After leaving a conference my adrenalin is always very high.
I’ve taken in so many new ideas in a short period of time that I feel like I’m
suffering from information sickness (coined by Don DeLillo in “White Noise”). And yet I am not anxious to see it soon part.
I’m eager to incorporate all the data and make sense of it as fast as I can.
So was the case this past week in San Francisco as a fairly broad community
gathered for Web 2.0 Expo.
Here’s how I’m making sense of it all in 3 parts.
Part 1 – Presentations worth sitting through.
- 10 years ago page load time was all important. Smart
marketers, page designers and HTML coders were obsessed with finding ways to
reduce bloat on pages. Well, a decade
later the focus is back. Steve Souders (http://www.stevesouders.com) gave a very clear
presentation on ways to reduce page load time. You’ll be surprised, as I was, to
learn that most of the wait (avg. 70%+ on top 10 sites) happens on the
front-end, i.e., during the browser loading elements, not on the backend. He suggested many techniques to have JS
loading not prevent other objects from loading in parallel (a big culprit). He has made available 2 tools on his site:
YSlow and Cuzillion.
- After a several years of the paid search alphabet soup
(PPC, PPA, SEM) taking top spot in headlines thanks to Google’s intoxicating
effects on the media, the ugly cousin, natural or organic search is back. Why ugly? Here’s 4 reasons: 1) it involves
more moving parts than just bidding to have your ads listed; 2) it’s a process
that never ends; 3) it takes smart marketer who understand their market working
with smart Webmasters who understand how search indexing agents read pages; and
4) you can’t outsource it to an agency (to understand why see 1-3). There were multiple presenters talking about
search engine optimizing; of particular note is the presentation given by
Stephan Spencer (http://www.stephanspencer.com).
BTW, I believe most presentations will be made available as
a public service at: http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/schedule/proceedings
. If you don’t find it there, try emailing the presenters directly.
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