Standardized Testing

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Jackie

I’ve spent thousands of hours in schools throughout the United States and some in Canada working with teachers and administrators installing various software packages that help them run their schools. Working in areas from scheduling, grading, testing and reporting so I think I have a good flavour of what happens with some of the government funding choices, and the reprecussions of testing.  When the recent battle of standardized testing flared up again in BC, I must say, I sighed and shook my head.

I was in the US when high stakes testing turned teaching upside down. Teachers were incented to get students to do well on tests, which in turn, made the school look good, and receive more money. Teachers started to teach to the tests, including in some cases, giving the answers to students, and then were paid bonuses because their students were doing so well.

Crazy, I know.

I think it’s hard to evaluate teachers. In some districts the teachers require the principal to give written notice (up to a month) of when they will visit their classroom. What the heck!!! If I told my boss that he had to give me written notice to snoop around and evaluate me, I’d be out of a job in no time.

I think it’s imperative we find a way to evaluate teachers. We should make sure our children get good instruction. It’s an important job, really important. I’m not sure that raw student performance on a standardized test indicates how well teachers are teaching, it didn’t with me, of that I’m sure. But there should be some metrics to indicate which teachers are being successful and which are not so that we can figure out how to get teachers who are not doing well some help, and if they aren’t willing to do what it takes to be successful, fire them.

So, as far as the Fraser Institute and their school report… well, I’m sure it does indicate something about the school, but my guess is that it speaks more to the socioeconomic backdrop (and therefore it’s students and teachers) of the school than anything else.

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SEO Basics #3 – Heading Tags

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Jackie

What is a heading tag?

If you are using a CMS, you may not realize there are heading tags and that it’s an important structural component for your site. Heading Tags are like numbers for the outline of an essay.

h1 is the top level hierachy
h2 is the next level of hierachy
h3… etc

I’m using round brackets rather than angular brackets to avoid the headings from actually showing on this post – so normally you would use <> rather than ()

So a page might have a strucure like this

(h1) Green Technology (/h1)
(h2) Hydro Electric (/h2)
content
(h3) Environmental Impact of Dams (/h3)
content
(h2) Solar (/h2)
etc

It’s important to use heading tags appropriately for structuring your content, they shouldn’t be used to replace the use of formatting, like bolding.

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SEO basics #2 – Description Meta Tag

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Jackie

So, what is a Description Meta Tag, and what is it used for?

A Description Meta Tag is a short summary (no more than a paragraph) of the contents of a webpage. Google and other search engines use (and they don’t rely on it as heavily as they used to) the Description Meta Tag to figure out what content is on a webpage. Google uses this tag for the short blurb you see on seach results, if your content doesn’t match well with the search request. The best Description Meta Tags are targeted to the searching audience. Essentially, if Google can’t find good clean content for their little blurb, it uses the Description Meta Tag.

If you view the source on this page: www.kindredtechnologies.com you’ll see the Meta Description in the source as an example.

Because Google can use it for their search result blurb – here are some important hints.

  • Use unique descriptions for each page – make them catchy, so the person reading the blurb will click thru to your website
  • Descriptions, similar to titles, should accurately reflect the content on the page

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some page descriptions to write.

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Quoting Services Projects – an age old conundrum

Posted on February 4, 2009 by Jackie

I was recently working with a client, putting together a quote for some web development work. This work had two major components:

  1. Website Design
  2. Website Development / Deployment on a CMS

The customer required, as so many customers do, a quote for the project before starting. Not unreasonable, because it’s possible they could go into the project with a 100k budget and without a firm quote, the same project could turn out to be a $250k budget disaster.

The services team I was working with wanted to really iron out the scope of the project before committing to any pricing. Many services teams have faced the problem of quoting too early and having “client assumed” scope creep into their project. Bringing more scope into the project without an effective way to say “that wasn’t in the scope” is often responsible for driving down the gross margin and eroding all the profit out of many services projects. It’s hard to tell a cleint “we didn’t agree that was in scope” if the scope is a few vague lines made up by the sales exec.

