Home » Archives for December 2007
Paint a pixel of the Impersonal Artwork
Everyone can paint a pixel of this artwork and be credited as one of the authors of the resulting piece.
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9 Ways to Gauge Your Visitors’ Experience
One of the most important factors in the success of a website is the visitors’ opinions and experiences. A site that is liked by visitors will typically be successful, while those that aren’t liked by visitors will struggle. A challenge that all website owners face is determining how visitors feel about their experience on the site. In most cases you won’t have the option to speak directly with visitors to get their opinions.Fortunately, there are a number of items that can help you to find out what visitors think of your site. Sometimes you’ll have to interpret the results, as a number of outside influences can factor in as well. Here are 9 factors that I feel can help a website owner to understand the opinions of visitors.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is a calculation that shows what percentage of visitors are leaving the site after viewing only one page. For example, if 100 visitors come to a website and 40 of them leave before visiting a 2nd page on the site, the bounce rate is 40%. Bounce rates can be calculated for a website as a whole, or for individual pages. Most good statistics programs, including Google Analytics, provide the bounce rate.
What does bounce rate really show? It can give you an idea of your visitors’ first impressions of your site. If a high percentage are leaving without visiting a 2nd page, maybe they don’t feel that the site is really interesting to them.
What does bounce rate really show? It can give you an idea of your visitors’ first impressions of your site. If a high percentage are leaving without visiting a 2nd page, maybe they don’t feel that the site is really interesting to them.
There are a number of factors that can influence bounce rate, most importantly, the source of the traffic. Some types of traffic will typically not be interested in viewing multiple pages on a site. An example is social media traffic. Most Digg users are not going to click-through to a lot of pages on your site after arriving through Digg. They are more likely to leave after seeing one page and return to the social media site that they were using.
If your bounce rate is very low, it probably means that your visitors are pretty interested in your site when they arrive. Lowering bounce rate should be a goal of any website owner (unless you are using ads that you want visitors to click on in order to earn revenue for yourself).
Page Views Per Visit
Another statistic that is somewhat similar to bounce rate is the average number of page views by your visitors. This number is calculated simply by dividing the number of page views by the number of visitors. It will also give you an indication of whether visitors are leaving right away, or if they are staying for a while and navigating through the site.
Page views per visit will also be affected by the source of the traffic. Again, visitors like social media users will tend to view one page and leave, which will of course lower your average number of page views.
Page Views Per Visit
Another statistic that is somewhat similar to bounce rate is the average number of page views by your visitors. This number is calculated simply by dividing the number of page views by the number of visitors. It will also give you an indication of whether visitors are leaving right away, or if they are staying for a while and navigating through the site.
Page views per visit will also be affected by the source of the traffic. Again, visitors like social media users will tend to view one page and leave, which will of course lower your average number of page views.
A high number of page views per visit can be a good sign that visitors are staying on your site and navigating from page-to-page. I find it helpful to track the average number of page views from month-to-month. If I notice a significant change in the average than I can assume that the visitors’ experience has changed either for the better or for the worse.
Time On the Site
The time on site is simply an average length of time that visitors are on your site. Longer amounts of time are obviously a better sign than smaller amounts of time.
Depending on the type of website, this may be a better calculation than the first two that were mentioned. An example here would be a blog with long, detailed articles. If visitors are staying for several minutes to read the article you may be accomplishing what you want even if they are leaving after viewing that one page. Having a visitor view 1 page for 5 minutes is better than having a visitor arrive and leave 10 seconds later without even really reading the page. In this case the bounce rate and average number of page views wouldn’t reflect the difference, but the average time on site would.
I tend to not emphasize the time on the site too much, because I think there are so many other factors that play in to the calculation. Most internet surfers have multiple browser tabs or windows open at the same time. While they may be focusing on another tab, your site could be up for 15 minutes even though they aren’t looking at it. Similarly, they could get up and walk away from the computer for 20 minutes.
Even if the number is not completely reliable, it can still help to show trends. If time on the site is increasing or decreasing, it may be a sign that visitors are behaving differently than they had been.
I tend to not emphasize the time on the site too much, because I think there are so many other factors that play in to the calculation. Most internet surfers have multiple browser tabs or windows open at the same time. While they may be focusing on another tab, your site could be up for 15 minutes even though they aren’t looking at it. Similarly, they could get up and walk away from the computer for 20 minutes.
Even if the number is not completely reliable, it can still help to show trends. If time on the site is increasing or decreasing, it may be a sign that visitors are behaving differently than they had been.
Subscribers (Growth/Decline)
Most bloggers tend to measure their success by the number of new subscribers they receive. Subscriber counts fluctuate every day, so it can be a good indication of how visitors are feeling about your blog. If subscriber counts are jumping it is probably and indication that visitors like what they are reading. Conversely, if your count is falling or standing still, it may be a sign that visitors are not impressed enough with what they are seeing to lead them to subscribe.
The most common way for bloggers to track their subscribers is by using FeedBurner’s service. FeedBurner users should be aware that counts will drop at times when many subscribers are not accessing their RSS feeds, like weekends and holidays.
Inbound Links
Sometimes you can see what visitors think of your website by the inbound links that you are receiving. Most webmasters and bloggers that link to you will have visited the page at some point, and in most cases the link can be seen as a type of endorsement for what you have created. Of course, sometimes people link to a page for some other reason. One time when I was checking the inbound links to this blog I found a post that linked to one of my posts on a list of posts that he hated. While this link didn’t represent an endorsement of my post, it did help me to understand the experience that at least one visitor had on my site.
In general, if one of your pages or blog posts is receiving a lot of inbound links it is a sign that people think it provides some sort of value that others will appreciate. The number of links you get will also be influenced by other factors. For example, pages that get thousands of visitors from Digg or Del.icio.us tend to receive a lot of inbound links. Other pages on your site may be just as appreciated by visitors, but they simply may not be getting as many visitors, and as a result they get fewer links.
Social Media Votes
The point of social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and others is to allow users to vote for content that they like. If your pages, pictures, or videos are getting a lot of votes on social media sites it can be an indication that people like what you have provided.
There are also other factors in social media voting that you should take into consideration. First of all, the quality of the title can make a big difference. A good title can not only draw more click-throughs, but it can also draw blind votes where users are voting your content up without even visiting. Before I changed hosting companies for this blog one of the posts went to the front page of Digg and the server crashed. The page wasn’t available for several hours, but plenty of diggs kept coming. I assume that most of the diggs were submitted based only on the title without even visiting to see that the site was down. Also, the profile of the user submitting the item can make a difference. “Power users” will usually get more votes that average users.
Comments/Feedback
One of the best ways to learn about the experience of visitors is to get their feedback directly. Blogs are great for this purpose as they make it easy for visitors to comment. Any website should have a way for visitors to contact the site owner with feedback and questions.
One of the problems with blog comments is that a lot of times they tend to only be positive. Just because someone leaves a comment that says “great post” doesn’t mean that it really is a great post. Some people comment just to get a link, and in these cases they usually just leave compliments. Other readers do leave negative comments, but many times these are not any constructive that can help you to improve.
Regardless of what type of website you run, make an effort to get your visitors to communicate with you about your site. It’s difficult for website owners and bloggers to look at their site from the perspective of a visitor, so visitor opinions can be very valuable.
Most bloggers tend to measure their success by the number of new subscribers they receive. Subscriber counts fluctuate every day, so it can be a good indication of how visitors are feeling about your blog. If subscriber counts are jumping it is probably and indication that visitors like what they are reading. Conversely, if your count is falling or standing still, it may be a sign that visitors are not impressed enough with what they are seeing to lead them to subscribe.
The most common way for bloggers to track their subscribers is by using FeedBurner’s service. FeedBurner users should be aware that counts will drop at times when many subscribers are not accessing their RSS feeds, like weekends and holidays.
Inbound Links
Sometimes you can see what visitors think of your website by the inbound links that you are receiving. Most webmasters and bloggers that link to you will have visited the page at some point, and in most cases the link can be seen as a type of endorsement for what you have created. Of course, sometimes people link to a page for some other reason. One time when I was checking the inbound links to this blog I found a post that linked to one of my posts on a list of posts that he hated. While this link didn’t represent an endorsement of my post, it did help me to understand the experience that at least one visitor had on my site.
In general, if one of your pages or blog posts is receiving a lot of inbound links it is a sign that people think it provides some sort of value that others will appreciate. The number of links you get will also be influenced by other factors. For example, pages that get thousands of visitors from Digg or Del.icio.us tend to receive a lot of inbound links. Other pages on your site may be just as appreciated by visitors, but they simply may not be getting as many visitors, and as a result they get fewer links.
Social Media Votes
The point of social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and others is to allow users to vote for content that they like. If your pages, pictures, or videos are getting a lot of votes on social media sites it can be an indication that people like what you have provided.
There are also other factors in social media voting that you should take into consideration. First of all, the quality of the title can make a big difference. A good title can not only draw more click-throughs, but it can also draw blind votes where users are voting your content up without even visiting. Before I changed hosting companies for this blog one of the posts went to the front page of Digg and the server crashed. The page wasn’t available for several hours, but plenty of diggs kept coming. I assume that most of the diggs were submitted based only on the title without even visiting to see that the site was down. Also, the profile of the user submitting the item can make a difference. “Power users” will usually get more votes that average users.
Comments/Feedback
One of the best ways to learn about the experience of visitors is to get their feedback directly. Blogs are great for this purpose as they make it easy for visitors to comment. Any website should have a way for visitors to contact the site owner with feedback and questions.
One of the problems with blog comments is that a lot of times they tend to only be positive. Just because someone leaves a comment that says “great post” doesn’t mean that it really is a great post. Some people comment just to get a link, and in these cases they usually just leave compliments. Other readers do leave negative comments, but many times these are not any constructive that can help you to improve.
Regardless of what type of website you run, make an effort to get your visitors to communicate with you about your site. It’s difficult for website owners and bloggers to look at their site from the perspective of a visitor, so visitor opinions can be very valuable.
Polls/Surveys
One way to get some of those opinions from your visitors is to use a poll or a survey. There are a few resources like PollDaddy and the WordPress Polls plugin that make it easy to implement a poll or survey into your site.
Conversions
Most websites have something they ultimately want from their visitors. For some it may be the purchase of a product or service. For others it may be opting in to a mailing list. Regardless of what you want your visitors to do, your conversion rate can be an indication of how your visitors view your offer.
Great amounts of time and money are spent on optimizing landing pages to increase conversions for sales. This doesn’t need to be limited to landing pages and product sales. Let’s take an example from blogging. Imagine that you are trying to increase the amount of comments that you get on your blog posts. One of the measures that you could use is visitor to comment conversion. If 100 people visit a post and 2 leave comments, the conversion rate is 2%. Say you write a different style of post attempting to increase comments and 200 people visit that post and 6 people comment. Now your conversion rate is 3%.
One way to get some of those opinions from your visitors is to use a poll or a survey. There are a few resources like PollDaddy and the WordPress Polls plugin that make it easy to implement a poll or survey into your site.
Conversions
Most websites have something they ultimately want from their visitors. For some it may be the purchase of a product or service. For others it may be opting in to a mailing list. Regardless of what you want your visitors to do, your conversion rate can be an indication of how your visitors view your offer.
