We’ve been telling you about the future collaboration between Yahoo! and Bing in a past post: Is the Yahoo! switch to Bing an anti-google strategy?. Well, it is now official, the first tests have been made in the USA and Canada as stated by this morning’s post on the Bing Community Blog. According to Yahoo!’s post on Yahoo! Search Blog, 25% of the paid and organic traffic now generated on the US Yahoo! search results are from Bing.

Preparing your site for Bing & Yahoo!

It seems that there will be some changes in the way the Bingbot will be crawling websites. One will have to concentrate on only one bot when it comes to search engine optimisation now. This means that the Yahoo! Slurp will be killed and that webmasters will have to make full use of the Bing Webmaster Center to optimise their SEO on Bing. If one has not done it until now, it will now become an important element as all will go through only one pipe now

For webmasters, it’s important to be familiar with how the Bing crawler interacts with your site. After the full algorithmic transition is complete, you only need to optimize for one crawler (Bing), as we will provide Yahoo! with results from our index.

Bing Webmaster Center, the new place to be.

With this new roll out, the Bing Webmaster Center will prove to be a valuable source of information and will also be a great toolbox for the optimisation of one’s website. Even if you rely a lot more on traffic generated by Google Caffeine, you will have to make sure that your indexation and your presence in results pages at Bing’s are really correct as the same elements will be used in Yahoo!.

Most, if not all, web designers know the notoriously popular site Smashing Magazine as well as its newly built network, the Smashing Network. Now, what made Smashing Magazine one of the most popular web design related sites out there is the great use, and even a bit of abuse, of the “listicles”, the list posts concept. They have not been the inventors of this concept but sure turned it into the trend it now is (in the web design world).

Trending and whoring.

Some brief Internet history. Once the Smashing Magazine concept took up and proved to be efficient and overtly performing (in terms of traffic hence in terms of revenue on advertisement), hundreds of clones started sprouting all over the place and, let’s admit it, started performing well too. The trend was on and the trend whores have been running around since then consuming, copying, listing, writing, “yes-manning”, “great listing” the content and the concept.

What goes up…

The major problem in all this ran around two major drawbacks.

First one, the popularity of such posts and the traffic generated has brought round a huge amount of link addicts. These are the people leaving two words to two lines comments on the posts, usually positive “great article” comments, just for the sake of putting a link to their own website either to catch link juice or to drive traffic elsewhere. This stiffled discussion and did not add value to the original article.

The other problem was that, at some given point, the whole thing started getting a bit cranky. Some of the lists posts were really light, no analysis whatsoever, just lists of, say, screenshots. I’m not a lists fan but I do read some of Smashing Magazine’s articles and some were really, really shallow. Worse, the other copying trend whores were publishing even shallower posts (I might even have one around in my own archives when I was testing what type of posts I would be publishing).

Setting the record straight.

I can’t say that it started out from there but Paul Scrivens at Drawar went back on how he launched Whitespace and how the concept caught up to be eventually made popular by Smashing Magazine. In this article, Smashing Magazine Killed The Community (Or Maybe It Was Me), Paul explains how this concept slowly started breaking up the web design community. What I found great in it is the mature response of Vitaly Friedman, Smashing Magazine’s CEO, who stated that there were changes coming on the site.

Last month, in the opinion section of Smashing Magazine, Kari Patila restressed the point on the trends that are driving web design today, trends that seem to be depreciating the community.

Changes at Smashing Magazine.

Great changes are those that are not those that jump out at first sight but do great things. Has anyone noticed that the number of comments on the latest Smashing Magazine articles have suddenly fell from the usual 300+ comments (mostly “great posts” ones) to under a 100 mostly well discussed ones? Yes there are changes there.

The team at Smashing Magazine must have analysed of what was polluting the articles and have made 2 major changes. They have been promoting more content oriented articles while keeping some great well-written list posts but the best move I think is the pure and simple removal of comment authors’ website link in the comments. This gave no more incentive to link addicts.

