Posts Tagged ‘the_internets’
0SEO! The Teenage Zombie Brain Sucker Topic From Hell. If you’ve talked to me before you already know that I think it’s a sham. I don’t hate it per se, but I think it’s definitely one of the most over-hyped, over-paid-attention-to subjects of the decade.
So in light of recent resurfacing of this topic (a.k.a. we have to pitch our webservices to a client tomorrow), I finally put together some of my thoughts on it in a semi-coherent way. But get this… not only will I be semi-coherent, I will even borrow a page from marketing blogs’ book of clichés. (Do blogs have books or are they books? Hm.) I give you…
Tina’s Easy 4-step Cure to the Common SEO
1. Search engines aren’t the only way you should be marketing your website
Think about it this way: how many of your friends actually became friends with you because they were a stranger randomly yelling your name from the top of mountain? Probably not too many, except for the one that is a professional yodeler. On the internet, the search engine is like the random name-yelling. “Give me a blog!” “Okay here are 21 million blogs! Hopefully one is what you want!” A better way to tell people about your site is to use business cards, word-of-mouth, trading links (LEGALLY), and even email marketing if you have to. Search really should be a last resort.
For a long time, I’ve gone away from using absolute positioning to structure my webpages and have since relied almost exclusively on floats to position things side-by-side. It seemed that absolute positioning had its disadvantages because it takes elements out of the flow of the page. So if you absolutely position a long block of text or something likewise huge, it can cover and obscure small inline things that follow it. It just makes everything a little bit crazy because suddenly things aren’t stacking up the way you expect, you get z-index issues, and IE6 explodes (IE6 explodes no matter what you do, actually.). But just now I realized one benefit of using absolute positioning over floats in some places: looking good when naked.
I was pondering whether to write this post, for fear that it would turn into yet another plaintive whine littering the Internets, but you know what, I think this is important enough to whine about. So here goes:
I just spent this entire evening of 5 hours doing nothing but sifting through the Internets instead of getting things done. (There, didn’t that sound suitably whiny? Anyhow.) Usually when I come home from work, I expect to Get Things Done, and by that I mean draw in my sketchbook or make progress on any of the 5 projects I have going or learn some more AS3 or finish a book. But instead, tonight, I read Google Reader. I read Google Reader’s 1000+ unread entries for 5 hours straight, interspersed with link-swapping via IM and Twitter-monitoring. While Blipping songs. And Wikipedia-surfing. And petting the cat.
Judging by tonight and the frequency with which tonight’s scenario has occurred over the past 3 months, I have pretty much become Web 2.0’s bitch. But now is not the time to feel self conscious about having potentially earned a new stereotypical designation. Now is the time to think carefully about why I do this, why I feel compelled to sacrifice hours of my life at a time to basically what amounts to info-hoarding.
What happens when photographers decide they need a smart-looking webfolio? For one, Flash designers with a partiality for tricky navigational interfaces get a great deal of business. For two, Swiss Modernism-inspired minimalism (not the Donald Judd kind, but the squeaky-clean, konigi.com, chromophobic kind) makes a terrific comeback. With lasers. For example, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
These are things I observed today as I was rooting around the web for ideas on what passes for a sexy photographer’s website. (My workplace has a couple of photographer portfolios to work on this week, and, like any good designer nowadays, I tend to start off with a bit of stealing ideas inspirational research.) What I found here only affirmed what I kinda sorta assumed about photographer websites before: that photographers everywhere, regardless of genre or country, all seem to have some sort of vendetta against ornament, embellishment, or any flights of aesthetic fancy in their portfolio designs. And yet, these are things that the rest of the web are apparently clamoring for right now. What gives, photographers?
Maybe it is just that all contemporary photographers are direct descendents of Adolf Loos (the prolific bastard). A more plausible excuse would be that photographer (or more generally, visual artist) portfolios are special, website-wise, in nearly all of their content is graphical in nature. It makes sense, therefore, they don’t want the graphics of a design competing with their work, both visually and connotatively. I talked to a photographer once about this, and she expressed the belief that a website for a photographer ought to be like a virtual gallery wall – a blank slate upon which their expression can shine, unhampered, in all its purity and clarity. No background noise, with all it potential for accidental suggestiveness, seducing the attention of the viewer or leading his mind far afield.
Which is why it totally follows that there would be so many minimal designs out there. But why all the Flash? This I haven’t had a chance to talk to a real photographer about, but my guess is that without it, the sites would be downright boring. Because yes, even though they are pictures and people love looking at pictures way more than they do reading text (Remember your elementary school days? Chapter books were quite hard to get used to.), nowadays the average user is always expecting a little more. They want a little fancier dish than just solid, well-composed content (even if that content is suberbly well-lit compositions of strippers). I think it’s like how people don’t just go out to dine in order to eat food anymore – they go out for the experience. The lighting, the service, the texture of the tablecloth… we don’t just want our roast chicken on a platter, it has to be brought to us garnished with a farce or a coulis or peacock feathers or who knows what. Is that a bit of exasperation you detect in my voice? Well yes, maybe a little.
Out of boredom and a little deviousness, I decided to revamp this simple little webgame I coded in PHP a while back. It has a spicy new layout (for some reason it reminds me of chili peppers) and involved massive amounts of help from Yang the First Class Programmer Boy (thanks, YtFCPB). It is called…
… and it is a cross between the Dadaist parlor game Exquisite Corpse and the children’s game Telephone.
No there really is no point in it… at least practically speaking (but I donno, maybe you’ll find that it is (unintentially) a great way to beef up your grammar chops… tee hee). For me, though, this was a great way to get back into the world of web programming. Because I’m preparing to take on a much more massive and ambitious (at least for my sucky programming fu) project, involving Thank You cards and acts of kindness and eventually, an awe-inspiring web-based dynamically generated display of visual complexity… and I hope to have this ready in 2 months for inclusion in my grad school app.
I’ll write a longer blog later about this Thank You cards idea and how it came to be, but for now, dinner is calling. Yom yom yom.
