Feedback for Slope (Beta)A mildly amusing (and hopefully insightful) presentation from the perspective of a customer experience enthusiast & SEO expert. (That’s me, Amanda Tiffany)

I saw your Twitter Auto-DM à la Socedo invite to test Slope Beta.

I think Slope’s Story is great. I’m happy to make myself available for feedback as your product progresses out of beta.

My knowledge of professional video production via remote collaboration tools is, admittedly, in short supply.

The majority of my expertise lies in marketing, optimization, strategic planning, and a few other technical verticals.

I might not be the ideal candidate for product testing, but I can still offer up some thoughts in an area that’s related to your

product.

Quick Hello:I’m Amanda AKA @AmandasAbroad

Awesome Concept

Slope Looks Impressive

Kudos for making a new tool for remote teams! Reading about your team’s process create value where other tools left

Thanks for the Beta Invite

Before taking a look at Slope I explored the website and blog a bit. I found a few notable issues that I’m compelled to share with you.

I’m not concerned about spelling mistakes, or coming across a broken

link here or there.

I’m concerned with potential security risks, and the customer experience

(or UX) of Slope’s website.

You may already know of the errors or issues I’ve observed while

exploring Slope’s site.

Just in case you haven’t: I am happy to share what

I’ve noticed so far.

1.Security Risks

Site Exposure | Content Security Policies | Certificate Errors

“

Security Certificate

Errors

Yikes.

Such a P.I.T.A. and a red flag

to visitors

Many images and a few script files on goslope.com are being served from HTTP on pages that have been difinitively switched to serving from the HTTPS protocol.

‘Insecure’ or ‘Mixed Content’ can trigger alarming warnings in a user’s browser.

A person might get close to the end of a signup or buying funnel, far enough to see light on the other side even. But if they’re bombarded with security errors, they might be too unnerved to stick around.

There are many approaches to finding and solving mixed content issues.

It can be costly & time consuming to fix...

Especially for sites with thousands of pages hiding potential problems.

Lucky day for SlopeI’ve taken the liberty of finding most of the links to assets that are causing this issue for you.

Aha! Here are a couple...

Changing these and any other HTTP files to serve from HTTPS should fix certificate warnings.

CTRL+F

More possible causes & potential fixes for this error can be found here:

http://bit.ly/mixedhttphttp://bit.ly/fixinsecure

Finding assets that cause SSL certificate errors using your computer:

● In Firefox or Chrome, navigate to https://goslope.com

● Press F12 on your keyboard● In the box that appears at the bottom of your

screen, click Console tab. ● Errors are highlighted Red; Warnings are

highlighted Yellow.

Here’s a list from Slope to get you started:

http://bit.ly/SlopeHTTPList

2. About JSON-LDSupercharging Slope’s social media discoverability.

I happened to spot Slope’s JSON-LD code generated by Yoast’s SEO plugin.

Only search queries are handled here… why not declare Slope’s social media

profiles as well?

WIN: Profiles are then added to Google’s Knowledge Graph

i.e. Glorious preeminence of a company’s social media profiles in search results will no longer be the

desperate, laughable pipe-dream of enthusiastic, espresso-fueled CEO’s everywhere.

While nosing around for vulnerabilities...

Side Note: Many features have been added into new versions of the SEO Yoast plugin. I noticed Slope is running version 1.7.4 while the current version is 2.3.5.

Ultimately, the choice of updating is entirely up to you and your webdev team.

In any case, the benefits of declaring your company’s social profiles are so worth the effort of adding in a few lines of JSON-LD code.

3. Bah Bye Redirects

Redirect trouble? Goat and fix them! Give those pesky redirects the bleating of a lifetime!

Sheepish redirects... (I can’t help myself)

I noticed some odd behavior when trying to reach Slope’s robots.txt file.

Baa’d Jokes Aside

I don’t have much experience with investigating odd redirect behavior, and can’t weigh-in here with complete

confidence on why this is happening without a peek at your backend.

It may not be indicative of a problem, necessarily.However, if it were my site, I’d investigate the potential of

it being a security vulnerability, and any impacts to UX.(Google exists for a reason)

Think about adding the links to Slope’s social media profiles on the About Us page. Shameless self promotion is great right? Right.

Other notes, suggestions, and concepts to consider.

Consider reviewing the content on Slope’s support page. There are unfinished answers, misspellings, and grammar mistakes.

BONUS TIP: There is only lorem ipsum latin filler content on the TernPro Creative copyright page.

Google Webmasters suggests having a site’s robots.txt file include a reference to sitemap/s.

Eliminate sensitive pages from displaying in Google search results, like wp-login.php, with a NOINDEX meta tag.

Disable WP Login page or learn how to hide errors when bad passwords or usernames are entered on wp-login.php See Tip #9

Even super-impressive slideshows must come to an end at some point. Usually around the time those “why-am-I-reading-this” thoughts pop into one’s head.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my feedback, and I sincerely hope you learned something helpful along the way. If not, feel free to complain at me (or shower me with your gratitude, or ask questions, or hire me for a project, whatever floats your goat!) by contacting me here:

http://goo.gl/forms/6RPUyr1ldd

Let’s finish up & get back to work now, eh?

Or on LinkedIn Or via Twitter Thank you! Ciao now :) - Amanda Tiffany