According to a new report Google Fiber was told to slash staff numbers in half and drastically reduce installation costs

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How do you calculate ROI based on true lead value or quality?

WmW members discuss how to figure out which campaigns bring in the highest real revenue and lead quality

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Adsense 3 ads limit lifted?

Is Google AdSense removing the limit of 3-ads-per-page?

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Google wants to put an end to pop-over ads

Google to downrank pages with intrusive interstitials

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Why Aren’t You Asking Questions?

This week's sponsor: CONTENTFUL

CONTENTFUL, an API-first, developer-friendly CMS. Build custom content-rich front-end with the tools of your choice.

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Pinterest Adds Video Advertising

Adding to its buyable Pins capability, Pinterest is now moving in to video advertising on the main Pinterest feed.

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Communicating Animation

Another 10k Apart: Create a Website in 10 KB, Win Prizes!

It gives us great pleasure to announce the 2016 10k Apart competition. Create a fully functioning website in 10 KB or less! Amaze your friends! Astound the world! Compete for fabulous prizes!

Why 10k? Why now? It’s simple, really. In the 16 years since we told you about the first contest to create a functioning website in 5 KB or less, countless aspects of web design and development have changed. And, year after year, A List Apart has marked those changes, even instigating more than a few of them ourselves. But in all those years, one thing has remained constant: the need to keep our websites lean. Indeed, in the age of mobile slash responsive slash multidevice design, keeping sites lean and mean is more important than ever.

In 2000, Stewart Butterfield launched the original 5k competition to celebrate the skill, ingenuity, and innovation of designers and developers who wring every byte of performance out of the websites and applications they fashion. Ten years later, Microsoft and An Event Apart launched the first 10k Apart—adding progressive enhancement, accessibility, and responsive web design to the competition’s requirements.

And now, An Event Apart and Microsoft Edge have teamed up once more to entice you, the makers of websites, to improve your performance game yet again by competing in a new 10k Apart that’s even tougher than the last one. Golly!

Ah, but there’s gain for your pain. Besides fame and glory, you could win $10,000 in cash, tickets to An Event Apart, the complete A Book Apart series, and a copy of Aaron Gustafson’s Adaptive Web Design, 2nd Edition, which I consider the unofficial successor to Designing With Web Standards. So what are you waiting for? Hop on over to the 10k Apart website for complete rules and details.

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Link Maintenance Matters

"Even if you don't care about Google rankings, you should care about growing referral traffic to your website so your business isn't 100pct reliant on Google sending organic traffic."

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Chrome 53 Browser Will Block Background Flash Content

Chrome is helping kill off Flash in coming updates.

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Facebook Finds a Way Round the Ad Blockers

Facebook seems to have found a way around the ad blockers on its desktop site and will turn on the system Tuesday.

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Practical SVG

World Wide Web is 25 Years Old

It was 25-years ago that Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World's first Web Page at CERN.

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Google Updates and SERP Changes - August 2016

WebmasterWorld's monthly look at Google's SERPs changes.

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Facebook Changes Newsfeed over Clickbait Headlines

You know the type of headlines... "..you won't believe what happens next..."

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Firefox Wants to Get Rid of Your Custom 404 Error Pages

WebmasterWorld Members discuss the latest Mozilla Test Pilot add-on, and it's causing some angst. When Mozilla's Firefox Test Pilot add-on receives a 404 error it displays, "This page appears to be missing. View a saved version courtesy of the Wayback Machine".

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Google Previews Expanded AMP Support in Entire SERPs

Google is showing a preview of its expanded AMP results with the idea that webmasters can see how having AMP pages will help their sites.

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Finding Opportunities in the Mistakes We Make

Roughly six years into my software development career, I had worked on interesting projects, met amazing people, and had the opportunity to travel to exotic cities. Yet I was frustrated. I was burning the candle at both ends to get things done. I didn’t look back to see if I could improve on how things were being done; I had no time. Deep down I knew it wasn’t feasible. I was working hard, not smart; I felt like I wasn’t working toward anything; I was falling behind with technology. I was burning out.

