My step-father is a business professor at Krannert School of Management and recommended I check out David Aaker, whom I guess is considered a bit of an authority on the subject. Aaker stresses relevance as an element of branding that a lot of people forget.

Relevance occupies the space between someone knowing who you are and someone liking what you do. Say I’m hungry for a salad. There are thousands of places I could go to get one (including produce stores to make my own). Even though I’m familiar with McDonald’s, it’s not going to pop into my brain as a destination. I don’t connect “salad” and “McDonald’s”, even though I might connect “food” with “McDonald’s”. It’s not relevant to the current question. Similarly, while I might consider Black & Decker relevant if I were looking for a hedge trimmer or cordless drill, I wouldn’t if it were a rice cooker I was after.

In this way, branding closely mimics findability on the web. Findability is the conceptual sequel to information architecture that stresses the process of users finding your information over the internal structure of the information itself. Do I care if your product is considered top of the line if I never click to the page that describes it?

The folks over at Xerox PARC (who have previously brought you the mouse, desktop icon, etc.) have put together a model of human behavior while looking for data that they call “Scent Navigation Information Foraging”, abbreviated both appropriately and hilariously as SNIF. SNIF suggests that people roam the web like hungry beasts in search of information. When we catch a scent, we bound off in that direction (by clicking a link) and smell the air again (by scanning the page). For instance, if I were looking for a job from Lockheed Martin, I wouldn’t expect to find a job description on their (awful) homepage, but I would scan for any trigger words that might help me get closer like “careers”, “jobs”, “opportunities” or failing those “about us” or “corporate”. Finding one, I’d pounce and then see if I could get closer from the next page, until I had the poor data-gazelle in my gnashing teeth.

With farms and factories producing far more than we could ever want, the problem of scarcity has been for the most part solved on a physical plane (though problems of sustainable production and equitable distribution of resources remain). Still, demand for branding remains high due to the “supply” of relevance being finite. We simply cannot hold information about the offerings of every single company in our heads. Our collective psyches are slashed and burned for profit, with very little regard for what we ourselves may or may not want to store in there. Cynicism, sarcasm, and an increased resistance to advertising is the end result.

A healthier and more sustainable strategy for branding may be to further pursue the foraging model in greater depth. Advertising would be limited to those seeking advertising, and specifically seeking the products being advertised. This simple evolution—contextual branding—is not only respectful, but how Google makes billions of dollars a year. Like other landscapes allowed to recover after intense resource extraction, perhaps our minds will eventually return to a more peaceful state.

First, you have to love Apple products. They’re really pretty on the outside, but they run some sort of Unix type thing on the inside. Just like webmasters. We have to be comfortable using Photoshop one second and vi the next. Of course, if you don’t actually use a Mac to do your webmastering, you’ll have to balance things out by owning lots of iPods (they come in several “gotta catch’em all” sizes).

Next, you need to be super-organized. Webmastering can be very stressful, what with managing a co-located server running all the very latest versions of lots of Open Source software, editing standards-compliant XHTML Strict files by hand, and manipulating custom graphics pixel by pixel. To handle all of these high-tech tasks, you need a Moleskine. That’s right. Nothing says “I’m a cutting edge webmaster,” like a 200-year old notebook. Feeling a little Luddite? Balance it out with a Fisher Space Pen and you’ll be right as rain (which, incidentally, you could write during—the Space Pen can write underwater, upside down, and even in space!).

Finally, you’re going to want to drink a lot of coffee. This will do two things for you. One, it will give lots of energy to accomplish all of the unreasonable tasks that are constantly asked of you by your tech-ignorant staff. Second, it will make you jittery and paranoid so all tasks asked of you seem unreasonable and that you are vastly more intelligent than everyone else.

I’m sure I have other secrets that make me a smart webmaster. Some may have to do with findability, progressive disclosure, or the application of Zipf curves to traffic patterns, but they’re harder to grasp. Just stick with the basics (above) and you, too, can be a smart webmaster. Oh, and go vote for RAN in the Squidoo poll.