Web Designers, graphic designers, and all designers are face with Design Challenges. Let's dive into the world of web design, graphic design, usability, information technology, and look at life and the work place. Come back often to see what I see. View my world and the Design Challenges that I'm face with
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Reality meets the Web
Today AOL announce its partnership with Reality TV king, Mark Burnett. They have come together to create an online Scavenger Hunt where the game named Gold Rush will consists of looking for clues across a multitude of Web sites.
Although they claim that the clues will not require any computer expertise, I believe that those more Web savvy will definitely have a great advantage over luddites. In an effort to level the battle field, a person may choose to join or form a syndicate whereby a group of friends can come together to solve the pop cultured clues.
The bottom line is that the Web has become a medium which may soon replace TV primetime and these creative geniuses are looking to have an edge in the competition for eyeballs. IPTV is coming and 9-5 will become the next target for a vast audience.
I was speaking with a friend recently who mentioned that he feels that banks are really not giving a good interest rate on savings account. I did some checking and turns out he is right, my bank currently pays less than a percent. I never really paid much attention to interest rates and thought all banks pretty much give you the same return on your money. Turns out, I am more than wrong.
There is one bank who is offering close to 5% on any direct deposit account, the bank ING, the trick, there is no physical bank. They claim they can provide a higher ROI because the have cut down the overhead of physical branches. I'm not sure I feel 100% comfortable with this idea, yet! But in all honesty what's the difference, the money is FDIC insured, they seem legit as they advertise on most major TV networks, sponsor the New York City Marathon, and claim to have over 200k professional clients. With all these facts and more how can you not thrust and take a leap of faith?
The bottom line is that your money isn't going to gain anything by just sitting in a bank account, you must research your options and study them carefully, I know I am, and will let you know how things work out.
Search Engine Optimization is the process by which an SEO specialist (yes, a new title for a new industry) analyzes a particular Web site with the hopes of getting it to rank better for a particular keyword or term within the search engines.
I have now become a Jedi in this industry, that is, I have studied the industry soooo muchhhh that I have declared myself as an SEO master. Actually, I didn't quite self proclaimed the title, rather, I have been seek by many to optimize their sites. I have become quite good at this and it's really all thanks to a small program out there called Web CEO. I don't have any relations with the company and will not receive any endorsement payment, although I wish I would, but the program has really worked wonders for me and I wanted to share this with you. Mainly because the program takes you step by step into understanding what each component of an HTML page does. For example, I made a Web site go from having no google ranking, to watched it climb slowly over a period of two weeks to now rank at 17, hoping to be on the first page by the beginning of the week.
But to tell you a little secret, you can optimize a site to death, but if it just doesn't have the content to back it up it will never make a stride. The bottom line is that no matter what many companies out there promise, your site will get nowhere within the search engines unless you have the editorial content to make them rise. This is specially true for those small business sites which pay thousand of dollars to SEO firms, and see little to no results except for the whole and indent in their cash flow.
This time is not the apprentice making headlines, but Trump filling a lawsuit against Warner Books, an enterprise who published a book claiming that the Donald is not worth what he claims, therefore viewed as an unflattering and offensive allegation. However, Forbes magazine claims that the Trump empire extends in the sum of $2.7 Billion. The book however, claims a networth of roughly 270 millions.
I, for one, am happy to see that someone is finally standing up to the press. I'm tire of seeing lies run in articles, newspapers, TV, and books, to later see small retractions and apologies from editors who don't take the time to verify their facts, or choose to publish things in an effort to gather eyeballs to their medium.
The bottom line is that if you are going to have your work seeing by millions you better be sure that you are doing the right thing and dotting your i's and crossing your t's or it could be you facing a $5 billion dollar lawsuit. For more on this click onto this article.
Since I became an adult, I have become health conscious. That is, I exercise regularly and for the most part don't eat fast food. In the past two years, I have drastically change my diet to cut out most junk food and include more fruit and vegetables.
After all of this, my weight hasn't, for the most part, change. My weight typically stays the same, plus or minus 5 pounds. I feel healthier and have notice decreased body fat, yet my BMI is yet to change.
According to all insurance companies, thought I look fit and well in shape, I am overweight. I decided to look further and found this BMI calculator which basically takes the same formula develop between 1830-1850 defined as weight/height. The government to this day still considers this formula to determine the health of an individual.
The bottom line is that this formula is outdated. People in the 1800's didn't have the same physiques that most people who work out have today. This formula fails to take into account body types, muscle development and the ration of body fat to weight. I am surprised that with all technologies and modern equipment, we are yet to develop a "chart" that represents and labels individuals more accurately. I guess it is a good thing that insurance companies don't charge base on this, otherwise I would have to drop 50 pounds to be at the point the chart would want me to be base on my BMI. I think at that weight I would be grossly underweight and malnourished, not to mention extremely unhealthy.
It seems now a days that if you are in the Web business, you work for google, in a matter of speaking of course. Everyday I find myself optimizing more and more for search engine ranking.
