Read The struggle is real: Self-serve SEO or pay for page rank? by Laura Legendary

To plagiarize the 80’s pop ditty, everybody wants to rule the world. When it comes to achieving any sort of visibility on Google, there’s not a great deal of room at the top. In fact, d…

A few thoughts of my own.

At the risk of ruffling the feathers of the SEO community, as a blind entrepeneur I’ve found that focusing overly much on the mechanics of search engine optimization detracts from the rest of my business.

Things like Google Analytics, for example, are almost completely inaccessible, and so tracking that kind of data is something I don’t do at this point. I’ve also made a point of not tracking any metrics that prove to be not beneficial, and I’m focusing on creating content that my visitors find useful.

Sometimes, (a lot of the time), that’s shorter posts, curation of resources I use, and (once my writing muscles are up to snuff again), the occasional longer tutorial.

I think that, if you’re concerned about ranking in the search engines, then you will have to be prepared to either spend a lot of money to hire someone to do it for you, (and there are only a handfull of people or businesses I would trust with that task), or you’re going to have to spend a lot of time keeping up with algorythmic changes, along with possibly hiring someone to read and interpret your analytics data.

Things like well-structured content, though, continue to be relevant, even despite the algorythm updates.

I spent some time today putting a system in place to track the unbillable time I spend on contributions to free software, and when I say contribution I’m being pretty liberal about what counts as contribution: Advocacy, not just code, for example. I believe in the mission of free software, but the fact is free software isn’t without cost, and sometimes that cost can get pretty high. I’m also working out how to document my contributions in my portfolio, including the free accessibility advocacy that I do. This is going to take a little more work and some more research, but I feel it needs to be done. I need to be able to keep track of this stuff so I can limit it when necessary. Right now I’m thinking of setting the limit at ten percent of free time outside of shabbat and festivals, because those are times when no work of any kind is done, as a general rule. I’m not going to get into the exceptions around festivals because it’s a lengthy topic, but to say no work of any kind can be done on festivals would be technically inaccurate. I think ten percent is a reasonable amount of time. It’s not a ton, but it places an upper limit on the time I have available to do this kind of work. I will also document the time spent, although I haven’t decided whether I will publish a weekly or monthly or yearly report. This is going to be an interesting project.

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Reviewing 2016

2016’s been a bit rough around here. Three close friends have died, two from cancer and one of them in a car accident. Two of those deaths happened recently, less than a month apart, and I’m still unpacking those. But there’s also been an amazing amount of awesome this year too, and I’ll detail that below.

2016 Achievements

I haz the props!

One of the goals I set for myself in review of 2015 was to contribute code to WordPress core. In March of 2016, I received my first WordPress props, and in April of 2016 I was recognized as part of the motley crew of contributors to WordPress 4.5, otherwise known as Coleman. This was a huge achievement for me because I’ve pretty much been a WordPress evangelist in both my personal and professional lives since 2005, and it was really awesome to earn a spot on the WordPress credits page.

DictationBridge

DictationBridge, before it even had a name, began when Pranav Lal, Lucy Greco of UC Berkeley, and I started working together to discuss making a free addon for $750 just to bring a license current. I can’t be the only one in this situation, and I don’t believe anyone else should pay up to 68% of the retail price as a penalty.

In July of 2015, Chris Hofstader joined the team to take over the executive role on the effort. Together, Pranav, Chris, Lucy and I built out the amazing team of fourteen that’s bringing DB to the world.

In August and September of 2015, Pranav and Chris tried to negotiate a licensing deal with a group in Germany to use their code as the core of DictationBridge. The German group wished to maintain proprietary source code which was a deal breaker for DB, as we were committed from the start to the values of an open source project. Chris then called Mike Calvo and they negotiated an agreement that permitted Serotek to license the dictation code from its SystemAccess screen reader in a manner compatible with our philosophy that a blind or otherwise disabled person should never be forced to pay a penny more than anyone else to use the same technology. The agreement with Serotek made history as it’s the first time a vendor of proprietary closed source assistive technology software has agreed to open up its source in exchange for a very modest licensing fee.