Great amounts of time and money are spent on optimizing landing pages to increase conversions for sales. This doesn’t need to be limited to landing pages and product sales. Let’s take an example from blogging. Imagine that you are trying to increase the amount of comments that you get on your blog posts. One of the measures that you could use is visitor to comment conversion. If 100 people visit a post and 2 leave comments, the conversion rate is 2%. Say you write a different style of post attempting to increase comments and 200 people visit that post and 6 people comment. Now your conversion rate is 3%.
There are any number of ways that you can use conversions to gauge the experiences of your visitors. Just remember that there are many, many factors that are involved so try to compare apples to apples.
What other ways do you gauge the experience of your website’s visitors? Which of the measurements listed here do you think are useless?
What other ways do you gauge the experience of your website’s visitors? Which of the measurements listed here do you think are useless?
Source: Vandelaydesign
Free Fonts Of The Month: Relato Sans, Droid Family
Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to.
This month we’d like to present you Relato Sans and the Droid font family. Please read the license agreement carefully - it can change from time to time.
You can find over 60 more free fonts in our section Free Fonts.
Free Fonts Of The Month
This month we’d like to present you Relato Sans and the Droid font family. Please read the license agreement carefully - it can change from time to time.
You can find over 60 more free fonts in our section Free Fonts.
Free Fonts Of The Month
Relato Sans Relato Sans is the best of a fresh new breed of humanist sans serifs. Witness Eduardo Manso’s technical and artistic skill for yourself with this complimentary sampling of the complete OpenType family. Registration is required to download the file.
Droid Font FamilyGoogle’s Android project, an open platform for mobile devices, includes the Droid font family, which was designed to provide optimal quality and comfort on a mobile handset when rendered in application menus, web browsers and for other screen text.
The Droid family of fonts consists of Droid Sans, Droid Sans Mono and Droid Serif. Each contains extensive character set coverage including Western Europe, Eastern/Central Europe, Baltic, Cyrillic, Greek and Turkish support. Description with a specimen. You can find concrete instruction of how you can use the fonts in this article.
10 Awsome Website designs/redesigns of 2007
These are some of our favorite new designs, and redesigns from 2007. We don't often blog about outstanding design as much function at Webware, but it's a very important aspect of how we interact with Webware, and what people see when they first come to a site. All of these sites were either new in 2007, or received major redesigns.
Twitter
Twitter, which has really taken off this year, took a page from some popular blogging services like Wordpress and Blogger to let users tweak and style the way their user pages look. Beyond that, the service has a lot of character and a simple design that's easy to use.
Apple .Mac photo galleries
Apple's .Mac service got a considerable upgrade earlier this year, and even non-members can enjoy the new photo galleries. These things are gorgeous, and can be tweaked for both color and presentation by whoever is looking at them.
Continue reading to see the rest...
Google Docs and Spreadsheets
While the editing tools have remained the same, the front end for managing your online documents on Google's Docs and Spreadsheets service was given a massive overhaul in late June. Gone went the simple pastels in place of a whole lot of blue and a new management and sharing system that made it easier to organize documents and who you're sharing them with.
Adobe Buzzword
While Google mucked around with a front end of Docs and Spreadsheets, Adobe Systems Inc. was busy acquiring Virtual Ubiquity--the makers of Buzzword, a simply stunning Adobe Flash-based word processor. While we had (and still have) our reservations for using Buzzword over some of the other solutions out there, it's gorgeous, and makes the best use of fonts and design elements that we've seen in a Web based text editor.
Pownce
Pownce owes its stylized, yet simple look to Daniel Burka, who designed the understated Digg.com. Pownce does a lot of things right, including user-selectable themes and packing a lot of items in to a small amount of space without cluttering things up.
Vimeo
Vimeo.com's redesign in late June (their fifth total) shares a lot in common with Twitter and Pownce. There are rounded corners all over the place, and lots of big, simple text. We're also big fans of the layout, which is easy to dig through, and even better looking with the addition of videos in high def.
Picnik
Picnik. The first time we played with Picnik we were floored on how good it looked. Not only that, but how fast everything loaded. For the editing newbie, its clean and simple interface is a whole lot easier to approach than some desktop software when it comes to editing photos. Flickr users get the added benefit of having it as their default photo editing tool, as seen in the screenshot above.
Current
Media company Current TV, which is partially owned by former Vice President Al Gore ditched the TV moniker and went with the simpler Current.com for its new site that launched this past October. Besides having a slick layout, check out the "On TV" section, which serves up the latest live video in a really neat looking swooping channel guide.
Facebook for the iPhone
Facebook for iPhone. There are a ton of iPhone apps out there, but one of the most beautiful is the mobile version of Facebook. The site was designed from the very beginning to be make use of your fingers, and the app ends up being even prettier than the regular version of the site. Things like no page refreshes when clicking a link, and built-in slideshows make it functional and beautiful.
Fluther
Fluther. Got a question? Avoid the mean green of Yahoo Answers and check out Fluther's soothing aquatic-themed questions and answers site. Besides having a jellyfish mascot who wears glasses, the design is wonderfully simple, and pulls you into reading what others are talking about right away. The site's iPhone app ain't too shabby either.
We're certainly leaving tons of new sites out of this list. Got any favorites of your own? Share em in the comments.
Technology in 2008
Three fearless predictions
1. Surfing will slow
PEERING into Tech.view’s crystal ball, the one thing we can predict with at least some certainty is that 2008 will be the year we stop taking access to the internet for granted. The internet is not about to grind to a halt, but as more and more users clamber aboard to download music, video clips and games while communicating incessantly by e-mail, chat and instant messaging, the information superhighway sometimes crawls with bumper-to-bumper traffic.
The biggest road-hog remains spam (unsolicited e-mail), which accounts for 90% of traffic on the internet. Phone companies and other large ISPs (internet service providers) have tolerated it for years because it would cost too much to fix. Besides, eliminating spam would only benefit their customers, not themselves.
How so? Because the big fat pipes used by ISPs operate symmetrically, with equal bandwidth for upstream and downstream traffic. But end-users have traditionally downloaded megabytes of information from the web, while uploading only kilobytes of key strokes and mouse clicks. So, when spammers dump billions of pieces of e-mail onto the internet, it travels over the phone companies’ relatively empty upstream segments.
That can’t last. For a start, millions of gadgets are joining the human hordes. Any gizmo worth its silicon these days has its own internet connection—so it can update itself automatically, communicate autonomously with other digital species, and anticipate its user’s every whim.
Part of the solution?Soon, portable media-players, personal navigators, digital cameras, DVD players, flat-panel TV sets, and even mobile phones won’t be able to function properly without access to the internet. Expect even digital picture frames to have a WiFi connection so they can grab the latest photos from Flickr.
Meanwhile, users are changing the way they use the internet: they are now uploading, as well as downloading, gigabytes galore—thanks to the popularity of social networks like Facebook, YouTube and MySpace.
Hailed by the industry as the wave of the future, “user-generated content” is proving to be a tsunami of unprecedented proportions. Everyone, it seems, is suddenly a budding Martin Scorsese, bent on sharing his or her home-made videos with fellow YouTubers.
Once the biggest files being shared via Napster and other P2P (peer-to-peer) networks were MP3 music tracks occupying a few modest megabytes. Today, music videos and TV episodes of hundreds of megabytes are being swapped over the internet by BitTorrent, Gnutella and other file-sharing networks.
And it’s all two-way traffic. The whole point of P2P is that everyone who is downloading is simultaneously uploading to others.
That’s just the beginning. Legal or otherwise, swapping multi-gigabyte high-definition video and movie files is becoming increasingly common.
In fact, it will soon be the norm. Television networks have found they can make more money from advertising while giving their show away for free over the internet than they can from broadcasting them. Now the movie studios are learning to do much the same.
The result is a gridlock. That the telephone companies are running out of bandwidth can be seen from their equipment orders.
Cisco, the leading supplier of core routers used to direct traffic over the internet’s backbone, has just had another bumper quarter, with net income up 37% over the same period a year ago. Juniper Networks, another information-technology firm, did even better. Both companies credit the proliferation of social networks, the craze for internet searching, multimedia downloading, and the widespread adoption of P2P sharing for the surge in new business.
While major internet service providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast all plan to upgrade their backbones, it will be a year or two before improvements begin to show. By then, internet television will be in full bloom, spammers will have multiplied ten-fold, WiFi will be embedded in every moving object, and users will be screaming for yet more capacity.
In the meantime, accept that surfing the web is going to be more like travelling the highways at holiday time. You’ll get there, eventually, but the going won’t be great.
2. Surfing will detach
Earlier this month, Google bid for the most desirable chunk (known as C-block) of the 700-megahertz wireless spectrum being auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in late January 2008. The 700-megahertz frequencies used by channels 52 to 69 of analog television are being freed up by the switch to all-digital broadcasting in February 2009.
The frequencies concerned are among the world’s most valuable. They were used for broadcasting UHF television because they suffered little atmospheric absorption, could be beamed for miles, and could then penetrate all the nooks and crannies in buildings. Their relatively short wavelength makes the transmission equipment compact and the antennas small.
Mobile phone companies lust after the 700 megahertz frequencies because of their long range and broadband capabilities. They see lots of lucrative things like mobile television and other broadband services to offer customers.
But the 700 megahertz band is also the last great hope for a “third pipe” for internet access in America. Such a wireless network would offer consumers a serious alternative to the pricey and poor DSL (digital subscriber line) services they get from the likes of AT&T and Verizon, and to the marginally better cable broadband Comcast provides.
Over the past couple of months, techdom has been abuzz with rumours about Google getting into the mobile phone business—with a G-Phone to trump Apple’s iPhone. That’s highly unlikely.
The speculation was triggered by the company’s recent unveiling of its Android operating-system for mobile phones. But the whole point of Android is not to allow Google to make fancy handsets, but to make it easier for others to do so.
The aim, of course, is to flood the market with “open access” phones that have none of the restrictions that big carriers impose—like not being able to download software and games from other makers, or search the internet freely, or make free VoIP (voice of internet protocol) calls from within a WiFi hotspot.
Android has been made available to a group of manufacturers orchestrated by Google and known as the Open Handset Alliance. One of the nimblest of the group, HTC of Taiwan, has already started showing a BlackBerry-like prototype based on the Android operating system. Expect to see a raft of Android phones from other manufacturers over the coming months.
Nor is Google in the business of building a network of cellular antennas and fat communications pipes. Should it win the bidding for C-block, it would presumably team up with Frontline Wireless, a startup with serious expertise and money behind it.
That’s because Google’s core business is organising knowledge and giving users access to it. Google makes its money—and lots of it—from matching advertisers to consumers who use its search engine to look up things, not from tinkering with slim-margin ventures like wireless networks.
But despite owning the world’s largest knowledge base—with over 60% of the online search market—Google is at the mercy of others who control the on-ramps to the internet. That rankles.
Worse, it has no way of getting at the other billion users who rely more on mobile phones than personal computers to organise their lives. Clearly, the time has come to muscle into the moribund mobile-phone business.