This scenario often ends up putting a lot of stress between the sales arm of an organization and the delivery arm of an organization. Sales will twist any nearby arm to get a quote from services and services will spend gobs of “unallocated” money in the sales cycle trying to nail down the client so they know what they are going to deliver. This struggle can often be seen by reviewing Statements of Work (SOW) or Project quote documents. The version put together by sales will be high level and vague, the version put together by the services department will be detailed and outline all the specific deliverables.

I’ve lived on both sides of the equation, and both are correct, but they have different goals. Sales wants to close the deal (and get their commission), Services knows they need to deliver a profitable project (and get their performance bonus). The incentives set up for the organization to succeed really do pit these two teams somewhat against one another in this particular scenario.

So, how does a services company give a quote to a customer that doesn’t leave either the customer, or the company assuming too much risk? It’s tricky, particularly if it’s a competitive situation and companies are squaring off on talent and price.

Here are my thoughts and some options:

  • Get in early and get a strategy project without coupling it to the rest of the delivery. These deals often close faster, and puts your organization into the ‘trusted advisor’ role with your customer. You can get paid for all that information gathering and then provide a really good estimate for the rest of the project.

 

  • Break up the project into phases and only quote on the next phase – give wide estimates (+/-) for the rest of the phases

 

  • Time & Materials – does anyone truly get a time & materials project anymore? Beware of the “time & materials” project that has a cap – also known as a fixed bid project without the 20% contingency!

 

  • Version the estimates. Detail out as much as you can, give an estimate and version that estimate. Have the customer sign off on that estimate and it’s related scope. Place a clause in the quote that you will notify the customer if anything comes up that increases scope and therfore the cost, essentially putting in a change control mechanism.

 

  • Find out the clients overall budget and work a top-down quote using “budget buckets” like this:

 

  • Strategy – 20%
  • Design – 30%
  • Development & Deployment – 50%

 

The nice thing about the last two methods is that you can work closely with the client to manage scope… if they want to stay in budget, they’ll work with you to cut features and functionality, or quite often, they find extra money to get that widget they all want on the site.

How did I solve my last quoting troubles? Well, I chose to version the project quote, we closed the deal and kicked off the project. I’ll know in a few months how it will turn out.

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SEO Basics #1 – Page Title Tags

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Jackie

First and foremost – what is a page title?

A page title is the title the browser displays on a website. For example on this page:

http://www.kindredtechnologies.com/ProjectManagement.aspx

The page title is Kindred Technologies – Project Management

You can also see the page title by viewing the source of the page, you should see something like this (in the top few lines of code):

<title>Kindred Technologies – Project Management</title>

If you have a hard coded site (you require a programmer to modify your pages) that person should have had a discussion of page titles with you. If you have a content management system (CMS) you will likely (should) have a place where you enter the page title. Ask your website design / development company if you don’t see a place in the cms page editing screen what is happening with your page titles.

So, once you find out if you have page titles on your site, what’s next?

Titles should be accurate and unique

Website companies sometimes just hard code the title of your company or product as the page title for all pages, which is a mistake. So, for my site, even my homepage has more than just “Kindred Technologies” as the page title. But don’t use a lot of words – this isn’t where you enter all your keywords or long phrases. Use a very small descriptor for your homepage as well as your company name. For your subpages use the title of your company or product and the main subject of the page.

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SEO basics – Introduction

Posted on January 31, 2009 by Jackie

I recently re-launched my website at www.kindredtechnologies.com. I am now in the process of working on the basic SEO for the site and as I went through the basic steps that are important, I thought I’d share what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. Much of this many of you will know, but some of you may not, and hopefully this will give you some easy tips for your own site. I am not writing anything new – these are tried, true and well documented strategies, but if you are a beginner to the web, this will likely help you get started.

I’ll post each item individually, and use my site as an example so you can follow along and check your site for some of the basics. If you paid for someone to develop your website and these basics seem to be missing, well go demand they fix it for free, or send me an email and I’ll give you a quote and help you make some adjustments.


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Technorati

Posted on January 1, 2008 by Jackie

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