Design

“And we want to be on the first page of Google,” another new client said matter-of-factly, as the after-thought of our Web design meeting. I nodded, inhaled, and began my spiel.

“What are your stats now?” I asked, although I knew the answer. Many small businesses don’t review their site stats, don’t know how to view them online and can’t really interpret them, but all Web site rebuilding plans include being on the first page of Google results. Let’s try to marry the want with some how-to and understand how this works.

KNOW YOUR STATS
Know what your Web stats are. Contact your Web firm and demand the link. Bookmark them. Look at them! Pay attention to the “search keyphrases” and “search keywords” that users enter into search engines and find your site.

Site traffic is saved to logs and statistics programs display the data. Web stat programs are usually loaded on the server, so they have to be available from your hosting company. One of the most common stat packages is Webalizer, a fast and free log file analyzer. There are countless guides to help you interpret the numbers. And the mystery between “hits” and “visits” is explained here. Another common stat program is AWStats, an open source project at SourceForge There is a plethora of stat programs, many of which are free [see DLS for more info]

BUY BETTER STATS
You can buy access to better, more colorful stats with graphs and charts and circles and arrows. If you have a marketing department, they should take a look at WebTrends for small business, one of the older analytics, and check out the demos. WebTrends, like many other quality stat packages, is not free, so decide if the pretty pictures are worth the price.

I WANT TO BE ON THE FIRST PAGE OF GOOGLE!
You want higher ranking in the search engines’ results? In the olden days, everyone played on the same field. Nowadays, it takes a village to raise your rankings. Try these suggestions, many of which are human-intensive.

1. Be Compliant - Make sure your Web site is W3C compliant [http://www.w3.org/] and search-engine friendly. That’s a starting point that involves a careful Web audit and repair. If you’re using FrontPage for a business site, it’s time to stop. Develop a quality site that meets the rules.
2. Get a Google sitemap added to your site and submitted to Google.
3. Drive traffic to your site with quality links from important other Web sites. This means that you have to contact the Webmaster at another site that you think has great traffic that you want and get a quality link from them (and give them one in return).
   
   

   “If you want to know more about this, click here.” – This is an example of a bad link. Hyperlinked “click here” needs to disappear from Web sites.

   “Contact Sue’s Bakery to order custom wedding cakes in North Carolina.” – That’s a better link. Write your own link with the URL you want and send it to the other Webmaster. Like I said, it’s human-intensive.

4. Pictures are secondary. Make sure that you have content-rich text on all your site pages; that your page titles use quality keywords; that you use quality meta tags. In short, get a quality Web designer.
5. SEO v SEM Learn the difference between SEO (Search Engine Optimization, more technical) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Check out SEMPO, the professional organization of SEM firms and look for a quality firm using SEMPO’s search tool (check the firm’s references, too).
6. Marketing - not IT Raising your ranking on any search engine is a marketing, not a technology, expense. Budget for it. Be open to buying keywords. Understand if you want a regional or national campaign.

THE COST OF PAGE RANKING
You might find that quality SEM is more costly than a site overhaul but you’ll certainly find that good SEM firms don’t send spam and promise to submit your site to 400 search engines (you can do that yourself). Sample URL submission pages:

• Google
• Yahoo!
• Microsoft Live
• Dmoz

PAGE RANK BOTTOM LINE

• Review your statistics regularly and learn what they mean.
• Make sure your business’s Web site meets (or greets) W3C recommendations.
• Get quality link exchanges from quality sites.
• Use content-rich text all over your site.
• Develop realistic goals for your page ranking effort.
• Talk to a reputable SEM firm (and get referrals) before embarking on a marketing campaign for your Web site.
• Ignore the page-rank shysters.

Windows keeps the Start button, taskbar and system tray at the bottom of the display and a menubar in every window. Mac OS X keeps one main menubar at the top of the display, with a ‘dock’ of larger icons that take the place of the Windows taskbar at the bottom of the display. Linux, for the most part, seems to prefer the Windows UI, typically using a taskbar-like system with menubars again in every window, but through the power of Open Source, you can do just about anything you want to the Linux UI to make it feel more like home. Some people find one approach more useful, while others prefer a different side of the fence. While the debate surrounding one’s OS preference isn’t showing any signs of subsiding, we thought it might be useful to offer at least a little insight and theory into why some fundamentals of Mac OS X are designed so differently.

