I received an e-mail from Alan Mann, asking:

My son Simon tells me that I am on the first page of Google and on the second page. I don’t know how this happens but I am dying to know. If you can enlighten me I will be delighted.

It’s a fair question, and although I have written on this topic before, I thought it was worth posting my reply here. So this is what I told Alan:

The simple answer is that Alan has many pages, and Google arranges these (and all the other pages belonging to all the other Alan Manns – er, Alans Mann) according to how likely it is that each page is the one you were looking for.

Google (that is, the software that drives Google) uses a variety of criteria to rank the pages: how likely is a page to be relevant (how often does the search term appear, how near the start of the page, is it in the headline or the page title) and do other sites regard it as helpful (do they link to it, and when they link to this page does the search term appear in the text of the link?). This much we know, and do our best to put the right words in the right places, to help people who are looking for you (or who are looking for information, and don’t know that you’re the person to ask) to find you.

Google are a bit secretive about what tests they use, because there are people who try to beat the system, and get their page to the top of the list whether it’s the most useful one or not. But you get the general idea.

So if Simon searches for you, he might well find that Google has ranked two pages differently, depending on how relevant they are to his search term (ie, what he has typed into the box). So if I go to google.co.uk and type [alan mann] (just those two words, no quotation marks) your front page comes up fourth on the list, and the front page of the aeroplanes section comes up second on page 2. Could be better, but alas, the Alan Manns are a very talented bunch.

On the other hand, if I don’t know I’m looking for you, but want paintings of planes and trains, I type [paintings planes trains] into the box, and you are top of the list: which is very gratifying. Likewise [cristimar], where you come out just ahead of a dwarfish cherry tree. And [famous lizzie west] and [british chimney art].

You can while away many a happy hour playing with Google; sometimes you find what you’re looking for, and sometimes something you never dreamed of. If you decide to try a little ego-googling, let me know how you get on: in particular, if there are any terms you think people might use when looking for you or your work which don’t perform as well as they should, let me know, because there may be something we should be saying on the site and aren’t!

That last point goes for all our sites: we try to make sure that they can be found by people using the obvious key words, but – especially for specialist sites – what is obvious to people in the field is not always obvious to us!

At 6:15pm local time on 28th July 1998, the 24-year-old Sergey Brin uploaded a list of his favourite books to his personal webspace on the Stamford University server. Quite how a man whose 25th birthday was about four weeks off had been able to accumulate 15,257 favourite books is a bit of a mystery. That’s an average of around two a day since the age of five, plus of course all the rubbish that didn’t make the cut into the list of favourite books.

Whether Sergey has managed to add to his list of favourites since 1998 is not revealed. Six weeks later, with Larry Page, he founded Google and the rest, as they say, is history.

But, as web designers for a range of authors, we have a soft spot for this list, because a number of our clients are listed there. The first one we became aware of was Chaz Brenchley‘s Shelter. Anne Fine has two books: Flour Babies and The Killjoy. The Murder Squad‘s John Baker makes it into the list with Poet in the Gutter; Martin Edwards with Perfectly Criminal, the anthology he edited for the Crime Writers Association. And finally, Dinah Lampitt (Deryn Lake) and As Shadows Haunting.

A list as varied as the tastes of the young Sergey Brin and, of course, our clients.

There is a variety of bicycle race where the contestants spend most of the race cycling as slowly as possible round the vélodrome before one of them makes a break and pedals like the clappers for the finishing line. Start sprinting too soon and you run out of steam and your opponent will overhaul you. Leave it too late and you lose.

What has this to do with web design? Well, one of our clients is the Crime Writers Association and at midnight last night the 2008 Debut Dagger Competition closed. In recent years we’ve added an online entry facility to the dead tree and snail mail alternative: contestants upload their entry and pay the entry fee via PayPal. The competition opened on 15 November and closed on 15 February. That’s 93 days in total. So what percentage entered on the last day?

Over 30%. And almost 5% left it to the last hour of the last day. That’s why it reminded me of a bicycle race.

Cornwell Internet would like to wish Ted Rogers a very happy birthday. At 90 – today – he must surely be our oldest client, though (as Silver Surfers ourselves!) we know that the internet is wasted on the young!