Starting this post is quite weird for me in the sense that I don’t really know how to tackle it, what tone to give it or how to deal with it. So I’m setting out to explain that I’m a human being, more than less pacifist and ready to learn and share information and knowledge with people around me. This last statement is the aim of the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius itself even if the targeted audience is really small. I however have a big problem with the Mauritian mentality. People cannot be honest enough and contact you simply asking for an information or a review or whatever can be their needs in terms of project management, SEO or design. So to all who don’t know how to write a mail here’s a template:

Hi,

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris lacinia arcu ac lorem vulputate euismod. Donec tempus ullamcorper facilisis. Phasellus orci augue, malesuada et luctus at, consequat ac odio. Proin et elit sed dui sodales luctus. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus ac felis euismod lacus suscipit commodo. Integer ac augue purus, vel viverra nulla. Ut volutpat ultricies volutpat. Vestibulum commodo imperdiet elit, ac posuere tortor faucibus at.

Best regards
Insert your signature here.

Friendly tip: being polite gives you extra points!

Explaining things to you dear reader.

I know that a lot of my regular readers must be wondering what I’m talking about here. Let’s get to the root of things. Last year I used the DCDM example to illustrate my article on what Mauritian companies were missing on the web. Fair enough, this has had some positive impact (I’m sure) on how this major Mauritian company saw its own online presence. This would explain why, nearly everyday over the past 2 weeks, somebody has been trying to attract my attention to the DCDM issue.

The problem with all this is that (and this meets the first part of my post) the person or persons DID NOT have the humility of sending me a mail or using the contact form available on the Bureau to ask me to do a review of their site (at least that’s what I’m thinking it is) or to write a sequel to the previously published article. No! This person or these persons has/have been spending his/their time making the same query on Google for nearly 13 days. Is that stupid or what? Proof:

Along with that, an in depth analysis of the IP address, strangely from the same C class domain over the whole period, analysis gives more than guilty info from the Google user. Proxies anybody?

Letting time run by.

At first I stayed on my position of not saying anything about this because one of my core convictions is that if people did communicate, a lot of our everyday problems would be solved. As these queries have stopped since this week-end I’ve stepped out to really see why someone would have spent all this energy trying to inform me that I should maybe give a look to the DCDM website. Which I tried to do this evening but…

… and it’s a major BUT.

The most astonishing thing happened. I tried a Google search for DCDM. The idea was to look at their website and also catch up with the previous article’s position in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) to see that it does not do too much harm in DCDM’s rankings. But, as The Beatles put it: “Hey Jude, don’t take it bad…” the DCDM website has gone from being an outrage to the company to a complete ordeal for any user. I don’t know how they coded the thing but Google has blocked it as “This site might harm your computer.” for malware detection.

Don’t try clicking on the “more” results, you’ll get more of the harmful message.

What is going on here is that the whole project is turning into a fiasco having major impact on the Company’s online reputation and, if they’ve got an IT department, they really have to see to it that the people they’re employing do really have the necessary competences. I mean, it is easy and fun to play with Google to leave “Dan Brown” style breadcrumbs to the Bureau but it would be best to spend that time to check the code, the SEO and the compatibility issues of one’s website.

The Mauritian blogosphere has taken the rise. The eldest bloggers have been active for nearly a decade now. Mauritian blogs are listed on the Mauritius Blog List and Island Website and debates are hot on the past, present and future of blogs, be they on independent hosting or on blogging platforms. Some blogs are visitor baits and others are in niches. Yashvin and Ludovic have been interviewed quite often in the Mauritian press.

And then comes this article on L’Express. Huge publicity for Over Blog, a free French blog platform. The objective (improving the knowledge of blogs in Mauritius) is very commendable but the tone and the choice of words is not really that engaging. Even if the author points out the fact that blogging is not new, the whole tone runs like… “go on people, this is the new craze, open up a blog on Over Blog”. Does that author know that there are hundreds of platforms and that with a WordPress MU platform, any site can become a hoster (e.g: Le Monde)?

Another thing is that the author qualifies the blog as a way to express oneself without having to wait for a comment publication in the press or online. This gives the idea that a blog is like a blank page where you say one thing and go away. This also shows complete oblivion. No information on the way the web works, the communication levers to use to get a blog running and have visitors. The building processes. Say something on your blog but if you do not know how to promote your content and are not ready to fill up the space nearly everyday, it’s no use.