I started searching for an opportunity to facilitate my technical growth. Two years later I was based at an enterprise client who adopted agile software development methodologies, and everything changed for me. This new world exposed me to a diverse working environment and new perspectives, and encouraged me to ask even more questions than before. This is when I discovered the power of the words “reflect, inspect, and adapt.”

It wasn’t a walk in the park with unicorns and rainbows, but the experience has aided me in officially branding my career as one exciting journey of professional and self-discovery. Now ten years into my career, I realize that for most of that time I have been in survival mode. After looking back, I’d like to share how I found opportunities in the mistakes I made.

Define clear career and personal goals

Computers weren’t a household name when I was growing up in South Africa, but I was lucky to have access to my dad’s Pentium 386. I was amazed at this technology. When we got internet access, I was immediately hooked on the online world. I taught myself HTML and later built my own machine with the money I made from designing a website for the local newspaper.

When I chose my higher education path I had one goal—I wanted to make websites. I didn’t want a degree; I wanted experience. I studied at a college for two years, then excitedly entered the workforce to follow my passion.

As I entered the workforce, I wasn’t prepared for the politics: managers expecting things to be done almost immediately; clients who don’t engage and are unsure of what they want; clients who express urgency, yet wait for the last minute to provide you with everything you need; an increased workload due to colleagues who stay well inside their comfort zone. These are just some examples of the politics that initiated my frustrations.

I wondered if this is where I’d still be in five or ten years and if I would be able to sustain it. I didn’t know the answer to the former, but to the latter it was definitely no.

Coupled with turning thirty, the new perspectives I developed in the agile environment made me really evaluate my future. I realized that I didn’t have goals; I was only chasing my passion. Granted, it is fun and I gained a lot of experience in many different areas in IT, but I don’t have anything tangible to show for it now.

After much reflection, I discovered these goals for myself:

1. Increase productivity. I minimize distractions like email, social media, and uninvited guests to improve my productivity. To make sure I am working on the right tasks, I need to have a clear understanding about what I am working on and why.
2. Develop software that has a positive impact on people. It is important to understand business thinking and impact on users. I need to ask appropriate questions, and I need to guide and negotiate with product stakeholders.
3. Share my knowledge. I can create an online identity (publish articles, blog), possibly speak at events, and contribute to open-source software. I can find projects on GitHub of libraries and tools that I regularly use and create a pull request.
4. Better my craftsmanship. I can learn through code reviews and peer conversations, listen to podcasts, read up on best practices, read more craft-related reference books, and reflect on my implementation.
5. Learn to live mindfully. To have a positive impact on people, I can make small adjustments and engage those around me to help me grow. Meditation, reflection, and motivational books are tools I could use to guide me.
6. Showcase my career. Create a tangible timeline of projects I have worked on including screenshots, descriptions, technologies, and learnings.

These goals feel more defined to me than just making cool websites. I wish I had set some goals a little sooner but luckily — as cliché as it sounds — it’s never too late. Goals give you direction and purpose. Like me, you may have worked many late nights on personal projects that never materialized. It helps to have focus and something definite to achieve. I find what’s best of all is that I don’t feel constrained by having these goals. They represent what’s important to me now but if my values change, I can inspect and adapt my goals.

Put people before technology

For too long, I worked alone on my own codebases and wondered if I was doing things the right way. I had little to no exposure to working in teams and dealing with industry buzzwords like agile, TDD/BDD, Gang of Four, SOLID, code reviews, continuous integration/delivery, DevOps, and <insert your favorite technical jargon here>. I was in a bubble falling further behind in the fast-paced technical world. I was focused on working with technology and never realized how important it is to collaborate.