Bidding $5 billion or more (the reserve is $4.6 billion) to beat out wireless heavyweights like AT&T and Verizon could give Google the option to become a cell-phone operator in partnership with Frontline, with a ready supply of handsets from its alliance partners and none of the hassles of running a network. Alternatively, it could become an internet service provider with a long-range wireless network to rival the WiMAX networks being built by Sprint and others.
But Google may want to do neither. Sceptics note that Google single-handedly persuaded the FCC to attach all manner of “open access” provisions to the C-block of frequencies—something that was anathema to the mobile-phone companies. Verizon even sued the FCC in a bid to block its move to open access.
Having failed to do so, Verizon now says it will open its network to third-party devices sometime in the future—and presumably for an additional charge. But the FCC is not just taking Verizon’s word for it.
The winner of the C-block of frequencies, whoever that may be (and Verizon is the odds-on favourite), will have to open the network to any device that meets the basic specification. And the devices themselves will have to be open to other suppliers’ software and services.
In short, win or lose, Google has already achieved its objective. Internet searches will doubtless be as popular among mobile-internet surfers as among their sedentary cousins. Owning at least 60% of the mobile search market is the prize Google has been after all along.
3. Surfing—and everything else computer-related—will open
Rejoice: the embrace of “openness” by firms that have grown fat on closed, proprietary technology is something we’ll see more of in 2008. Verizon is not the only one to cry uncle and reluctantly accept the inevitable.
Even Apple, long a bastion of closed systems, is coming round to the open idea. Its heavily protected iPhone was hacked within days of being launched by owners determined to run third-party software like Skype on it.
Apple’s initial response was to attempt a heavy-handed crackdown. But then a court decision in Germany forced its local carrier to unlock all iPhones sold there. Good news for iPhone owners everywhere: a flood of third-party applications is now underway.
The trend toward openness has been given added impetus by the recent collapse of the legal battles brought by SCO, a software developer. Formerly known as Santa Cruz Operations, the firm bought the Unix operating system and core technology in 1995 from Novell (which, in turn, had bought it from its original developer, AT&T).
Short of cash, SCO initiated a series of lawsuits against companies developing Linux software, claiming it contained chunks of copyrighted Unix code. Pressured by worried customers fearing prosecution, a handful of Linux distributors settled with SCO just to stay in business.
But IBM, which uses Linux, was having none of it, and fought the firm through the courts until it won. SCO is now operating under Chapter 11 of the American bankruptcy code.
The verdict removed, once and for all, the burden that had been inhibiting Linux’s broader acceptance. Linux is now accepted as being Unix-like, but not a Unix-derivative.
Bulletproof distributions of Linux from Red Hat and Novell have long been used on back-office servers. Since the verdict against SCO, Linux has swiftly become popular in small businesses and the home.
That’s largely the doing of Gutsy Gibbon, the code-name for the Ubuntu 7.10 from Canonical. Along with distributions such as Linspire, Mint, Xandros, OpenSUSE and gOS, Ubuntu (and its siblings Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu) has smoothed most of Linux’s geeky edges while polishing it for the desktop.
No question, Gutsy Gibbon is the sleekest, best integrated and most user-friendly Linux distribution yet. It’s now simpler to set up and configure than Windows. A great deal of work has gone into making the graphics, and especially the fonts, as intuitive and attractive as the Mac’s.
Like other Linux desktop editions, Ubuntu works perfectly well on lowly machines that couldn’t hope to run Windows XP, let alone Vista Home Edition or Apple’s OS-X.
Your correspondent has been happily using Gutsy Gibbon on a ten-year-old desktop with only 128 megabytes of RAM and a tiny 10 gigabyte hard-drive. When Michael Dell, the boss of Dell Computers, runs Ubuntu on one of his home systems, Linux is clearly doing many things right.
And because it is free, Linux become the operating system of choice for low-end PCs. It started with Nicholas Negroponte, the brains behind the One Laptop Per Child project that aims to deliver computerised education to children in the developing world. His clever XO laptop, costing less than $200, would never have seen the light of day without its clever Linux operating system.
But Mr Negroponte has done more than create one of the world’s most ingenious computers. With a potential market measured in the hundreds of millions, he has frightened a lot of big-time computer makers into seeing how good a laptop they can build for less than $500.
All start with a desktop version of Linux. Recent arrivals include the Asus Eee from Taiwan, which lists for $400. The company expects to sell close on four million Eees this financial year. Another Taiwanese maker, Everex, is selling its gPC desktop through Walmart for $199.
When firms are used to buying $1,000 office PCs running Vista Business Edition and loading each with a $200 copy of Microsoft Office, the attractions of a sub-$500 computer using a free operating system like Linux and a free productivity suite like OpenOffice suddenly become very compelling.
And that’s not counting the $20,000 or more needed for Microsoft’s Exchange and SharePoint server software. Again, Linux provides such server software for free.
Pundits agree: neither Microsoft nor Apple can compete at the new price points being plumbed by companies looking to cut costs. With open-source software maturing fast, Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, Evolution, Pidgin and some 23,000 other Linux applications available for free seem more than ready to fill that gap. By some reckonings, Linux fans will soon outnumber Macintosh addicts. Linus Torvalds should be rightly proud.
1. Surfing will slow
PEERING into Tech.view’s crystal ball, the one thing we can predict with at least some certainty is that 2008 will be the year we stop taking access to the internet for granted. The internet is not about to grind to a halt, but as more and more users clamber aboard to download music, video clips and games while communicating incessantly by e-mail, chat and instant messaging, the information superhighway sometimes crawls with bumper-to-bumper traffic.
The biggest road-hog remains spam (unsolicited e-mail), which accounts for 90% of traffic on the internet. Phone companies and other large ISPs (internet service providers) have tolerated it for years because it would cost too much to fix. Besides, eliminating spam would only benefit their customers, not themselves.
How so? Because the big fat pipes used by ISPs operate symmetrically, with equal bandwidth for upstream and downstream traffic. But end-users have traditionally downloaded megabytes of information from the web, while uploading only kilobytes of key strokes and mouse clicks. So, when spammers dump billions of pieces of e-mail onto the internet, it travels over the phone companies’ relatively empty upstream segments.
That can’t last. For a start, millions of gadgets are joining the human hordes. Any gizmo worth its silicon these days has its own internet connection—so it can update itself automatically, communicate autonomously with other digital species, and anticipate its user’s every whim.
Part of the solution?Soon, portable media-players, personal navigators, digital cameras, DVD players, flat-panel TV sets, and even mobile phones won’t be able to function properly without access to the internet. Expect even digital picture frames to have a WiFi connection so they can grab the latest photos from Flickr.
Meanwhile, users are changing the way they use the internet: they are now uploading, as well as downloading, gigabytes galore—thanks to the popularity of social networks like Facebook, YouTube and MySpace.
Hailed by the industry as the wave of the future, “user-generated content” is proving to be a tsunami of unprecedented proportions. Everyone, it seems, is suddenly a budding Martin Scorsese, bent on sharing his or her home-made videos with fellow YouTubers.
Once the biggest files being shared via Napster and other P2P (peer-to-peer) networks were MP3 music tracks occupying a few modest megabytes. Today, music videos and TV episodes of hundreds of megabytes are being swapped over the internet by BitTorrent, Gnutella and other file-sharing networks.
And it’s all two-way traffic. The whole point of P2P is that everyone who is downloading is simultaneously uploading to others.
That’s just the beginning. Legal or otherwise, swapping multi-gigabyte high-definition video and movie files is becoming increasingly common.
In fact, it will soon be the norm. Television networks have found they can make more money from advertising while giving their show away for free over the internet than they can from broadcasting them. Now the movie studios are learning to do much the same.The result is a gridlock. That the telephone companies are running out of bandwidth can be seen from their equipment orders.
Cisco, the leading supplier of core routers used to direct traffic over the internet’s backbone, has just had another bumper quarter, with net income up 37% over the same period a year ago. Juniper Networks, another information-technology firm, did even better. Both companies credit the proliferation of social networks, the craze for internet searching, multimedia downloading, and the widespread adoption of P2P sharing for the surge in new business.
While major internet service providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast all plan to upgrade their backbones, it will be a year or two before improvements begin to show. By then, internet television will be in full bloom, spammers will have multiplied ten-fold, WiFi will be embedded in every moving object, and users will be screaming for yet more capacity.
In the meantime, accept that surfing the web is going to be more like travelling the highways at holiday time. You’ll get there, eventually, but the going won’t be great.
2. Surfing will detach
Earlier this month, Google bid for the most desirable chunk (known as C-block) of the 700-megahertz wireless spectrum being auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in late January 2008. The 700-megahertz frequencies used by channels 52 to 69 of analog television are being freed up by the switch to all-digital broadcasting in February 2009.
The frequencies concerned are among the world’s most valuable. They were used for broadcasting UHF television because they suffered little atmospheric absorption, could be beamed for miles, and could then penetrate all the nooks and crannies in buildings. Their relatively short wavelength makes the transmission equipment compact and the antennas small.
Mobile phone companies lust after the 700 megahertz frequencies because of their long range and broadband capabilities. They see lots of lucrative things like mobile television and other broadband services to offer customers.
But the 700 megahertz band is also the last great hope for a “third pipe” for internet access in America. Such a wireless network would offer consumers a serious alternative to the pricey and poor DSL (digital subscriber line) services they get from the likes of AT&T and Verizon, and to the marginally better cable broadband Comcast provides.
Over the past couple of months, techdom has been abuzz with rumours about Google getting into the mobile phone business—with a G-Phone to trump Apple’s iPhone. That’s highly unlikely.
The speculation was triggered by the company’s recent unveiling of its Android operating-system for mobile phones. But the whole point of Android is not to allow Google to make fancy handsets, but to make it easier for others to do so.
The aim, of course, is to flood the market with “open access” phones that have none of the restrictions that big carriers impose—like not being able to download software and games from other makers, or search the internet freely, or make free VoIP (voice of internet protocol) calls from within a WiFi hotspot.
Android has been made available to a group of manufacturers orchestrated by Google and known as the Open Handset Alliance. One of the nimblest of the group, HTC of Taiwan, has already started showing a BlackBerry-like prototype based on the Android operating system. Expect to see a raft of Android phones from other manufacturers over the coming months.
Nor is Google in the business of building a network of cellular antennas and fat communications pipes. Should it win the bidding for C-block, it would presumably team up with Frontline Wireless, a startup with serious expertise and money behind it.
That’s because Google’s core business is organising knowledge and giving users access to it. Google makes its money—and lots of it—from matching advertisers to consumers who use its search engine to look up things, not from tinkering with slim-margin ventures like wireless networks.
But despite owning the world’s largest knowledge base—with over 60% of the online search market—Google is at the mercy of others who control the on-ramps to the internet. That rankles.
Worse, it has no way of getting at the other billion users who rely more on mobile phones than personal computers to organise their lives. Clearly, the time has come to muscle into the moribund mobile-phone business.
Bidding $5 billion or more (the reserve is $4.6 billion) to beat out wireless heavyweights like AT&T and Verizon could give Google the option to become a cell-phone operator in partnership with Frontline, with a ready supply of handsets from its alliance partners and none of the hassles of running a network. Alternatively, it could become an internet service provider with a long-range wireless network to rival the WiMAX networks being built by Sprint and others.
