Search with Design

I live in fonts. I love some, like others, but over the years have found quite a few that I would prefer to see the dentist than see their ugly serifs. Straight to the list. (drum roll.)

10. Times New Roman - yeah, I started there, and yes, I do not like this font. (see company of unexpected success despite themselves.)
9. Lucida
8. and her cousin, Lucida Calligraphy
7. Courier - and Courier New, new? really? new? give me a break, we don’t use typewriters any more. and I don’t need to make a one page essay appear to be 7 pages for a college introduction course.
6. IMPACT! - Nothing ruins a good design like the image of an elderly man with ear hair screaming the text on the screen like the impact font.
5.Wingdings (1, 2 and 3, and if there are more, then all those as well.)
4. Bookman Old Style - boor-ring!
3. haettenschweiler - what is this even named for? An unsexy comic female super hero rottweiler?
2. Montype Corsiva - don’t ever use this, ever. I dropped a client because they wanted this font as their logo.
1. Comic Sans - please join the resistance.

Also see America’s Most Fonted.

I’ve been building websites since 96. Honestly. I started in notepad and a ftp program that look more like crunched potato chips under the sofa cushions that a true file transfer software and built a site for a silicon valley company that’s still in business, remarkably. 17 years for a software company is like 98 in human years. I remember walking 12 blocks to the IP’s computer office/closet with my desktop slung over my should while I tried to navigate thru protocols and subdomains. It was so 1996. Thank goodness for wifi, godaddy.com, newsvine, the Big G, and even 12 different ESPN homepages (more on this in some other post due out in late november, if you’re lucky.) The internet has come a long way.

But sometimes, the work flow for a single designer hasn’t. This evening i’m doing something that takes either an incredible amount of boring, blackhole-like time to do, or I just haven’t figured out my pricing structure to hire a replacement junior web dev. I’m doing updates. For more than one site. Several. 4 actually so far. And still 2 to go. I hate the updates. I love the databases, the dynamics, the user updated content. I don’t like to move numbers around, change the font size and then put up this month’s information.

When I first started out in the biz, it was my lifeline to consistent work. I would get the design job for cheap. And then burn them with the cost of maintenance. Now, I couldn’t charge enough to pay for the pain that it causes me. Perhaps it’s my personality, but it just feels so much like paying bills.

Am I alone on this one?

June, 2007 marks the date I officially switched tribes and joined the Ubuntu crowd.

As far as I can tell, Ubuntu is an African word with no direct translation, but which embodies the concept of “being completely inscrutable, yet self-congratulating and better than Windows”.  The truth is that it is a distribution of Linux, favored by many due to its easy install, and similarities to the Windows environment.
But why go all the way to Linux from my previously favored WinXP?  Glad you asked…

To be honest, I saw the release of Windows Vista approaching and realized that I was getting sick of playing a (small) part in the empire-building of Microsoft.  As much as I had hated the switch from my trust Win98 to WinXP, I had learned to live with it after a lot of slipstreaming CDs, backups and tweaks.  But Vista’s DRM-pushing, close-to-spyware using, sanitized like a mental hospital hanging from a cliff feeling just wasn’t going to cut it for me.  So what if it’s pretty?  Nothing runs on it and it will mark every file I create as illegal.

So why not go with a Mac?  After all, they’re powerful, chic, nerdy and they look like a hip young rock star.  Here’s where things get complicated.

I have a serious dislike for laptops.  I’ve never been able to find a laptop which fit the bill for a computer I could actually work on.  I need lightweight, power, small screen, excellent keyboard, durability, battery-life…the list goes on and on.  I’m a laptop snob.  There is only one line of laptops on earth that I will buy and use, and that is the IBM Thinkpad.

I love my little Thinkpad.  The keyboard is great, the battery and weight are good.  Also high on the list is the thumbstick, which is tough to master at first, but once mastered, makes a touchpad feel like drawing in the sand with a stick.

I need my desktop and laptop to sync fairly effortlessly, and because IBM doesn’t make a LeopardPad, I had to shoot the middle.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have my trusty copy of XP dual-booted (although I haven’t seen the familiar green ‘Start’ button in weeks).  I keep it around for one reason, and one reason only: Battlefield 2.

The switch to Ubuntu wasn’t bad, the three biggest sticking points being syncing my iPod (done with Amarok and patience), enabling the ‘Back’ button on my MS Intellimouse (done with some extra drivers), and disabling my on-board sound in favor of the SoundBlaster 5.1 card (accomplished through some text file editing and a reboot).

