Konami Code
A recent mock up for a new design had a couple of us musing on the avenues for adding interesting discoverable content to websites. By interesting I of course mean silliness that may not be appreciated by the clientèle and so the thought ended there. There are however websites that have audiences that are perhaps more appreciative of easter eggs. A growing subset of these use the Konami Code first seen back in the heady days of the NES. Enter the elusive code on such a site and all manner of wackiness occurs. Try it on Facebook for instance. Clearly it’s a bit onerous to try this on every website you visit just on the off chance they have something for you but thankfully wikipedia steps up with this handy list – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Konami_code_websites
Want to add it to your website ? Konami-js provides an easy drop in solution http://www.snaptortoise.com/konami-js/ and there’s a jQuery plug-in for fans of that library http://www.gethifi.com/blog/konami-code-jquery-plugin-pointlessly-easy
P.s. It’s Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A
“Link baiting” – Just another term for building a good website?
SEO has its fair share of buzz words these days (we are marketers after all), one that is particularly common of late is “link baiting”. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of this term before or if you’re not sure what it actually means because it’s quite simple really…
The term “link baiting” refers to a simple strategy for naturally increasing the number of links to your website, and as we all know the more links you have coming in to your website the higher your page rank and the better your site will rank in the SERP’s. Link baiting is a completely natural approach to link building and will leave your site with genuine, organically built links; it does not involve buying links, endlessly commenting on blogs, using any automated posting software or anything wacky like that. With this system other people will build links to your website for you and best of all it is so simple that any website owner can do it.
So what is the catch and how does it work?
Ok, lets get down to brass tacks…link baiting…lets think about it. The clue is in the name – so we are laying bait to promote people to link to our sites. I guess the big question is, what is the bait?
The bait can be anything that engages people, something they like, use, need or enjoy – something so engaging and attention grabbing they just have to link to it. So what type of content can cause enough of a fuss that people, without being asked, decide to link to your website? Well the first question is probably what kind of people are you looking to attract and what will engage them? This is when market research and a good knowledge of your customers comes into play, the answer is very different depending on the type and role of your website.
Common types of “link bait” include Interviews with industry guru’s, useful industry tools, great articles, specialised reports, contests, reviews, controversial opinions, free resources and tools, “how to” articles and videos, and anything else that you think might appeal you your audience.
In short, what you are looking to do here is build a good website. If you build a high quality, well thought out, engaging website that is focused around the user then you should never need to build a single link to your website – given time they will come to you.
To go back to Google phrase from time gone by, “content is king”.
CSS3 PIE
Internet Explorer has long been the bane of modern web development and while Microsoft are forging ahead with an ever growing list of features for IE9 there will still be for some time a need to support earlier versions. To meet the need for brand spanking new HTML and CSS support in old browsers there is a slowly increasing list of workarounds usually involving Javascript that enables the latest features. While certainly not the first CSS3 PIE is one of the more interesting solutions to the problem as it adds some of the more eye catching styling abilities of CSS3 to IE6 thru 8. With the addition of a simple behaviour file to your CSS you can have support for gradients, shadows and yes, even rounded corners.
Cyber Cops?
Is this the first glimpse of the internet police?
To Tweet or not to Tweet, that is the question?
Six simple strategies on how to use Twitter effectively:
1. Shout about it.
2. Don’t be selfish – share the knowledge.
3. Ask a question.
4. Product or service launch.
5. Give advice.
6. Acknowledge and Say Hello to followers.
In Summary…
Design-by-Committee is web site suicide.
Perhaps a bit harsh but this is something that has been plaguing Web Design Agencies for years, let me explain.
What is ‘Design-by-Committee’?
When a single goal or aim takes a back seat to ‘letting everyone have their say’.
When a group of two or more business owners have a vision to hire a design agency to build their new website, or redesign their old site, they all have their own ideas and thoughts on how it should look and work. They all put their ideas forward and come to a happy medium whereby all of their ideas are appeased and added to the initial brief.
