I have just read a fascinating article in Smashing Magazine, likening web design to artchitecture. The article points to three areas where both professions need to focus: durability, utility and beauty.
Durability, because your website has to be built on solid foundations so that it can scale in terms of size and in terms of handling an increasing number of visitors.
Utility, because your website is there in order to allow your visitors to find information out about you as simply and as easily as possible. It needs to be user friendly. It must also enable your visitor to fulfil your objective for the website; be that contacting you or buying something from you.
Design, because your website must look pleasing to the eye. An ugly website will discourage visitors from exploring further. An attractive website will encourage visitors to delve deeper.
The new .tel domain names are released today (3rd December) for purchase by registered trade mark holders.
So what are they? They are supposed to act as a universal point for relaying your individual or your business contact details. You can tier how much information you want to be made public through your dashboard, so that you could make all your contact details available for your friends or close colleagues and a restricted amount available for public use.
There are three phases of availability:
1) Today trademark owners can purchase the .tel name relating to their brand at a cost of £279.99
2) 3rd February 2009: the “landrush” phase whereby you can purchase the .tel name at the premium cost of £79.99
3) 24th March 2009: open to anybody to purchase at a cost of £14.99.
Are they worth buying? At this stage I do not know. Looking at the costs, they are expensive unless you risk waiting for the domain name to be open for all comers.
However, it may make it easier for people to find you or your business’s contact information and prove to be an indispensible tool for mobile phones. So instead of giving somebody your telephone number, you will be able to give them your .tel address and they can choose to contact you in any number of ways via their mobile phones or computers (e.g. Skype, mobile, land line, email, Twitter etc etc).
You can buy them at Domain Monster if you are interested and you can read a BBC article about it here.
Yahoo! Glue looks like an interesting new search tool. Enter a topic and it returns images, videos, articles and the conventional search results all on one page.
Despite Yahoo’s trials and tribulations on the stock market, they still run very good web based tools. Flickr (photo sharing), Delicious (boomarks) and Upcoming (events) are all the best websites in their category.
This article on Sitepoint makes some interesting points about how participating in forums can help drive high quality traffic to your website.
Visitors who find you this way are more likely to be active seekers of information, community minded and engaged. They are also likely to have visited your website because they liked your contributions and are eager to learn more about you.
So, what is the best advice for becoming involved in a forum?
Firstly, concentrate on being active in two or three forums. Any more, and you will not be sufficiently active or focused.
Also, choose a forum in which you can contribute expertise and where your target audience might be.
Once you have selected your forums, build your profile, add a link to your website and be active.
You need to build your reputation and you can do this via your expertise, by offering something different, by being polite and being constructive. Avoid negativity and self promotion as it will only reflect badly on you.
If you would like more advice on forums, please contact me and I will be happy to help.
As part of its 10 year Birthday, Google is letting you search the web as if it is 2001.
This is the earliest, workable search it can revive. Previous years are apparantly incompatible.
Google 2001.
I subscribe to Martin Lewis’ Money Saving Expert email newsletter. It regularly alerts me to some great offers.
For this week only, 3 are offering Mobile Broadband at £5 per month on an 18 month contract with a 1GB download allowance. There are no set up fees. 5GB allowance is £7.50.
I do not have lots of use for mobile broadband, but it in the past, it would have occasionally been useful. So, for £5 per month, I have decided that it is worth buying.
I ordered it on Wednesday and it has arrived today. It is a neat USB device, the size of a memory stick.
On a Mac, despite what the leaflet says, you do need to load additional drivers. However, this is simple. You can download them from the 3 website and I was up an running in 5 minutes.
I have not used it much, but the speed on the BBC website seemed very good and more than adequate for me.
So, if you are interested in no longer being dependent on expensive WiFi hotspots, I recommend looking at this offer.
For the second day, I am linking to 37 Signals. I make no apology. They are wise.
“Simply put, employees are treated like children. They are not allowed to think for themselves, and there are too many layers of approval, just too much insulation that prevents anyone from doing anything. The traditional workplace is broken, and until someone realizes that, there’s always going to be conflict.”
The traditional workplace is broken - (37signals)
This is another thought provoking article from 37 Signals about how to monetise blogging.
They started with salient blog posts, from which they produced the book “Getting Real,” from which they started a course of seminars. The conclusion being that by repackaging their original blog posts, they were able to earn money in three different ways.
Making money twice - (37signals).
I have had a quick look at Google Chrome.
My first impressions are good. It is clean, simple and uncluttered. It looks as though it has some good functionality such as suggesting search terms as you type, shortcuts to your Google Apps and easy bookmarking. It also very fast.
So will it take over the world? I think inertia will prevent most people form swapping their Internet Explorer default browser on their PC’s. At least in the short term.
If anyone can challenge Internet Explorer’s dominance, then Google are the brand that could do it. However, that will rely on either getting it pre-installed on PC’s or making it a logical next step for the millions who use Google as their search engine (as over 80% of web searches are in the UK).
Early reports suggest that Chrome is building up a significant share but much of this will be people trying it out. It is also likely that the biggest loser will be Firefox at least in the short term. It will take longer for it to eat into Internet Explorer’s market dominance.
I like this idea that I read in an interview with Simon Waterfall of digital agency, Poke as reported in .net magazine.
Every four months, all 55 of their employees get up and move desks:
Because you sit next to somebody new, you sit next to a different skill set or age group. It stops you becoming so introverted that you don’t accept the new……. it’s a great way to be inspired all the time.”