The next bit of history we made happened when the Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired of San Francisco made an official endorsement of and large monetary contribution to the DictationBridge campaign. Quoting Brian Bashin, CEO of the SF Lighthouse, “The Lighthouse believes it has a moral obligation to support the access needs of blind and visually-impaired people wherever they live.” During the discussions between the DB team and our friends at SF Lighthouse, one of the major goals we set was to ensure that a blind person in an emerging nation could buy a cheap laptop at a flea market and have full access to dictation features built into Windows, a goal we’ve never heard expressed by a large organization in the blindness space before. By collaborating with SF Lighthouse, the DictationBridge team built what we hope to be a long standing bridge between those of us in the free software community and at least one well established advocacy organization.
The nature of the DictationBridge team is also a first of its kind in the blindness business. The team is made up of people from two businesses (3 Mouse Technology and Serotek), a number of independent contributors and a coalition of activists in the blindness and technology world. The team has a number of members for whom dictation is a requirement and not a feature and we’ve some of the strongest engineering and management talent available in the world of accessibility. Assembling an ad hoc team like this one on which everyone works toward a common goal is unprecedented in this field.

Both of these achievements helped add some awesome to a year that I couldn’t be happier to see on its way out. I haven’t nailed down next year’s plans yet, but they will definitely include more contributions to WordPress, and, hopefully, more projects like DictationBridge. With DictationBridge, we’re fast approaching the first public beta. And there’s still plenty left to do. Free software hasn’t eaten the assistive technology world yet, and this is something that can’t happen soon enough.

For right now, those are the only goals I have for 2017. I’m still working through what I want to accomplish as far as my business is concerned, and more importantly, a plan of action for accomplishing it without killing myself in the process. So for now, I’ll say a hardy goodbye to 2016, and as far as 2017 is concerned, bring it on.

As someone who builds websites, I come across the following scenario all too often.

Someone contacts me, and tells me that they either need to update an existing website, or build a new one, and they want that website to do things like sell their products or get newsletter subscribers or any other call to action. They’ve got ideas about the visuals, or they’ve got ideas about how much profit they’re expecting the site to generate, and they’ve even got a few ideas about how they want their site to generate all this abundance. They usually involve the notion that their website will do magical things for them while they sleep, with very little effort on their part, and with the idea of content as an afterthought.

It doesn’t work like that.

You cannot half-ass content. It is the driving force behind your website. Your content, more than your visual design or the code that forms your website, is what does all that magic for you. Good content takes time to write and it takes strategy. Hope is not that strategy. Content can’t just be thrown together. It needs to be informed by the overall goals of your website, and it needs to speak to your audience. Yes, you have to define an audience, and it’s not anyone with a pulse and a checkbook. Good content takes research and planning. It takes hard work, and it has to be consistently updated. Websites are not brochures or advertisements or online business cards or fliers that you stick on someone’s windshield, hoping that whoever owns that car will call you wanting to buy what you’re selling. Websites are complex pieces of application software. They are living and breathing things that need to be fed and cared for. You feed them by crafting content that is useful to your audience both before and after the sale or newsletter sign-up. You care for them by keeping their underlying code up-to-date. But most importantly, you feed them. By feeding your website good, quality content, you feed your audience. Your audience then gives back by responding to your call to action, which is also content, and needs to be crafted to suit the overall goals of your website.

As if that wasn’t enough, your content should also inform the visual design of your website. A website that is not designed around the content it will contain is nothing more than an empty shell and the culmination of a lot of wasted time and effort, and any responses to your calls to action will happen for no other reason than sheer luck.

There are lots of moving parts that make up a well-performing website, and they’re all important. But content is the most important. If you don’t have that figured out, you may as well not even have a website.

The open web continues to remain important, regardless of how much ink it gets. But every once in a while, something happens, and that event throws a light on why the open web is so important.

At the end of June, Dennis Cooper, (an experimental artist), found that his blog, including an entire decade’s worth of his content, was deleted by Google. I currently have a client who wrote an article for the Huffington Post and wanted to highlight that article on his newly rebuilt website. It’s gone. Not on the Huffington Post, not in Google’s search results anywhere, not on archive.org. Completely gone.

If you care about your content, on any level, (and surely you do, because you took the time to create it), don’t post it on a closed platform alone. Not Facebook, not Twitter, not AudioBoom, not SoundCloud, or any number of closed platforms that have come and gone over the years. If you want to post links to it on these platforms for the exposure, fine. But by all means, don’t turn over ownership of content you’ve created to anyone who’s not you. And that’s exactly what you’re doing when you post your content solely on closed platforms like Medium and the like. You’re getting exposure in exchange for content ownership, and, (depending on the terms of service for each platform), you’re handing over the usage rights, and you’re granting these platforms the right to use your content, your hard work, however they like. And it’s not their job to keep your content safe by backing it up for you.

Yes, hosting your content yourself has its inconveniences. You have to work for exposure. You have to learn how your self-hosted platform, (like WordPress or Drupal), works, so that you can add content. But at the end of the day, that content remains yours, and you control who does what with it. So if you’re willing to spend time creating that content, spend the extra time ensuring that you own it, and can therefore safeguard it.