All in all, the switch has gone great, and it’s only getting better as I play with Compiz/XGL effects and customizing my computer through clever use of Launchers and Terminal.
I think Windows Vista could be greatest thing that ever happened to the Linux community.  More users = more options.

Why not come over for a stay with the tribe?

Not all stats all created equal. And Time On Page is one of those.As a designer, I’m always looking for ways to improve my work and continually that has been directed at delivering quality designs that answer the audience’s questions and provide intuitive design for navigation, content and images. One way to examine your effort is to monitor time on page. But, agh, the TOP stat is so misleading. So for example, I redesign a section of a site to create an easier experience for the user offering more obvious navigation, easy to digest content and a simple tour-style click thru button on the same place on each page. Viola! Great design, great implementation, and yet, the client argues, nothing was gained because the overall time on the page decreased. Is this a valid argument, or could I be right, that a better design makes content more consumable, quicker?

I hate the answer, both are right. So lets look at when time on page counts and when its worthless.

It counts

Flash sites - most flash sites are designed as one page, housing all the content and media in one browser-sized block. The greater the time on this page is also seen as the greater the experience. You could however add tracking to items that could be clicked on to better dissect the audience.

Trailers / Tutorials / Flash Demos - Here time does matter. How far did the visitor get? It’s much like the shopping cart effect. Watch to see where they dropped off, then improve that section of the demo. This was studied by Sesame Street creators and well documented in Malcolm Galdwell’s book, The Tipping Point.

One-page sites - This is close to, but not synonymous with Flash sites. This included ajax sites, and clever javascript sites as well as a good portal with the latest trend of the panel boxes (See yahoo.com as an example)

Checkouts / Registrations / Searches - But it’s the opposite here, you want less time, not more. Time here is a factor of how quickly you can process a request. Think of user errors, indecision, pages in the process, render and download times, authentication of credit cards, server loads, etcetera. If the world was buying your book on your eCommerce site, how many could you process in an hour?

It doesn’t count

Established websites - if you are already receiving traffic and you want to make a change and detect the effectiveness of the new design to the old you need to pick large metrics, like conversion actions not time on pages. When you make a large enough change it become impossible to compare apples to onions.

Advanced web surfers - with Cable internet access and not dial-up, with tabbed browsing now on IE7 and obviously on Firefox, along with “restore session” you can hang on to a site not via bookmarking it, but just tabbing to it, and tabbing off to anything else and tabbing back. I’m notorious for a tab bar full of sites I’ve visited over the last 48 hours. This would swing the metric with just one visitor like me into a different world sending the complete wrong signal to the designer and client alike.

Blogs / News articles - traffic is measured by uniques and total visits, or more basically, page requests, or page renders. If I’m buying ads, I want to pay for the page request, not for the 3rd 30 second time slot on a popular news article. Blogs are basically just creative content. The total time alloted to digesting an article depends on a great number of factors, including how bright your audience is, how tiny your text is, how distracted the reader is, if you content is work safe, and on and on. Time means nothing compared to total page views. How big is your audience, not how slow.

Pages with the print button - If you can print it, you can read it offline. Again, blogs, news, even business sites that have details about their product. I don’t mind reading online, but there are some people who can’t stand staring at text illuminated by a big dim flashlight pointed directly at their eyeballs.

I left thinking I didn’t list everything - that I might have to come back and add a few more. But basically, I’m also left trying to defend TOP as a stat, but not as the standing metric. In any design process going forward I will devote some attention up front to whatever stats I’m looking increase and concentrate on getting buyoff and commitment to those metrics to build better designs.

So I opened a free Stumble Upon account awhile back. And then forgot my password.

No problem. Forgot password link, type in email, boom, inbox(1) new message. But it’s a temporary password. Something I’ll copy and past once, and then immediately change to something I’ll remember. Done, right? Wait for it, wait for it. Nope. Wrong.

Here’s what SU has to say:

“How do I change my password?
Select Change Password from the dropdown meny on the StumbleUpon toolbar (a small, inverted triangle indicates the location of this drop-down menu). Stumbleupon recommends that for security reasons you should choose a password unrelated to those that you might use for Banking or e-Commerce transactions.”

WHAT!?! Download the toolbar? Are they kidding? What drunken CTO dreamed this gridlocked downloading traffic jam up? But no, it’s about buy in. About guilt. About them telling me, remember your password, or get our ugly step-daughter and then, if you want your Princess Password back, download the TOLLBAR, the Toilbar, the toilet-part, the troll-grrarr!

