The agency I work for runs a blog dedicated to the world of search marketing over at SearchFuel.com and today, I’ve posted my first contribution to the subject matter.  Well, since I’m no search expert, I instead posted on website usability, because ultimately the only reason people search is to get to a website so it had better not be terrible.  Below is an excerpt of the post, but head over the the SearchFuel blog to check out the whole thing!

Use a captcha that doesn’t look like the scrambled love child of some random word string and a Jackson Pollack painting: Seriously, I would rather you ask me to do long division to prove I am human than ask me to unscramble some vocabulary vomit covered by a spirograph picture some three year old cranked out. After I fail a captcha three or four times, I start to wonder if I really am human…

Don’t require ridiculous passwords: Unless I am registering for a NASA mission control computer or signing up for an email list that includes nuclear launch codes, anything that requires a password can be letters and numbers. I should not have to type out a password that looks like something with 4 symbols and a capital/lower-case letter mix that a 13 year old girl would send in a text message to her friends. If I have to write down my 37 character password, I think that kind of defeats the purpose of security.