hal9000.ie

Google Schools Competition

Google yesterday announced the winner of their schools competition to design a new ‘doodle 4 Google’.

The winner was Ruth Deeney from Donegal and you can see her winning logo design on Google’s home page (Google.ie) all day today. Her theme is the future viewed through a crystal ball, as she says herself:

We won’t have to lift a finger with our advanced technology, like nanny robots and elevators to other planets. Future here we come!

Indeed!

The competition is a cool initiative from Google and promotes art and web design amongst school children. It’s the Texaco Art Competition for the Web 2.0 era!

Facebook favicon as it appears on IE browser

A  good favicon is one that is obvious to the eye, will be readily recognisable as being related to your site. Bear in mind the small size you have to work with. You won’t fit many letters in and colour is key. A design or logo works best. It will add a professional look to your site by carrying through your branding.

The favicon appears in a number of places, including:

• the browser address bar
• the Favourites or Bookmarks -  making you a little easier to find (if your logo is strong)
• a desktop shortcut
• RSS feed
• Google Toolbar

A favicon can be created and added to a WordPress site quite easily using the following steps:

1. create, or use an existing, logo or image and make it square
2. use an online favicon creator, such as   www.favicon.cc  to shrink your image to a 16 pixel square image and then save it in  .ico format.
3. call the image favicon.ico
4. upload a copy of the file to your sites main directory of your site (public_html) using a FTP client.
5. upload another copy of the file to your sites main Theme folder
6. in your WordPress Admin, edit your header file, header.php by finding the line that begins with <link rel="shortcut icon" and ends with /favicon.ico" /> and overwrite with:                                   <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?/favicon.ico” />                                                      (note no spaces between ’bloginfo’ and(‘template                                                          
7. Clear your browser cache. This is simply clearing out your temporary   internet files. Do this in Internet Explorer by selecting Tools, then Internet Options, then General by selecting  Delete Browsing History and tick the box for deleting ‘Temporary Internet Files’.
8. You’re done!

There’s a saying which has great resonance in the IT industry – ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it!’

In many cases, this is the best approach to developing and maintaining computer software. If the system is working, performing it’s required functions correctly, and  there is no business requirement to make corrections, then the cost-benefit equation definitely falls down on the side of leaving well enough alone. Changing a computer system, even slightly, can be costly, requires testing, and always runs the risk of causing unforeseen impacts. All developers know that a misplaced full stop can cause a program to run riot, causing  untold chaos, before coming to it’s ‘logical’ end in a crash! 

However, let’s take a look again at the business requirement. If your business has a web site and one of your requirements is to attract traffic, that is, you want to be found by search engines, and ranked highly in their results, then your web site must be build with underlying technology that the search engines can ’crawl’ effectively and index the content of.

Many older websites were built using ‘frames’, this is now an out-dated technology, as search engines cannot access the data, therefore they cannot index it, and your business will not be returned in results. Your site can also run into problems if the underlying code with which it’s written is not completely valid. It may appear to look alright, but if the code is not up to current standards, then the search engines may not read it correctly – and you lose out.

To see if your code meets current standards of XHTML, you can run your code through a validator. All you have to do is go to Validator.W3.org and type in your URL (web site address). It will then read through to see how ‘clean’ your code is.

If you see lots of errors, so will Google’s bots!

Note:    a ‘bot‘, while it sounds like a new strain of bacteria, is actually a piece  of software that fulfils a task, over and over again, a bit like a robot.

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Google has launched it’s iPhone competitor and it’s called the Nexus One. This Smartphone runs with Google’s own Android operating system and has a touch screen display – of course.

However, it differs to the iPhone in that it has an open platform which will allow developers create applications and bring them to the consumer far, far quicker than new apps can make it onto Apple’s iPhone (Apple has a something of a ‘jumping through hoops’ process for developers to go through).

It also differs to the iPhone, and this is good news for consumers, in that Google are also opening an online store where the shiny new object can be purchased with, or without, mobile operator contract. Although this is in the US only so far, but a deal is to be struck with Vodafone for European consumers.

For those doing business on the web, or who are still to join their online brethren, this launch further illustrates the growth of the mobile web. The Telephone is long since a talking matter. They are now a multi-functional device connecting in a multitude of ways, and growing all the time. The young folk no longer wear watches. People tweet from their phone, they email, facebook, shop, find themselves (geographically anyway) and so forth and so on.

According to Google, the number of mobile internet searches grew by 30% in the third qtr of 2009, over the previous 3 mths (Sunday Times, 3/1/2010). The challenge for web marketeers is to ensure that their marketing strategies are viewable on the small screen size.

Obviously, the main drawback is the small screen, but also developers should bear in mind download times, as these can be expensive for the consumer. Also, the design needs to avoid the requirement for a mouse, as a stylus is more likely to be used. One column layouts work best and the amount of text reduced.

Nexus comes from the Latin and means ‘connected group’  or ‘centre of something’. And that is just where Google is.

Have you seen something like this on a website and wondered why the font size was different?

The font size reflects the importance (or population size in this example) of the various tags. 

Web Design today differs to the earlier, somewhat static sites. Web site development since Web 2.0 (circa 2004) uses additional functionality to increase the interaction with the user, thereby enhancing the user experience. Such interaction, at it’s simplest may take the form of a search facility, right across the spectrum to allowing RSS feeds from blogs as they are updated. Information  is now often given a number of labels or keywords in order to increase the searchability, for example of a document or a blog post ie. the data is indexed. This is known as tagging. Your photo can even be tagged on Facebook!

To take tagging a stage further, the image above is referred to as a Tag Cloud. A Tag Cloud is just a visual representation of content, generated by how the information has been tagged.

So, how is this useful for you?

For example, this post has 4 tags, which you can see below. Tagging makes it easier for users to find what they want on your site. And that makes them happy. Happy users come back and stay longer.

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It is almost time for the 2010 Irish Blog Awards and a list of the contenders can be found at awards.ie/blogawards.

So, it’s a good time to take a look at one of last year’s winners, IrishEconomy.ie which won in 2009 in the category for Best Specialist Blog. It’s a particularly interesting case as it is an example of a blog which has been developed using WordPress and could have been up and running in a matter of moments. More on WordPress to come.

The IrishEconomy.ie site has not been customised and is an example of a web site straight out of the box, so to speak. The look of the site is that of the default WordPress theme designed by Michael Heilemann – they didn’t even change the colour!

looks like..

And they didn’t need to. The site gets over 3,000 hits per day (Sunday Times, 20th Nov 2009) and it’s success is due to content. WordPress has given them the functionality they need, without any fuss, and WordPress does provide powerful blogging functionality, but it is content that is the cornerstone of a successful blog.

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