One of the basic principles that informs the Mac OS X menubar is something called Fitts’ Law, which I first learned about from John Gruber of Daring Fireball in a post here. To keep things brief, however, I’ll just quote a short introduction from the Wikipedia:

In ergonomics, Fitts’ law is a model of human movement, predicting the time required to rapidly move from a starting position to a final target area, as a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. Fitts’ law is used to model the act of pointing, both in the real world, for example, with a hand or finger and on computers, for example, with a mouse.

To summarize: Fitts’ Law is about how far you have to travel to hit a target, and how easy that target is to hit. Apple implemented these concepts (and I’m sure plenty of others) when designing their menubar by pinning it to the very top of the display, not only from a hierarchal standpoint (you can always look to the very top left of your display to find out exactly which app you’re in), but also from a ‘make it easy as possible to hit this’ perspective. You can simply fling your mouse ‘up’ and you’re at the menubar; even if you click on the very top-most pixel above File, Edit or Help, you’ll still hit that menu item and activate it. It’s a seemingly minor detail, but one that can help quite a bit during one’s daily computing.

This concept is also present in other major OS interfaces, such as the Windows Start button; fling your mouse ‘down and left’, click and you’ll hit the One Button to Rule Them All. Mac OS X’s Apple and Spotlight menus also function the same way: fling your mouse ‘up and to the left’, click in the furthest pixel up there and you’ll activate the Apple menu; ‘up and to the right’, and you’re in Spotlight.

If anything, the main point we want to get across is that there is typically a lot of theory that goes into the design of an OS and how users interact with it. We might not always agree with the approach taken by one camp or another, but at least people are thinking about this stuff, because even in 2007, computers still aren’t that intuitive to some users who have yet to hop on board the digital train. The more thought, consistency and intuitiveness OS engineers design into our software, the easier it will be for everyone to come along for the ride, no matter what side of the car they’re sitting on.

Creative Suite 3 Web Premium arrived, and boy is it packing a punch. Before we get to dissecting the intricacies of this major upgrade, we thought it would be fun to step it up a notch in the ‘I got a new [thing]‘ space on the internets with an unboxing video. Yep - the days of unboxing pictures are numbered, as video is the inarguable craze these days. Granted, CS3 isn’t quite as hot as some new imported gadget, but you can consider this a sort of test run with the format.

We will of course have more on CS3 once it’s actually installed, so enjoy the unboxing video for now, and let us know what you think.

A little nip-and-tuck has gone on at Google Search recently. As we mentioned yesterday in the Googleholic, Google has been testing a slight rework for their search interface and we had a Javascript workaround to see it.

The rework is now evident when visiting Google.com. Nothing too major has gone on and it still closely resembles your favorite search location, but with some added freshness. Along the top of the page when logged in, users are now presented with a list of Google services along with their Google Account services including Web, Images, Video, News, Maps, Mail and a drop down to reach Calendar, Docs, Groups, Blogs, Books, Patents, Notebook, Web History and My Account.

A little freshness has been added to the styling of the page, where a few slight tweaks have been made. There is now a gradient box above the results for an added feeling of depth surrounding the Results numbers. Google has now also pushed the page listing on the bottom to align on the left instead of the center, and added a Google search box, again in a gradient box at the bottom under the results. It’s nice to see these subtle changes, they add a refreshing little perk to the Search site and give it a more polished feel.

Update : If you don’t see the redesign, you can try this fix. Paste this line into your address bar.
javascript:document.cookie=”PREF=ID=fddb01133a87d314:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1177334998:LM=1177334998:GM=1:S=OOg0FEVzpPplxe9J;path=/;domain=.google.com”
To revert back, clear your cookies. Warning, try at your own risk!

Being a designer requires at least some degree of perfectionism, a fact which often boils to the surface when working with imperfect tools– such as when one needs to create a barcode for a package or book cover design. We know of more than a few designers who have gone so far as to attempt to re-create an authentic looking barcode in Illustrator– something that takes way too much time and energy to be practical.