The Designer in question has to take their brief and do all he/she can to please the members of the committee. This is nigh on impossible.
What we often end up with is a middle ground, whereby all members have had some of their input included but the site completely misses the initial goal or aim. This is where the original vision and purpose of the new web site has completely lost out to ‘pleasing the committee’.
This is a sure fire way to have a mish-mash of a design with flawed functionality.
Stick to the Plan
Whether the new site is to attract interest, sell products or even a first port of call for any new customer, make sure you stick to the plan!
The end-users are the most important thing to your site so think about what they would want, what would they want to see? It easy to say “Well that site has got that element, so I want it” but look beyond the obvious and think ‘Why have they got that?” and “Is it appropriate to my customers or potential customers”
Don’t ignore the ideas and skills of the designers/developers that YOU have hired.
Although they don’t know your business or industry they can often steer you in the right direction on how to communicate directly to you customers and potential customers. Listen to them.
Here is some further reading on Design-by-Committee and how to approach having a new web site or redesigning your existing site.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/29/why-design-by-commitee-should-die/
Google Launch SSL Encrypted Searches
Secure searches for Google.com users are now available at https://www.google.com helping us all make private searches even if we are connecting via an unsecured network (even the Google maps sniffer car can’t snoop on that – see my previous post). With the use of an SSL Google are effectively creating an encrypted tunnel between your browser and their servers, meaning that your searches cannot be sniffed out by people wanting to gather data on you.
Using technology commonly found on ecommerce sites, Google have improved security across the web for the user, not to mention making browsing in China an all together safer experience.
HTML5 Client Side storage. In every browser. Right now.
Somewhere along the road to cloud based storage accessed through web applications a weary programmer sighed and pointed out that you would not have access to your data if you have no internet connection. The response was to add local client side storage as part of the HTML5 spec. Hence-forth you could keep a copy of all your data on your local machine for your web apps to access. Possibly the same programmer pointed out that while this was indeed a solution wouldn’t it require everyone to have fully HTML5 compliant browsers ? I imagine there was a lot of frowning from various people at this point. Never fear though because more clever programming chaps have come up with ways to have client side storage on all browsers. Yes, even those produced by Microsoft, which incidentally have had this ability since IE5.5.
Store.js – http://github.com/marcuswestin/store.js
Lawnchair – http://brianleroux.github.com/lawnchair/
PersistJS – http://pablotron.org/?cid=1557
MilkCrate – http://github.com/garrow/milkcratejs
Google's Sniffing Around
Google’s all seeing eye just keeps on getting worse! As if the whole streetcar invasion wasn’t enough bad press they just had to go one step further…
Taking unauthorised pictures of people and property left a bad taste in the public’s mouth, but Google’s most recent scandal takes the biscuit! Incase you hadn’t heard, Google’s latest potential law suit involves the monitoring of data sent over unsecured Wi-Fi networks in 30 countries.
Only after the German authorities requested to view Google’s logs did Google admit to having gathered `pay load` data as well as SSID’s and MAC addresses by sniffing packets on open networks and loging what was been sent and received. Google amassed a total of 600Gb of data via their already controversial street view cars.
Just another story indicating the importance of encrypting your Wi-Fi network.
CSS Media Queries
Nary a month on from the UK launch of the iPad it’s iPhone 4 day. Beyond the sight of people getting giddy over expensive consumer electronics the proliferation of mobile devices with all sorts of different resolutions and orientations raises the question of how best to serve web content that can be viewed as nature intended on all these devices. We’re not even past clients asking for pages that “fit on one screen” to which we invariably point to articles such as this – http://www.cxpartners.co.uk/thoughts/the_myth_of_the_page_fold_evidence_from_user_testing.htm – so how do we build for everyone ?
One answer are CSS media queries. Simply put these allow you to supply different CSS depending upon queries about the devices resolution and orientation. For more information see http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/04/using-css-media-queries-ipad.html and http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/