SEO has become the industry to know. If I knew then what I know now, I would be a rich man. Unfortunately, I only heard of Search Engine Optimization about three years ago when I applied for a job with an SEO firm from whom I turned down a job, little did I know then that SEO would be so hot!
I recently came across a very good SEO program call Web CEO. It was offered to me via "spam" - a newsletter which I subscribed too eons ago from some folks who walked away from their original purpose and have now turned themselves into Web hosters/SEO specialists.
The bottom line is that if you want to succeed you better be flexible enough to jump from one wagon to the next. The Web market is constantly changing. Search engines like google change their algorithms every quarter in order to weed out SEO spammers. If you want your site to rank, the best thing is to keep your site clean and only apply the best and honest rules.
Now that you have fully reconfigured your site, it is user friendly, you have optimized its search engine locale, the rest lies in how you can monetize. If you are like many others, you are probably thinking google ads.
My friends you would be thinking right. I was recently reading an article on how quickly google ads become stale. Web site visitors have become numb to the friendly text ad banners, and since they folks at google are a powerhouse of marketing and business knowledge, they have come up with a way to keep your visitors focus on these ads. You can simply randomize the colors of your ads. You can now show your visitors up to four different color combinations of ads, the best part, it is all done very easily. Change these four lines of code within your google ads:
All color need to be entered in hex codes, for example for white you would type ffffff.
The bottom line is that just like content needs to be fresh to keep people visiting your site, ads must be fresh as well if you are to have a good click thru rate for all your ads. A simple measure as changing the color of the ads can mean a world of difference between users clicking and simply ignoring those ads. Now if you are tire of google ads and want to experiment with other types of ads, simply visit this post from a Web master who got banned from google ads, but has found countless other programs to help you maximize the revenue from your site.
Now that you have fully reconfigured your site, it is user friendly, you have optimized its search engine locale, the rest lies in how you can monietize. If you are like many others, you are probably thinking google ads.
My friends you would be thinking right. I was recently reading an article on how quickly google ads become stale. Web site visitors have become numb to the friendly text ad banners, and since they folks at google are a powerhouse of marketing and business knowledge, they have come up with a way to keep your visitors focus on these ads. You can simply randomize the colors of your ads. You can now show your visitors upto four different color combinations of ads, the best part, it is all done very easily. Change these four lines of code within your google ads:
All color need to be entered in hex codes, for example for white you would type ffffff.
The bottom line is that just like content needs to be fresh to keep people visiting your site, ads must be fresh as well if you are to have a good click thru rate for all your ads. A simple measure as changing the color of the ads can mean a world of difference between users clicking and simply ignoring those ads. Now if you are tire of google ads and want to experiment with other types of ads, simply visit this post from a Web master who got banned from google ads, but has found countless other programs to help you maximize the revenue from your site.
Whoring is illegal in most of the US, with the exception of a small area near sin city. It seems though that eBay has broken all the rules as a whole family is up for bid. A couple has put themselves up for bid along with their five kids.
The Rhode Island family is not selling sex, but leasing their services for five years. They come with a bunch of useful skills, offering to run errands, change the oil in the car, among others. The asking price, $1.5 million US duckets, at first glance this seems pretty hefty. Lets remember that most of us don't really need them to run our errands, but an "A" list celebrity could well afford them and would typically want a package deal like this in their mansions.
I guess this is all among the plethora of new creative ideas to make over a million bucks that started with the now famous Million Dollar Homepage.
The bottom line is that creativity goes a long way and if you are creative enough, you too could be on your way to becoming the next millionaire.
I never heard this term before this week when I was asked to collaborate with a great developer on this project. We were asked to create a map of all attendees to the number one VoIP conference in the World which currently has over 8,000 attendees with number growing by the hour.
Turns out a Mashup is a Web site or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. Google provides an API interface into its google map database that allows the mapping of longitude and latitude data to a pinpoint. This interface was used to generate this map.
Although a bit challenging for my developer, it came out great, but with some many points it takes a few minutes to see all the data fully loaded.
The bottom line is that one must face all challenges head first. Don't be afraid to dive right into a new technology and experiment. Once you get over your fear of suffering a lost, the outcome would be more than great.
Despite the billions of dollars spent every year in this country on over-the-counter cough syrups, most such medicines do little if anything to relieve coughs, the nation's chest physicians say, according to reports from the Associated Press this morning.
I don't know about you, but when I have a cold I run out to the pharmacy the instance I start feeling sick. I want to start tackling the disease as quickly a possible as I cannot afford to take any time off from work or my daily life.
For so long we have been fed so many things that we no longer can tell the difference between the truth and lies. In all honesty, we have been told that caffeine is good, then caffeine is bad, and now is back to being good... Can somebody please make up their mind?
Now we are told that cough syrups do nothing, I have to disagree. Maybe is just a mind game, but when I take a cold medicine, I feel almost instant relief. Nyquil is one of the best over the counter drugs ever invented, I take this stuff and is off to bed I go. Rest is what is needed to help heal, so if the cough syrup doesn't do anything for the cough, well, at least it allows for some rest to occurred.
