So what does the dev lifecycle look like, well I’ve always likened it to the game of Chutes and Ladders. As you move through the process, you run across chutes and ladders that either launch you forward or move you back 3 spaces.
However, in most organizations, it’s not as cut and dry as just having the SEOs and developers working together. Often times a project team includes a project manager, business analyst, product manager, QA engineer, SEO, designer, development lead and various other team members. So, how do you make certain that the SEO efforts don’t fall through the cracks? What are the best ways to get SEO into the dev process? Who are the key players? And what happens when SEO doesn’t make it into the process?
Ask the Experts
Having come from a development background, I have been a part of many dev projects and have specifically worked on SEO related projects both large and small scale. I asked a few experts to also weigh in and give their perspective on making SEO part of the development lifecycle.
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Jessica Bowman is well-known in the SEO community and runs an SEM / SEO In-House Blog. You can often find her speaking or moderating in-house SEO sessions at numerous conferences throughout the year. Just next week she’ll be speaking on the panel "In-House SEO: Structuring the Organization for Success" at SES San Jose [I'll be there as well, covering it for the MozPlex, say hello if you see me!]. I’ve heard her speak several times and asked her to weigh in on getting SEO into the development process.
Fran Larkin is the Senior Product Manager for Simply Hired. He’s responsible for the job seeker experience and SEO on SimplyHired.com as well as business development for over 5,000 Job-a-matic publishers, including MySpace, BusinessWeek, CNNMoney.com and The Washington Post. [Whew!] I worked directly with him on an in-depth Site Audit a couple months ago, and have seen firsthand how quickly some of the SEO initiatives have made it to production.Where Does SEO Fit into the Dev Process
When an organization is about to begin a new development project, how and where does SEO fit into that process? Every company will be slightly different, but the ideas are generally the same.Jessica Bowman:
“The shorter list would be where doesn’t SEO go into the development process? SEO needs to be intricately weaved throughout every aspect of the development life cycle from inception to QA testing: identifying the ROI of the project when you incorporate SEO, sitting in requirements meetings, collaborating on wireframes BEFORE they are presented to the project team and contributing detailed SEO requirements to project documentation and QA Testing (or have the QA testing team test for SEO).”Fran Larkin:
"Simply Hired is an extremely job seeker-focused company, so from the very beginning of our product planning efforts, we work hard to align our user experience goals with an SEO-friendly site architecture."
Making Sure SEO Doesn’t Fall Through the Cracks
With all the back and forth that happens on that journey through the game of Chutes and Ladders… aka the dev lifecycle, how do you make sure that your SEO efforts don’t fall through the cracks?Jessica Bowman:
SEO needs to be involved every step of the way – in some areas an SEO team needs to be more intricately involved in the nitty-gritty details than a website product manager, which is surprising to most companies, and even many SEOs. What companies do not realize is that the role of an SEO is not like any other function in the organization. What I tell clients is that SEO needs to be two-peas-in-a-pod with Website Product Managers and Project Managers (at some companies this is the same role).Fran Larkin:
Website Product Managers
Project Managers
- Ultimately responsible for the website and its success.
- It’s in their best interest to maximize traffic, which includes SEO traffic.
- Get a product manager to buy into SEO fully.
They can become your most coveted SEO champion, because they are in a position that both IT and business sponsors will listen to.
One of the things an SEO should do is comb through the project plan to identify where SEO needs to be involved in a project because most project managers are not experienced at integrating SEO into the right places of the development life cycle. If a company hasn’t integrated SEO into a project before, it’s worth the money to pay a consultant with experience integrating SEO into the development process for a given project, and once you learn, you can transfer those insights into future projects.
- Oversee every minute detail that is completed for a project.
- Organize meetings and ensure the right people are involved in reviews and approvals.
- It’s vital for project managers to fully understand how and why SEO needs to be involved. They are the ones who can make it happen.