Fortunately for us and others (who probably need barcodes to, you know, allow the scanning of things), Wolf Software provides professional quality barcode creation software free of charge for both Mac and Windows. In addition to the old standby’s of UPC and ISBN, users have the option to choose from a large variety of other barcode formats, including Datamatix (pictured here encoding “Download Squad”).

[Via creativebits]

Let the fun begin! Adobe has released preview versions of After Effects CS3 and Premiere Pro CS3. This should give you something to play with until the final products ship “mid-summer”.

The After Effects preview is available to licensed users of After Effects 7, Production Studio, Video Bundle or Web Bundle. You will need to provide your AE7, Production Studio or Bundle serial number in order to get an After Effects CS3 preview serial number. If you don’t own any of the required products, you can check out the software for 2 days before it self destructs. The preview is available as a Universal Binary for Mac and XP/Vista platforms.

The Premiere Pro preview is available for Intel Macs and XP/Vista platforms. Sorry PowerPC users, there are no plans for a version of Premiere Pro for you. I don’t see any license restriction on this preview so it looks like anyone can give it a whirl. There is a big gotcha if you are running Mac OS 10.4.9. DV Capture will not be functional, and that’s kinda a big deal. Adobe is working with Apple to resolve this problem, but if you want to capture DV with the preview version, Adobe recommends you reinstall the OS using your original system discs, then update to 10.4.8. No thank you.

Remember, these are preview versions so if you get into trouble there is no tech support. As a Premiere Pro to Final Cut Pro switcher, I’m curious how Premiere’s entry back into the Mac world will play out.

No doubt, Photoshop is an expensive and useful tool. Much like Microsoft Word, Photoshop is full of functionality that you may never use, and it’s also loaded with shortcuts, surprises and splendor. You could use Photoshop for years, and still barely scratch the surface of its full power.

This gem of a reference doc can be found deep within Scribd, the very Web 2.0ish online library. It’s brimming with all manner of tips and tricks you can use to become a Photoshop workflow god. For instance, did you know you can reset all your preferences to their box defaults simply by holding down Ctrl Alt Shift immediately after launching Photoshop? How about when using the circular Marquee tool, holding the Alt key will get perfect circles drawn from the center out, rather than those tedious egg shapes that drag from the corner?

[via Digg]

Adobe says you’ll have to upgrade to new versions of popular (and really expensive) software like Photoshop, InDesign and DreamWeaver if you want them to run well under Windows Vista.

Current versions of many Adobe products won’t run flawlessly under Windows Vista, this announcement only confirms that they never will. So, if you’re a creative professional (who hasn’t already jumped ship to OS X) start getting out the check book. Adobe’s CS3 creative suite will be out next week, and it ain’t gonna be cheap.

We probably should have realized something was up when Adobe’s own document on Vista compatibility (which we wrote about almost a month ago) dodged the question by stating that Adobe would release free patches for “some of Adobe’s currently available products.” To our credit, it would have been much easier to spot if they’d said, “some of Adobe’s currently available products, but not the ones anyone actually uses or cares about.”

In just over one week, on March 27th at 3:30 p.m. EST, Adobe will be hosting their special Creative Suite 3 launch event in New York City, and the entire event will be webcast from their website for all the world to see.

Alls you got to do is tune into their website at the prescribed time, and then you too will witness firsthand the launch of “the largest software release in Adobe’s 25-year history”. Their words, not mine, but this is indeed a much-anticipated event, seeing that specific details regarding CS3 have been on the down low, for the most part. So, tune in!

If you’re already tired of the look of Windows Vista now you can give your Vista desktop own special flair using WindowBlinds. WindowBlinds officially released version 5.5 yesterday, the first version of the program to support Vista. The program allows you to personalize Vista by applying and creating different skins for everything from your scroll bar to the Start Menu. There are literally thousands of skins to choose from or you can create your own using SkinStudio.

In addition to changing the way your desktop looks, you can also change how you operate it. Your skins can add shortcuts to different programs, link buttons, roll-up buttons, and media control buttons as well making your desktop not only look better but operate a little better as well.

WindowBlinds can be downloaded for $19.95, or purchased as part of ObjectDesktop which includes a collection of programs to enhance your desktop such as IconPackager, DesktopX, and Keyboard LaunchPad.

[Via WinCustomize]