Alan Mann writes to tell me that he heard Jon Lord’s Durham Concerto last night, and that it’s a great piece of work! Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I google these names, and find the web site which not only tells me how this piece came about, but also allows me to listen to the music.

My only reservation is the claim that the concerto somehow “puts Durham on the world map”, as if that were necessary. This morning’s Today programme had an item about the Gough map – and the map itself, which was drawn sometime around 1360, shows Durham quite clearly.

Part of my job at Cornwell Internet is to keep an eye out for things which might be useful to our clients: ideas, sites, links, graphics. Yes, that’s partly an excuse for me to spend my work time surfing the net, but it’s also how we were able, for example, to set up Michael Jecks’s photo diary within budget: free photo-hosting site Flickr offered the features we needed.

So when I started receiving invitations to join Facebook, I clicked on through to the site to see what all the fuss was about. You can’t, in fact, do that: Facebook is a social networking site in the sense that it provides a facility for existing networks of friends to keep in touch, and you can’t see what it has to offer unles you sign up and start to contact people who are already your friends. I took a deep breath, and did that.

Six weeks later, what’s the verdict? Well, Facebook isn’t for me, and I don’t see any immediate application for our clients, either. I’ve heard people talk about Facebook as MySpace for grown-ups, but Myspace can be used to reach new people, as well as to keep in touch with people you already know; having a MySpace profile can be a form of viral marketing (in a good way!).

Facebook doesn’t do this. Writer Paul Cornell blogs in defence of Facebook, and points out quite fairly that it’s not a question of what Facebook can do for you, but what you can use Facebook to do for yourself. Even so, it’s only useful if a substantial proportion of the people you want to do it with also have Facebook accounts: otherwise, there are probably better ways of reaching them.

Monday’s Guardian carried an article about Facebook, attacking the site on a number of grounds, from the Luddite (“if I want to network with people, I’ll talk to them”) to the perfectly justified (“it’s all about gathering personal data and using it to target advertising”). If I were handing over money to Facebook, I might well be concerned that its founders have radical neoconservative ideas (though there are few big internet businesses whose politics I’d actually endorse). But the reason why I’m withdrawing from Facebook is simply that it has nothing to offer me.

It still surprises me how many web designers must only look at their pages in Internet Explorer, because when you use other browsers, they can look very odd indeed. For preference, when we are browsing the web, Jean uses Firefox and I use Seamonkey which is from the same Mozilla stable. Both adhere closely to published standards and are growing in popularity: it varies from website to website but, for example, 10% of visitors to Anne Fine’s website now use Firefox and for the Crimewriters’ Association it’s 15%. Other browsers are also out there, in particular Mac users will almost certainly use Safari. The result is that Internet Explorer’s share is dropping. Our most recent figure for the CWA website shows that only 62.3% of visitors were using Internet Explorer.

None of this would matter if Internet Explorer obeyed the rules. Unfortunately Microsoft seem to think they know better and, although the latest version is much closer to the standard, web sites still look different in different browsers. And of course as web designers we cannot go round dictating to people what browser they should use, though some web sites presume to do this! This is why Jean and I look at the sites we design in a variety of browsers, including Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and we use various techniques to ensure our sites are visible and make sense in all of them. Designers who only use Internet Explorer can deter surfers using other browsers and in extreme cases the site may be unusable.

A brief note in yesterday’s Technology Guardian claims that internet users are growing older (or rather, since we are all growing older, the average age of users is rising). Here’s what they say, verbatim: "Over the past year (October 2006 – 07), the average age of the UK internet population has risen from 35.7 to 37.9, according to Nielsen’s research." (and a link follows to their source, Nielsen Online).

Since the average age of Cornwell Internet is even higher than those figures, and the same is probably true of our clients (though I would not be so indiscreet as to ask), I was interested enough to look up the full story.

Nielsen’s press release is available as a document file at tinyurl.com/27gv7u. It reveals that the site whose users have the lowest average age is MiniClip, an online games site, and the site whose users have the highest is M & S – which is not entirely surprising, especially given that only the hundred most popular online brands were monitored for the press release. In general, younger users visited games, media and social networking sites, and older users visited online shopping and financial sites (and Friends Reunited, which is also social networking).

