You have to drive folks to innovate. The tendency in lots of large organizations is to try and find a comfortable place where you think you can get measured rewards for measured work. In other words, they say to themselves, “I know how much I’m going to get if I do this much, and then my life is in balance.” I just don’t think you get a lot of innovation under those circumstances. You want people to figure out how to do things better, to figure out a smarter way. When that’s a constant process, you start seeing things innovate. It’s not because someone comes up with some brand-new idea where you say, “Oh, no one’s ever thought about this before.”
I would hazard to guess that no one is going to read this. Not this post, not this website or anything about me. Why? Because it’s too long, there’s too much, and who can invest in something that they may or may not be interesting or helpful.
I’m actually okay with this, because really this site has one purpose, I want a visitor to know: Who I am and what I do. Everything else on the site is just in support of that.
That got me to thinking: Should more sites be designed around a tl;dr statement?
The term tl;dr means “Too long; don’t read”, you’ll find it in use in some popular forums such as Hacker News and Reddit and is usually followed by a short synopsis of a more lengthy comment that adds color and nuisance, but really the tl;dr says it all.
When thinking about your site, could it be summed up in a short thesis sentence? Will digging deeper only reinforce the thesis? If so why not help your visitors?
I had the good fortune to take the two day workshop for SEO. It was a very good experience,and there is plenty that can help others. Here is my Top Ten takeaways from the workshop that can help everyone
10. Google is really the only search engine that matters. They carefully control their search market share here in the US to under 66% so they won’t get charged with running a monopoly. In other parts of the world they have 90% market share
9. Check what is the norm for you industry. Generally a well optimized web page falls in what is considered normal for like pages. For example, a shopping page might only have 250 words of copy, this is considered ‘natural’. Google does try to consider that when determining Search Engine results, so if you are doing something different, while you may not penalized, it may not help.
8. #1, #2 and #3 are the only positions that matter in a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Google is increasingly adding value to searches by adding maps, images and videos in SERPs, a great thing for the user, but it does take a little more effort for the site that wants to get above the fold. Position 20 might as well be position 10,000.
7. Search results is a games of inches. With millions of results per query, the distance between position 3 and position 2 and position 1 is the width of a hair. It’s about which page is ‘least imperfect’. Put another way SERPs is a game of inches.
6. Focus on the long-tail. When people search they generally try to be specific as possible generally using 3-4 words. If those terms don’t produce the desired results, then the user start searching more broadly
5. Use the tilde ‘~’ when doing keyword research. The tilde is an undocumented way when doing a google search to also return up a result that not only produce your results but also other terms that users have used when searching for the same thing, this is great for long-tail keyword research. An example search term might be “~fashion”, which also brings up ‘style’, ‘accessories’, ‘clothing’ and a slew of fashion related terms
4. Structure you site into silos. If structure is properly done, you can maximize pagerank for internal links. So, that means fewer links per page, linking to landing pages, and being a lot more thoughtful on how you link to other areas of the site and whether you should.
3. Use Google endorsed schema’s. Sitemaps XML files are something we already know about, but a new thing google has endorsed is schemas. This s a spec they intend to probably support in 2012, but it’s a headache to implement, so weight the cost benefit of implementation
2. Result may vary, Factors in SERP can be influence by location and the searches that can before it. For example, if you initially search pushups you’d probably get a lot of results about exercise, but if the search before that one was on bras, you’d get a different set of results. In regards to location, they are starting to be more and more important in result rankings. Think about those things when writing for your sites.
1. Content is still king. We all know this, but the definition is expanding to video (with transcribing), PDFs and images, (which google is starting to learn to read), and of course social media
I've had an additional blog to help people become better speakers called Afterwit.com. This is dedicated to all things that go into making a better speaker. As a very active Toastmaster and something I'm passionate about, I'm always on the lookout for good resources. I've just recently posting there again. Check it out.
I participated in the foursquare hackathon over the weekend. My project is called Everything is cool. The idea behind my project is that most people when they hear of something going on in your area,, whether it be something weather related, or an accident, all they really want know is where you are and that you are okay.
My app let’s you do that in the quickest way possible. Using the Foursquare API, once you sign in it grabs the nearest location to you. From there you can just hit a button, and an email or text will be sent to your contact list with two pieces of information: Where you are and that everything is cool. Here is a link to the demo
I think the term social media will be obsolete. In 5 years all media (and everything else for that matter) will be social and baked into everything that we interact with because everything we interact with will be connected in some form or fashion to a greater network.
