Month: January 2008

Categories
seo

Bad Times, Bad SEO

As a bad taste SEO techniques adopter a company called Sitelynx on behalf of the The Times (UK) was spamming media sites with links. Why would a reputable publication like The Times fall for black-hat SEO techniques is another story. What is interesting is that a report on Waxy.org looks like a breakdown to bootstrapping your web site. Well, at least a part of it. Comments give an idea what was done wrong, what worked and what didn’t. Very interesting indeed.

Last week I was participating in another experiment with Freshmeat.net. A lot of pages there have PR 3 and above, so it was naturally a good idea to comment away. However, moderators appear to be quite on guard, so most of the experimental posts and accounts went down the drain couple of days after the end.

Categories
creative

8 Web Design Mistakes That Developers Make – Turn Mistake Into Challenge

“An excellent website takes a particularly savvy blend of both great design and great code. Because of this, you often find designers having to figure out code and developers trying their hand at design…“

read original | digg story

Great article if you are involved in web design and if you read it thoroughly. I must admit – in our web design studio we sometimes get carried away with using free fonts and free images. However, the problem (at least sometimes) isn’t our laziness or not knowing any better.

Most problem arise with such “bad behavior” are tied to our inability to persuade clients not to use widespread imagery. At times it gets all but funny – “it worked for them, it will naturally work for us“. Naturally, it won’t. We’re getting better at explaining things to our clients, but we’re not flawless yet.

This, however, poses another opportunity to be better then competition. Alright, we’ll use that image you’ve seen a dozen times, but we’ll try to do it the best we can. So that the next time you see it on someone else’s web site, you would recall our client, not that other web site. Use that image to create a point of origin.

Creativity doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be creative.

Categories
flash

Sprout: The Online WYSIWYG Editor for Flash

Sprout is a browser-based, WYSIWYG editor for Flash with an interface reminiscent of Photoshop or Dreamweaver. Designers can use it to create, publish and track Flash widgets, websites and mashups, thereby obviating the need for them to work with programmers who would cost time and money, and who might not execute designs satisfactorily.

original | digg story

Unfortunately the service is still in closed beta, so I was not able to use it firsthand. However, the potential for it (as I derive from the video) is high. If my clients would be able to mash something up in such editor to show me how they want their flash animation to be done – just this would save us a lot of cost and time.

Can’t wait to try it myself.