Worse. Let me quote this part:

Si la communauté des internautes apprécient ces opinions directes et sans complaisance, de nombreux journalistes et éditorialistes ont décrié la manière non professionnelle de donner des éléments d’informations pas toujours contre-vérifiés contrairement à la presse traditionnelle*.

As said earlier, having an article on blogs is commendable but the author should have dug a little more in the blogging world and analysed the life and actions of bloggers, especially Mauritian ones, before publishing such a shallow article on blogs.

*If the community of users appreciate these direct and uncompromising opinions, many journalists and columnists have stated the unprofessional manner of providing information not always cross-checked unlike the traditional press.

You sometimes find yourself reading a blog in one go. These are blogs so interesting that you just can’t get enough of them. Ideas are bright, the text is great and the overall tone is just engaging. This is the whole spirit of Mauricianismes. The great cool Mauritian “dipain, diber, fromaz” blog. Above all blogs I follow (and I’m but a lurker on Mauricianismes) I think that this “Martian spoken here” blog is the best Mauritian blog of 2009. Cheers to Siganus K. for this great blog.

Envato is a renowned name in the web design world. Why? Just because they have some of the best tutorial websites in all the possible fields concerning design and web design. Adobe doesn’t have to be presented, it being one of the world’s IT Megalosaurus. Now, among all its educational websites, Envato had FlashDen, which was the web’s most prominent and precious tutorial base for Flash… the famous Adobe application.

However, as from yesterday. The site is no longer called FlashDen. A whole community of flash users, developers and tutors were just taken aback by a sudden surge from Adobe which simply ordered the web company to change its site’s name under the ruling that Flash was a registered trade mark. Ok with that. But… and there’s a “big but…” FlashDen was one of the most advanced sites and the world’s largest marketplace on Flash. What it was doing was promoting Flash and Flex, which are Adobe technologies that we, web designers, tend to avoid. I’m not meaning that I’ve turned Flash-addict in a day but that Adobe seems to be trying to cut a branch on which it is sitting.

True enough, the site’s name change will not affect the quality of the content delivered by the FlashDen (now called ActiveDen) authors but it is just a sort of questioning about some sort of abuse in authority by Adobe. As the information runs, “FlashDen” is registered as trade mark in Australia for Envato. I think that they just didn’t want to go further in the confrontation with Adobe.

Anyhow, you now know that you just don’t need to have the word “Flash” in your domain name if you want to keep it.

Read Collis Ta’eed’s (Envato CEO) view on the subject.

We’ve been talking about conversion and sales in the honest way all this time. The core of the talk has been “how to organise and optimise your site to give it the best chances”. This is how you honestly maximize conversions and offer great service to your customers.

This, sadly, doesn’t fall into the standards. When you make use of some psychology along with some of the core elements dear to a targetted population, the money can come flowing rather quickly. Those having been in touch with the advertising world will easily understand my point. Here is an example of how it is done read the article and come back here to see the analysis: white teeth.

I fell on this website while looking at this article sent over Twitter and this ad was on the top left. As I had already scrolled, I didn’t see that it was an ad but thought it was a current article off the same website (link colour strategy being the same): “Learn the trick, discovered by a mom to turn yellow teeth white for under $5.”

Mind you, I haven’t got teeth problems. Another thing is that my dentists have always been cool and I know that the actual natural colour of teeth is light ivory and not white. What caught my attention is the fact that it was a “mom” and “under $5″. How could a mom find such a cheap trick.

The psychology

The first thing is to hit where it hurts most. Here, the target population will clearly be the American population. Why? Because they are obsessed by health and looks. So white teeth for $5 is a big bet. Second, health insurance is expensive and having no social security makes that caring for teeth comes in second line. Here, the cheap promise for such a demanded look is quite an incentive.

White teeth are an obsession in the States.

The personnae

Telling a person that you are a company selling some low priced product guaranteeing some miracle might not be the best approach to sell your good/bad product. Most of us know this old far west recurring scene where some charlatan selling a miracle oil and has an acolyte who comes round nearly dying, takes a sip and starts dancing around lively and all… Its the same thing here, the only difference is that the guy selling the product is not present.

Here we have a mom of two. Defining the caring American woman who takes care of her house, husband and kids. She respects all the standards of many American women who redempted from smoking and loves her small comfort and “was self employed for many years and had no dental coverage whatsoever”. If she finds a cheap way of doing things, this will surely attract attention.