None of which explains those unexpectedly high average ages; in fact, the closer you look, the odder it gets: the average ages of visitors to the list of youth-oriented sites vary from 28.1 to 34.2, while the older internet users are from 43.2 to 46.5. According to Nielsen’s figures, the average visitor to YouTube is 34.4. Now, I love YouTube. There’s some wonderful archive material there. Cornwell Internet has its own YouTube account, which we use to post videos for clients, from the crimewriters’alliance who call themselves the Murder Squad to the New Rope String Band: but I’m sceptical that visitors over thirty outnumber those in their teens and twenties. So I started to look at where Nielsen’s figures came from.

The press release states "All figures in this release come from NetView – the Nielsen//NetRatings panel of around 45,000 UK Internet users who have opted in to download a meter which records all their PC, online and application usage on a continual and ongoing basis." I would like to think that this is reliable, and that UK internet users really are typically in their thirties; it would give businesses an incentive to design their sites for grown-ups, and to abandon the irritating animations and tiny print! But these figures are so extreme that I fear there is a flaw in the methodology: perhaps Nielsen have failed to recruit a representative proportion of young people to their panel, or perhaps computers bearing their meter are being used by younger family members, as well as the person who signed up for the research.

Or perhaps it’s true, and the silver surfers really are conquering the web.

Everyone wants their web site to appear high up on the lists of the major search engines, and one of the challenges for designers is – well, not making sure that it does, because you can’t make sure: a high ranking can’t be guaranteed (as we explain in detail here). What we – and those companies who specialise in Search Engine Optimisation – can do is make sure your site is Google-friendly (for example, search engines index text, so we make sure that key search terms are not concealed in graphics).

Naturally, there are people who try to beat the system. To make it harder for them, Google is quite secretive about how it ranks sites, (which makes it harder for everyone) but here’s one example: We know that a site with plenty of incoming links is rated higher because of it (it makes sense that if people link to your site, it’s because they think the information on it is useful, and if they think so, other people are likely to think so too – so the site is given a higher ranking). One result of this is that unscrupulous people try to create as many links as possible, not because the information is relevant and useful, but just to improve their rankings. They create interdependent sites, all multiply linked to each other; they seek out guestbooks which are not being maintained, and write entries which are nothing but links to their sites… Naturally, the search engines retaliate by refining their criteria – where once the quantity of links was enough, now they look at the quality of the links as well.

An article in last week’s Technology Guardian reported that Google’s revision of its rules habitually takes place in December, and this makes life very hard for companies who want maximum exposure in the run-up to Christmas, and have to work out how they have displeased Google, and why their ranking has dropped. “Is Google a Grinch or a good guy?” it asks.

It’s certainly possible to do something in all innocence which is treated as suspect and loses your site credibility with the search engines. I’ve done it myself – once, long ago, I was transferring a site to a new home, revising and updating as I went, and thought it was a good idea to retain links to the old pages until I had time to replace them. This did not go down well, and it took a long time to get the new site the sort of rating it deserved. So I do have some sympathy with the feeling that Google is a Grinch, making people’s Christmas harder than it should be.

Nonetheless, the intention is not to be a Grinch. If anything, Google is more like Santa Claus, trying to reward the sites which have genuinely valuable or entertaining content and punish those who cheat to obtain credit they don’t deserve. They make a list, they check it twice, they try to find out who’s naughty or nice…

The Blinking Eye Publishing launch at Newcastle’s Lit & Phil on Wednesday was an emotional occasion. Every book launch is a celebration, and Blinking Eye were launching four books, so that’s quadruply the case; and the books were the work of competition winners (the winner’s collection and runners-up anthology for both poetry and short story competitions), so there was a real excitement, the sense of something special and festive. The tiny mince pies with stars on them helped, too!

But the event was also Jeanne Macdonald‘s farewell performance. Blinking Eye was Jeanne’s baby, and Cornwell Internet was there almost from the start. We saw the organisation grow from a project to a reality, from a single competition to two – and we were delighted to see a short story competition alongside the poetry competition, because why should poetry have all the fun? Of course we were sorry when Blinking Eye decided, as part of a business review, to move their web site to a new supplier, but it’s all part of the process of growing up and moving on.

So we were happy to be there to mark the end of an era, and to wish both Blinking Eye and Jeanne herself every success in whatever comes next. Here’s hoping that the Blinking Eye competitions will resume in all their glory in 2009 after their hiatus!