The Science of Web Art, Design and Development

I am starting to worry about Google an the democratic way of the web.

Google always claimed that their algorithm was to reflect the true democratic nature of the web, through linkbacks, but these days they have power enough to just dictate what they want,

A client called me this week seeking advice because Google has sent them a mail (yes, I know, amazing, google sent them an email) telling them that they were blacklisted for at least 30 days because they had put too many keywords on the pages of their company’s website.

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Since I published the Zo’C powerblogroll plugin, I have received a lot of feedback from users who’d like to use the plugin but they are discouraged by the fact that you need to deal with PHP code, even if it is in a very small amount.

I’m willing to release a new, much more user friendly, version. But while this doesn’t happen, I’ve recorded two videos showing how to install and configure the plugin.

In the video, I use the One Click Install plugin that is a great one and I strongly recommend. If you don’t want to use it, however, you’ll have to use the normal FTP method as with any other plugin.

Installing, activating, and using the plugin from your theme

(video will open in a new window)

Adding links to Wordpress

In case you don’t know how to fill all the information that your Powerbloroll can display (such as the favicon, description, notes, RSS, etc.) this video shows you how to do it.

(video will open in a new window)

Tired of that old Archive page that displays the months in which you have posts? Even worse, tired of that bulk on your sidebar?

If you come to think of it, it is probably helping your visitors very little, unless they are looking for a specific post and have a rather good idea of when it was published. But if they do know that much, they are more likely to use the search box instead.

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Like many people, it’s been quite a while that I hear about podcasts, but haven’t really been catching up on this technology, but some weeks ago, I suddently became interested on this technology and subscribed to a couple of them.

While some turned out really boring and unsibscribed soon, others got me thinking:

If I had this kind of technology when I was a geek teen, I’d be delighted! Finding resources for my crazy projects would have been so much easier.

And then a question popped into my mind, just as there are great podcasts out there and, further, it is a wonderful technology whose full use still have to be show, there is a lot of garbage out there and that could not be a good thing for children.

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Picture by Chris Bevan(cc)

Consider this:

How lost is a visitor that come to your 404 and how lost is a visitor that comes to your home page?

Home pages are not what they used to be. Unless you are a big site, people don’t go to your index page and try to find something on it.

Say I’m looking for Strawberry Jam. I know lots and lots of sites about food, but I won’t look strawberry jam in any of them, I’ll go to mother google and ask.

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Michael Martine from Remarkablogger has launched a free e-book for subcribers to his blog.

The e-book How to Start a Business Blog covers with a great informal tone 12 steps to plan a successful blog with exercises that, above all, help you get organized. A must read!

I was just watching the Helvetica Film that just arrived after a very long wait, and I one of the many interesting things was to see designer Win Crouwel saying

You can’t make better design with computers, but you can speed up your work

Win Crouvel

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If you haven’t heard about Django, it is a Python Based framework to build complex and resource savvy sites easily and quickly. I have been studying and playing with Django in the last days and I’m simply amazed about it.

If you are a designer rather than a developer, the word python might scare you a little, since you don’t want to learn any python at all. Instead, if you are a developer, you might be skeptic to read that complex sites can be built easily.

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This post is just a quickie to wish all Zo’C Readers a Great Christmas. And I hope following this blog this year has been as interesting for you as mantaining it has been for me.

Also, warm feelings to the nice people at Authority Blogger Forum, which is friendly community and an invaluable resource for bloggers.

When I started working on the web, ten years ago, sites should be done to be visible with a resolution of 640×480px, otherwise a good part of visitors would be blocked out. As resolutions increased the minimum size increased to 800×600 and today it is believed that designing towards 1024×768 is safe.

Will this number increase in the future? Should we still concern about low resolutions? What is The ultimate answer to screen resolutions for web design?

I really don’t think the ultimate answer for screen resolutions is a number, no matter what the number is. I think the answer is a process by which websites are developed.

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