If you work in a company with a silo-based culture or one- or two-people teams, try not to accept things for what they are:

• Get involved with your coworkers by communicating and collaborating on projects.
• Try introducing knowledge-sharing sessions and code reviews.
• Reflect on what worked and what didn’t and also unpack why, so that you can learn from it.
• Approach management with suggestions on how you and your colleagues can produce more solid and effective software.
• Attend conferences or smaller community meetups. Not only can you learn a lot through the content but you have the chance to network and learn from an array of people with different skills.

Prioritize your tasks

I often worked about twelve to sixteen hours a day on projects with short deadlines. I spent my official work hours helping colleagues with problems, immediately responding to email, attending to people with queries or friendly drop-ins, supporting projects that were in production, or fighting fires resulting from errors that usually came from miscommunication. This left me with very little time to be productive. When I finally got to work on my project, my perfectionism only increased my stress levels. Regardless, I never missed a deadline.

I thought everything was important. If I didn’t do what I was doing the world would end, right? No! The reality is that when everything is important, nothing is important.

This working behavior sets unrealistic expectations for the business, your colleagues, and yourself. It hides underlying issues that need to be addressed and resolved. If you are working at an unsustainable pace, you can’t deliver your best work plus you end up missing out on actually living your life.

The power of retrospectives

The most important ceremony (or activity) I was introduced to in the agile environment was the retrospective, which is “the process of retrospecting at the heart of Scrum (Inspect and Adapt), eXtreme Programming (fix it when it breaks) and Lean Software Development (Kaizen or Continuous Improvement)”.¹

Through retrospection you are granted the opportunity to reflect on how you — and the team — did something, so that you can improve the process. Let’s run through this technique to identify some pain points using the situation I had found myself in:

• Working unsustainable hours because there was too much to do. I helped everyone else before I worked on my own tasks, I worked on things that didn’t add much value, and I thought that all the features needed to be ready for launch. I was blind to asking for help when I needed it.
• Dealing with too many distractions. I allowed the distractions by immediately switching context to help others because it was important to them.
• Key-person dependency. I was the only person working on one of the projects.
• Miscommunication resulting in errors. Communication was done via email and the stakeholders were off-site. There wasn’t quick feedback to indicate if the project was going in the right direction.

Once the pain points are identified, adjustments need to be made in order to see improvement. Large adjustments could take too long to implement or adjust to, which leads to disruptions. Smaller adjustments are better. These adjustments may or may not work in the long haul, so we can look at them as experiments.

• To work more sustainably I need to know what I need to work on — and why — so that I can add value without wearing myself out. Perhaps I could find out what needs to be available for launch and create a prioritized list of things to do. This list could help me focus and get into the “zone.”
• To manage client expectations, we can try open communication. This can also help me prioritize my tasks.
• To overcome some of the distractions I could reap the benefits of being selfish by saying no (within reason). This could help me stay in the zone for longer. If anything must be expedited I can start offering trade-offs: if I do X now, can Y wait?
• To alleviate the pressures of being the sole person able to do certain things, I could have more conversations with my manager and train a colleague so that they are aware of what is going on and someone can take over in the event that I get sick or am on vacation.
• To reduce errors from miscommunication, perhaps we could create visibility for stakeholders. Introduce a physical workflow board and have constant feedback loops by requesting frequent reviews to demonstrate what we have done.

Experiments run for a period of time and need to be measured. This is a grey area. Measurements aren’t always accurate, but it always boils down to the pain. If the pain is the same or has increased, then the experiment needs to be adjusted or a new experiment introduced. If it has been alleviated, even slightly, then there is improvement.

Learning through experimentation

Many of the experiments mentioned above already form part of the agile Scrum framework, so let me introduce you to real-world experiments we did in our team.

Based on the way our development stories were deployed, we experienced pain with testing stories in the appropriate order. We were using Jenkins for automated deployments and each one got a number incremented from the previous one, but the testers weren’t testing the stories in any particular order. If a story was ready to be deployed, they wouldn’t know if there was another, untested story that they were unwittingly promoting to production along with it, or if the story they tried to deploy was being held back by other stories still awaiting testing.

