Industry News

I see many threads with complaints, excitement, sadness and fear in the forums. Most have to do with Google rankings. It goes like this... The webmaster says something like, "my rankings and traffic from Google tanked," now I look and I have...

Don Norman points out some of the misconceptions of style in a good piece called Great Design Always Means Great Style. He concludes:

There are many dimensions to great design, but great style is certainly among the most important. Style in appearance, style in behavior, style in the manner of interaction – style in every aspect of the product or service. Great style requires careful deliberate specification and then attention to all the details that result, for everything must be...

I am seeing some early signs of a possible major Google update currently underway. The chatter has definitely spiked in the early morning hours of today, September 4th.

This comes shortly after an unconfirmed August 21st update...

Something was missing, and I didn’t exactly know what it was. Around a year or so ago, I joined a big agency, and that gave me a chance to look at a lot of sites, provide in-depth consultation audits for a number of clients, perform monthly strategy...

I’ve been thinking about workflows for Responsive Web Design quite a bit, particularly since it’s now become our default approach on every new project (similar to Cloud Four’s recent change of heart). I’ve been especially influenced by two recent articles on the topic, namely Dennis Kardys’s A More Flexible Workflow, and Viljami Salminen’s Responsive workflow.

I struggled a bit to make their approaches fit into how we worked, so I decided to expand on what they’ve done and draw something...

This past month, we did not have any official update but something made the Google results rumble in late August...

There’s been a good amount of talk on the web about the “T-Shaped” marketer becoming a model for the future. Several articles will go into more depth than I can, but I did want to share my thoughts on the topic and an illustration I made for a recent presentation.

T-Shaped basically refers to having a light level of knowledge in a broad array of skills, and deep knowledge/ability in a single one (or a few). This model may not seem particularly remarkable or unique, but it carries qualities...

In The ‘Mood Graph’: How Our Emotions Are Taking Over the Web Evan Selinger writes about the rise if emoji and other emotional signals in social media:

But there are costs to a mood graph too. The more we rely on finishing ideas with the same limited words (feeling happy) and images (smiley face) available to everyone on a platform, the more those pre-fabricated symbols structure and limit the ideas we express. Such general symbols can also lead to even more confusion or misunderstanding...

Last night, Matt Cutts tweeted that he is working up several "ghost-related puns for a spam network."

I suspect they are working on targeting more and more link and spam networks and it is thus on his mind...