“We explicitly document the SEO requirements of each new product that we launch – everything from the URLs to individual nofollows. As a result, our dev team has the detail that they need, and our QA team checks to ensure that the SEO requirements function as specified,”
The Key Players
This is a big one for me, the “who” of the project. Does every person who’s a part of the project need to have some understanding of optimizing websites to be search engine friendly? Or is it only necessary for specific people to watch and care about the SEO tasks? Is it ok for developers to not understand why they need to set up 301 redirects, or is the fact that they know how to do it good enough?Jessica Bowman:
"It’s best when everyone on a project has an understanding of SEO because then everyone can look out for SEO on each project. The most important roles to understand SEO include:Fran Larkin:
When looking at the roles, focus on each role by project, rather than team. Often times, especially in large organizations, the usability, design and programming teams are split up into different projects, each working on a different release and your ‘seo expert’ within the programming team may not be involved on all projects. It’s vital that the leads assigned to any given project have intimate knowledge about SEO, or work closely with the SEO team in a way that they have never worked with any other function in the company."
- Lead programmer(s)
- Lead Usability Designer(s)
- Product manager(s)
- Project manager(s)
Simply Hired is an extremely job seeker-focused company, so from the very beginning of our product planning efforts, we work hard to align our user experience goals with an SEO-friendly site architecture.I’d like to add that the Quality Assurance team should have a keen understanding of SEO in general plus they need to know specifically what they are testing. Additionally, the QA team should have a complete set of tools to help them test whether a redirect is for sure doing a 301, or whether the analytics program is tracking correctly for example.
When SEO isn’t a Part of the Process
I have personally seen a site’s traffic plummet when SEO wasn’t taken into consideration. For example, in one case, a section of the site was being moved to a new (and improved – heh) platform. This new platform created two different URLs for the pages, plus the original pages were never 301’d to the new page. Now, the company had 3 different sets of URLs that all lead to the same content and that were all accessible in one way or another (through feeds, site search, in-bound and internal links).Jessica Bowman:
"When SEO isn’t part of the process, you leave money on the table, and throw even more money out the door and in the garbage for good measure. The worst case scenario is that it can wreak havoc on your efforts and can cost thousands of dollars to fix (hundreds of thousands for large organizations and complex websites), it can throw away years of SEO work and tank your rankings and traffic in a single release. A lot is at stake when you make changes to a website, it’s surprising how sometimes the smallest little change that doesn’t seem to relate to SEO can negatively impact the bottom line. For this reason, it’s in a company’s best interest to educate everyone in the company on SEO and keep the SEO team informed on what is happening in each release."Fran Larkin:
SEO issues are treated like any other bugs on the site. We track them, determine the importance and prioritize accordingly.
Where Does That Leave Us?
Every organization and their processes (or lack of processes) are different. What is universal though is the importance of weaving SEO into that process. As both Jessica and Fran mentioned, it’s important to make sure everyone is on board and has an understanding of what SEO is and why it’s important. Finding an SEO proponent within each department will help your efforts immensely.For example, at Simply Hired, they send the marketing and product team to conferences like SES, circulate SEO-related blog posts with the company, and give all new engineers a copy of the Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet to post on their cube wall.
Another way to get people involved is to set up various training courses with different people within the company and ask them to try their new SEO skills on their personal websites. Most people have some sort of website and get a lot more interested in having their personal site rank well in the search engines, than a big corporate site that they have no control over.
What do you do in your organization to make sure SEO doesn’t fall through the cracks? What works and what doesn’t work? Have you learned any lessons you’d like to share?
Game Piece Photo Attribution:
I've found (in large organizations), even if the developers know and realize the importance of SEO, if SEO is not scoped for in the project, then you can forget about implementing SEO.
I'm not saying it is not important for developers to understand SEO, but rather, SEOs should integrate SEO into the product development process well before it reaches the implementation phase.
Let me explain with some real examples from the past two weeks at my work:
Example 1: SEO-savvy developer says they will build into the testing phase some additional time to test for SEO friendliness, only for product manager to say, "I have not scoped any QA time for SEO, you are not to use that time for testing SEO".
Example 2: Scrum meeting where developers ask "What happened to the SEO that was scoped for this sprint?"
Product manager replies "Sorry, SEO is not a core requirement, skip it SEO".
What happened in these two cases?
At my company, there are many teams that the SEOs have to work with: developer, product, user experience, testing, designers etc. These teams follow a detailed product development process called the product development life cycle (PDLC).
To ensure SEO is part of the PDLC, I need to get the product and project managers to buy-in to the importance of SEO.
