Cross-posted on the Google Grants Blog

Googlers often participate in live site clinics at conferences, giving advice about real-world sites and allowing webmasters to learn by example. Now Google’s Search Quality team is excited to host an online site clinic right here on this blog. In future posts, we’ll be looking at some user-submitted examples and offering broad advice that you can apply to your site.

This site clinic will focus on non-profit organizations, but chances are that our advice will benefit small business and government sites as well. If you work for a non-profit and would like us to consider your site, read on for submission instructions.

How to Submit Your Site:
To register your site for our clinic, fill in the information requested on our form. From there, we will determine trends and share corresponding best practices to improve site quality and user experience. Our analysis will be available in a follow-up post, and will adhere to public standards of webmaster guidance. Please note that by submitting your site, you permit us to use your site as an example in our follow-up site clinic posts.

We have a few guidelines:
  1. Your site must belong to an officially registered non-profit organization.
  2. In order to ensure that you’re the site owner, you must verify ownership of your site in Google Webmaster Tools. You can do that (for free) here.
  3. To the best of your ability, make sure your site meets our webmaster quality guidelines. We will be using the same principles as a basis for our analysis.
All set? Submit your site for consideration here.

The site clinic goes live today, and submissions will be accepted until Monday, November 8, 2010. Stay tuned for some useful webmaster tips when we review the sites.

Posted by Alexi Douvas and Jen Lee, Search Quality Team
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See our Spotlight Gallery for more examples of TV-optimized sites.

What does "optimized for TV" mean?

It means that, for the user sitting on their couch, your site on their TV is an even more enjoyable experience:
  • Text is large enough to be viewable from the sofa-to-TV distance.
  • Site navigation can be performed through button arrows on the remote (a D-pad), rather than mouse/touchpad usage
  • Selectable elements provide a visual queue when selected (when you’re 10 feet away, it needs to be really, really obvious what selections are highlighted)
  • and more...
How can webmasters gain a general idea of their site’s appearance on TV?

First, remember that appearance alone doesn't incorporate whether your site can be easily navigated by TV users (i.e. users with a remote rather than a mouse). With that said, here’s a quick workaround to give you a ballpark idea of how your site looks on TV. (For more in-depth info, please see the “Design considerations” in our optimization guide.)
  1. On a large monitor, make your window size 1920 x 1080.
  2. In a browser, visit your site at full screen.
  3. Zoom the browser to 1.5x the normal size. This is performed in different ways with different keyboards. For example, in Chrome if you press ctrl+ (press ctrl and + at the same time) twice, that’ll zoom the browser to nearly 1.5x the initial size.
  4. Move back 3 x (the distance between you and the monitor).
  5. Check out your site!
And don’t forget, if you want to see your site with the real thing, Google TV enabled devices are now available in stores.

How can you learn more?

Our team just published a developer site, with TV optimization techniques, at code.google.com/tv/web/.

Written by , Developer Programs Tech Lead
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