But Google may want to do neither. Sceptics note that Google single-handedly persuaded the FCC to attach all manner of “open access” provisions to the C-block of frequencies—something that was anathema to the mobile-phone companies. Verizon even sued the FCC in a bid to block its move to open access.
Having failed to do so, Verizon now says it will open its network to third-party devices sometime in the future—and presumably for an additional charge. But the FCC is not just taking Verizon’s word for it.
The winner of the C-block of frequencies, whoever that may be (and Verizon is the odds-on favourite), will have to open the network to any device that meets the basic specification. And the devices themselves will have to be open to other suppliers’ software and services.
In short, win or lose, Google has already achieved its objective. Internet searches will doubtless be as popular among mobile-internet surfers as among their sedentary cousins. Owning at least 60% of the mobile search market is the prize Google has been after all along.
3. Surfing—and everything else computer-related—will open
Rejoice: the embrace of “openness” by firms that have grown fat on closed, proprietary technology is something we’ll see more of in 2008. Verizon is not the only one to cry uncle and reluctantly accept the inevitable.
Even Apple, long a bastion of closed systems, is coming round to the open idea. Its heavily protected iPhone was hacked within days of being launched by owners determined to run third-party software like Skype on it.
Apple’s initial response was to attempt a heavy-handed crackdown. But then a court decision in Germany forced its local carrier to unlock all iPhones sold there. Good news for iPhone owners everywhere: a flood of third-party applications is now underway.
The trend toward openness has been given added impetus by the recent collapse of the legal battles brought by SCO, a software developer. Formerly known as Santa Cruz Operations, the firm bought the Unix operating system and core technology in 1995 from Novell (which, in turn, had bought it from its original developer, AT&T).
Short of cash, SCO initiated a series of lawsuits against companies developing Linux software, claiming it contained chunks of copyrighted Unix code. Pressured by worried customers fearing prosecution, a handful of Linux distributors settled with SCO just to stay in business.
But IBM, which uses Linux, was having none of it, and fought the firm through the courts until it won. SCO is now operating under Chapter 11 of the American bankruptcy code.
The verdict removed, once and for all, the burden that had been inhibiting Linux’s broader acceptance. Linux is now accepted as being Unix-like, but not a Unix-derivative.
Bulletproof distributions of Linux from Red Hat and Novell have long been used on back-office servers. Since the verdict against SCO, Linux has swiftly become popular in small businesses and the home.
That’s largely the doing of Gutsy Gibbon, the code-name for the Ubuntu 7.10 from Canonical. Along with distributions such as Linspire, Mint, Xandros, OpenSUSE and gOS, Ubuntu (and its siblings Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu) has smoothed most of Linux’s geeky edges while polishing it for the desktop.
No question, Gutsy Gibbon is the sleekest, best integrated and most user-friendly Linux distribution yet. It’s now simpler to set up and configure than Windows. A great deal of work has gone into making the graphics, and especially the fonts, as intuitive and attractive as the Mac’s.
Like other Linux desktop editions, Ubuntu works perfectly well on lowly machines that couldn’t hope to run Windows XP, let alone Vista Home Edition or Apple’s OS-X.
Your correspondent has been happily using Gutsy Gibbon on a ten-year-old desktop with only 128 megabytes of RAM and a tiny 10 gigabyte hard-drive. When Michael Dell, the boss of Dell Computers, runs Ubuntu on one of his home systems, Linux is clearly doing many things right.
And because it is free, Linux become the operating system of choice for low-end PCs. It started with Nicholas Negroponte, the brains behind the One Laptop Per Child project that aims to deliver computerised education to children in the developing world. His clever XO laptop, costing less than $200, would never have seen the light of day without its clever Linux operating system.
But Mr Negroponte has done more than create one of the world’s most ingenious computers. With a potential market measured in the hundreds of millions, he has frightened a lot of big-time computer makers into seeing how good a laptop they can build for less than $500.
All start with a desktop version of Linux. Recent arrivals include the Asus Eee from Taiwan, which lists for $400. The company expects to sell close on four million Eees this financial year. Another Taiwanese maker, Everex, is selling its gPC desktop through Walmart for $199.
When firms are used to buying $1,000 office PCs running Vista Business Edition and loading each with a $200 copy of Microsoft Office, the attractions of a sub-$500 computer using a free operating system like Linux and a free productivity suite like OpenOffice suddenly become very compelling.
And that’s not counting the $20,000 or more needed for Microsoft’s Exchange and SharePoint server software. Again, Linux provides such server software for free.
Pundits agree: neither Microsoft nor Apple can compete at the new price points being plumbed by companies looking to cut costs. With open-source software maturing fast, Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, Evolution, Pidgin and some 23,000 other Linux applications available for free seem more than ready to fill that gap. By some reckonings, Linux fans will soon outnumber Macintosh addicts. Linus Torvalds should be rightly proud.
Guerilla Marketing tips for Indian Startups: Secrets of getting users without burning ca$h
Majority of the readership of this blog consist of aspiring entrepreneurs, probably in consumer Internet or mobile space . Every one of us have an idea for a service which according to him/her is exactly what market needs . This post is not about objective merit of your idea. If you are betting your reputation, money, energy and time [in that order ], I assume that you have good reason to do that .This post is not about revenue model .You may or may not have a revenue model and may be secretly wishing that you will cause a blip on the radar of Google,Yahoo,Ebay,MS or HT of world and they will acquire you . There is nothing drastically wrong in your assumption . This may happen .
I am sure you have got an “A-Team”. You have gone to right colleges, your room mate have fairly good understanding of LAMP stack so it won’t be a herculean task for two of you to code it up. Your friend who is a usability pro is ready to help you part time in designing logo , UI ,workflow and everything “creative”.
What’s the problem then?Why we are waiting then? What’s stopping you to start? Why Ashish doesn’t find enough startups to profile? Don’t tell me you are married or you are above 30 , that’s just an excuse!
In most of the cases, real answer lies in one sentence “I am not sure about Marketing” .
Underlying assumption in our story is that “Build it and they will come” but we fear that this may not happen . And we are not sure how too get our message across to our targeted user base . We count on being discovered by world . And that rarely happens.
We need to go out and talk to our user , tell them about our product offering. But you may ask- how? You are not funded (at least not yet), so you can’t possibly run full page advertisement in national newspapers,you can’t do TVC like Desimartini and Fropper; neither you can do bill board bash like BiggAdda. So what can we do ?
This is what this post is all about:
How to engineer word of mouth.
How to spread the word about your service ? How to make people aware that you exist ?
Its about street smart tactics of creating buzz . Not revenue ,Not sales, Not cash flow . Just how to make people know that you exist & make them talk about your service? & do it with little money .
I know some of you might be thinking “Here is Yet another armchair grandmaster.
Well……. I don’t have a series of successful venture exit behind me , neither I am running a cool startup . I have been a Software Product sales guy in past and I know a thing or two about how people react when exposed to new software or new way of doing things and how we can soften their reaction and use it for our advantage .
Secondly I am observing IT Consumer internet space for a long time now . thanks to my involvement in USENET I have been a mute witness to some ideas being discussed in those forum and than ending up being big time success.
Third is I have talked to few Jr guys in big PR Agency in valley about how they engineer a Word of mouth ? What’s their secret recipe? To my great surprise these are some basic common sense tactics This post my attempt to spark a discussion about the relevance and effectiveness of these tactics in Indian context .
A point of caution first, Operating assumption while writing this post is that
1) you are based out of a metro so you want to get early adopters from these cities only . 2) you are in Internet /Mobile space and your target user base is college Kid ,young or middle age professionals .
Your Sys Admin :
A startup in silicon valley wanted to make a Web based IM platform where you can log into your IM friend list at Yahoo Messenger ,AoL ,Jabber ,GTalk etc[ You know which company I am talking about ] . when they were about to launch Public Beta they started brainstorming way to spread the word . One of their approach was to contact System administrators community. Most of the BIG corporation don’t allow you to install messenger client on your computer .
Sys Admin knew it, they were good guys, they want to help their colleague but they were bound by corporate IT policy. With web based IM, it was possible for them to address this issue . Not to officially endorse the venture but quietly slip the word around . one cubic at a time . So founder called one of his friend who was a SysAdmin at a big IT service firm, showed him a basic demo and requested him to tell people about it .
Surprise ……server log showed that in next 3 days 500 people logged in to their service from a single building of that company. Very soon, every branch of that company started using it . Truth was that they were using Lotus Notes messenger to tell their colleague about this cool new Web Based IM . That SysAdmin probably had told it to few guys, may be out of sense of obligation.
But he started an avalanche. Next thing this startup did was to log on to a job site and find out all the guys in who were IT Admin, shoot them an email and rest as they say is History ….errr……History in making .
Now think about it . Lot of the Web2.0 stuff consist of making desktop application run inside a browser and similar stuff. I am sure your Sys Admin friend can help. Think about it .
Your Job Portal :
When we were starting out Delhi Chapter or Mobile Monday, we faced a problem. Where can we find people who might be interested in attending this group? So we checked Naukri.com to find out which company is hiring for Mobile specific Skill set and found out our friends in that company to spread the word. In some cases we even called the HR of that company and make her send event notification. So, you see that Your Naukri.com is a rich repository of Internet savvy people. I am sure you know at least one recruitment consultant , you can borrow his login id for a night and do some data mining. You can do a very targeted marketing . you can say some thing like
“Prashant , its been 6 years since you left college , i m sure you miss some of your friends , find out where are they and may be some of them are working with you at infy Bangalore .Join XYZ.com ”
” Prashant , last year I Quit my job as Mobile Developer to follow my dream , we bootstrapped a little company and our product is in Public beta now , as a fellow mobile developer i would like to have your view in this . please join our beta prog . if you like what we did please tell your friends about it ”
Chances are that reader of these emails will respond to your campaign . but for god sake please be careful and don’t send an email starting with “Dear Candidate ” .
Your HR Guy:
HR is not just for recruitment . there is one more responsibility of HR , Training . As you are a startup so I am sure you must have heard of some latest Buzzwords like Agile, Scrum, Rapid Prototyping ,Test driven development etc . and thanks to your training in Traditional IT Service companies I am sure most of you don’t understand it fully . But that doesn’t matter much ,you can read about it . Borrow a copy of Getting Real from your friend . Lobby with some HR or Training firm, arrange for a workshop to dispense gyan about somethings like “Making a High Performance Web based Transaction server with two people team ” or whatever is relevant , share your experience .
Truth be told ….some guys in Bangalore have actually done it. Not once but three times . Each time they were paid 25K . Few more such session are in pipeline for them . Their initial motivation was purely financial [Cash strapped venture] but later on they infused more and more marketing angle to it . And why not? On Each occasion time a focused audience of 500 saw , listened and interacted with their product for 20 Min . if you can not get some one interested in your product after 20 Min then….either the guy is not worth it or your product .
Those of you who are doing startup would admit that 1 year of work in your own venture gives you more opportunity to learn that 5 years in a CMM Level 5 IT Firm . I am sure you can use it., Why not share it and share it well. call your Boss and HR at the company you used to work for ..tell them you did one such training for a client you can’t disclose i was wondering if you would like to do it .