The Key Players
Product managers (PMs) are vital to embedding SEO into the PDLC. For a project, the PMs create (or polish up) the business case, create the task list and control the slate. They decide what each discipline does and when and for how long they do it. This includes SEO.
Here's a Training Day analogy:
You could spend the time to instruct a police officer in proper protocol only for Denzel Washington to tell the officer, oh hey, forget protocol, we don't have time for that crap, here are your tasks, extortation and manipulation.
Alonzo Harris aka the product manager manages Ethan Hawke's time and if SEO doesn't have time allocated, then your SEO aspirations are as good as (Russian-hitmen) dead.
(Sorry, I've always wanted to throw in a Training Day reference to SEO)
Similarly, without educating the project manager on the importance of SEO, it's a good bet any allocated SEO tasks will not be followed up, signed off or tested on. A project manager is tenacious in ensuring all aspects of the project are being looked after, so why not empower them to make SEO a must-have aspect of a successful project?
Of course, I'm generalizing a lot - agile dev teams have much more leeway in squeezing in SEO into projects, but typically, the larger the team and the larger the project, the more difficult it is to do SEO without product manager and project manager involvement.
"Is the fact that they know how to do it good enough?"
Unfortunately (from the perspective of a SEO educator), I think it is okay that developers know the 'How' and not the 'Why' of SEO. I have talked to many developers who are simply not interested in learning the reasoning behind SEO, who just want to get on with their assigned tasks. Hard to change their mind, even if you have SEO champions in the dev ranks.
To summarize, don't forget about educating the developers but please take those product managers and project managers to task!
*clap* *clap* *clap* totally agree! And nice Training Day reference. :)
100% agreed. We see it on the usability side, too. It's easy to pay lip service and say "This is important!", but if you don't specifically build it into the project and assign specific responsibilities to specific people (yes, that's a lot specifics), it's not going to happen.
At the same time, if you wait until the end of product development or a website launch, then the poor SEO or usability evangelist is basically left with the unenviable job of saying "here's why everything you did is wrong". At that point, we're either ignored and hated, or the company has to spend a lot of money and time fixing what could have been done right the first time.
*clap* *clap* dittos! And also agree with Dr. Pete:
I look forward to attending Jessica's session at SES SJ and appreciate the tips to remind clients not to leave money on the table!
I wanted to completely agree with this posting.
There is also a great importance to include the SEO within the design process which I think was missed in your key players section. I mention design as we typically see client (design by committee-which can be really tough) & graphic artist get together create a beautiful layout that would be hard/costly or impossible to optimize with lots of flash, entry pages, non-content rich pages and if the client approves the design there is plenty of back peddling that will need to be done and even more so if the design is approved by the coder.
If possible the SEO needs to be consulted on all levels of design, content creation and buildout.
Totally agree about the design stage. The site structure and navigation is typically planned at the design stage. It's critical to think about SEO at this stage.
I recently worked on a project where the design included a Flash splash page and a very poor internal navigation system. Fortunately, I was doing the site build, so I was able to advise on the SEO problems this would create.
I definitely agree here! It's always different within each company though. I've worked places where there were web designers who did nothing but design, and other places where they designed and built out the templates using CSS, divs, etc. I think the idea to gather is that everyone in the process, from initial idea and inception to final release to production should have some understanding of SEO, and that SEO has a place along every step of the way.
Thanks for your comments guys, and we should definitely make note that designers are an important part of the process. :)
I strongly agree as well! I've been trying to incorporate this for a long time. Now there is a post to back me up! Thank you so much! I love the picture too! I used to played that game all of the time!
Having worked for a large web development agency I've experienced how SEO fits into the development process first hand. A major problem I encountered was that in taking the initial brief Account Managers didn't truly understand the business objectives of the client, they only had a rough idea. Of course this is not all together surprising - it takes time to get under the skin of a business but that is a vital part of SEO.
Web development agencies tend to clock time and therefore cost like accountants - if it is not paid for it isn't going in. In such a competitive area SEO is often sold in after the build (to keep the initial build costs down) as a service but by this time it can be too late and a false economy!
