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
Mosaic's of Web sites are an interesting concept as this seems to be the new movement. What I'm basically referring to here is the thumbnail display of sites and not necessarily a mosaic, as mosaics are very complexed and required a long time to create. The aforementioned site took a snapshot of the stories for February 2006. I wonder if it took them until now to finish their work.
More interesting will be to have some algorithm take a daily snapshot and then create the Mosaic accordingly an see if any pattern emerges.
The bottom line is that with a little creativity and some basic design and development skills an individual or group could make themselves stand out from the crowd. These folks at urlyart.com have certainly taken a stab and have obviously succeeded. Of course, there is a more interesting question here, where is the Web heading in terms of Web sites snapshots. Should we all start ramping up and start designing Web sites that are pleasing in a thumbnail view or do appealing sites look good no matter the size. After all, Opera started doing thumbnail views in their browser, IE7, has implemented Quick Tabs showing a thumbnail view of all tabs opened. Snap.com search engine results are driven by a pictorial view and so does Alexa. What's next? where do we go from here?
I have given up to the hype and have recently started to track digg.com as a source of learning the latest and greatest in the world.
You may have noticed that I also recently added the digg, delicious, and slashdot icons on all my entries. I'm still working out the bugs to make the integration flawless, but I'm getting there.
Back to the topic at hand, the whole reason for bringing digg up is that I came across this USB use today and thought, what an inventive and curious thing the human mind is, check it out.
The bottom line is that need is the mother of all inventions. Now if I could only figure out what it is I need maybe I could make billions selling it to others who may need the same.
It's hard to believe that with so much war between the major SEs (Search Engines), Google, Yahoo, and MSN, one company would try to enter the Search Engine Market expecting to make an impact. But such is the mission of Snap.
Snap was started by Bill Gross, the same man who started Overture and sold it to Yahoo for $1.63 billion, seems set to continue a long line of profitable start-ups with this one. Snap has quickly become one of the top five alternative to the three major search engines. Though Google, Yahoo, and MSN combined hold over 90 percent of the search engine market, with Google dominationg over 60% of the users, Snap has shown its colors and that it may have a prayer in the Search Engine Market.
The bottom line is that while the big three are fighting for control, this small startup has shown that with some talent success can be achieve. Snap is not out to organize the world's information, they are not out to be the most use search engine, but simply to provide another way to search the Web. Right now the site provides a clean, easy to use interface and seems that it has not been gamed, I'm sure for SEOs will find a way to break it soon enough.
Netflix has announce yet another service for their customers, they are offering free streaming movies. This service comes as the demand for immediate viewing has risen.
Blockbuster is currently running a big ad campaign trashing Netflix because its members have to wait for the movies to come through the mail; while Blockbuster offers a similar rent by mail service with the advantage that their members can run to the store and pick up movies at no additional charge.
Netflix, which has been named the #1 rated Web site for customer satisfaction for three consecutive periods, according a semi-annual survey by ForeSee Results and FGI Research in the spring of 2005 and the winter and spring of 2006, didn't want fall behind. As such, they have reacted offering its catalog of about 70,000 DVDs over the internet. The typical Netflix subscriber will benefit from approximatedly 18 hours of internet viewing in addition to the 3 movies at a time deal with no additional cost.
However, the company wants to make sure they have the technical support for the new addition so they are opening the new program slowly with only a few of its close to 6 million subscribers having received an invitation.
I have spend the last three days waiting for my invitation. I was one of the first subscribers to Netflix when they open their virtual doors for business and thought I would receive an invitation soon. I have seen no mention of the online viewing feature on their Web site, and even send them an email about it, but have received no respond.
The bottom line is that although I'm not previewed to the service yet, I'm desperatly and impatiently awaiting for my invite. I LOVE NETFLIX!!!! I hope to receive my invite soon as I will be traveling and it will be nice to be able to have something to do on those nights I find myself away from home.
I recently learned that for many purposes, especially SEO it is important that your domain name redirect to either its www or non-www version but not both.
If you are able to access a site via www.paralleldesigns.net and paralleldesigns.net then the search engines consider this two different pages that hold the same content. This is consider text/content spamming. This kind of practice will get you penalize, therefore yielding a lower search engine ranking.
To do a quick test on your site, install the google toolbar and visit your site. You should see a different page rank depending on how you visit the site. In my case, when I was visiting www.paralleldesigns.net/blog I would see a PR of 4, but when I visited blog.paralleldesigns.net I notice a PR of 0.
Because we all work for Google, I wanted to make sure I complied with this and all other search engines.
The bottom line is that with so many rules that apply to the search engines, it is hard to always do the right thing, especially if you don't know what is the right thing.
If you want to follow this rule, then create an .htaccess file and enter the following code:
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.paralleldesigns.net$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.paralleldesigns.net/$1 [R=301,L]
of course, you would want to change my domain name for yours.
On their Web site Apple claims to have redesign and reinvent the cellphone. More specifically, they make claims of "a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching", all combined in one small device.
Not only have they have major challenges with the name, iPhone, but as well they are making a false claim. In my opinion they are far from redesigning the phone. They basically have taken and iPod and added a touchpad for dialing. Another way to view this is that they have taken the Smartphone and added an ipod to it.
The bottom line is that you cannot make such large claims without being able to back them up. Today's consumer is technological savvy. The Web is an avenue into all the information the consumer needs to compare and understand all products. When you claim to revolutionize something you have best be prepare to state how, not simply tell me that I can use a wheel to select a name to dial. Perhaps Apple has never heard of Skype. Skype can claim to have redesigned the way people communicate, they were first to create a network of VoIP and softphone users with point and click to dial abilities. As for mp3 capabilities, hello Apple, this is old news and far from redesigned. My Verizon Phone from Motorola is two years old and has many capabilities; from randomizing playlists to playing video to Internet access and Vcast for TV viewing. Face it Apple, you are very late to a mature industry... As they say, too little too late. Now go out there and pay the high tag for something you don't need, you never going to use, but you can tell all your friends you own.
This should make us all proud. Seems that besides killing insurgents in foregin countries, previously we were busy killing all life forms in Mars, accidentally of course.
Back in the 70's we send the first mission to Mars to seek new forms of life and check out the planet for perhaps a better place to live. Today, 30 years later, we come to find the results of this mission as NASA is coming clean in regards to its Viking mission.
An article on seattlepi.com explains, "When the Viking 1 and 2 Mars Landers dropped onto the Martian surface in 1976 to look for signs of living creatures, the scientific consensus was that they had failed to find any".
But Schulze-Makuch and his German colleague, Joop Houtkooper of Justus Liebig University, argue that the failure could have been more about how the scientific community defined life at that time. Back then, the WSU researcher noted, the definition assumed that any form of life would be based on water.
Water, thus a resource required by life on Earth, turns out to be the killer of microorganisms on Mars.
The bottom line is that although hard to believe, we cannot and probably will not ever see a time when we abandoned our planet for another, not on our lifetimes anyways. We were designed to inhabit this land and resources on this planet are designed to substained us. Other planets were designed with other goals in mind and life forms adapted as such. Godspeed to all of us!
I wish you a merry christ... huh? what? wait that is gone. Happy New Year and I wish you a good one filled with a basket of creativity, prosperity and clients allowing you to reach your design needs.
2006 was not the best of years for me, but we have to take the good with the bad. By design, that's life. I just hope this year keeps up at the same pace as which it has started, filled with praises and potential new clients.
The bottom line is that we should always strive to be happy. People usually mark the beginning of the year as the time for resolutions. Often times they set unreachable goals leading to abandonment of these. As for me, I'm not making any resolutions therefore I will have no let downs.
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