MBA Colleges
You can do the same for Guest lecture at MBA college …any MBA college with good student strength. Just add some entrepreneurship spin to your pitch and tell your story. If you are in a Metro I am sure you must be having one in next block- get in touch with them … Biz school depend big time on case studies,guest lectures ,summer training etc. You can be a case study to them . there are more than 20 MBA colleges in Jaipur itself . I am sure not all of them have their guest lecture schedule full. You can surely help . Do it while Web 2.0 is hot J
PTA Meetings
This might sound a little weird to some of you. Go to your local affluent schools, talk about the internet domain in context of your product. This will help parents who see their kids spending a lot of time online on Facebook , Orkut or P2P. Parents want to know more about it, but they don’t know whom to ask.
Introduce them to cult of Poke and scrap - they want to be cool or they simply want to connect with there kid by a common pursuit. You can surely tell them a thing or two and I bet these parents would go and boast it to their kids and you know a social network site endorsed by your dad is a excellent way to make it stand out. I am sure it won’t do much harm either. Key here is to balance between talking about your domain and your product. Worth a try. Isn’t it ??
Night Out @ College Hostel :
I am yet to find a person who doesn’t like to talk about romance of startingup , But at the same time i am yet to see a startup who actually capitalize on this romance . When it comes to marketing that is your best weapon . Don’t sponsor annual cultural fest of the local engineering college . Instead try this go to hostel one night on some pre text [b’day ,visiting your cousin , alumni etc].
Show them your Product . Tell them how much fun you guys are having in doing this. Show some pics of your team in bean bag and some of your pics with Narayan Murthy at some conference and tell a good story over beer . If you are able to pull a good show, you will have some good number of crusaders in that campus next day .Make sure you have everyone’s email id; and as a follow up, ask them to relay your message to college mailing list. Avoid sending a direct email to list- let your crusader relay it and take glory of introducing a cool thing.
In India, startup is still a novelty and having a chance to talk to entrepreneur is bigger novelty. I don’t see anyone capitalizing on this.
On the other hand, what are Indian startups doing ? Spamming Orkut??
There are few more tactics. Some of them too whacky, some of them too specific to application that they don’t need to be mentioned for the purpose of a generic discussion; and of course some of them too good to share. I am sure you can come up with few of your own!
What do you think about these type of guerilla tactics? Can it work in India ? Let me know your thoughts .
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22 Resources to Easily Create CSS Layouts
Web designers are always looking for ways to save time and simplify the design process. Well, creating a basic layout doesn’t have to take any time at all. All of the resources listed here will help you to create the structure for CSS-based designs. None of these resources are templates that attempt to replace the need for a design; rather, they all aim to simplify the process by creating a skeleton that you will build upon.
Layout Gala - 40 different CSS-based layouts including fixed and fluid widths.
BluePrintCSS - BluePrintCSS “aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.”
Intensivstation - 16 different CSS-based layouts are provided
Dynamic Drive’s CSS Library - One of the leading sources of coding and scripts provides 12 CSS-based layouts.
CSSCreator.com - Rather than providing templates, CSS Creator is a tool that allows you to enter some information about the layout that you want to create, and it produces the code. You choose things like width, columns and colors.
Layout-o-matic - Inknoise has a tool that is similar to CSS Creator. You choose a few variables and it will give you the code for a basic CSS layout.
The Layout Reservoir - BlueRobot.com provides the CSS for 3 different layouts.
Code Sucks.com - There are over 90 different layouts to choose from, including fixed width and faux columns.
CSSeasy - At CSSeasy you’ll find 8 different layouts to choose from.
Tomorrow’s Laundry - WordPress theme designers will love the blank theme layouts from Tomorrow’s Laundry. Four different layouts provide the basic building blocks for your theme designs.
WordPress Theme Generator - Another resource for WordPress designers, the theme generator will let you choose the layout you want and it generates the code.
Yahoo! Developer Network - YUI Grids CSS provide a starting point for your layouts for fluid or fixed width.
SSI Developer - At SSI Developer there are a variety of two and three column layouts. Each layout indicates the browsers in which it has been tested.
Mollio - Mollio offers several attractive layouts, but they give a disclaimer that there may be some rendering problems with IE7.
CSS Tinderbox - Here you’ll find four simple but attractive layouts.
Mitch Bryson - Mitch provides eight different CSS-based layouts to choose from.
Layout Gala - 40 different CSS-based layouts including fixed and fluid widths.
BluePrintCSS - BluePrintCSS “aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.”
Intensivstation - 16 different CSS-based layouts are provided
Dynamic Drive’s CSS Library - One of the leading sources of coding and scripts provides 12 CSS-based layouts.
CSSCreator.com - Rather than providing templates, CSS Creator is a tool that allows you to enter some information about the layout that you want to create, and it produces the code. You choose things like width, columns and colors.
Layout-o-matic - Inknoise has a tool that is similar to CSS Creator. You choose a few variables and it will give you the code for a basic CSS layout.
The Layout Reservoir - BlueRobot.com provides the CSS for 3 different layouts.
Code Sucks.com - There are over 90 different layouts to choose from, including fixed width and faux columns.
CSSeasy - At CSSeasy you’ll find 8 different layouts to choose from.
Tomorrow’s Laundry - WordPress theme designers will love the blank theme layouts from Tomorrow’s Laundry. Four different layouts provide the basic building blocks for your theme designs.
WordPress Theme Generator - Another resource for WordPress designers, the theme generator will let you choose the layout you want and it generates the code.
Yahoo! Developer Network - YUI Grids CSS provide a starting point for your layouts for fluid or fixed width.
SSI Developer - At SSI Developer there are a variety of two and three column layouts. Each layout indicates the browsers in which it has been tested.
Mollio - Mollio offers several attractive layouts, but they give a disclaimer that there may be some rendering problems with IE7.
CSS Tinderbox - Here you’ll find four simple but attractive layouts.
Mitch Bryson - Mitch provides eight different CSS-based layouts to choose from.
Firdamatic - Another tool similar to CSS Creator and Layout-o-matic, Firdomatic will let you choose several items and then it will create the code for your layout.
Strictly CSS - Strictly CSS has an article that provides ten different CSS layouts based on the same HTML code.
Max Design - Twenty-three different layouts in several different categories are available from Max Design.
Glish.com - Here is an article that includes links to a number of CSS-based layouts.
mycelly.com - Twelve different layouts.
Little Boxes - Sixteen more layouts.
Information technology in India
Gravity's pull
Is India's computer-services industry heading for a fall?
MOST foreigners visit Mysore to see its many palaces, testaments to bygone royal splendour. But the city, south of Bangalore, is also a good place to observe monuments to India's modern might. One of its suburbs contains a lush campus with a collection of futuristic buildings: the Global Education Centre, one of the world's largest corporate-training facilities, operated by Infosys, a leading Indian information-technology (IT) services firm.
Visiting the centre, you would think that for India's IT businesses, the sky is the limit. Rarely has an industry grown so rapidly for so long. It has boasted annual growth rates of nearly 30% in the past ten years, with revenues now nearing $50 billion, about 5.4% of India's GDP. But some in India are starting to worry that the industry is heading for a fall. At the very least, analysts say, the industry's leading firms—Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro, to name only the three largest—need to do more to adapt their business models as the industry matures.
The “IT” in India's IT industry has always been something of a misnomer. True, most of its more than 1.6m employees sit in front of computers, writing software for Western firms, remotely maintaining their computers and electronically handling some of their operations. But the business is mostly about people and processes. The very essence of India's IT firms is their ability to marshal huge local workforces to supply high-quality services.
One of their biggest innovations has been to borrow ideas from manufacturing and apply them to services, by building a sophisticated human supply-chain, for instance. They have also focused on certification and continuous improvement—a result of having to be, at least initially, better than their Western rivals in order to win business, says Girish Paranjpe, the boss of Wipro's consulting arm. Today more Indian than American firms meet the highest internationally recognised standards for software development.
All this has enabled Indian firms to take advantage of a rare, if not unique, set of market conditions. On the demand side, Western companies needed to cut costs, but their computer systems still required a lot of human labour. On the supply side, there was an army of well trained, English-speaking engineers demanding only a fraction of a Western salary. Fast fibre-optic links brought both sides together and a favourable exchange rate made this global connection even more attractive: customers paid in dollars, and employees were paid in rupees. The result was a “low-risk, high-margin business”, says Kiran Karnik, the outgoing president of Nasscom, the industry's trade group. To increase sales, firms could hire more people without caring too much about productivity, with the result that growth in revenue correlated closely with growth in headcount.
So why the concern? Indian IT faces a host of threats, says Sudin Apte of Forrester Research, a consultancy, who argues that the industry needs to reinvent itself. The most immediate difficulty is the rapid appreciation of the rupee against the dollar in recent months (see article). Since its low in mid-2006, it has gained 16%. This has made a liability out of what had been a big asset for Indian IT firms—making most of their sales in America. The strong rupee has also thrown other structural problems into relief. These fall into three categories.
What goes up...
First come the familiar problems. One is India's clogged and insufficient infrastructure: workers in Bangalore can spend four hours a day in traffic. Then there are the tax breaks that subsidise the industry, some of which expire in 2009. There is also a growing talent shortage. Indian engineering schools award around 200,000 diplomas each year, and produce around 250,000 graduates, but only half are employable by the IT industry. Employees have learnt to switch jobs for better pay, and salaries are going up by 10-15% a year. For senior staff, they will soon reach Western levels.
Second, competitors are starting to emerge. IT industries in other parts of the world, such as Central Europe, may never match India's in size, but they can still pick off valuable contracts. Meanwhile, foreign IT firms have been beefing up their Indian subsidiaries. In 2002 the six biggest—including Accenture, IBM and HP—had fewer than 10,000 employees in total in the country. Their combined Indian workforce now exceeds 150,000. This enables them to rival the Indian firms in scale and cost, while exploiting their stronger brands and international scope.
The third category concerns future threats. In the short term a slowdown in IT spending looms as America's economy weakens. In the longer term Indian firms must keep abreast of technological changes. Many of the services they now provide will eventually be automated; this is already starting to happen, for example, in software testing. Western firms, meanwhile, increasingly want Indian providers to do more than just keep systems running; they want help in developing new solutions to business problems—something few Indian firms are set up to do.
The question is whether the industry's business model can cope with these threats even as the potential for growth in its established markets declines. According to calculations by CLSA, a French-Asian investment bank, Indian IT firms will soon have a share of nearly 20% of their addressable market's value and almost 40% of its volume. They will also struggle to make their existing business more efficient: most fat has already been cut.
Many think that Indian IT firms need to move into new, higher-margin services and to cut the link between revenues and headcount, for instance by offering more consulting, developing more intellectual property and making acquisitions abroad. To be fair, the leading firms are already doing this. Infosys now generates nearly a quarter of its revenues from consulting, says its new boss, S. Gopalakrishnan; and Wipro recently paid $600m for Infocrossing, an American firm, the largest in a series of acquisitions by Indian firms.