I agree with others here who are saying that SEO education of the whole team (especially Project Managers) is key to the success of any SEO efforts.
i think your right seo is definatly a way to get more money from the customer but when i walk in and explain how we want to be thinking about seo from the begining because if they get this nice new site and no attention is paid to seo then they wont get as much / any organic traffic and the site is a waste of money. I have to explain that direct traffic to their url is worthless if they cant be found you can tell as many people as you want and hand out tons of buisness cards but it will never be as good as getting search traffic to your site which is where people are looking for a solution and you rank as first in line to be able to help them solve it
my opinion w/e what do you think ? :)
Like you say client education is important as well. I've heard more than once "It's all about the keyword tag isn't it?" and it wasn't all that long ago a client of mine decided that hidden text was the future and went ahead without me (using another SEO company who had recommended it) and got a 30 day ban. It was great for my experience as I had never had a site banned before but not to hot for them.
The client needs to understand that a website without online marketing is like a shop on a desert island. It might be a great shop but no one will ever visit it unless you take them there!
I worked at Web Dev Agency for 4 years and I can hear those words ringing in my ears. Not even specifically about SEO... but anything that comes up that wasn't specifically spelled out in the contract with the client.
It seems that these days if you launch this awesome website that no one can access then you end up having egg on your face. Why not please your client by simply making it a part of the every day dev process, rather than an add on. In the end the client will be happy and so will you because you'll get repeat customers, or excellent referrals.
Great post, Jennita! This makes me excited and nervous all at the same time. I'm a project manager getting ready to do a complete redesign of our most important website (er, that's my day job... not the humble blog you'd find if you clicked on my profile link). The only thing is that we don't have an SEO, product manager or usability designer.
I have a marketing manager, a BA/QA a developer, and a digital designer. $400M/year on the line. No sweat, right? Pray for us, MozLand.
I think it's awesome that you're a project manager and are so involved with the SEOmoz blog! WOOT! That gives me hope. :)
There is no reason that every single person you've listed couldn't learn about SEO and gain more understanding of the benefits. Not every organization has a budget for a full time SEO, so you weave it in however you can. Now if you're managing the project, you have the ability to make sure that those tasks make it into the project plan. Try and get one other person to completely buy in, and they'll be your SEO champion to the rest of the team.
Because... who's going to listen to the project manager, right? (haha I kid! ;) You can definitely make the redesign go smoothly! Also, give that QA person a handful of tools to use to test 301 redirects and other things, and they'll be sold (hopefully).
Good Luck!
Our father, who art the web, SEO is thy name...thy spider come, text will be done, in HTML as it is in Webmaster guidelines. Give us this day our daily traffic, and forgive us our linking, as we forgive blog spammers that spam against us, and lead us not into blackness, but deliver us the search engines, for revenue is the goal, and conversion the power, and the glory goes to SEO for ever and ever...
Recite daily and see if that works...
LOL! I just had to tweet a link to that. Favorite comment ever!
Thanks J...a brief moment of divine inspiration...
OMG I can feel the mozlove! Thanks for the advice, Jennita (and for the prayers, kpaulin lol).
I've been evangelizing SEO (and essential goodness like usability) for months now. The project team has drank the Koolaid and we're near giddy to put everything in motion.
I might be the only visitor to SEOmoz at the moment, but our whole team is our SEO champion. Everyone is ready and willing to do their part to implement some of the best tools and tactics seen everyday right here at SEOmoz.
In SEO we trust... :D
Need more thumbs for this one!
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of S-E-O. It is trampling out the spam where the search engines go;
It hath loosed the fateful lightning of it's terrible swift robots.txt;
It's truth is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! SEO's truth is marching on.
SEO has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
It is sifting out the spammers of men before the search engine's judgement seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer SEO! be jubilant, my tweets;
Our SEO is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Our SEO is marching on.
In the beauty of the search engines SEO was born across the web,
With a glory in it's work that pays you and me:
As SEO was born to make websites visible, let us live to make our clients seen;
While SEO is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! While SEO is marching on.
woot points !
Ok, you guys....I love SEO very very much. I'm always excited to learn new stuff and I keep a watchful eye on the next valuable insight....but I wouldn't take it THIS far. Sure, for fun, but some of us find it a bit offensive. Lets keep this a bit more professional, ok. :)
As a developer, I hold myself to extremely high standards.
