"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." - William Morris

URLs without ‘www’

Posted: June 7th, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Interaction Design | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

Recently a trend has started to represent website URLs without the preceding ‘www’ sub-domain, short for ‘world wide wed’ and indicative of a web page. For example this site can be found both at www.isuseful.com and isuseful.com, but by default when I talk about the site address I drop the ‘www’.

Personally I find the ‘www’ to be distracting residue from the old days of the web, and advocate removing it wherever possible. This can now be seen in a number of print and TV ads for popular brands, where the ‘www’ is now rarely used – interestingly for less well known brands the ‘www’ is still in full effect. However there is a danger for existing website owners here – most people when they set up their wonderful, new website will do the obvious checks from their home page for missing content, typos and the like. However most site owners rarely think what might happen to people coming to their site from sources other than clicking on a link. Mis-typed pages are generally captured by a 404 Page Not Found error, which on well built sites results in a helpful page that allows the visitor to search and find what they want. However in the case of a mis-typed of missing sub-domain (ww.example.com or example.com) the user will be presented with either a missing site error or a long wait, depending on their browser and the default behavior of your host’s web server. Either way this could make the visitor think your site has gone away, unless they’re canny enough to try adding a ‘www’ to the front and reload.

So my advice is to ensure, at the very least, you support no sub-domain for your website as well as the traditional www – and make sure you test this when creating new websites for yourself or your clients.


Stock Photography SEO

Posted: May 2nd, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: SEO | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

Last night I ended up having an interesting conversation with a friend who has worked tagging photos for a stock photo agency. While we were talking I was struck by the similarities between tagging your photos effectively, and that of carrying out SEO activities on your website. Both have a huge impact on your income if carried out successfully, both are hugely competitive for popular search terms and both require a level of expertise and talent for choosing the right words and terms. The only real difference is that in web SEO, if your site is not winning the search term ranking war you can go around organic search and get paid search results, in photography I don’t think anyone does that yet (anyone feel like starting that business?).

One fundamental difference right now, is that websites tend to be text based, whereas a photo is pure image. So with photos effective keyword tagging is pretty much the only way someone will find your photo when they are searching for a particular need, unless they already have a relationship with you. Expressing the contents of a photo in keywords is now a key skill for all photographers, and they often pay people to do it for them. You have to look at the photo, describe what’s there, and not be emotional about it. You have to be aware of synonyms for key words, and you have to categorize how many of each object are in the photo – such as ‘2 women’. Saying ‘our holiday’ is not going to win you any stock photo business, it’s too personal and non-descriptive. Same with web SEO. A blog title like ‘I’m annoyed..’ may express how you feel, but won’t help your witty, helpful rant on why Microsoft Vista sucks be found by the people who need to read it.

Of course all the major search players are creating more and more advanced image searches as we speak. Google’s image search has a lot of interesting tech behind the scenes, such as face matching, but none of it is yet targeted towards stock photo needs. As this technology evolves we may see the end of the need for photographers to sit and manually tag their photos, but I suspect that’s a long way off. Computer based interpretation of spoken speech has taken a long time to get to the poor level it’s at, and image interpretation is possibly a harder task with less priority. So for now photographers need to be SEO experts in their own field, or they just need to become a world class famous photographer on commission who never needs to worry about stock again. Simple.


Nature Inspired Design

Posted: April 21st, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Inspiration | Tags: , | No Comments »

The National Geographic has a fascinating article on how scientists and engineers took inspiration from nature for a swathe of inventions, new and old. Combined with some beautiful photography, the inventions covered range from glare-free screens, through cars with less drag to the classic velcro. It’s a fascinating read, and reminds us how inspirational the world can be.


The Pirate’s Dilemma: To Compete, or Not To Compete

Posted: April 16th, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Social Media | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, gave a great talk recently at the Medeci conference. He covers a lot of the ground from his book here, with great anecdotes about how piracy affects our society, and consequently how we do business. His summary: sometimes you should sue pirates, if they’re not adding value to society, but in many cases you shouldn’t – in the cases where popular opinion is generally in favor of that brand of piracy. For example with music downloading, people know it’s wrong, but pirates still buy music from download sources such as iTunes – however noone thinks it’s right that a big music company sues a young music fan for downloading. To paraphrase Mason, “If suing your customers is your business, then you are lawyers and no longer in the music industry”.

Mason’s solution is simple, if the piracy you face is something that society wants (eg, quick music downloads for cheaper than CD) then you should give it to them – otherwise someone else will. There are three steps to this; 1) watch the pirates – let them do their stuff, remixing and re-packaging your stuff. Good piracy a) adds value to the original, b) creates innovation and, perversely, c) creates demand for new things based around your brand. 2) You have to question what your real business is… for example iTunes now sells convenience, rather than music – you could get the music for free online but it’s a bit of a hassle, iTunes is familiar, quick and comfortable to use. So sell a different experience, Hollywood had it’s biggest summer ever – $4 billion – so piracy can’t be hurting them that much. 3) Finally, the hardest step – copy the pirates to beat them, because if you don’t – your competitors will.

All good advice, with great anecdotes. You can watch Mason’s entire talk here.


‘Death by Blogging’ – Modern Life Strikes Again

Posted: April 8th, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Internet Life | Tags: , , | No Comments »

The New York Times has a short piece on a few prolific bloggers who recently dropped dead. The concern is that the highly competitive (and lucrative) market for fast breaking blog stories is driving up stress levels amongst top tier bloggers. Habits such as no life/work separation and the business need to have the first post on a new tech break-through in order to drive better views and advertising revenues is endemic. People now expect information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and many home grown bloggers take this to heart, not realising that larger organisations have teams on shifts to produce the same results.

Personally I’m not sure that these first recorded ‘blogging’ deaths a summer of dead bloggers make – to badly paraphrase an old saying. Modern life and health habits all conspire to preventing long life. All of us working on computers day in, day out would do well to take a moment away, de-stress and enjoy a physical life away from the screens that surround us. It’s a hard truth, but one we all need to follow, however fun our internet lives are.