Digital Rubbish

I’ve been looking into whether or not we should employ a CMS for our website and had am evaluating Expression Engine. A friend mentioned EE to me about a year ago, and I remember being impressed by the clean interface and rich feature set. But this time around, I’m digging deeper into the functionality and can’t seem to find anything that addresses SEO features for EE.

Searching through Expression Engine’s search forums I came across a lot of uninformed, and frankly, totally incorrect assumptions about making website pages SEO friendly. The kicker was when I came across this EE employee’s response to a customer question about SEO:

хотелско обзавеждане

If Expression Engine’s employees think that SEO is “voodoo,” I shouldn’t get my hopes up about “voodoo” features like canonical URLs, 301 redirects, no-follow tags or custom navigation/categorization structure.

Ironically, the title of the forum post was “SEO vs. EE.” That should’ve been another clue.

Today was our first session of what we’re calling “Team Education Day” at Engine Yard. We used to hold these when I was at Netsprout; we called them “Knowledge Sharing Days.” The concept is that each member of the team chooses a topic to give a short, half hour presentation on, with an additional half hour for Q&A. The sessions are held every other week. On a highly cross-functional team, presentations needs to be high-level, so as to be useful to everyone. On teams of designers, or developers, presentations can be more technical or detailed.

In our case, we have a team made up of designers, developers, marketing, writers and managers, so the conversations are definitely higher-level. That’s not to say that the information isn’t useful; the whole idea of these Education Days is to learn something new. Cross-functional teams may be made up of different and varying disciplines, but everyone is aided by knowing how to do even a little bit of each others’ job.

Here are some photos of Andy’s presentation on Git:

<span class=”full-image-block”><span><img src=”/storage/IMG_0253.JPG?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1220024780497”/></span><span class=”thumbnail-caption”>Andy giving his Git presentation</span></span> <span class=”full-image-block”><span><img src=”/storage/IMG_0256.JPG?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1220024863824”/></span><span class=”thumbnail-caption”>Complete with Keynote presentation!</span></span>