Without waiting for a retrospective we had a conversation to highlight the pain. We chose to write the build number on a note stuck on the story card on our wall and add a comment to our digital storyboard. This created quick visibility on the chronological order of the possible deployments of our stories.

A change control process was later introduced that required details of a production deployment and a rollback plan for that change. We couldn’t quickly access the last few production build numbers, so we started writing them on stickies and put those onto a new section on our physical board. Now we didn’t have to search through email or log in to Jenkins to find these numbers. One day, we were asked when we last deployed and had to go back to email for the answer, so we started adding the date to the deployment number stickies.

These were simple experiments but they added a lot of value by saving time. We acted on alleviating pain as it happened.

Don’t be afraid to experiment if you are not in an Agile world. If you simply run to business with problems and offer no solutions then business will frown at you. The goal here is simple: identify your pain points and find simple solutions (or improvements) to try to alleviate the pain. Experiment, inspect, and adapt often.

Believe in yourself

Survival mode never did me any good. I didn’t get an award for working long hours to make deadlines. Letting my mistakes and frustrations build up over the years made me stop believing in myself.

I was stuck in a rut; technology was changing around me fast and I was burnt out and falling behind. I’d scroll through Stack Overflow and instantly feel stupid. I’d spend time looking at all the amazing websites winning awards on Awwwards and feel inadequate. I didn’t have a life as it was consumed by my obsession for work. I didn’t know what I wanted anymore, or what I wanted to aspire to.

Introspection helped me. By inspecting my behavior, I was able to make minor adjustments that I would then inspect again to see if they worked. This simple activity can show you what you are capable of and lead you to learning more about yourself and those around you. I am applying what I have learned in software in a personal capacity. I have my life back, and I feel empowered and freed.

My final thoughts

I’ve definitely made a lot of mistakes in my career. What I have shared with you is probably only a fraction of them. I don’t regret my mistakes at all; that is how I got my experience. The only regret I have is that I wish I had begun reflecting on them sooner.

When a mistake is made, an opportunity is born: learn from that mistake to do something differently next time. Take time to step out of the subjective into the objective, so that you can reflect and consider what you could do to change it. (And don’t be too hard on yourself!)

My journey has taught me to implement small experiments that can be measured and to run them for short periods of time. If something works, keep it. If not, adjust it or throw it away. By making small changes, there are fewer disruptions. If you too are in survival mode — stop and breathe now! Reflect, inspect, and adapt.

Footnotes

• 1. From the Agile Retrospective Wiki.

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Windows 10 Anniversary Update Rolls Out Today

Over 350 million devices will start receiving the Windows 10 Anniversary update from today.

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Google, Alphabet Q2, 2016, Profit up 24pct to $4.88 billion

Google's, or I should say, Alphabet's, latest result for its Q2, 2016 show that its Year on year profits growth of 24% to $4.88 billion was ahead of analysts expectations.

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What is "Good Quality Traffic" for an AdSense Publisher?

WebmasterWorld Members discuss how to define good quality traffic for Google AdSense Publishers.

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Making Links Usable Again

WebmasterWorld Members discuss whether are we seeing a rollback where for a long time a graphic designer ruled the design with no input from a usability expert or UX/UI designer to where people are calling "Enough!" on non-functional design?

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Google Rolls Out New AdWords Developments For Mobile

Google is rolling out expanded text ads, responsive ads for display, and device bid adjustments to enable more precise control of device bids.

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Resurrecting Dead Personas

Windows 10 upgrades will cost $119 after July 29

If you've been dragging your heels on upgrading to Windows 10, now is the time to take action.

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Verizon to Acquire Yahoo for $4.83 Billion

One of the most talked about and expected takeover's has been confirmed: Verizon to acquire Yahoo's operating business.

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EFF Sues US Government over Copyright Law

The EFF is suing the US Government over onerous copyright provisions of copyright law that violate the First Amendment.

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Report: Verizon Closing in on Yahoo Deal

"Verizon is discussing a price close to $5 billion for Yahoo�s core internet business..."