No javascript without graceful degragation. No bloated code, keep everything sorted. And DEFINITELY keep semantics in mind and clean for simple SEO management.
I consider on-page seo (aside from the title tags and meta tags) part of the development process. Its not a separate step. Its not a separate component. It simply comes from being a good developer.
I dont understand where most of the fighting for SEO can come from, unless your simply dealing with "developers" who use frontpage or dreamweaver.
Where does the conflict come from? What kind of extra work are you asking from your developers? Is it the copy on the page, meaning the marketing? Thats (usually) not a developers job to handle.
When it comes to proper keyword research and adwords management, that is a completely separate beast from the development process is it not?
Forgive me if I dont understand all this self praise I hear from SEOs all the time. As far as I am concerned, most of what I hear that needs to be done is part of my basic development routine!
Jessica's comment about "identifying the ROI of the project" is really the crux of it for me. Too often SEO gets left behind because the SEO evangelist is unable to quantify SEO in terms of a cost/benefit analysis.
We've got to be able to demonstrate upfront that two things about the proposed SEO integration are true:
1.) That SEO will deliver positive ROI; and
2.) That our proposed SEO specs will deliver more ROI than other SEO specs, AND more ROI than any other form of marketing effort.
We're asking the client to make an investment, so if we can't demonstrate this, then we deserve to be ignored :)
Very true. Generally the programmers do not have understanding of SEO and neither its importance.
In today's world when you are builiding any product for the web , SEO has to be considered.
SEO aspect should be taken in consideration in architecture phase itself. Small things like how the url is displayed, whether the prominent headings are in H1/H2/H3 or not , are very important.
A lot of stuff can be learned from wordpress software
this is good news for me because my job responsibilities make me both a seo as well as a developer. I find that i try to put seo into everything that i am creating and i think that its important. Seo should be done from the beginning whenever possible almost every day i have to tell a client asking for edits that their site is all images and cant be spidere. proper use of alt,h1,and the way i code my css all are in an attempt to have less html markup, more content towards the top of the page and a linking and site structure that is both accessible and geared towards seo
so in short i totally agree with this post and i think that on small site with one or 2 developers that it is perfectly reasonable for your programmers to have at least a little seo knowledge and on bigger projects i don't know the feasibility of them all getting seo but i cant harp enough about how valuable it is
Great post.
I have been part of a development process change in a large tech organisation that has gone from the traditional 'waterfall' methodology, to a more modern 'agile' development approach.
More than anything else, this has seen a dramatic increase in the level of engagement SEO received, more granular and embedded training and integration of best practices etc. So this points more to the type of dev process than overall personalities and positions.
One thing I did learn from this post was that apparently "Simply Hired is an extremely job seeker-focused company"... :p
We've gone through the same waterfall to agile development approach too and I've definitely noticed that the dev crew are much more approachable and proactive in engaging with search and analytics...
Now to work on those PM and project managers :P
Great post J-Lo! I love the Chutes & Ladders analogy.
Our website design and marketing company does not include SEO in the PDLC but offers clients an option to go in for SEO during website design/ redesign stage. During the past one year I have found that sites have in fact saved money by going in for SEO during the website design stage, because their site structure, URLs, content and design template are already optimized
Redoing a website from the SEO point of view often negates the effect of SEO unless the site is well linked with popular keywords as anchor text.
Thanks for the post Jennita, I am forwarding it to our CEO!
great post I totally agree with you :)
Thanks for the detailed information about SEO work and developing. The board game analogies were really helpful and quite clever. For people such as a veterinarian or boutique owner, being able to understand the basics of good SEO and developer work is important since it can greatly affect the success of the business, but it is nice when these concepts are presented in such an understandable way so that hours aren't spent trying to figure the information out.
[removed link]
Good article. In the company I work for now I used to be the SEM team leader looking after PPC, SEO and a few other bits and bobs. I then moved out of this role to become a proxy product owner in a project delivery framework known as "SCRUM".
Simply put I represent the businesses interests in the development side of things. For a company with over 5000 employees I would estimate about 5 employees no anything sufficient around SEO, so its a real challenge to fight that corner.
