Greetings, readers! Welcome to the June 2009 issue of ZooNews, from professional Web site design company Zoonini Web Services.

It may sound a tad cliché-ish, but when creating Web sites, I always try to use current best practices to make sites that are attractive, functional, and easily found in search engines. One of the small tips that my optimization partner A.C. Riley and I currently recommend is to redirect the non-www version of your site to the www version. In other words, when someone types http://zoonini.com into the browser, they're automatically redirected to http://www.zoonini.com.

The rationale is that having incoming links from external sites that use both www and non-www URLs weakens their value as a factor in search-engine optimization (SEO). By putting a redirect on one of those URL variations, you force search engines to count only one URL instead of two, which concentrates their SEO value instead of diluting it. You could also redirect the www version to the non-www version, but we usually recommend the first way, since most people are likely to use "www" when linking to your site from theirs. This type of redirect is one aspect of a larger process called URL canonicalization or URL normalization.

Depending on your Web hosting setup, adding this redirect is often a simple matter of having your Web designer place a few lines of code in a special file on your server. At Zoonini, I now do this as standard practice on all new sites, and I'm currently in the process of adding the redirect to all sites that I host, at no charge.

On May 28, the Urban Dictionary, a repository of slang terminology, added its four millionth submission since 1999.

It defines tweetless as: "Refraining from tweeting. Finding that you have nothing to tweet or write. Drawing a blank when contemplating your Twitter page. Also used when one is stunned or surprised by something viewed on Twitter."

Got a technology term you'd like demystified in ZooNews? Send it to questions@zoonini.com.

This month Zoonini launched a site remake for J-organize, a professional-organizing firm headed by Jacki Hollywood Brown specializing in residential, small-office, and equestrian – yes, horse-related! – organizing. Timed to coincide with a move to Trenton, Ontario, from her previous base in Montreal, the site was optimized by A.C. Riley Communications to attract new clients via keyword searches. It runs on WordPress, allowing Jacki to make her own updates to the informational pages, as well as to add organizing tip-filled articles. The most recent pieces are automatically featured in a sidebar area. We wish Jacki all the best with her business in its new location!

A most unexpected thing happened last week. I won a little Twitter contest run by Montreal Gazette journalist Roberto Rocha and had the privilege of accompanying him to visit Google's Montreal office. (Didn't know Montreal even had a Google office? You're not alone! I only found out myself a few weeks ago.)

Here are 10 interesting tidbits I learned during my chat with three members of  the Google team: Montreal software developers Marc-Antoine Ruel and Fabrice Jaubert, and Tamara Micner, a communications associate based in Google's Toronto office.

• Google's Montreal office consists almost entirely of software engineers and developers. There are two other Canadian offices, Waterloo (engineering) & Toronto (sales & marketing).
• Even before the Montreal office opened, its future employees had a hand in choosing the office's location, its architect, as well as the renovation and design plans.
• There were only two things we weren't allowed to take pictures of: whiteboards and food brand names.
• Nearly every office and conference room has a window, facing either McGill College Avenue or bustling Ste-Catherine Street, a major shopping artery.
• When it first opened, the Montreal office consisted almost entirely of staff from Iceland. There was a party when the Icelandic staff eventually dipped below 50%.
• Google Montreal employs one engineer who is blind.
• Google's Chrome browser, partly developed in Montreal, was created with two primary concerns in mind: speed and stability. It was designed to accommodate power users, so if one browser tab crashes, for example, the others should remain usable. It was also developed to be as "transparent" as possible, with a small learning curve so users can focus on Web content, not the browser.
• There are currently approximately 10 million users worldwide of Chrome's PC version. The Mac edition is due to be released within several months.
• The upcoming Google Wave – a new Web-based collaboration tool – is so popular internally, many staff are still waiting for their beta accounts.
• Google has a saying that they should "eat their own dog food" – i.e. that they should use their own products. They use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs on a daily basis, among others.

Roberto Rocha's blog post about our visit is available here, while the full Gazette article can be found here. I posted some of my own photos on Twitpic. Click on a photo to see a larger view.

Have a wonderful summer, everyone!

À la prochaine,

kp
aka Kathryn Presner