T-Log

[Google search result of ‘“CityU Web Hacker” turtle‘ ]

For those who participated the extreme web designer award competition, they must realized that at this moment it is really hard to get a higher ranking in the Google search result, as you will see there is a list of websites that with linked to some forums with similar so called “spam” posts.

To allow a website be famous, actually doing similar work with the above mentioned can greatly making oneself website being exposed to numerous places in the Internet. Even though you did much about SEO, nothing help in fighting this kind of scenario in a short period of time.

Why forum content usually being indexed so quickly? Actually, most forum are designed with consideration of SEO, making search engine robot to grab the site content, meanwhile, search engine also like to grab information from forum as the content usually more abundant as well as more updated, abundant contents means higher possibility in finding the targeted information. And when you post the same/similar post to several forums, search engine may think that pieces of information is important hence setting that entity’s ranking higher.

Even though this act can raise the possibility of exposing the website to others, people not happy with such act, similar with email spamming, such kind of act is web spamming. Such act swaps the useful pieces of information behind in the search engine, and keep showing duplicated information mean useless and wait time for filtering. Hence, there is ethics for web authoring.

In fact, promoting your site with SEO has ethics to follow:
http://w529.com/SEO-code-ethics.php

Some of the points are:
No SEO practitioner will intentionally mislead, harm, or offend a consumer.
No SEO practitioner will falsely represent the content of the client site.
No SEO practitioner will participate in a conflict of interest without prior notice to all parties involved.

Web author should all apply SEO for allowing the search engine to be easier reading the website contents, doing work on their own site and some proper promotion way, but not to flood the web(doing thing that out of the website boundary)

Here is a web forum debate discuss about:
“Adding Links To Sites You Designed Right or Wrong?”
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=54670

Wish people will use proper way to promote the site, including this web design competition.

http://www.dontclick.it/

Website author want visitors to explore the website by clicking everywhere of the site. And there is a period in the Internet history that online advertising company persuade people to click onto their advertisements and giving money in return so as to attract more advertisement businesses. However, we generally decide our site with many links and visitors have to keep clicking the mouse for information/content. Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.cameronmoll.com/speaking/2006/webjam/essential_web_skills.pdf

This is a small presentation PDF file from Cameron Moll illustrating the different between the good designer and the great designer. For web design field, being a good designer is our goal, but it is not yet enough. We need to set our goal as “to be a great web designer”.

Here are the 9 skills that mentioned by  Cameron Moll:

Good designers:

• Decorate
• Believe “less” is more
• Fix problems
• Are inspired within a genre
• Macrodesign
• Treat text as content
• Use good typefaces
• Code for one instance
• Redesign

Great designers:

• Communicate
• Believe “less” and “more” co-exist
• Prevent problems
• Are inspired by their total environment
• Microdesign
• Treat text as UI
• Use good typography
• Code for many instances
• Realign

This presentation give me a very clear mindmap about how to push our mind of web design much upper so as to reach the great designer standard. Inside the presentation file, I think “microdesign” and “inspiration by the total environment” are the two most important points. Macrodesign stands for an important position in web design as good layout design give a good impression to web visitors, but if no focus are paid onto small places, visitors may not find interest with the site as not eye catching points for them to stay. “inspiration by the total environment”, mentioning that web site can be made by inspiration from poem, such as the balance alignment of the content, so as to enforcing the meaning of the content.

Cameron Moll is a graphic designer with proficiency in website interface layout, UI design, XHTML, CSS, typography, the mobile web, and traditional print design. He gives talk about web design and explanation about how to design in a proper way.

http://www.informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period

Last week lecture mentioned about the use of font-type, from the view point of art, we call this “Typography”.

In the past, some artists played font to show their artwork design, this generally migrate to the field of graphic design and publication scope. For the above blog passage, it states that nowadays the most important thing for web design is the use of typography -Information design is typography.

The passage quoted a famous Swiss typographer, Emil Ruder, his comments on typography:

Today we are inundated with such an immense flood of printed matter that the value of the individual work has depreciated, for our harassed contemporaries simply cannot take everything that is printed today. It is the typographer’s task to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him.

The comment that Emil gave is exactly the task the web author, the information designer needs to do. As good use of typography, or optimizing typography can enhance readability, accessibility, usability and overall graphic balance.

Even though a website full of text may distract people from accessing to the webpage, but this is also the issue that informative website has to deal with, especially there are many different resolution for different computer users and different rendering power for different browsers; Using image as layout design cannot remain the same among different platform. A great web designer knows how to work with text not just as content, but treats “text as a user interface”.

As we are not reach the status of great web designer, we can still use graphic in enhancing web layout. However, when we concentrating on graphic components, we can think more about how can we use typography in giving visitors surprise and attracting them to stay longer in the website.

A great site use typography for layout design: Subtraction

Beyond this: typography of the sky: Designboom

Google becomes the publicly known best search engine nowadays, however I start to doubt with its searching ability and the trust level of links that provided by it.

Read the rest of this entry »