Thank you Stumble. Clever. But poor. Tricks don’t get customer’s to treat you better. Open email to SU tech department. Sure, more troll-grrarr downloads. But is it working to build screaming fans? Honestly, I’m just curious.

so there.

Its the same as My Google, which I don’t use. So perhaps this is an effort to convert non-My Google users by pegging the popular “i” in front of their logo. iGoogle’s first noticeable difference is the tabs.

Now you can have tabbed tabs if you are a power firefox user. Or, if you are a superhero firefox user, you will already have set your default homepage to a folder not a single webpage so that on each load of Firefox the browser pulls up all your favorite and necessary websites.

The other trendy addition are themes. Each pre-built theme allows a bit of personalization to the otherwise sterile and milky homepage that is synonymous with Google. The theme changes the font color, heading colors and backgrounds, and main portion of the screen where the Google search box and your admin controls live. This portion has always been my gripe with My Google iGoogle, too much real estate given to their search box, and not enough to my selected content and information. Smart product development though, it keeps Google literally front and center above all your stuff.

I’m heavily anticipating a mac announcement about iapple.com.

Luke and I have come up with a great idea for a new consulting business come web application that has the ability to evolve over the next 5 years or so. It provides a service used by huge amounts of people every year, but that has been traditionally handled by a professional. The hook is that we would use SEO tricks, social networking and quality design and style to augment (or replace) the activities of the professional. Let me see if I can explain more clearly with an example…

Let’s say yachting suddenly becomes extremely popular. Folks who already own yachts might see their’s begin to go up in value. To find a buyer for your yacht you can employ a broker for a % of the sale amount and he will track down a buyer, do some negotiating, etc. Because the broker has never really been in a “hot” yacht market before, he only knows his old tricks: calling his friends in the boat business, placing a classifieds ad, etc.

If we were to apply our model in the target industry (sorry, the boats are just a metaphor, we’re not in the yachting market… yet) we would create a stylish one-page site for each yacht, we would make it a thirdlevel domain on our aged and SEO’d website (say TradeWinns.YachtParty.com), and we would make the social/viral elements easy to access and use. The one-page design would also allow buyers to browse a ton of yachts in a day, and because we’ve standardized the photo gallery, the pricing info, the features, etc. it’s all very easy to compare.

Now, a few other ‘YachtParty.com’ ideas have sprung up already, but none of them have been successful. We believe it’s because the first adopters of the idea are trying to hard to replace the Yacht brokers instead of allowing them to gain value from the system too. Also, a lot of these websites list way too many items on the page, when buyers only really want to see pretty pictures and a price first, and then browse a features list and so forth second. They don’t need to know what the weather is like where the boat is docked.

So here’s our hurdle: we can’t think of a name. The industry in which we’re operating is highly saturated with spam and personal sites, and almost every domain name we can come up with is taken or subpar. Here’s a list of how we’ve approached it so far:

1. We’ve tried coming up with 10 names we liked and trying those out, without doing any pre-research.
2. We’ve tried brute force dictionary combinations, using a thesaurus and WhoIs to find unused combinations
3. We’ve tried stepping way outside the boundaries of our idea to drive at the concept of why people buy or sell a yacht.
4. We’ve recently tried to go Web2.0 and drop the ‘e’ off of a fun word (yachtr or sailr anyone?).

That’s where we’re at now. Do you have any tips on how you find a good domain name? We could really use the help.

Nancy Simonson’s marketing and promotional products company, Adfigo Marketing went live today. Their goal in offering high quality service, attention to detail and their ability to find the perfect fit for their clients all played into the clean lines and comfortable blue tones that etch their new site. There’s plenty more in store, including some great gift ideas, so stay tuned.

Congratulations Nancy and Kelly. I think this is a great step forward in your industry in provide quality over quantity, relationships over revenue.

I do. I want the black one. Like the one below. I’m considering going without eating for a week so I can afford to buy one.

Do you want one? Comment or digg if you do. If this article gets over 100 diggs I’ll give one away to in a subsequent blog article. Stay tuned.

(so purty.)

I know, this is a design post coming from the SEO, but that’s the point! I have no eye for color when it comes to design. I’m influenced much more by the geometry of the piece.

For instance, I saw this template online and thought the design was great:

Crispy Cut

And geometrically speaking it is. But color-wise, it needed work. Now I could sit all day and not come up with anything much better, so I headed over to Kuler, and found the ‘Japanese Garden’ scheme (a very popular one on the site):

And once I got done applying that theme, and using a couple of other tricks, I have this:

Promotions Guide

I know it’s not the greatest design in the world, but you can see how a little color change can really change the look of the site overall.

Use Kuler!