Photos

Very important thing, photos showing the mother of two and her kids. This gives Cathy Anderson some reality in the world and twice the before-after photos. This is the classic convince through repetition system.

Comments

So here she is explaining how she found out 2 products on via CNN reporters and tried them and got those white teeth. There are links all around on this blog like site (with comments enabled so that “satisfied persons” might say respond to the great product and increase sales) where people can buy all the products online with special offers.

The worse of the comments must be this one:

Diane says:

Hey Cathy, I’m a dental hygienist and I just came across your blog.

My boss would be so upset to know that people have figured out about this stuff! Truth be told, at our dental office we charge about $450 for the same thing you are getting here for free. Nice trick!

So here you have everything to convince one into buying your stuff. But here’s the other side of it. You’re being misguided.

Region

Cathy here is a real American mom. But hey, if 1/5 of US Americans cannot even locate the USA on a world map or know so many things on the world, how do you want them to know ask themselves where is Cathy’s city situated? Yes, because Cathy lives in Lille, Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Hey, is that not the North of France? Now, if she were really living here, she wouldn’t have had to be so stressed by dental coverage, health is free in France.

Comments and shipping

She wouldn’t have had to talk in dollars and even with that, she wouldn’t even get any free trial from the US, postage and packing would be around 15€. Worse, there’s even this comment:

I tried to enroll in this free trial but I found out its offered only in the United States, Canada, and the UK.

So how the hell did she get it in France?

Photo

I’ve known Cathy for a long time. She’s been roaming in the web design business for so long that her face is now so ever familiar. Here are some 3 other sites where she is present:

Babble
Playborhood
The Lost Ogle

Cathy Anderson is really well known as well as her kids as you can see.

Conclusion

Here we are then, this is how you can “pawn” the American market by using false elements and playing on the sensitive parts of the people on only one page. This site and offer has been done to rank and sell eveyday to some poor person who doesn’t have money to go to the dentist. This is a great selling strategy but it does not follow the lines of challenge that do give you the thrill of fighting for ranking and selling through conversion. Shall we call it the American way?

All in all, I’ve just left a comment, for the fun of it, on the site. I don’t think it’ll be published but here it is exclusively for you:

Hi Cathy, I’m sure I know you. I work at the pawn shop down Opera Lane in Lille. I’ve always thought that you had a great smile .

So, here is a humoristic approach to the trends making the day on the web. You have surely understood that we are talking about the lists trend. It seems like every site and especially blogs has a type of list in its branch. A list of shops, a list of tools, a list of inspirational sites. Most of the time the list is driven with mindblowing adjectives boasting about the best experience you’ll ever have reading these lists. You can have a look at my archives, these usually make their way in the miniblogging section of this site.

The CSS guy has made a nice article on this trend. Just reading the title will make you at least smile. For the rest, catch it up here:

59+ Amazing (and jaw-dropping) web design-related lists with titles that will rip your face off, blow your mama’s mind, and make you cry under the crushing pain of their inspiration

If you were one of our lucky participants, you might use your winner packs to try this superb tutorial on how to create a richly ornate typographic illustration. What about that? Dive in the contest then.

I remember a girl who wanted to write, during my university days, a research paper on “Science and technical students and their approach to canon literature.” The first thing to be done, as she was being guided by her tutors, was to define “canon literature”. It happens that she dismissed science fiction, hence dismissing J.R.R Tolkien who entered the British canon in 1996 with “The Lord of the Rings”.

I’m saying this because sometimes, reading things out of our own world might give us other approaches to our work. These might help us improve our way of designing web sites. They might push us to other boundaries which are less rigid than just building either with creative juices and forgetting usability or doing just usability and code while forgetting the fun part of things.

You might for example tackle this report on Experts vs. Online Consumers: A Comparative Credibility Study of Health and Finance Web Sites published by a Stanford (Google anyone?) research group. This sheds some light on how experts evaluate a site according to its content, while online consumers evaluate the same sites on the basis of design. So if you want a website that sells both to experts and consumers (lightly said) you would need to have both content and design. Consumer Web Watch has a lot of other reports of that sort.

