A good example is Financial Education Professionals, which provides training to employees of financial institutions in meeting their legal compliance obligations.

Since FEP first accepted my 2003 proposal to build them a website, the company has grown in the number of staff, the number and scope of training programs it offers and the geographical  range of their customers.

During the same period browsers have improved, bandwidth has increased, coding and programming languages have evolved, screen sizes have increased, search engines have grown in scope and sophistication and people have become more adept, confident and discerning in how they use the web.

The FEP site has been through five major incarnations in those seven years, with the latest just completed having moved the site from a static HTML format to a dynamic format using WordPress for its content management system.

The neat thing about FEP as a model of how a website evolves is that it is both very simple and very complex.It’s one of those sites where content is not just king but holy emperor: it’s a site of text-based information about text-based services. The company made – and has stuck with – a conscious decision to eschew elaborate visual flourishes in favour of the best possible presentation of tightly honed, highly purposeful words.

“Best possible” in this context is judged by the ability of the site to bring in new business.The needs of potential FEP customers can be complicated and diverse, according to their understanding and application of legal requirements. The customers for the various training products have different needs, and the website must convey these differences while retaining an overall cohesiveness that will give customers confidence in the company.

It is naturally also an exercise in search engine optimisation. Given that professional SEO is still dominated by people who think it’s about manipulating search engine rankings in order to attract maximum traffic, it’s not really hard to look good simply by focusing on placing relevant, well-written, accurate, timely and actionable text on web pages that are easily indexed by search engines.

Even though financial training is a very competitive online market, it’s not hard to stand out by being clear, honest and empowering.

It doesn’t hurt to think things through (even if you get a high search engine ranking for a specific term, what will make someone click through to your website from a Google page rather than your competitors? And once they’re on your site, what will make them ‘buy’?), but I find there’s much to learn from successful actors who learn to “leave themselves alone” in order to do their best work.

In SEO terms, that means saying what you have to say well and letting it do its work. Allow potential customers to make a balanced and informed decision to come to you rather than trying to trick them. That will get you targeted, meaningful traffic with a higher likelihood of making a sale.

It doesn’t hurt that WordPress theme developers are increasingly offering convenient ways to use meta text to the best possible effect.

Another aspect of the FEP website is that the proprietors’ active focus on the site as a tool for bringing customers has made them very aware of their customers’ online habits. They know their market very well, and their online market even better. For example, potential FEP customers are not going to purchase a training program online at the click of a button. What they want from a website is enough information to make them comfortable contacting the vendor by email or telephone or downloading an application form to complete offline.

That may change – as ecommerce customers in all markets have changed radically in the last ten years – but right now FEP have a good handle on who will buy their services, why and how. The website is an extension and reflection of that know-how.

A key point is that it is a design task in itself to organise and present a basically text-only site in such a way that it looks and acts cutting edge. I’d like to think that in those terms the FEP has site has become better and better during the last seven years.

It’s actually really rewarding to think that my work on the FEP website has played some part in helping the company to reach its current level of success.

I look forward to the inevitable set of new challenges as the site continues to develop into the future.

“Kate Vale and an engineer, Lars Rasmussen, at Google’s office in Darling Park.”

Being a Lead Engineer for Google Maps clearly didn’t impress the journos too much.

They probably wondered how a lowly engineer managed to muscle in on this photo opportunity in the first place.

That’s what understatement gets you.

Technorati Tags: Lars Rasmussen, Google

That would be a big call for any conference, let alone one that focuses on what is now called ‘the search industry’, but it lived up to the billing.

The speaker who was probably most influential in my decision to attend was Chris Sherman, whose work with Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineWatch and more recently Search Engine Land has not only inspired me in theory but has provided practical guidelines that have helped me and my clients no end.

It’s funny how things work out. Even a few years ago, my emphasis on optimising websites for search engines was viewed with some distaste by web designer colleagues who believed that as long as you made quality websites (meaning valid, semantic, accessible, fast-loading, standards-compliant and tables-free websites with strong design aesthetics and well-written text), people would find them.

SEO was viewed as being dominated by ‘black hats’ who favoured keyword spamming, hidden text, site cloaking, link farming and other nefarious means of generating traffic. My belief remains that I have clients looking for a commercial edge and I can’t just rely on “build it and they will come”.

What’s more, my experience has been – and remains – that so many people fail to implement even basic search engine optimisation techniques that it’s not hard to positively affect search engine ranking placement and page rank by using meta tags, markup attributes, editorial technique and good old common sense.

Designers and developers seem now, however, to be paying more attention to SEO techniques. There’s not much room anymore for a commercial designer or developer to say they leave that to the marketing department.

Maybe I have an advantage there, in that I AM the marketing department, as well as the design department, the development department, the systems department, the editorial department and the hosting department. I also make pretty good coffee.

Anyway, Chris Sherman was terrific. The fear is always that someone you admire will turn out not to be a very good speaker or, worse, they can talk but they don’t say anything of value. Chris was the opposite: warm and engaging, serious and silly, insightful and challenging. I came away feeling I had learned some things about how search has developed and where it’s going.

And that was just the keynote speaker.

The day was packed with sessions drawing on the skills and experience of people whose work I know well (Chris Dimmock, Andy Beal, Detlev Johnson) and those new to me (Aidan Beanland, Fred Schebesta, Hilton Rutger). One session was even moderated by Russ Weakley, co-chair of the Web Standards Group and one of Australia’s best designers.

As it happened, I didn’t even get to the second day (too much work to do!), which featured one of the sessions that I was most interested in: Adam Lasnik and others from Google answering questions about the dominant search engine of our time, including how it deals with CSS, standards compliance and semantic code.

Fortunately, as is the way with many internet-focused conferences these days, proceedings were recorded and made available for attendees to download.

I feel this convergence of design, development and search skills will continue to grow into the future, although I can’t help hoping it won’t grow so fast that I can’t stay somewhere near the front ranks.

I’ll just have to work harder (or smarter), I suppose.

Technorati Tags: Search Summit, search industry, search engine optimisation, search marketing, conference