The bottom line is that these quacks can't make up their mind on what is good and what isn't, so until then I am going to keep taking that which makes me feel better when battling the runny nose and itchy throat.
So, there is a small company on the west coast called Adobe, they produce a wonderful product call Illustrator. Illustrator is the number one vector base tool for creating graphics, the problem is that the designer has to render it to bitmap format to put the images on the Web.
Then came flash, a product originating from a small company that got guzzled by Macromedia, which is know part of the aforementioned Adobe. This tool became quite popular among Web designers and developers as it allowed for vector images to be render directly on the Web and played by a small plug-in that comes standard with most modern Web browsers. This plug-in further allowed animation to also be rendered on the Web.
Microsoft, in their great competitive wisdom, came out with their own tools. The took the popular vector engine embeded in powerpoint and word and translated it to the Web in the form of Vector Markup Language (VML). VML is an application of Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 which defines a format for the encoding of vector information together with additional markup to describe how that information may be displayed and edited.
Because VML is xml based it allows for readability by most browsers than can read xml. This was a major breakthorugh as Web designers could take their html and xml foundation to quickly and easily create vector graphics on the Web. The problem is that vml never really took off as most people are anti Microsoft.
The bottom line is that as designers we have to be open to new ideas, even if we don't like the company who is producing the tools. I like to try everything technology I can, and expended a few days looking at VML recently and found it to be very useful and see a lot of potential here. To learn more visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/VML/
It might be a rumor, but it had to happen sooner or later. When google told the software giant to take a hike a few years ago, everyone though that Microsoft would invest into its own search engine. Well, they were right Microsoft invested millions into the msn search engine, but it still not popular, mostly due to its inaccuracy to pick up top pages during its searches.
It seems Microsoft has had enough and doesn't want to invest anymore into the defunct search engine as they made an $80 Billion offer to Yahoo this past weekend. Yahoo rejected the offer stating that it was too low.
I don't know about you, but if someone offered me that kind of cash, I would jump at a heart's beat. However, I can't blame the folks at Yahoo, after all they are ranked as the most visited Web site in the World.
The bottom line is that if you create a great product why would you sell it. As shown by the folks at Yahoo, there is simply not enough money to give up your company if you build it from the ground up. As for the Redmont giant, should have jump onto this Internet/Web thing when it was first starting, Bill, you snozze you loose.
Malicious Virus embedded within Windows Meta Files (WMF)
A new year brings a new wave of virus attacks, this time targeted via hyperlinks to a picture file. Microsoft release late yesterday a fix for yet another vulnerability within the software giant software. The worm named xmas-2006 FUNNY.jpg can arrive via the MSN instant messenger or via email in the form of a hyperlink, once the user clicks on the link, they are infected. The file is a variant of Bifrose backdoor, detected as W32/Bifrose.KT, which executes a malicious program from the web server www.ritztours.com
Make sure you keep your antivirus software updated with the latest virus definitions, update your windows software often, preferably set it to auto install all updates.
The bottom line is that with all the phishing emails, virus threads, and all malicious hacks and software, you must be careful when opening emails. Be worry of instant messages that originate from unknown people and always double check a hyperlink before/after you arrive at the Web page. Many hackers disguise themselves with URLs that appear valid and cloak pages to misrepresent reputable businesses.
Today I wanted to create some curvy text and the Warp Text tool wasn't fullfilling my needs. I decided to do some quick searching within the Photoshop help file, I really dislike Photoshop's help file, and after 30 seconds of googling I found the solution.
Illustrator has vector support for this within the expanded menu off the Text tool, but Photoshop doesn't even document this wonderful and easy to use feature. Here are the steps:
Create a path to follow using the pen or shape tools. If you already have the curves created, you can use it, the text will live independently on a separate layer.
Switch to the text tool and hover it near the path to follow, you will see the mouse cursor turn to indicate that it will type along the path.
Type and set your text as desired and you are done.
Most commercial software packages provide excellent features, however, they often lack the documentation to show users how to use them. The bottom line is that when you need to create something, don't be afraid to turn to the Web and do some quick research, most likely if you though of it, it has already been done. If your research turns up nothing, then write down your idea and sell it, you are now an inventor.
So this is 2006, the year to accomplish more than previous ones. Microsoft will be releasing the newest version of the Windows software. Adobe will be releasing a greater version of Flash and hopefully more vector support for Photoshop.
I will be once again teaching and working on developing an online course for my popular visual communications class. As well, this is the year that life will fall into place for many around me and it will all be great!
On another note, I'm a big fan of google holiday logos, but I simply didn't get the Happy New Year one today. If any of you care to explain, by all mean. These use to be so cool, Christmas wasn't a great one either.
I expect to see a lot of cleaner designs this year as I think may designers are realizing that they have cluttered the Web and it is now time to clean things up, but this won't come until late spring.
The bottom line is that this year is no different than any other year, just make sure to set attainable goals and work towards accomplishing them.
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