Who knows, you might even want to try Maslow’s classic psychology research on human needs where he defines the characteristics of the basic human needs and how to satisfy them. This is taught to marketing students: by designing a product that fulfills more needs than that of your competitor, your product might have more success whatever the price. Examples: Iphone, German/Italian Cars (for Europe) which can’t be sold in the US because of the need for bigger cars…

As the Dalai Lama said “Each year, go somewhere you’ve never been before”. This just might work to improve your web desiging.

I’ve been hanging around CSS tricks which I didn’t visit for quite some time. It happens that Chris Coyier, Css Tricks editor, made a survey on the use of CSS frameworks. These are used to rapidly prototype website designs. I have jotted on some of them around on the Web Design Bureau : 960gs and Blueprint. As things go on, these are useful tools but I don’t use them as I have my own way of developing websites and writing my own code. I also have a tendency, when I am the code master, to code things from scratch following specific design patterns.

Now, if you don’t use a framework, it doesn’t mean you’re a dork. You might just not have time to try and master a tool or have difficulties that any developer has to dive into other people’s code. I, for some time, thought that I was not doing a good thing for not using frameworks and I have tried some of them. I would like to stress that frameworks should be used for rapid prototyping, I don’t think that they’re good groundwork for complete integration. You might want to have complete control over your code.

All in all, my thoughts were confirmed in reading the CSS Frameworks survey results. I don’t have anything against them but I just like to control and throw my own code. The poll confirms that over 50% of the Web designers (answering it) do not use any framework. Others do use frameworks but the results are disseminated among a variety of those and many build their own. If we look at things the other way round it also means that around 30% of Web designers are using frameworks, meaning that these are gaining as design patterns and standards.

I think that it takes time to master a framework and this is whart hinders their progress in the community. It might change with time and who knows, I might myself be in the new riders of frameworks.

A month ago, I wrote an article on web design education in Mauritius which got me some sour reactions from so-called “web design professionals” from Mauritius. Sure, the first reaction in Mauritius is to insult then think. But do you do it when you’re a professional? Anyway, this is their way of doing the business: ego and self-satisfaction ensuring that all the inequalities prevailing in Mauritius carries on healthily. [Rant and denounciation off]

Coming back to the issue of web design education, a lot has come out from the ongoing contest to win a copy of Mark Boulton’s “Designing for the web”. Read the comments and you’ll get a great view of how most people in the industry have learned their trade. As a matter of fact, school and university lectures are practically non-existent in web design. Most of the time this goes in this order:

1. Learn from the web with online tutorials
2. Learn by scouting portfolios and “big hats” in the trade
3. Books (depending on how they are written, bland and factual ones are not favourites)
4. Ebooks/PDF books (new technology has us)
5. Practice (trial and error)

Once again, read through the comments (and add yours if you’re interested in the topic or the contest) and get to know how people have started out in the domain.

Along with these are two excellent overviews that I would like to share. These might even be the groundwork for a new way of teaching or building a curriculum around web design:

• Teach the Web has published a Monograph where the underlying question is “What to teach to the next generation of web professionals?”. Leslie Jensen-Inman has interviewed 32 top category web designers to understand that intricacies and issues of learning web design and the results are astounding. They are to the point and well documented. A real view of what web design education should be.
• The School of Visual Arts has an MFA in interaction design as well as a great active blog on the theme of interaction design. Readers have requested reading recommendations in terms of interaction design and this has given a superb list of books to be assigned/already assigned to their courses.
  

  These could be landmark texts, underdogs, or critical reads, or stepping stones to other fields.

One of the last tweets I saw today stated: “Reading is hazardous for your stupidity…”. Thanks for the message pal! Looking back at what has been hazardous for my stupidity through the past week is the PDF book I bought off Five Simple Steps by Mark Boulton.

What I like with Web design guru Mark Boulton is his transversal view of web design and his direct and concise way of explaining the underlying design concepts. It reads with a great pace while giving you “to the point” information on webdesign in a 100+ PDF printable, personalised book! This is another example of a great Web design book to own. You can read other writings from Mark Boulton on his blog.

Having said this, the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius is offering 2 (yes TWO) copies of Mark Boulton’s book. Just leave a comment on this post about your experience of “learning” from books (most web designers, designers or programmers do so at a certain point in their lives) to enter the contest which will end on Monday 2nd of March 2009. I can assure you that you’ll even love the book’s layout!