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French Data Protection Commission Serves Notice on Microsoft over Windows 10 Data Privacy

France's data protection commission, CNIL, has served formal notice on Microsoft over Windows 10 privacy and data collection.

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Mozilla will block Flash in Firefox starting next month

This marks is the beginning of the end of Flash in Firefox

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Google AdSense: How Best to Tackle Content Thieves

WebmasterWorld Members discuss how to tackle the ongoing problem of content theft from a Google AdSense site.

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Twitter Account Verification Submission Now Open to All

If an account meets certain criterion, as detailed in the submission process, users can now apply to have a twitter account verified.

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Adapting to Input

Opera $1.2 Billion Buyout Drops to $600 Million in New Deal

Opera Software has struck a new deal for $600 million for parts of its business.

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Windows 10 Subscriptions Coming For Enterprise Users

How long before consumers get hit with subscription?

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New EU Antitrust Investigations Against Google over AdWords and AdSense

The EU has filed new antitrust investigations alleging Google's comparison shopping, and AdWords and AdSense breach EU rules.

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The Itinerant Geek

This spring I spent almost a month on the road, and last year I delivered 26 presentations in eight different countries, spending almost four months traveling. While doing all of this I am also running a business. I work every day that I am on the road, most days putting in at least six hours in addition to my commitments for whichever event I am at. I can only keep up this pace because travel is not a huge stressor in my life. Here are some things I have learned about making that possible, in the hope they are useful to anyone setting off on their first long trip. Add your own travel tips in the comments.

Before you go

During the run-up to going away, I stay as organized as possible. Otherwise I would lose a lot of time just preparing for the trips. I have a Trello board set up with packing list templates. I copy a list and remove or add anything specific to that trip. Then I can just grab things without thinking about it and check them off. I also use Trello to log the status of plans for each trip; for example, do I have a hotel room and flights booked? Is the slide deck ready? Do I know how I am getting from the airport to the hotel? This way I have instant access to the state of my plans and can also share this information if needed.

It is easy to think you will always have access to your information in its original form. However, it is worth printing a copy of your itinerary to keep with you just in case you can’t get online or your phone battery runs out. For times when you don’t have physical access to something at the moment, take photos of your passport and car insurance (if it covers rentals), and upload them somewhere secure.

Your travel may require a visa. If your passport is expiring within six months of your trip, you may want to get a new one — some countries won’t issue a visa on a passport that is due to expire soon. You can in some cases obtain pre-authorization, such as through the American ESTA form for participating in its Visa Waiver Program. This might have changed since your last trip. For example, Canada has introduced an eTA system as of March 2016. I’ve traveled to Canada for ConFoo for the last four years - if I attend next year, I’ll need to remember to apply for this beforehand.

Tell your bank and credit card company that you are traveling to try and avoid their blocking your card as soon as you make a purchase in your destination.

Make sure you have travel insurance that covers not only your possessions but yourself as well. Be aware that travel insurance will not pay out if you become sick or injured due to an existing condition that you didn’t tell them about first. You will have to pay an increased premium for cover of an existing issue, but finding yourself with no cover and far from home is something you want to avoid.

Make sure that you have sufficient of any medicine that you need. Include some extra in case of an unscheduled delay in returning home. I also usually pack a few supplies of common remedies - especially if I am going somewhere that is not English speaking. I have a vivid memory of acting out an allergic reaction to a Polish pharmacist to remind me of this!

I also prepare for the work I’ll be doing on the road. In addition to preparing for the talks or workshops I might be giving, I prepare for work on Perch or for the business. I organize my to-do list to prioritize tasks that are difficult to do on the road, and make sure they are done before I go. I push tasks into the travel period that I find easier on the small screen of my laptop, or that I can complete even in a distracting environment.

