However, I discovered once it was installed that ‘Faviconize‘ hadn’t been upgraded to FF3 compatibility yet.  This is one of those times when you say to yourself, “It’ll be ok, it’s just a little plugin…” and then realize every day that you miss it dearly.

For those not in the know, Faviconize is a plugin for FF that allows you to shorten the tabs in your browser down to just their favicon, instead of having the full title.  When you work on a non-design-grade laptop (read: 12.1″ screen) like I do, it gets very frustrating very quickly to have to scroll back and forth to find your tabs.  Since I always have at least three standard tabs open: Pandora, Google Apps Mail, and Google Apps Calendar, I use Faviconize to reduce them to the smaller tab size in order to keep my “web-desktop” uncluttered.

(A quick sidenote to web designers: Pandora, GMail, and GCal have all gone the extra mile and made some nice-looking, easily recognized Favicons.  This is a major point of usability for bookmarks, tabs, toolbars, etc.  I’m not saying they’re successful because they have good favicons, but it certainly doesn’t hurt, so make one!)

It was amazing how much productivity (I felt like) I lost due to have to scroll around and constantly reorganize tabs.

But I was happy to discover this morning that Faviconize now works with FF3.  I’m just not sure why the FF team doesn’t include this feature in their software by default.  This is one of those things that should be an easy add-on, and wouldn’t be intrusive to those who don’t use it.

Anyway, it’s back and I’m happy about it.

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.

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?

Not that it’s anything new. Since the early days of the web, corporations have struggled to find their place among the throngs of people browsing the web. But like the Amway salesmen at your backyard BBQ: they’re all push, no pull.

This irreverent look at the internet in 1996 helps to set the scene for how far behind major companies are and will be (go ahead and read that page through, ‘karjalae’ does a great job of lampooning the cavemen of the internet age).
The inexorable march of progress hasn’t made things any better for the heavy hitters in the commercial world. As any tech-savvy person knows, giving tools like Flash, Actionscript and SQL to the technologically un-evolved CEO of a major organization is like handing a monkey a flamethrower: it’s funny until he turns it on you.

Once the craze of just having a webpage was over, the tech-leaders began blogging. And although it took a few years for the bigwigs to catch on, catch on they did. This time, WalMart got caught up in a scandal, hiring a marketing agency to ’spin’ the idea of a couple who RV across America, staying overnight in WalMart parking lots. The outrage of internet users was surpassed only by the absurdity of the PR firm “that truly gets social media” (Edleman) being called out by BusinessWeek (whose web team doesn’t even have a proper www to non-www redirect working).

So WalMart gets another point in the ‘evil’ column and the internet continues to find new ways to entertain millions, and confound commercial entities.

The latest attempt to substitute corporate dollars for internet know-how comes to us from the Spice Girls, the quintet of British harpies, based on ‘diversity’ and backed by a marketing engine that would make Ferrari whimper. If anyone could leverage social networking into a crowd of screaming fans, they can, right?

Yes and no. Corporations are just now finding out that fan sites make money (a trick internet marketers discovered right around the time the iMac was released), and that you can ask people to vote for where they want bands to appear (how much exposure has Eventful had already?). Meanwhile, internet users are congregating at places like Fark, Digg and Reddit, and web designers and internet marketers are running ahead of the pack, trying to create the next social empire.

So when Big Spice asks folks to vote for what city they should play in, of course the internet’s equivalent of punk-music is going to suggest no other city than Baghdad, Iraq (Fark.com always runs the risk of being NSFW, but the first screen seems sterile).

But when the other shoe drops, we all need to remember that money talks, and in that conversation we’re playing in the corporate sandbox.

The bottom line is that the Spice Girls are going to play any venue they please, whether or not social networking votes them on to Mars.

But it doesn’t mean that they “get it”.

(On a side note, I came across this little gem during my research. Thanks, Dan!)

Lessons

1. Work your whole life.

2. Sit in parks with bohemian women waiting for them to recognize you.

3. Inflate your prices and hope some finally pays up.

I’ve always tried hard as a designer to understand why other designers love this story.

I try and think logically, but quickly fall into self loathing and despair. Does this mean I’m not a designer because I don’t get it?  Should I work hard or smarter? Or am I too stupid to work smarter so I might as well toil my days over? Or should I pretend I understand it? “Yeah, it’s art, so you wouldn’t get it.” Or can you just call it like you see it, regardless if its an urban legend or not.

Pablo understand one thing very well, to be an artist you needed to sell your work. To do that professional for a living you needed an audience. So he found one in several different ways. He had initial talent, which got him some attention. Then he branched off and created something new among his close peers. This made him stand out, which gave him more attention. But he, like many artists before him, realized that just being and thinking differently wasn’t enough, you needed something more than stories and ancedotes, rumors and headlines to be a professional artist, you still needed works. Which means you needed to work.

Many artists had talents understudies that would learn under the masters and help finish up certain painters or even copy a work completely and then have the original artist sell those copies using their name. But some works take more than just hours, they take weeks or even months. So what did Picasso do, create an artistic painting in the least possible brush strokes. He didn’t create minimalism. He created worktheleastism. More paintings in front of more people at the same time, during his lifetime afforded him the maximum exposure that would allow him to remain a professional artist, doing whatever he pleased with his time, money and women.

Pablo Picasso was a brilliant marketer, acting on the timing of his previous success to push him in front of a larger and larger audience. He didn’t spend his lifetime perfecting his fine brush strokes. As he aged, his hand and eye both became thick and lazy. He mastered the business of art. He captured attention, produced quantity and charged heavily.

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?

“I can continue my legacy of creating fiendishly complex spreadsheets and then leaving before training anyone it.

It’s like being a superior alien intelligence and leaving complex machines laying around populated planets”

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.

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.

Recently, a client emailed me a list of ‘notes and things to try’ which he received from one of the attendees of SESNY.  He asked me what he could be doing with each note that would help the optimization of his website. Rather than waste the hour or so I spent putting together the answers on one person, I thought I’d spread the responses around for the benefit of all.  I’ll try out a few of these posts and if it catches on, I’ll make it a series for the next few weeks (there are 39 points on this list in front of me!).  So without further introduction…
Note #1.   We can use Google geo-targeting ads to get an extra line of ad text that lists city and state in the ad.

To clarify the note, let me first explain that if you use geo-targeting in this way, Google will place a line beneath your ad denoting where your business or branch office is located.   Geo-targeting is not quite the right word, and ‘local search’ would probably be more appropriate.  You can see what I mean at the right.  Notice how the AOL ad doesn’t specify a location, where the Athena Capital ad does.

(As a side note, AOL is using half their title line to showcase the word Denver.  You could say that they’re not taking advantage of local search, but I would guess their ad gets more clicks when someone is looking for something in ‘Denver’)

So, where would I recommend using this kind of tactic?  Any industry where being local might be an advantage, or help to differentiate your business.  For instance, if I am a searcher looking for ‘motorcycle parts’ I might be wanting a local shop to help me select and install parts, or I could be looking for an online store.  If your ad doesn’t tell me you’re local, I’m going to assume that you’re national and click or not click depending on what I need.  In this case, the local store would lose business to people needed someone local and would gain excess (untargeted) clicks from shoppers needing a national store.

Of course, if you have a national business that is commonly mistaken for something local, this will compound the problem.  For instance, if you offer national foreclosure listings, but people looking for help with their foreclosure commonly click your ads looking for assistance, adding a locality tagline will only increase the number of untargeted clicks.

I would definitely recommend taking a careful look at which keywords these pros and cons could affect before enabling a local search campaign.  Make sure you are using them wisely.