Social as it is defined now refers to living organisms, i.e. people, but I think that definition is bound to expand to include things as well. What we’ll really mean though is everything will be networked and ‘aware’ of it’s surroundings. I can imagine a world where the alarm clock will be networked to your online calendar and will know when you have a 9am meeting and disable the snooze button.
Additionally, they say that the best time to be on social networks is when you are alone but the gulf of being in two places at once (reality and virtual) will continue to close, on one end technology will be get better and phones (or whatever they will be called) as a distribution and consumption platform will have evolved in to something less intrusive and natural. On the other hand talking with someone face-to-face and doing whatever else will become accepted and even expected by the mainstream.
Will we all still be on Facebook? Google+? Something else? Maybe, whatever is invisible, I don’t want the platform to be awesome, I want to be awesome. People tend to gravitate to what is easy, cheap and gives it to them how they want it, where they want it.
The first thing we noticed was a drop in traffic. Then other symptoms that seemed unrelated at the time were also being reported like search not working. it wasn't until we got a notice from Google Webmaster that we realized we'd been hacked. Again.
The reality
After taking the site down for the second time in two weeks, it dawned on me, if we are to continue we’d better learn to fail.
It’s simple, a website with our set -up running a popular content management system on a public facing website might be compromised. It could happen for a variety reasons both in and out of our control. The important thing then is getting the site back to a point where it is safe as soon as possible while being 99% sure that whatever compromised the site in the first place has been removed.
I posted my first project on GitHub. It’s a very simply Day/Night theme switcher built on jQuery based on the client time. This is not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination, something I thought was cooll. I’ve wanted to try GitHub for a while and this seemed like a good first step to try it out. As for the switcher, I tend to work on projects that are proprietary or not viable as an open source project; I thought this was a good opportunity to finally build this for tobiaswright.com, which I should implement soon. Anyway, enjoy.
While I’ve moved on from being a designer (and arguably, most designers should at some point move from being *just* a designer), there is always the ever present debate of whether a designer should go to college. I’m not particularly against designers who are self-taught, but I am an advocate for anyone going to college whether for design or almost anything else. It just opens so many more doors, also you learn to deal with people. In the specific instant of design I think there are a couple invaluable reasons to go to school.
1. The peer group. This is so incredible important in the early life of a designer. I think that feedback of early work amongst one’s peers is essential. To a certain extent it’s finding one’s voice and personal style of the designer. It also lays the groundwork for future work habits.
2. Learning context. I once asked an instructor how she could grade art. She gave a good, if rote answer. Art can be graded based on what has come before and the rules that have already been established. The same can be said with design. Of course another rote idiom applies here: You have to know the rules to break the rules.
3. Experience. Not real world experience, but experiences in different aspects of communication, whether its printmaking, bookkeeping, or painting. These experiences I think help round out a designers work and voice, and expose the designer to things they may not necessarily be exposed to if they are self-taught. There is something to be said for a well rounded education.
More often than not my main job is managing the chain of information. The pieces that dictate what drives the information is, the what, how, why, who and when and usually can be decided pretty easily. The challenge is how much of the information needs to be passed on. Like too little information, too much information can bring productivity to a screeching halt.
don’t take action if you have only enough information to give you less than a 40 percent chance of being right, but don’t wait until you have enough facts to be 100 percent sure, because by then it is almost always too late
My task is 1. Making sure information and resources get to where they need to be and 2. Determining how much information needs to get there.
For example, some people only need to know the what, others the how and others the when. As we shift to a knowledge based society, where information is fueling the how people think, what people do and what is considered important, distribution is gold.
Let's talk a bit about the big pile of money for digital advertising. Retailers have a certain budget that they hand over to agencies. These advertising and digital agenices build target audience profiles, concepts and creative, take their cut, and hand it down the line to the byzantine maze of digital buying and selling. The digital buying and selling process includes Demand Side Platforms (DSPs), Ad Networks, Trading Desk, brokers, etc., that find the veticals for particular ads, sell premium ads directly to publishers or place low-brow ads in remenant hell. Also we must include the infrastucture that has also grown up around the often opaque process that insure ads are being run, run in approiate places and can report back what is happening.
Eventually the pennies that are left reach publishers. Where we publishers, like The Budget Fashionista, get offers of 0.50 CPM (Cost per thousand impressions). With .50 CPM, we won’t be retiring anytime soon, and there is no way we can run a business soley on advertising. Much to the chagrin of a lot of startup pitches that I hear. Even at such low CPM all that matters at the end of the day is the dope on the table. In other words, they just want the numbers.
