Building Findable Websites-Interview with Aaron Walter, Author, Web Designer and Educator

Greetings WOW members and Web professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the media coverage of the Voices That Matter Web Design Conference that took place in Nashville last month.

For today?’s podcast, I have the pleasure to be interviewing Aaron Walter, Author, Web Designer and Educator from Atlanta, Georgia. Aaron is the author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO. I met up with Aaron to talk about his session and to ask him to summarize the session complete with some great website findability resources that you can start using today.

Check out the three minute podcast interview with Aaron Walter on the WOW Technology Minute website.

Today’s WOW Technology Minute is sponsored by the Web 2.0 Expo New York taking place September 16 – 19, 2008 at the Javits Center
New York, NY.

From start-ups to enterprises, the Web 2.0 Expo New York is the event for the designers, developers, entrepreneurs, VCs, marketing professionals, product managers and business strategists building businesses on the web.

Seven conference tracks, a vibrant expo hall and plenty of networking events cover business strategy, web design, user experience, SEM, tagging, developer hacks, community building, AJAX, Ruby, web operations, user-generated content, and more.

Check out all of the great links including a discount code for WOW members on the WOW Technology Minute website.

Register today at Web 2 Expo website and use code webny08bm6 to receive 20% off your full conference pass.

Transcript of Aaron Walter Interview

BILL CULLIFER: Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute at the Voices That Matter Conference here in Nashville. I have the pleasure to be introducing and interviewing Aaron Walter. Aaron is a specialist in usability and he?’s also a faculty member at the Art Institute of Atlanta. Good morning Aaron and thanks for agreeing to this interview.

AARON WALTER: Good morning.

BILL: Aaron, you presented on Findability – Design Comp to Code. Can you summarize that session for the listeners of this podcast?

AARON: Sure. The idea with this is we?’re talking about findability which is, I wrote a book called BUILDING FINDABLE WEBSITES, and the idea is looking at our craft in a holistic way, thinking about how we build our messages and how we connect that with an audience. And that is search engine optimization, social networking and all sorts of different strategies as we?’re building a site. This particular session was about how to use visual design principles. So findability is not just about SEO stuff, but also I would say that designers have the power to do jedi mind tricks on users, where they can say, “I want you to look over here at this thing. I want you to perform this action.” So the idea was we were looking at basic principles of design, talking about contrast. Are we using color, scale, position, texture, and various other design techniques to direct users?’ attention to key elements on the page that relate to business objectives? And then we looked at a case study of a project that sort of embodied all of those different techniques.

BILL: Excellent. And you have resources that lend itself to this topic, is that also correct?

AARON: Yeah. Well I have, there are a lot of resources actually on my book?’s website Building Findable Websites.com In fact when I was writing my book I wrote way too much and there?’s about 120 pages, five chapters, free that are there.

BILL: Wow. Terrific.

AARON: And I will be publishing a findability checklist pretty soon and it?’s just best practices. When you?’re working on a new site or you?’re redesigning a website, what are the things I need to keep in mind that I can do to make it more findable to my audience? And then it has references to where you can find the technical details of how to pull something off, has references to the chapters in the book.

BILL: Excellent. Sounds like a great resource. And where can we find that again?

AARON: It?’s www.buildingfindablewebsites.com.

BILL: Excellent. Well, we certainly appreciate the time. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW), the WOW Technology Minute at the Voices That Matter Conference. Thanks again Aaron.

AARON: Thank you.