But is the industry moving fast enough? Nasscom's Mr Karnik says no, but he thinks there is still time to change things. Partha Iyengar of Gartner, another consultancy, sees more urgency. He expects slower growth and lower margins if the big firms are not making most of their money in consulting and other high-margin areas within three or four years. This will be hard, he says: today's focus on people, processes and profits may keep many firms from reaching the next level. But, he says, India's IT firms have shown before that they can change if they really need to.
Even if the heavyweights stumble, smaller firms are ready to take up the baton. For example, MindTree Consulting was founded 1999 in anticipation of the very threats that have now materialised. However potent these threats prove, they have already demonstrated that for all the talk of the world being flat, economic gravity still applies.
Is India's computer-services industry heading for a fall?
MOST foreigners visit Mysore to see its many palaces, testaments to bygone royal splendour. But the city, south of Bangalore, is also a good place to observe monuments to India's modern might. One of its suburbs contains a lush campus with a collection of futuristic buildings: the Global Education Centre, one of the world's largest corporate-training facilities, operated by Infosys, a leading Indian information-technology (IT) services firm.Visiting the centre, you would think that for India's IT businesses, the sky is the limit. Rarely has an industry grown so rapidly for so long. It has boasted annual growth rates of nearly 30% in the past ten years, with revenues now nearing $50 billion, about 5.4% of India's GDP. But some in India are starting to worry that the industry is heading for a fall. At the very least, analysts say, the industry's leading firms—Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro, to name only the three largest—need to do more to adapt their business models as the industry matures.
The “IT” in India's IT industry has always been something of a misnomer. True, most of its more than 1.6m employees sit in front of computers, writing software for Western firms, remotely maintaining their computers and electronically handling some of their operations. But the business is mostly about people and processes. The very essence of India's IT firms is their ability to marshal huge local workforces to supply high-quality services.
One of their biggest innovations has been to borrow ideas from manufacturing and apply them to services, by building a sophisticated human supply-chain, for instance. They have also focused on certification and continuous improvement—a result of having to be, at least initially, better than their Western rivals in order to win business, says Girish Paranjpe, the boss of Wipro's consulting arm. Today more Indian than American firms meet the highest internationally recognised standards for software development.
All this has enabled Indian firms to take advantage of a rare, if not unique, set of market conditions. On the demand side, Western companies needed to cut costs, but their computer systems still required a lot of human labour. On the supply side, there was an army of well trained, English-speaking engineers demanding only a fraction of a Western salary. Fast fibre-optic links brought both sides together and a favourable exchange rate made this global connection even more attractive: customers paid in dollars, and employees were paid in rupees. The result was a “low-risk, high-margin business”, says Kiran Karnik, the outgoing president of Nasscom, the industry's trade group. To increase sales, firms could hire more people without caring too much about productivity, with the result that growth in revenue correlated closely with growth in headcount.
So why the concern? Indian IT faces a host of threats, says Sudin Apte of Forrester Research, a consultancy, who argues that the industry needs to reinvent itself. The most immediate difficulty is the rapid appreciation of the rupee against the dollar in recent months (see article). Since its low in mid-2006, it has gained 16%. This has made a liability out of what had been a big asset for Indian IT firms—making most of their sales in America. The strong rupee has also thrown other structural problems into relief. These fall into three categories.
What goes up...
First come the familiar problems. One is India's clogged and insufficient infrastructure: workers in Bangalore can spend four hours a day in traffic. Then there are the tax breaks that subsidise the industry, some of which expire in 2009. There is also a growing talent shortage. Indian engineering schools award around 200,000 diplomas each year, and produce around 250,000 graduates, but only half are employable by the IT industry. Employees have learnt to switch jobs for better pay, and salaries are going up by 10-15% a year. For senior staff, they will soon reach Western levels.
Second, competitors are starting to emerge. IT industries in other parts of the world, such as Central Europe, may never match India's in size, but they can still pick off valuable contracts. Meanwhile, foreign IT firms have been beefing up their Indian subsidiaries. In 2002 the six biggest—including Accenture, IBM and HP—had fewer than 10,000 employees in total in the country. Their combined Indian workforce now exceeds 150,000. This enables them to rival the Indian firms in scale and cost, while exploiting their stronger brands and international scope.
The third category concerns future threats. In the short term a slowdown in IT spending looms as America's economy weakens. In the longer term Indian firms must keep abreast of technological changes. Many of the services they now provide will eventually be automated; this is already starting to happen, for example, in software testing. Western firms, meanwhile, increasingly want Indian providers to do more than just keep systems running; they want help in developing new solutions to business problems—something few Indian firms are set up to do.
The question is whether the industry's business model can cope with these threats even as the potential for growth in its established markets declines. According to calculations by CLSA, a French-Asian investment bank, Indian IT firms will soon have a share of nearly 20% of their addressable market's value and almost 40% of its volume. They will also struggle to make their existing business more efficient: most fat has already been cut.
Many think that Indian IT firms need to move into new, higher-margin services and to cut the link between revenues and headcount, for instance by offering more consulting, developing more intellectual property and making acquisitions abroad. To be fair, the leading firms are already doing this. Infosys now generates nearly a quarter of its revenues from consulting, says its new boss, S. Gopalakrishnan; and Wipro recently paid $600m for Infocrossing, an American firm, the largest in a series of acquisitions by Indian firms.
But is the industry moving fast enough? Nasscom's Mr Karnik says no, but he thinks there is still time to change things. Partha Iyengar of Gartner, another consultancy, sees more urgency. He expects slower growth and lower margins if the big firms are not making most of their money in consulting and other high-margin areas within three or four years. This will be hard, he says: today's focus on people, processes and profits may keep many firms from reaching the next level. But, he says, India's IT firms have shown before that they can change if they really need to.
Even if the heavyweights stumble, smaller firms are ready to take up the baton. For example, MindTree Consulting was founded 1999 in anticipation of the very threats that have now materialised. However potent these threats prove, they have already demonstrated that for all the talk of the world being flat, economic gravity still applies.
Useful Resources
99 Useful Resources for Graphic Designers
Download AutoCAD 2007 for free
A to Z Online Resources for e-Learning
A Preview of HTML 5
Best Selling Graphic Design related Books
Website Design for your Customers - It's not what you want
99 Resources for Web 2.0 Design
10 Ways To Get Design Approval
One of the most challenging parts of the web design process is getting design sign off. It can prove time consuming, demoralizing and if you are not careful can lead to a dissatisfied client. What is more you can end up with a design that you are ashamed to include in your portfolio.
How then can you ensure that the design you produce is the one that gets built? How can you get the client to sign off on your design? Below are 10 tips learnt from years of bitter experience.
1. Define the role of the client and designer
Many of the clients you work with will not have been involved in a web project before. Even if they have they may have worked in a very different way to what you would expect. Take the time at the beginning of the project to explain their role in the design of the site.
The best approach is to emphasis that their job is to focus on the needs of their users and business. They should concentrate on the broad issues, while you worry about the details of layout, typography and colour scheme.
By clarifying what you expect from the client, you help them to provide the right kind of input throughout the process.
2. Understand the business
Before you open up Photoshop or put pen to paper, take the time to make sure you properly understand not only the brief but the organization behind the site. By understanding their business objectives, organizational structure and marketing strategy your design decisions will be better informed.
You cannot rely upon the brief to provide all of the information you need. It is important to dig deeper and get as good an understanding of their business as possible. This information will prove invaluable when justifying your design decisions.
3. Understand the users
We all like to think of ourselves as user centric designers, but exactly how much effort do you put into knowing your users before beginning the design process?
Take the time to really understand them the best you can. Try to meet with some real prospective users and get to know their needs. Failing that work with the client to produce user personas to help picture exactly what kind of people they are.
Understanding your users not only improves the quality of your work, but also helps move the discussion away from the personal preferences of the client, to the people who’s opinion really matters.
4. Avoid multiple concepts
Many clients like the idea of having the option to choose between multiple design concepts. However, although on the surface this might appear to be a good idea it can ultimately be counterproductive for design sign off.
In a world of limited budgets it is unwise to waste money on producing designs that are ultimately going to be thrown away. The resources would be better spent refining a single design through multiple iterations.
What is more, multiple concepts often cause confusion rather than clarity. It is common for a client to request one element from one design and another from the second. As any designer knows this seldom works.
5. Use mood boards
Clients are often better at expressing what they don’t like than what they do. This is one of the reasons why they favour producing multiple design concepts. An alternative less costly approach is to create a series of mood boards. These boards contain a collection of colours, typography and imagery which represent different “moods” or directions, which the design could take.
Mood boards are quick and easy to produce allowing you to try out various design approaches with the client without investing the time needed to produce complete design concepts. This means that by the time you develop a concept the client and designer have already established an understanding about the direction of the design.
6. Say what you like
It is not uncommon for a client to ask for a design that looks similar to another site they like. The problem is that it can often be hard to establish exactly what it is about the site that attracts them. Also in many cases the sites they like are not something you are keen to emulate!
A better approach that was suggested to me by Andy Budd is to show them sites that you think the design should emulate. Keep a collection of screen captures from well designed sites and pick out a few that are relevant to that particular client. Explain why you feel these designs might suit their project and ask for their feedback. If they don’t like your choices then expose them to more of your collection and see what they pick out.
7. Wireframe the homepage
Often clients find it hard to distinguish between design and content and so sometimes reject a design on the basis that the content is not right. This is particularly true when signing off the homepage.
You may therefore find it useful to establish the homepage content before producing the design. That way once they see the design they will not be distracted by the content. One of the best ways to do this is by producing a basic wireframe consisting of a series of content boxes. Once this has been approved you will find the sign off of design much easier.
8. Present your designs
Although it is true that a good design should speak for itself it still needs presenting to the client. The client needs to understand why you have made the design decisions you have, otherwise they will judge the design purely on personal preference.
Talk them through the design explaining how it meets the needs of their users and business objectives. Refer to the mood boards and preferred sites the client approved and explain how the design is a continuation of those. Never simply email the design through and hope the client interprets your work correctly!
9. Provide written supporting material
Unfortunately, no matter how well you justify the design to the client he is almost certain to want to show it to others. He may need his bosses approval or require internal buy in. At the very least he is going to want to get a second opinion from a friend or colleague.
The problem with this is that you are not going to be there to present to these people in the same way you did for the client. You cannot expect the client to present your ideas as well as you did. The reality is that you have lost control of how the design is perceived.
One way to minimize this problem is to provide written documentation supporting the design. This can be a summary of the presentation you gave to the client and allows him to distribute this along with the design. By putting a written explanation with the design you ensure that everybody who sees it gets the same message.
10. Control the feedback
My final piece of advice for managing design sign off is to control the way you receive feedback. A clients natural inclination will be to give you his personal opinion on the design. This is reinforced because you ask them what they think of the design. Instead ask them what their users will think of the design. Encourage them to think from the users perspective.
Also encourage them to keep that overarching focus I talked about in my first tip. Their tendency will be to try to improve the design, however that should be your problem not theirs. The role of a client should be to defend the needs of their users and business not do the design. Encourage the client to make comments such as “I am not sure that my female users will like the masculine colours” rather than “can we make the whole design pink.” It is down to them to identify the problems and for you as the designer to find the most appropriate solution.
