Industry News

Catch up on interesting new discussion and industry news.

    Google: You Must Wait A Few Weeks To Submit A Reconsideration Requests

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Jan 2, 2014
    We know Google doesn't like it when you submit a new reconsideration request a day or two after you get a rejection response from your reconsideration request. They want to see you put effort in after you get that response...

    Misunderstanding Amazon

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Jan 2, 2014
    It’s always worth reading Eugene Wei’s thoughts on Amazon’s strategy, and Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy is no exception. Wei discusses how most analysts don’t understand Amazon’s business at all. In particular, he tears into the idea that at some point, Amazon will just “flip the switch” — increase the prices on all their products and instantly become profitable:

    But “flipping a switch” is the wrong analogy because Amazon’s core business model does generate a profit...

    How culture affects user experience

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Jan 2, 2014
    Sean Madden makes some interesting points in American-Centric UI Is Leveling Tech Culture — and Design Diversity:

    Just as user-centered design transformed technology in the 1990s and early 2000s, cultural fluency needs to transform it today: user experience (UX) design that’s familiar enough with a user’s cultural background to meet him or her halfway.

    Cultural fluency demands abandoning the idea that functionality is a universal language, and that “good UX” is culturally...

    Entity Associations with Websites and Related Entities

    by Bill Slawski
    Jan 1, 2014
    When we talk about how web sites are related, it’s not unusual for us to talk about links between sites and pages. Google pays a lot of attention between such links, and they are at the heart of one of its most well known ranking signal – PageRank....

    New Year 2014 Logos From Google, Yahoo & Others

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Jan 1, 2014
    Happy 2014 everyone, wishing you a happy, healthy and successful New Year 2014! I deeply hope all of you have much success, happiness and good health...

    New Year's Eve 2013 From Google, Yahoo, Bing & Dogpile

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Dec 31, 2013
    Today is New Year's Eve 2013 and some of the search engines are getting ready for the party by posting special logos, Doodles, themes and creatives for the special day...

    The value of starting out with nothing

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Dec 30, 2013
    Craig Mod’s newsletter is one of the few emails I always look forward to reading. In the most recent one Craig gives some advice for people in their 20s:



    To the younger folks reading now: If you’re willing to live in that small apartment, forgo that fancy food and expensive clothing, and uphold a semblance of disciplined and focused work ethic, you can probably hack more experience into your life than you’d imagine. [...]



    The emotional textural quality of my memory of life...

    To Survive You Must Give Google Your Structure Content & Data?

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Dec 30, 2013
    Greg Niland, aka GoodROI, posted a thread at WebmasterWorld arguing that if you do not hand over your data and content to Google in a structure format, then you will die a slow death...

    Maybe social media won’t make us forever alone after all

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Dec 29, 2013
    Clive Thompson takes on the “social media is bad for teens” narrative in Don’t Blame Social Media if Your Teen Is Unsocial. He discusses some findings by Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd:

    What she has found, over and over, is that teenagers would love to socialize face-to-face with their friends. But adult society won’t let them. “Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other,” Boyd says. “They’re not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they’ve moved it...

    Maybe parallax scrolling isn’t all it’s cracked up to be

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Dec 27, 2013
    In Snow Fail: Do Readers Really Prefer Parallax Web Design? Eric Jaffe reports on a recent study done at Purdue University by graduate student Dede Frederick:

    “I’ve read from many blogs how people say it’s going to attract users and create so much of a better user experience,” Frederick tells Co.Design. “I thought it was going to be superior to a typical website in every aspect.”

    As it happens, the parallax site was only superior in one sense — fun. None of the other survey...