For many designers, Shepard Fairey is a genius who has imposed a style, worked on it and sent it to the top places in the design world. For the non designers, the name does not ring a bell. If I said “Obey Giant“, it starts tingling somewhere in the brain. And if I say Barack Obama Hope poster… they’ll say “yeah”!

Now, what’s the problem? Not Fairey’s talent and style certainly. It comes from somewhere else. Copyright infringement. Yeah that’s right. On what? On the said poster known as Hope. The Associated Press is claiming that it will sue Shepard Fairey for this infringement because he has used a photo published by AP without permission. The design community all over the world is talking about this and positions are being taken for or against Fairey. The court ruling will decide how much you have to change an image for it not to be an original any more.

It is obvious that the photo has been a direct reference for the poster but how can a person like Shepard Fairey fall in the copyright infringement trap? Second question: why did the AP wait for so long to get the case out? Was it because they were supporting the Obama campaign and did not want to let it be spoiled by such a case or is it because the poster has had such an impact and is still being sold as a piece of History on ebay that they want their share of the cake? In any case, this does the buzz for Fairey and the AP. This poster is going to get more famous than it already is.

You can still catch one of the posters still on sale on ebay before they go either overpriced or illegal.

The current issue (276) of A List Apart concentrates on the difficulties people have to study web design and above all, the quality of web design education. The two articles published triggered quite a lot of questionning and thoughts. Let’s face it, Web design education doesn’t practically exist. One of the major drawbacks according to me is that Web design is considered as a poor “sibling” of the larger “programming” family. Seems to me that, in Mauritius for example, Web design “oriented” classes will be given at the IVTB rather than at the University.

On my part, I do have a postgraduate degree in computer science and I have to admit that the “Web” courses I had there brought nothing to me. It was just an analysis of a list of tags used in HTML and a little bit of CSS. Some PHP was also considered as our programming base was OOP but not more. Everything I use today in my everyday job has been acquired in books and on reading online articles from sites like A List Apart and Web Designer blogs.

Another thing is, are the people giving those Web Design courses fully qualified? Let’s take an example, this is in no case a personal attack, just a fact. This person is called “Darkprint” and has been awarded the best student in graphic design and multimedia at the IVTB which has been covered by the press etc. Congrats to him! Problem is: his site is not standards compliant, there’s an overuse of images and spacers, the CSS is horrible. This shows that the courses he has had in Web Design were really poor. Furthermore, there’s a huge business management problem. If you’re going to be a freelancer, you have to manage your image and business. Do they teach that also? It doesn’t seem to be the case. On coming on this portfolio some things seem wrong. The only information I have is that the guy is young and ambitious and is called Darkprint and he uses a gmail account while having his own domain name. This lacks professionalism just because I won’t even know, provided I search the whole site or open the article, who the person is at the first glance.

Web design is more complex than it seems and many designers get into the job being completely oblivious of the REAL basic knowledge. Many people think that mastering [insert image editing software name here] is all that you need. The web culture, the trends, interactions, research and coding standards and knowledge are not taught! The uses neither. The WASP as well as the W3C have set up Web design education programs but these need time to get into the teaching culture, then it will take time to get the teachers qualified and eventually we’ll be able to get great Web designers leaving school with great value in their hands.

The Google Zeitgeist has been issued in December 2008. As expected, it bears a lot of useful and interesting information on the past year’s trends be they in terms of searches and in terms of navigation (I’ll get to this later). First things first.

One thing that I can boast about is inevitably the fact that Facebook is one of the most searched terms in the world, it is in the top 5 in most of the countries analysed by the Google team. It also crosschecks my analysis of the “Facebook” is better than “sex” trend test.

Along with these are the persons having created most of the buzz in the world. Namely Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, Heath Ledger, singing kiddos Jonas Brothers. . The American Presidential campaign is one heck of a buzz thing to closely look at and get inspiration from. World financial crisis also caused a lot of buzz but not in the “right” way of doing. This is one search expression that will keep on evolving over 2009.

So this is how the world has been running around on the Google search engine this past year. This gives us a real overview of how we use the Internet and how it stores information on everything that catches our interest.