It’s All About Typography

Posted on Jan 31, 2008 by Jonathan to Web Design

Typography is somewhat of a vice of mine. So much so that a 1700 paged FontBook weighs down a shelf of my bookcase. To me, nothing makes or breaks an otherwise class-design than the wrong typeface. While a scholarly, but contemporary, type from the Palatino family is mostly universal in application, something like Terfens will not be perceived as very professional and, in turn, you or your company as not all that serious about business.

vs.

Choosing the right typeface is not only about what best fits into your website’s aesthetical agenda, but how it reads. A heavy, tight, or widely-spaced type hinders the rate at which a user is able to read your text. It is only suitable for headlines, not the body. Because the speed of reading diminishes onscreen, compared to reading from a book or a newspaper, the transition must be made as seamlessly as possible.

With all of these factors in mind, choosing the right typeface can become a daunting task. If you are considering revamping the type on your site and flipping through the pages of a FontBook is more of an investment than you are willing to make, may I suggest a nifty little utility i recently stumbled upon, UrbanFonts. They offer over 8000 free types for download; and although most of them are slag, there are still a few quality ones floating around.

To gain a better grasp of how redesigning your typeface layout will affect your website, Smiley Cat Web Design Blog provides us with a GQ Magazine example; swapping out a crowded type for one with a bit more space between letters and words. Personally, I’m not a fan of their result. It may be more attractive on page, but it reads slower, and on a medium where the majority of readers are skimming their content, such a hindrance is just not acceptable.

Tags: typography

Facebook Marketing – Why You Should

Posted on Jan 29, 2008 by Jonathan to Social Media

It’s the new television—Social Networks. At least that’s the comparison most vulnerable to being tossed around when describing its marketability. And it’s true. Not since the television has such a versatile medium surfaced. It has the ability to swallow large chunks of our lives, like television; it connects people on an emotional level, like television. But where it truly becomes the new television is in the cornucopia of advertising potential that websites like Facebook have managed to cram into every orifice of their network. By creating a forum for hundreds of millions of users to branch off into their own targeted, niche markets, social media sites become an undisputed wealth of marketing allure.

Their reach is absurd. In the United States, Facebook has attracted a membership of 22 million; 84 percent of whom are between the age of 14 and 26 and almost evenly distributed between the sexes. These are very appealing demographics that make Facebook’s Ad Serving System an enticing approach to targeting a specific audience.

Facebook’s Advertising Model = Promising ROIs

What brings Facebook to the forefront and sets it a tier higher than all of the other Social Media Networks is that its marketing potential is not confined to one or two fronts. Beside the Ad Serving System, a slew—thousands—of third-party applications have emerged to serve as extensions or meta-versions of preexisting web services; Wordpress and the now-defunct Scrabulous come to mind. While this is all fine and good for them, what does this mean to you, the advertiser? It is a fresh platform for branding. Many companies are already successfully doing it by developing their own fully functional tools for Facebook users to integrate into their profile page. And because the only cost is a few mouse clicks, there is nothing to really detract a potential client from installing and interacting with your application.

Facebook has transformed from a website for college students to share photographs into a multifaceted marketing tool for tapping into the website’s 62 million worldwide clientele. It is almost hard to believe that the rest of us were unable to see its potential earlier; before Microsoft did by investing 240 million into the company and estimating its worth at 15 billion. But by their spot-on forecasting and the promising evolution of social media networks in general, advertising on the web has become a more focused and humanized practice.

Tags: facebook, social media marketing

Image Stretching with CSS

Posted on Jan 24, 2008 by Jonathan to Web Design

One of the most vital considerations when designing any website is how it will display in different browsers, at different resolutions and on different screens. While one person views your site with Firefox, another is using Internet Explorer and both are displaying specific elements in their own special way. To counteract this, it is a matter of finding a loophole to work around the browsers’ shortcomings, or opting for a solution that agrees with both, but compromises the final product.

It tends to be a time-consuming process and lose-lose for everyone involved. That is why it is helpful to have a clever community that consistently churns out new fixes to old problems. It is something I had recently had some trouble with, stretching images with CSS, but was eventually overcame. Alex Walker offers his one-stop reference guide for avoiding this nuance.

The first three solutions (Embedding everything into an SWF with Flash, HTML5, and Seam Carving) are brief overviews of methods that have worked in the past or have some glimmer of an effective future, but at present lack the clout. They are all precursor to his more efficient method that basically boils down to playing with CSS attributes.

The technique involves layering multiple transparent images, and instead of focusing the stretching on prominent foreground elements, focusing it on the menial and the background; almost creating an illusion of sorts without the once-problematic image tearing.

Walker provides a more in-depth discussion of the process, code snippets, and working examples of Image Stretching at http://www.sitepoint.com.

Tags: CSS

The Relevance of Yahoo!

Posted on Jan 22, 2008 by Jonathan to General

It is common practice and a well known fact among the major players (Google, Amazon, EBay) that to remain relevant and considered the competition, the user’s experience should be just that, an experience. By humanizing their services and becoming multifaceted interactive tools, they have secured top-spot in their respective communities. Yahoo! Search is on the heel of thirty fires, with rumors of 2,000 more. It is speculated that, at present, Yahoo! is a thirteenth of Google’s worth, with not much else going for them to cast an optimistic future.

Aaron Wall, author of SEO Book.com, offers ten suggestions to Yahoo!, and those in similar situations, on how they can achieve the relevancy needed to become a contender. Here are just a sample:

1.) “Increase the relevancy of their directory by actually featuring it (the directory looks like a sidebar to a blog that occupies most of dir.yahoo.com)”

The Yahoo! directory of present day looks and functions exactly like the Yahoo! directory I was using ten years ago.

“Become more selective with what sites they accept. You can appreciate their bad marketing of the Yahoo! Directory by the fact the Google Directory (a DMOZ clone) has a higher PageRank.”

2.) “Brand Yahoo! search as human edited safe search and find a way to pay end users for their contribution… Google gives Checkout advertisers free ads and a higher ad CTR (which leads to a lower ad cost).”

4.) “Let users comment on search results AND on listings in search results. Controversy surround this will lead to more people talking about and evaluating Yahoo! Search for quality.”

By creating a forum for the user to divulge his or her own experience and advice to future users, you can achieve that human interaction that is paramount to a service’s success. Case-and-point, Wikipedia.

9.) “Put the Yahoo! brand on the millions of syndicated domain landing pages they power each day.”

You don’t ever hear people saying, “I’m going to go yahoo that when I get home.” No, the catch phrase is “google it”. It rolls off the tongue. The Yahoo! marketing campaign needs to have a farther reach online and beyond those television ads with the guy yodeling, “Yahooooooo.”

Wall touches on six other points in 10 Things Yahoo! Search Must do to Become Relevant, all with the dominating theme of interaction; building Yahoo! into something that Google has seemingly perfected.

Tags: yahoo