Cre8tive Flow

I remember debates in the mid to late 90’s about if outlinks are a “good” idea. There were some fascinating attempts to make profitable traffic law for an Internet superhighway that was more like a frenetically fertile Wild West.

I subscribed to anyone who had a listserv or newsletter on how web sites work, for the sheer coolness of learning, of being able to “link” up with different worlds of information by simply using a mouse. I was hooked.

My attitude then and today is that when to link is a usability issue. I saw any SEO benefits of links as a desirable side effect.

Hurry, hurry! October 7, 2005 is the deadline for the early-bird registration fee for the next High Rankings Search Engine Marketing seminar, to be held at the Philadelphia Crowne Plaza - Valley Forge in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, Thursday, November 3 and Friday November 4, 2005.

If you don’t make that date, don’t despair. You can treat yourself to a 25% discount offered by Cre8asiteForums. Here’s how it works:

Register here.

Enter CRE8PC for your discount code.

You will receive a 25% discount on your registration fee.

In a totally unsolicitated, but shameless plug, one of the Cre8asite Forums members who regularly posts about design within the forums, and selflessly provides some of his thoughts on other people’s designs is holding a one day seminar on design, titled Web Design from Scratch LIVE.

The seminar is on 07 November 2005 in Chesterfield, England, and the price for the single day event sounds like a bargain at £ 295. It is intended for:

Designers

Developers

Managers

Site owners

And others who work on the web.

An excellent recap of the thoughts that went into the redesign of funny site The Onion from Khoi Vinh, called Making Fake News.

The Letter from Publisher J. Phineas Zweible is worth a look, too.

If you missed it earlier this week, The Onion posted an exclusive titled Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can’t Index. Insightful read.

The standards body for HTML and the World Wide Web has released a document that can be used in Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case for Your Organization. It’s a nice approach because it uses plain English to describe some of the many benefits that can come to an organization that adopts accessibility for their site. These include views from a number of perspectives, and describe some of the many returns on investment that adding accessibiility will bring:

Social Factors
Technical Factors
Financial Factors
Legal and Policy Factors

Boxes and Arrows has some nice strategies for presenting ads on a website from a page and site-wide stance - based not upon the financial success or failure of the ads, but rather from how they enhance or harm a visitor’s experience with a site.

It’s an enjoyable and informative article, well worth a look - Ads Are Here To Stay: Planning For Ad Placement.

Amongst the “Strategies” they present for displaying ads:

1. Ad Wrapping - so that visitors can distinquish between ads and the content of the page itself.

Every so often, someone at the forums asks about the value of web design classes.

It’s not uncommon for people to answer those questions with a selection of great books, forums, blogs, and web sites. It’s much rarer to see a recommendation for an actual set of classes.

The next time someone asks that question, I’m going to ask them if Ann Arbor, Michigan, is too far of a commute for them. In Crafting a User Experience Curriculum, Jason Withrow shows off the classes he has put together for a Internet Professional (INP) program.

Thanks to the latest edition of A List Apart, I have a good idea of what I’m going to be doing with the long weekend coming up.

I’m going to make it easy to phone a web site.

The article, Pocket-Sized Design: Taking Your Website to the Small Screen, has me excited about the project.

The pages are text heavy, and image light. I suspect that it will be an easy task. But I know that something always comes up. The toughest part of this task probably is that I don’t have a phone that will connect to the web.