When booking travel, give yourself plenty of time. If you are short of time then every delay becomes stressful, and stress is tiring. Get to the airport early. Plan longer layovers than the 70 minutes your airline believes it will take you to deplane from the first flight and make it round a labyrinthine nightmare from the 1980s to find the next one. On the way home from Nashville, my first plane was delayed due to the inbound flight having to change equipment. The three-hour layover I had chosen meant that even with almost two hours of delay I still made my transatlantic leg home in time. Travel is a lot less stressful if you allow enough time for things to go wrong.

Air travel tips

Try to fly with the same airline or group in order to build up your frequent flyer status. Even a little bit of “status” in an airline miles program will give you some perks, and often priority for upgrades and standby tickets.

If you want to take anything of significant size onto the aircraft as hand luggage, the large roller bags are often picked out to be gate-checked on busy flights. I travel with a Tom Bihn Aeronaut bag, which I can carry as a backpack. It is huge, but the gate staff never spot it and due to being soft-sided, it can squash into the overhead compartments on the smaller planes that are used for internal U.S. flights.

Have in your carry-on an overnight kit in case your checked luggage does not make it to your destination at the same time as you do. Most of the time you’ll find your bag comes in on the next flight and will be sent to your hotel, but if you need to get straight to an event it adds stress to be unable to change or brush your teeth.

If you plan to work on the flight, charge your laptop and devices whenever you can. More and more planes come with power these days - even in economy - but it can’t be relied on. I have a BatteryBox, a large external battery. It’s a bit heavy but means I can work throughout a 10-hour flight without needing to plug in.

On the subject of batteries, airlines are becoming increasingly and understandably concerned about the fire risk posed by lithium ion batteries. Make sure you keep any spare batteries in your hand luggage and remove them if your bag is gate-checked. Here is the guide issued by British Airways on the subject.

A small flat cool bag, even without an icepack, works for a good amount of time to cool food you are bringing from airside as an alternative to the strange offerings onboard. I usually pop a cold water bottle in with it. London Heathrow T5 has a Gordon Ramsay “Plane Food” restaurant that will make you a packed lunch in a small cool bag to take on the plane!

Get lounging

Airport lounges are an oasis. Something I didn’t realize when I started traveling is that many airport lounges are pay on entry rather than being reserved for people with higher class tickets or airline status. If you have a long layover then the free drinks, wifi, power, and snacks will be worth the price - and if it means you can get work done you can be making money. The LoungeBuddy app can help you locate lounges that you can access whether you have airline status or not.

There is another secret to airline lounges: they often have a hotline to the airline and can sort out your travel issues if your flight is delayed or canceled. With the delayed flight in my last trip I checked myself into the American Airlines lounge, mentioning my delay and concern for the ongoing leg of the flight. The member of staff on the desk had the flight status checked and put me on standby for another flight “just in case.” She then came to let me know - while I happily sat working in the lounge - that it all looked as if it would resolve in time for me to make my flight. Once again, far less stressful than trying to work this out myself or standing in a long line at the desk in the airport.

Looking after yourself

If you do one or two trips a year then you should just relax and enjoy them - eat all the food, drink the drinks, go to the parties and forget about your regular exercise routine. If you go to more than 20, you won’t be able to do that and also do anything else. I quickly learned how to pace myself and create routines wherever I am that help to bring a sense of normal life to hotel living.

I try as much as possible to eat the same sort of food I usually eat for the majority of the time - even if it does mean I’m eating alone rather than going out for another dinner. Hotel restaurants are used to the fussiest of international travelers and will usually be able to accommodate reasonable requests. I do a quick recce of possible food options when I arrive in a location, including places I can cobble together a healthy packed lunch if the conference food is not my thing. I’ll grab a sparkling water from the free bar rather than another beer, and I’ll make use of the hotel gym or go for a run to try and keep as much as possible to the training routine I have at home. I do enjoy some great meals and drinks with friends - I just try not to make that something that happens every night, then I really enjoy those I do get to.

