While surfing today I came across Phil Renaud’s latest post to Fad.Tastic, Content Usability vs Content Design. Check it out, bookmark fad.tastic, and comment :). He touches on the points of Style or Substance? Design or Content? Does there have to be a battle between the two?
In short you want my opinion: Content is more important than design, but design isn’t irrelavant.
It is recommended by the leaders in the field in online marketing thru the use of informational articles to keep them short and tight. They recommend keeping the articles (or most content for that matter) between two hundred and five hundred words. As a designer I agree with these gurus in online article marketing and most of their points in theory, as smaller articles get picked up on the Internet faster. However, in practice I can say that large content blocks have been picked up too, although it is true not to the degree as the smaller tighter articles do, but all content seem to have been picked up on websites all over the world now.
The hotter the subject the faster the articles will spread across cyber space; hot topics do help that is for certain, that I had noticed right away. My articles often, have punctuation; ‘issues” and the occassional speling airor y’know? But for the most part these Internet Article marketing professionals are right, and we should advise on the fundamentals.
Now then taking all these facts into consideration, I would say those who create many smaller articles do better in Internet article marketing and the gurus of the industry are correct in this point. I just think that point needs to be understood that I have noticed that many of my larger content sites spider better under the key words and get SEO higher rankings. And to that point get read and seen by more people here. So whereas I agree with these marketing experts, I am also dissecting this issue into complete scrutiny. Think on this when using article marketing on the Internet as part of your company’s growth strategy.
Understanding how color impacts your message. First impressions are lasting impressions, and web designers (novices and professionals) have only a fleeting moment to engage a visitor. According to the Institute for Color Research, “all human beings make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment, or item within 90 seconds of initial viewing, and that between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on color alone.”
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Cameron Moll, over at AListApart, published an article yesterday entitled “Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign”. This is a great read and you can go here to read Cameron’s entire article.
As he notes, incessant (or constant) redesign is far from extinction. I really enjoyed his points on the difference between “redesigners” and “realigners”. I myself have fallen in to the redesigner category in the past. Believing that the look and feel being changed would be the ‘opening’ for the site.
I have grown since that time and now fall in to the realigners category. Too often, we redesign the look and feel of a website when it’s not absolutely necessary. There are a multitude of sites that do need a visual facelift. Yet there are many who fail to see results in their website not because of the look but because of “what’s under the hood”.
I take pride in the visual schemes that I present to our design clients. But when I put the schemes together, I do so with the purpose of the site in mind. Far too often a site is made to fit with the design rather than the design fitting with the site.
I especially enjoy Cameron Moll’s summarization of the differences between redesigners and realigners:
The desire to redesign is aesthetic-driven, while the desire to realign is purpose-driven.
Cameron’s article shows quite a few examples of what realigning a website is all about; from small and large scale perspectives
There are two acceptable spellings of the word gray. Prior to today I was under the assumption that “gray” was the more popular of the pair, but after two quick Google searches for “gray” and “grey,” I realized the difference seems to be very slight (on the Web, at least).
So what, then, is the difference between the two spellings? According to Google Answers, the two words have almost the same meaning in all cases, and g-r-a-y is simply an American derivation of the original spelling g-r-e-y. According to Flak Magazine, the difference can be chalked up to the same happenstances that led to organize/organise and judgement/judgment. Apparently e.e. cummings and Prince are partly to blame as well. However, among the several hypotheses for why gray and grey exist, I believe the following to be the best:
Gray is a color.
Grey is a *colour*.
So next time you’re faced with the choice of spelling the word “gray,” feel free to go with whatever spelling best suits you at the time. I think I’ll continue to use g-r-e-y, just because it’s been so lucky for me in the past.
Up until today, I thought this was non-existant. Then I found this post on the IE blog. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but it may prove to be very interesting depending on how well it debugs JavaScript. Of course, I doubt it will compare to Firefox or Opera.
I am migrating to a new hiliting plugin for wordpress - the IG:hilite plugin displayed nicely to the frontend screen (with a few tweaks) but the admin section was littered with errors from the plugin code - It was a downright disappointment. I’ve just picked up Code Snippet and so far love the ease of use - it also uses the geshi formatting engine so I look forward to making hacks to setup for the new layout coming soon!
For those of you into Wordpress - I have found an awesome plugin resource here.
When it comes to installing software, secure design is often the last consideration. The first goal is usually just to get it to work. This is particularly true of databases. Databases are commonly referred to the keys to the kingdom: meaning that once they are compromised, all the valuable data that is stored there could fall into the hands of the attacker. With this in mind, this article will discuss various methods to secure databases, specifically one of the most popular freeware databases in use today, MySQL.
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James Archer in The Return of Design raises a complaint about tagging that I share - why don’t sites have decent tag delimiters? It’s an interesting question, and one that needs to be solved before tagging crosses over into the mainstream. I’m surprised it hasn’t been discussed and debated more. Tagging a photo or an article “sanfrancisco” or “newenglandpatriots” just isn’t intuitive to the general web user.
But there’s an even worse problem with the concatenation that’s common at services like del.icio.us or Flickr. It results in polluted metadata. In order for community metadata to be valuable to search, we’ll need to clean this up. It also encourages the use of simple, short terms rather than more robust concepts or phrases. Today’s systems have obviously been designed to sidestep backend technical challenges. Let’s make our software smarter to accommodate our users, rather than asking our users to accommodate our software.
Programmers and developers are accustomed to oddball text separators, but the general public isn’t. As these services become increasingly widespread, more people are going to be puzzled about the odd symbols in the middle of otherwise logical phrases.
Exactly. You know you have a user interface problem when your description of it starts with “programmers and developers are accustomed to…”
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Typographers have known for a long time that tabular data is easier to read when presented with alternating colors for each row. Most people have at one time or another seen computer printer paper with the light green bars alternating with white. To give your web listings and tables greater readability add alternating row background colors.
The question is how to implement this. Some way of keeping track of which row we are on and assigning a color is needed. This tutorial is too short to go into all the various ways you might try to do this by brute force. Instead I will offer a technique whose origin is lost in the mists of programmer lore.
We will turn to modular arithmetic to do the trick. Most programming languages offer a modulo operator, which returns the remainder of a division. I will not go into modular arithmetic here, you can find detailed explanations by doing a web search on the topic. We are interested in a particular behavior of the modulo function. It has the curious property that if you take a number modulo a second number, the first number never exceeds the value of the second. In other words, it acts to limit the value of a variable and that value will “wrap around” back to zero no matter how large the first number becomes.
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