The Last Stretch

I can’t believe it’s already the final week of our internships! I hope everyone had a great week. I started mine off with good ole’ wisdom teeth extraction. The procedure went well, and I took pain meds for the first time ever.

Besides that, I worked on more SEO research and website details, mainly sending last-minute feedback before receiving the WordPress website manual. With access as the site’s administrator, I have the ability to edit and add to the site as need be. The manual looks easy to operate, so it should not be difficult to fix grammar mistakes, include an updated newsfeed, and manage user login/registration and customer testimonials in the future.

This week I also spent time polishing up my PowerPoint presentation for this project. I've linked the PDF version of the PowerPoint for you all to view. I, along with all of my fellow Senior Research Project participants, will be presenting our findings on May 7, and I'm very excited to share my experiences and hear from my classmates. 

I am happy to say I will be posting again in a couple of weeks in a concluding entry to this blog.

Until then, I wish all of my classmates luck on committing to schools and hope that the finalizations of the Senior Research Projects go well for everyone.

Mia Lu

(Don't) Ignore the Man Behind the Curtain

While the website is being set in motion, I want to touch on my research behind the scenes of web development: Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I think it’s important to mention this subtopic in my project, since it is extremely significant for a business or organization’s (or really, anyone’s) online presence.

Since I am thoroughly lacking any substantial knowledge of SEO, I decided to look for information aimed towards fledglings like myself. Google searching “SEO for beginners” gave me plenty of options; the first result I came upon looked promising, so I dived into Moz.com’s “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO”.

I’m very glad and grateful that this chapter-based guide is concise and relatively easy to follow. Each section presents information accompanied by relatable examples, helpful diagrams, and amusing cartoons (including monkeys, robots, pandas—and there’s even a unicorn!). I’ve done my best to understand all ten chapters, and I definitely got used to taking classroom-like notes throughout my reading.

I have broken down the main sections of the guide and provided links to their respective chapters if you’re interested in checking them out:

1.  Crawling and indexing
2. Relevance vs. popularity
3.  Search queries and intent
4. Search engine marketing and problems to avoid
5. Navigational search engine friendly design
6. URL construction, title tags, and meta tags
7.  Usability/user experience and empathy
8. Content development
9. Keyword research
10. Link pattern building
11. Tools, misconceptions, and measurability

I would say if I had glanced at this list previous to my research, I wouldn’t have known anything. On the flip side, these may look familiar to anyone with web experience, especially those into coding—shout out to my classmates Alex and Kyle in their efforts to create a video game.

One of the most important reoccurring concepts throughout the guide was the advice to “build [your website] for users, not for search engines”. In all efforts to create a successful online presence, the user—or customer, in the case of my project—is the most significant. Anyone can essentially manipulate the search engine in his favor, but success won’t last without user satisfaction. Incorporating social media into one’s efforts is also associated with online triumph.

If you ever have the chance to research or study SEO, I do recommend at least briefing yourself on it. I had very little interest in it at first, but I learned to value its importance in our web-based world.

Hope this was interesting and “user-friendly”. :)

Mia Lu

Lists and Logos

After a look at the first draft of the website, I made a list of suggestions and possible improvements in my handy dandy notebook (sorry, but I just had to include that reference for all of you Blue’s Clues fanatics). When I had looked at the current site, I made a similar list, evaluating each web page and its content.

Now it was the newbie’s turn to be improved. The list ranged from picture quality, font consistency, and overall layout to inactive links, loading times, and scroll-down features. My favorite aspect of the new site is the clean and modernized look/layout, without being too flashy or loud, which I find is unfortunately the case for some business websites.

On another note, the aspect of the site that needs the most improvement, in my opinion, is the Testimonials page, which appears unprofessional and lacks much substance, seems “inactive”. I brought this up to Ms. Vaidya, and she suggested that I look at other business sites, especially Marvin Medisoft’s competition, to see what features were appealing. Upon this, I discovered that these sites included client logos in proximity to their testimonials, or on separate “Our Clients” pages, and I really liked how it looked.

Later, Ms. Vaidya sent me a list of current clients, and I proceeded to search online for their respective websites and logos. I copied and pasted around thirty-five client logos onto a Word doc and sent that to the designer to add to the testimonials and rename the page “Current Clients & Testimonials”.

I plan to continue this website project until our requests are seen to (hopefully, ASAP).

Meanwhile, I’ve been continuing my secretarial duties as well as looking at other TPN products that rival those of Marvin Medisoft’s just to get an idea of the competition from an outsider’s perspective as well as from a business intern’s point of view. I will definitely go into more detail about this in one of my future posts.

Hope you all have a good week!

Mia Lu