Archive for the ‘Website Design’ Category

What’s Wrong With Search Engines?

Friday, April 24th, 2009

I wonder how we will be searching for things online in the future? Are our search engines fundamentally flawed? Do we really want to search the way we do on Google and Yahoo, etc. or are we just conditioned to do so? Most search engines (the successful ones) are driven by advertising in the form of ads or in terms of certain pages that have been optimized by someone to show up higher in rank. Is this serving our searching needs? Do we need something different?

I use search engines hourly, at the very least. My business requires it, I like researching online and I use them for personal use such as shopping. Sometimes a set of results come up and I have to wonder why I am being presented with such results. Is it that the site’s algorithm is wrong? Did I type in the wrong term or phrase? Or, is there a better way that we can be searching that we have not thought of yet? Maybe we haven’t stopped, looked at our needs and figured out exactly what we need, regardless of the technology available.

Maybe typing in a phrase is wrong… Maybe 10 listings returned is wrong…. Maybe a long list of text or images is wrong… Maybe it’s all perfect… I am just very curious as to what people really need out of their online searches…

Posted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Thoughts on Marketing, User Experience, Website Design | 1 Comment »

Strengths and Weaknesses

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

I have a close friend and colleague that has been asking me to do a strengths \ weaknesses analysis of my company for months. Since the economic climate is changing rapidly and starting to affect the lives of all the web developers that I know personally, I have been trying to determine what we do best and what we do horribly. After we find a strength and weakness we make a change in order to help us keep up with what the future may hold.

One thing that I think we do well is give advice based on our experience as well as manage projects well when we have no stake in the development or design. We created a web project management division at http://www.thewebadvocates.com/ and we essentially become the best friend of a web development project for any given amount of hours.

I feel that pre-planning for web projects is something that we can help small through large companies with. It’s an exciting thing to be at the birth of a web project. We enjoy it and hope that our experience can help even the smallest company succeed with their web launch.

This seems like an advertisement, I know. But I want it to be a nod to my friend that pushes our companies along through tough times (and easy times), with good ideas and a bright outlook. Thanks…

Posted in Online Marketing and Promotion, Personal Feelings, Web Business Management, Website Design | Comments Off

The White House Website

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

This post has nothing to do with politics.

It has to do with the beautiful new website at www.whitehouse.gov. To say that I am impressed with it is an understatement. I happened upon the old website days before President Obama took office. For no reason what-so-ever, I just visited the site. I exclaimed out loud about what an embarrassment it was. Seriously, it was awful.

A few days later, I checked again and was I ever surprised. The coding is excellent, it is handicapped accessible and, as all websites should be, is about quality content. I certainly have never seen a government website of this caliber. The ancillary sites do a great job as well. There is good video usage, solid content and coding.

Kudos to the development team that is working on this family of sites.

Posted in Accessibility, User Experience, Website Design | 1 Comment »