I’m fortunate to not need a lot of sleep, however I try to get the same amount I would at home. I’ve also learned not to stress the time differences. If I am doing trips that involve the East and West Coast of America I will often just remain on East Coast time, getting up at 4am rather than trying to keep time-shifting back and forth. If you are time-shifting, eating at the right time for where you are and getting outside into the light can really help. The second point is not always easy given the hotel-basement nature of many conference venues. I tend to run in the morning to remind myself it is daytime, but just getting out for a short walk in the daylight before heading into the event can make a huge difference.

I take care to wash my hands after greeting all those conference-goers and spending time in airports and other places, and am a liberal user of wet wipes to clean everything from my plane tray table to the hotel remote control. Yes, I look like a germaphobe, however I would hate to have to cancel a talk because I got sick. Taking a bit of care with these things does seem to make a huge difference in terms of the number of minor illnesses I pick up.

Many of us in this industry are introverts and find constant expectation to socialize and be available tiring. I’m no exception and have learned to build alone time into my day, which helps me to be more fully present when I am spending time with other speakers and attendees. Even as a speaker at an event, when I believe it is very important for me to be available to chat to attendees and not to just vanish, this is possible. Being at a large number of events I often have seen the talks given by other speakers, or know I can catch them at the next event. So I will take some time to work or relax during a few sessions in order to make myself available to chat during the breaks.

If you are taking extended trips of two weeks or more these can be hugely disruptive to elements of your life that are important to your wellbeing. That might be in terms of being unable to attend your place of worship, meet with a therapist, or attend a support group meeting. With some thought and planning you may be able to avoid this becoming an additional source of stress - can you find a congregation in your location, use Skype to meet with your therapist, or touch base with someone from your group?

Working on the road

Once at your destination, getting set up to work comfortably makes a huge difference to how much you can get done. Being hunched over a laptop for days will leave you tired and in pain. My last trip was my first with the new and improved Roost Stand, along with an external Apple keyboard and trackpad. The Roost is amazing; it is incredibly light and allowed me to get the laptop to a really great position to work properly.

Plan your work periods in advance and be aware of what you can do with no, or limited internet connectivity. In OmniFocus I have a Context to flag up good candidates for offline work, and I also note what I need to have in order to do that work. I might need to ensure I have a copy of some documentation, or to have done a git pull on a repository before I head into the land of no wifi. I use Dash for technical documentation data sets when offline. On a ten-hour flight with no wifi you soon realize just how much stuff you look up every day!

If traveling to somewhere that is going to be horribly expensive for phone data, do some research in advance and find out how to get a local pay-as-you-go sim card. If you want to switch that in your phone, you need to have an unlocked phone (and also the tools to open your phone). My preferred method is to put the card into a mobile broadband modem, then connect my phone to that with the wifi. This means I can still receive calls on my usual number.

The possibility of breaking, losing, or having your laptop stolen increases when it isn’t safely on your desk in the office. Have good insurance, but also good backups. During conferences, we often switch off things like Dropbox or our backup service in order to preserve the wifi for everyone - don’t forget you have done this! As soon as you are able, make sure your backups run. My aim is always to be in a position where if I lost my laptop, I could walk into a store, buy a new one and be up and running within a few hours without losing my work, and especially the things I need to present.

Enjoy the world!

Don’t forget to also plan a little sightseeing in the places you go. I would hate to feel that all I ever saw of these places was the airport, hotel, and conference room. I love to book myself on a walking tour. You can discover a lot about a city in a few hours the morning before your flight out, and there are always other lone business travelers on these tours. I check Trip Advisor for reviews to find a good tour. Lonely Planet have “Top things to do in…” guides for many cities: here is the guide for Paris. I’ll pick off one item that fits into the time I have available and head out for some rapid tourism. As a runner I’m also able to see many of the sights by planning my runs around them!

Those of us to get to travel, who have the privilege of doing a job that can truly be done from anywhere, are very lucky. With a bit of planning you can enjoy travel, be part of events, and still get work done and remain healthy. By reducing stressful events you do have control over, you can be in better shape to deal with the inevitable times you do not.

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