So there you have it. My 10 tips to improve design sign off. Will this ensure design approval every time? Unfortunately not. However it should certainly help smooth the way.
Read more…
How then can you ensure that the design you produce is the one that gets built? How can you get the client to sign off on your design? Below are 10 tips learnt from years of bitter experience.
1. Define the role of the client and designer
Many of the clients you work with will not have been involved in a web project before. Even if they have they may have worked in a very different way to what you would expect. Take the time at the beginning of the project to explain their role in the design of the site.
The best approach is to emphasis that their job is to focus on the needs of their users and business. They should concentrate on the broad issues, while you worry about the details of layout, typography and colour scheme.
By clarifying what you expect from the client, you help them to provide the right kind of input throughout the process.
2. Understand the business
Before you open up Photoshop or put pen to paper, take the time to make sure you properly understand not only the brief but the organization behind the site. By understanding their business objectives, organizational structure and marketing strategy your design decisions will be better informed.
You cannot rely upon the brief to provide all of the information you need. It is important to dig deeper and get as good an understanding of their business as possible. This information will prove invaluable when justifying your design decisions.
3. Understand the users
We all like to think of ourselves as user centric designers, but exactly how much effort do you put into knowing your users before beginning the design process?
Take the time to really understand them the best you can. Try to meet with some real prospective users and get to know their needs. Failing that work with the client to produce user personas to help picture exactly what kind of people they are.
Understanding your users not only improves the quality of your work, but also helps move the discussion away from the personal preferences of the client, to the people who’s opinion really matters.
4. Avoid multiple concepts
Many clients like the idea of having the option to choose between multiple design concepts. However, although on the surface this might appear to be a good idea it can ultimately be counterproductive for design sign off.
In a world of limited budgets it is unwise to waste money on producing designs that are ultimately going to be thrown away. The resources would be better spent refining a single design through multiple iterations.
What is more, multiple concepts often cause confusion rather than clarity. It is common for a client to request one element from one design and another from the second. As any designer knows this seldom works.
5. Use mood boards
Clients are often better at expressing what they don’t like than what they do. This is one of the reasons why they favour producing multiple design concepts. An alternative less costly approach is to create a series of mood boards. These boards contain a collection of colours, typography and imagery which represent different “moods” or directions, which the design could take.
Mood boards are quick and easy to produce allowing you to try out various design approaches with the client without investing the time needed to produce complete design concepts. This means that by the time you develop a concept the client and designer have already established an understanding about the direction of the design.
6. Say what you like
It is not uncommon for a client to ask for a design that looks similar to another site they like. The problem is that it can often be hard to establish exactly what it is about the site that attracts them. Also in many cases the sites they like are not something you are keen to emulate!
A better approach that was suggested to me by Andy Budd is to show them sites that you think the design should emulate. Keep a collection of screen captures from well designed sites and pick out a few that are relevant to that particular client. Explain why you feel these designs might suit their project and ask for their feedback. If they don’t like your choices then expose them to more of your collection and see what they pick out.
7. Wireframe the homepage
Often clients find it hard to distinguish between design and content and so sometimes reject a design on the basis that the content is not right. This is particularly true when signing off the homepage.
You may therefore find it useful to establish the homepage content before producing the design. That way once they see the design they will not be distracted by the content. One of the best ways to do this is by producing a basic wireframe consisting of a series of content boxes. Once this has been approved you will find the sign off of design much easier.
8. Present your designs
Although it is true that a good design should speak for itself it still needs presenting to the client. The client needs to understand why you have made the design decisions you have, otherwise they will judge the design purely on personal preference.
Talk them through the design explaining how it meets the needs of their users and business objectives. Refer to the mood boards and preferred sites the client approved and explain how the design is a continuation of those. Never simply email the design through and hope the client interprets your work correctly!
9. Provide written supporting material
Unfortunately, no matter how well you justify the design to the client he is almost certain to want to show it to others. He may need his bosses approval or require internal buy in. At the very least he is going to want to get a second opinion from a friend or colleague.
The problem with this is that you are not going to be there to present to these people in the same way you did for the client. You cannot expect the client to present your ideas as well as you did. The reality is that you have lost control of how the design is perceived.
One way to minimize this problem is to provide written documentation supporting the design. This can be a summary of the presentation you gave to the client and allows him to distribute this along with the design. By putting a written explanation with the design you ensure that everybody who sees it gets the same message.
10. Control the feedback
My final piece of advice for managing design sign off is to control the way you receive feedback. A clients natural inclination will be to give you his personal opinion on the design. This is reinforced because you ask them what they think of the design. Instead ask them what their users will think of the design. Encourage them to think from the users perspective.
Also encourage them to keep that overarching focus I talked about in my first tip. Their tendency will be to try to improve the design, however that should be your problem not theirs. The role of a client should be to defend the needs of their users and business not do the design. Encourage the client to make comments such as “I am not sure that my female users will like the masculine colours” rather than “can we make the whole design pink.” It is down to them to identify the problems and for you as the designer to find the most appropriate solution.
So there you have it. My 10 tips to improve design sign off. Will this ensure design approval every time? Unfortunately not. However it should certainly help smooth the way.
25 Headline Formulas That Have Blessed Web 2.0
Headlines can make or break a story. With thousands of different articles vying for our attention, web users can afford to be picky.
In an ideal world we’d give articles a fighting chance to prove their worth, but in truth, unless we have pre-existing faith in the author, we often make the decision to read or ignore before our eyes have reached the end of the headline.
Web writers have only recently, it seems, started to realize the crucial importance of the headline. The ascendancy of the headline has been one aspect of Web 2.0 culture which hasn’t received the attention it deserves.
This post is a tour of the key web headline formulas being used today. Some will inspire you, others will make you cringe. All of them are sourced from real examples.
1. The destined for Digg
More than half of Americans – 56 per cent – say they’re not proud of the country [Source]
2. Because headlines and context don’t mix
‘Microsoft sucks’, says top blogger [Source]
3. Is that a threat?
Warning: People are Ignoring Advertising. But They do Read News. [Source]
4. The love it or hate it number + text combo
3 Painful Ways You Lose Money Every Month [Source]
5. Bait for the curious
What’s the scariest fish in the Amazon? Hint: It’s not the Piranha. It’s far, far worse. [Source]
6. The delayed number + text combo
Grip Your Readers With These 7 Knock-out Opening Sentences [Source]
7. The only slightly less loathed/loved ‘written’ number
Five Tips for Stealthy Facebooking [Source]
8. The not so secret anymore
Five Secret Strategies to Add $1 Million in Revenue [Source]
9. The number + assertion of superiority
Top 10 Wi-Fi Boosts, Tweaks and Apps [Source]
10. The savvy linkbaiter
45 Excellent Blog Designs [Source]
11. The resource list you’ll bookmark and never look at again
40+ Free Fonts for Professional Design [Source]
12. The hook, colon, describe
Quitting the Day Job: Finding the Guts to Pursue Your Dreams [Source]
13. The sensational claim only a member of the blogerati could make
The Web 2.0 World is Skunk-Drunk on its Own Kool-Aid [Source]
14. The splogger’s magnum opus
Welcome to the World of the Slim People [Source]
15. The subjective masquerading as objective
TIME: The Best Photos of 2005 [Source]
16. The wild promise
How to Amaze Your Friends and Family With Your Eerily Accurate Psychic Readings [Source]
17. The search-term as headline
How to Hack an iPod [Source]
18. The keyword stuffer
Monetize Your Blog With These Ways to Make Money Online Monetize Your Blog
19. The troubling question
Are You Prepared for a Blogging Emergency? [Source]
20. The amateur philosopher
Two Phrases That Destroyed American Culture [Source]
21. The harsh call
Most People Are Depressed For a Very Good Reason [Source]
22. Google + intrigue = traffic
Dr. Google Sends Pain Relief [Source]
23. The mysterious premise
5 HTML Elements You Probably Never Use (But Perhaps Should) [Source]
24. The self-improver
How to Become a Vegetarian, the Easy Way [Source]
25. The appeal to our fear of failure
Do You Make These Mistakes When You Write? [Source]
In an ideal world we’d give articles a fighting chance to prove their worth, but in truth, unless we have pre-existing faith in the author, we often make the decision to read or ignore before our eyes have reached the end of the headline.
Web writers have only recently, it seems, started to realize the crucial importance of the headline. The ascendancy of the headline has been one aspect of Web 2.0 culture which hasn’t received the attention it deserves.
This post is a tour of the key web headline formulas being used today. Some will inspire you, others will make you cringe. All of them are sourced from real examples.
1. The destined for Digg
More than half of Americans – 56 per cent – say they’re not proud of the country [Source]
2. Because headlines and context don’t mix
‘Microsoft sucks’, says top blogger [Source]
3. Is that a threat?
Warning: People are Ignoring Advertising. But They do Read News. [Source]
4. The love it or hate it number + text combo
3 Painful Ways You Lose Money Every Month [Source]
5. Bait for the curious
What’s the scariest fish in the Amazon? Hint: It’s not the Piranha. It’s far, far worse. [Source]
6. The delayed number + text combo
Grip Your Readers With These 7 Knock-out Opening Sentences [Source]
7. The only slightly less loathed/loved ‘written’ number
Five Tips for Stealthy Facebooking [Source]
8. The not so secret anymore
Five Secret Strategies to Add $1 Million in Revenue [Source]
9. The number + assertion of superiority
Top 10 Wi-Fi Boosts, Tweaks and Apps [Source]
10. The savvy linkbaiter
45 Excellent Blog Designs [Source]
11. The resource list you’ll bookmark and never look at again
40+ Free Fonts for Professional Design [Source]
12. The hook, colon, describe
Quitting the Day Job: Finding the Guts to Pursue Your Dreams [Source]
13. The sensational claim only a member of the blogerati could make
The Web 2.0 World is Skunk-Drunk on its Own Kool-Aid [Source]
14. The splogger’s magnum opus
Welcome to the World of the Slim People [Source]
15. The subjective masquerading as objective
TIME: The Best Photos of 2005 [Source]
16. The wild promise
How to Amaze Your Friends and Family With Your Eerily Accurate Psychic Readings [Source]
17. The search-term as headline
How to Hack an iPod [Source]
18. The keyword stuffer
Monetize Your Blog With These Ways to Make Money Online Monetize Your Blog
19. The troubling question
Are You Prepared for a Blogging Emergency? [Source]
20. The amateur philosopher
Two Phrases That Destroyed American Culture [Source]
21. The harsh call
Most People Are Depressed For a Very Good Reason [Source]
22. Google + intrigue = traffic
Dr. Google Sends Pain Relief [Source]
23. The mysterious premise
5 HTML Elements You Probably Never Use (But Perhaps Should) [Source]
24. The self-improver
How to Become a Vegetarian, the Easy Way [Source]
25. The appeal to our fear of failure
Do You Make These Mistakes When You Write? [Source]
Useful Resources
99 Useful Resources for Graphic Designers
Download AutoCAD 2007 for free
A to Z Online Resources for e-Learning
A Preview of HTML 5
Best Selling Graphic Design related Books
Website Design for your Customers - It's not what you want
99 Resources for Web 2.0 Design
Best Selling Graphic Design related Books
List of graphic design books will make a great addition to any graphic designer’s library!
1. Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines
This is a book you should not do without. It touches on every topic you need to know about how to be successful as a graphic artist. If you want experienced and practical advice on anything from setting prices for your work on the Internet to how to best manage your client relations – this is the book for you.
2. Sagmeister: Made You Look
Daring designer, Stefan Sagmeister, chronicles almost 40 years of working in this business in this book. Sagmeister conveys his wit and humor into these pages, as he tells you his personal adventures.
3. Make It Bigger
This book caters to designers who work with businesses. Read this to be inspired and benefit from the wisdom of years of experience working in the field of graphic design.
4. About Face: Reviving The Rules Of Typography
Talking about the large topic of typography, About Face, helps you navigate through the world with ease. Many wonderful and successful examples of typography are provided in this book.
5. Typographic Design: Form and Communication
This is the fourth edition of a best-selling book. If you want just one book to help you learn about how to properly typography, it’s this one. Whether you’re interested in the history of this art, or how it can be effectively used in this modern-era, this book is chock full of valuable information for graphic designers.
6. The Elements of Typographic Style
Author, Robert Bringhurst, has written this book, which uses beautiful language to tell the story of how to apply your own artistic sensibility to typography. One treat in this book is the examples of fonts in different languages such as Russian and Greek.
7. The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type
1. Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines
This is a book you should not do without. It touches on every topic you need to know about how to be successful as a graphic artist. If you want experienced and practical advice on anything from setting prices for your work on the Internet to how to best manage your client relations – this is the book for you.
2. Sagmeister: Made You Look
Daring designer, Stefan Sagmeister, chronicles almost 40 years of working in this business in this book. Sagmeister conveys his wit and humor into these pages, as he tells you his personal adventures.
3. Make It Bigger
This book caters to designers who work with businesses. Read this to be inspired and benefit from the wisdom of years of experience working in the field of graphic design.
4. About Face: Reviving The Rules Of Typography
Talking about the large topic of typography, About Face, helps you navigate through the world with ease. Many wonderful and successful examples of typography are provided in this book.
5. Typographic Design: Form and Communication
This is the fourth edition of a best-selling book. If you want just one book to help you learn about how to properly typography, it’s this one. Whether you’re interested in the history of this art, or how it can be effectively used in this modern-era, this book is chock full of valuable information for graphic designers.
6. The Elements of Typographic Style
Author, Robert Bringhurst, has written this book, which uses beautiful language to tell the story of how to apply your own artistic sensibility to typography. One treat in this book is the examples of fonts in different languages such as Russian and Greek.
7. The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type
This book’s author, Alexander W. White, is a strong advocate of white space – what you can also call negative space. Many designers feel the need to clutter things up, but less can be more. Learn how to master that idea with this great book.
8. Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop
This book focuses on layout. With it, you can comprehensively learn the elements of layout so that you can better use them in your work.
9. Designing with Type: The Essential Guide to Typography (Designing With Type)
A book that’s been around since 1971, this is something that will introduce you to typography. It offers pointers on how to take into account such things as the feeling of a text, as well as how effectively it is conveyed in different formats.
10. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design
This offers a wonderful writing up of the history of graphic design. It may be of interest to both current graphic designers, and general artistic-minded people.
11. Graphic Design: A New History
Own this book and learn about graphic design history in a new light. The book talks in-depth of the different times of history in correlation to what graphic design’s were used.
12. Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (Design Briefs)
Author Ellen Lupton has written this wonderful book. The book has three main sections: letter, text, and grid. Learn the history of each, how technology can help you, and then see examples in practice.
13. The Designer’s Toolkit: 500 Grids and Style Sheets: 500 Grids and Style Sheets
As you may have already guessed, this book challenges designers to re-think their idea of how to work within a grid. There are 500 grid and style sheets ready for you to produce your work on and see what you like.
14. Looking Closer 5: Critical Writings on Graphic Design
This is the fifth and final installment in a series of wonderful books. Within these pages you will find writing on controversial topics that will encourage you to think outside of the page, or the screen.
15. How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer
Learn what you have in common with other graphic designers who have achieved success. What has helped them overcome obstacles may very well help you as well. This book is full of interviews you will find invaluable.
16. Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design
The title of the book tells you what you’re getting, right off the bat. Michael Bierut writes with whimsy and a critical eye in this book that you are sure to enjoy and be educated from.
17. How To Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul
The work of a graphic designer is not easy, and you probably already know that. Within these160 pages you will discover writing on topics such as how to generate ideas when your mind is void of them. You don’t want to become a slave to mundane tasks and lose your spark, if you feel yourself drifting – reach for this book.
18. LogoLounge 3: 2,000 International Identities by Leading Designers (LogoLounge)
If you’re crazy for logos then this is the book for you. In this third installment, you will find a myriad of different logos – 2,000 to be exact. Get inspired with this book, and then get designing.
19. Logo Design (Midi Series)
This is a handy reference book on logo design. Students and professionals alike will enjoy this book.
20. Hand Job: A Catalog of Type
Fifty typographers are featured in this book, and what they all have in common is that they reject technology, and design their fonts by hand. While the title at first can seem shocking to anyone, it will stay shocking to a designer. When’s the last time you reached for a pen and paper for your final draft? Maybe next time you will, after reading this book.
21. Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through Design
Well-written, this book is what it claims to be – 100 ways to enhance, influence, increase, teach – you get the idea. It is easy to understand and follow, and gives you well-researched briefs on a variety of topics that normally you’d have to read about in several different books.
22. Adobe Photoshop CS3 Classroom in a Book
Experts that make up the Adobe Creative Team have put together this book for you to easily expand your knowledge of the Adobe Photoshop program. Learn how to do things better and faster, all from reading this book.
23. The Adobe Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter)
To have Adobe Photoshop is one thing; to be able to use it is one thing, but to be able to use it well is another. And that is especially true when it comes to digital photography. If you want the best tips and tricks, this book won’t lead you astray.
24. Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book
Master the programs in Adobe Illustrator by using this book as a step-by-stop guide. The Adobe Creative Team will guide you where you need to go.
25. The Adobe Illustrator CS3 Wow! Book (WOW!)
If you want to be the best with using Adobe’s Illustrator, you need this book. There are tons of lessons in this book to help you learn new tools. Ever wonder how to take a desaturated image and make it appear to be a color photo? Read and learn.
26. Adobe InDesign CS3 Classroom in a Book
This is a good book for beginners. Make sure to get the second printing, as the first as some typos!
8. Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop
This book focuses on layout. With it, you can comprehensively learn the elements of layout so that you can better use them in your work.
9. Designing with Type: The Essential Guide to Typography (Designing With Type)
A book that’s been around since 1971, this is something that will introduce you to typography. It offers pointers on how to take into account such things as the feeling of a text, as well as how effectively it is conveyed in different formats.
10. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design
This offers a wonderful writing up of the history of graphic design. It may be of interest to both current graphic designers, and general artistic-minded people.
11. Graphic Design: A New History
Own this book and learn about graphic design history in a new light. The book talks in-depth of the different times of history in correlation to what graphic design’s were used.
12. Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (Design Briefs)
Author Ellen Lupton has written this wonderful book. The book has three main sections: letter, text, and grid. Learn the history of each, how technology can help you, and then see examples in practice.
13. The Designer’s Toolkit: 500 Grids and Style Sheets: 500 Grids and Style Sheets
As you may have already guessed, this book challenges designers to re-think their idea of how to work within a grid. There are 500 grid and style sheets ready for you to produce your work on and see what you like.
14. Looking Closer 5: Critical Writings on Graphic Design
This is the fifth and final installment in a series of wonderful books. Within these pages you will find writing on controversial topics that will encourage you to think outside of the page, or the screen.
15. How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer
Learn what you have in common with other graphic designers who have achieved success. What has helped them overcome obstacles may very well help you as well. This book is full of interviews you will find invaluable.
16. Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design
The title of the book tells you what you’re getting, right off the bat. Michael Bierut writes with whimsy and a critical eye in this book that you are sure to enjoy and be educated from.
17. How To Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul
The work of a graphic designer is not easy, and you probably already know that. Within these160 pages you will discover writing on topics such as how to generate ideas when your mind is void of them. You don’t want to become a slave to mundane tasks and lose your spark, if you feel yourself drifting – reach for this book.
18. LogoLounge 3: 2,000 International Identities by Leading Designers (LogoLounge)
If you’re crazy for logos then this is the book for you. In this third installment, you will find a myriad of different logos – 2,000 to be exact. Get inspired with this book, and then get designing.
19. Logo Design (Midi Series)
This is a handy reference book on logo design. Students and professionals alike will enjoy this book.
20. Hand Job: A Catalog of Type
Fifty typographers are featured in this book, and what they all have in common is that they reject technology, and design their fonts by hand. While the title at first can seem shocking to anyone, it will stay shocking to a designer. When’s the last time you reached for a pen and paper for your final draft? Maybe next time you will, after reading this book.
21. Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through Design
Well-written, this book is what it claims to be – 100 ways to enhance, influence, increase, teach – you get the idea. It is easy to understand and follow, and gives you well-researched briefs on a variety of topics that normally you’d have to read about in several different books.
22. Adobe Photoshop CS3 Classroom in a Book
Experts that make up the Adobe Creative Team have put together this book for you to easily expand your knowledge of the Adobe Photoshop program. Learn how to do things better and faster, all from reading this book.
23. The Adobe Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter)
To have Adobe Photoshop is one thing; to be able to use it is one thing, but to be able to use it well is another. And that is especially true when it comes to digital photography. If you want the best tips and tricks, this book won’t lead you astray.
24. Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book
Master the programs in Adobe Illustrator by using this book as a step-by-stop guide. The Adobe Creative Team will guide you where you need to go.
25. The Adobe Illustrator CS3 Wow! Book (WOW!)
If you want to be the best with using Adobe’s Illustrator, you need this book. There are tons of lessons in this book to help you learn new tools. Ever wonder how to take a desaturated image and make it appear to be a color photo? Read and learn.
26. Adobe InDesign CS3 Classroom in a Book
This is a good book for beginners. Make sure to get the second printing, as the first as some typos!
27. HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition (Visual Quickstart Guide)
You should know HTML, and probably XHTML and CSS as well. So learn it here, with this wonderful book! This is not for advanced students.
28. CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
Authors Andy Budd, Simon Collison, and Cameron Moll have written the ultimate guide to CSS! Learn everything you wanted to know, and more – in this book.
29. Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS (2nd Edition)
When you build a Web site, you want it to work. This book will help you learn how to get out all of the kinks and bugs from your site so that the widest possible audience can access it without flaws.
30. SEO Book
When you have a Web site, you want traffic. You get that through search engine optimization (SEO). This is the only book you will ever need to master search engine optimization and you can download it!
Useful Resources
99 Useful Resources for Graphic Designers
Download AutoCAD 2007 for free
A to Z Online Resources for e-Learning
A Preview of HTML 5
25 Headline Formulas That Have Blessed Web 2.0
Website Design for your Customers - It's not what you want
99 Resources for Web 2.0 Design