I definitely feel however that having my own SEO knowledge there and having the final say on development work is beneficial in this process and has helped us improve on the organic search front.
The challenge is that I only represent 1 Scrum's interests and therefore we still have bad examples of development that effect SEO in a negative way.
Oh, and Jennita, with the correct attribute, can we steal (oops borrow) the snakes and ladders graphic?
Hah! I may have to pretty it up a bit, the more I look at it the more I want to change things. :) Definitely use it if you'd like, but don't forget where it came from! (oh... and I made that in Word haha!)
I agree it does have to be thought of at every point of the design and development process.
I try to explain to my clients in simple terms why they should have keywords here and there, and the importance of inbound links.
My clients always appreciate the insight and at the end of each project come away from it with a better understanding of how search engines work, and not having the belief that a lot of people do, that you can put up a page, and then it will magically become number one in google.
Getting SEO involved in the development process is always hard unless the people running the project are aware of the value of doing so. I find that there is slowly starting to be more awareness of the value and ROI that SEO can bring but there is still a long way to go.
I love the chutes and ladders chart!
Great post, Jennita.
Totally agree with your point. Sometimes it's just hard to communicate because you cannot expect everyone to understand what you are doing. I found it quite difficult when SEO was not considered in the design step, but when website goes live.
Thanks for the post
Yes, it's often an afterthought. "Oh, our pagination uses AJAX so Google can only get to the first 15 products on the page." I've actually heard that one. :)
Whenever we are fortunate enough to be brought in at the very beginning, one of the first things we do is offer a two hour "SEO Overview" presentation for the developement stakeholders including the CEO or CMO if at all possible...lots of case studies, practical mini-workshops where we get team members and execs to "write the perfect title tag" etc...(and make sure the boss wins :) )
The result is that SEO and conversion often becomes the driving factor rather than the poor cousin...but it's al in the timing...all too often it's more like "What about SEO?" a week before going live.
Hi ,
really good post
As I am also PHP Developer of my some websites & blgos
So now next i will tack care about this part also.
Thanks for good information.
Regards,
Samir
Absolutely fantastic post - lots to take away from this. We're considering the value of creating an internal blog/forum setup, and posting tutorialised snippets which can incorporate feedback and evolve to form definitive best practice guidelines.
Very inspiring!
Sounds like an excellent idea. However you can get more people in the company interested and learning about the benefits of SEO, the better!
I always find that if you mention this simple analogy to a client then you will have no problem with getting SEO addressed in the design process.
If you had a beautiful shop built with great fixtures, displays and filled it with wonderful sales staff, would you then build a brick wall around allowing no one in?
If it can't be found then it's no good, most clients do not realise this and it is our job to educate them.
I have recently worked with two separate clients on re-design projects, both times the "designers" were all about the look and feel with little if any consideration to promotion.
Having said that, once I had got everyone around the table the problems have been resolved.
It is a shame that it always seems to be SEO's that have to fight to be heard. In 12yrs I have only worked with two developers that considered promotion before I had to force the issue.
Personally I think this is a cop out from the web design community, it's not as if SEO is a new thing but this is across we SEO's have to bear.
Pete Gronland
really seomoz blog developers? why dont you add a trim function so we dont have whitespace at the ends of posts? save space on your page and on your server iono just a thought
What do you mean? The comment above? That's not something our system does automatically, he added those himself.
when you get the data back from the forms post you should call the trim() function or its equivalent so the trailing spaces and line returns are cut out and it doesn't bloat the page unnecessary
Edit:
ok so i did some looking and here it is
<p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
the rich text editor seems to put these p tags as line breaks so it should remove the extra ones at the end of the post just being picky cuz im a programmer ill think of a programmatic way to find where the true end of the post is and get back to yall
ok so i thought about writing some regex to find and replace the extra p tags but this should work too use a replace() to replace all the empty p tags "<p> </p>" in the page with a regular linefeed character call trim() so trailing whitespace is removed the call replace() again on the newline char and put back the p tags or a "<br>"(better in my opinion) just in case a couple of
<p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
happen in the middle of the post (they aren't extra whitespace so we don't need to remove it) so thats my solution its like 3 function calls and 1 line of code unless any of the developers that are reading this want to call em wack and give a more elegant solution :)