Infinite Path » SEO Design

Google gets the Instant buzz

admin — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 12:59:01 +0000

Instant seems to be the current buzzword at Google. First there was the annoying, but intriguing, rise of instant search results and now the firm has launched the latest addition to its results page – Instant Preview.

You’ve probably noticed the small magnifying glass which now appears alongside results and discovered that by clicking on it you can see a preview of the page in question. According to the company, the move will stop people from going to irrelevant pages and hence save them time.

Writing on the Google blog, product manager Raj Krishnan said: “In our testing, we’ve found that people who use Instant Previews are about five per cent more likely to be satisfied with the results they click.”

So does it work? Well, yes and no. Clicking on the magnifying glass does give you an instant preview, but often it’s so small it’s hard to tell what the site really looks like. Its major strength could be in helping people to avoid spammy sites that could be potentially harmful. As far as search engine optimisation goes, it probably won’t have a huge impact. It could reduce the number of clicks for sites that have used black hat techniques, but they tend to get penalised in the long run anyway.

For the rest of internet, it gives people a chance to show potential customers just how well-designed and relevant their site is to users before they click through. And if your site isn’t well-designed and relevant, well, you’ll just have to get cracking on some improvements, won’t you?

The Future of Web Design: What Next?

Infinite Path — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:00:04 +0000

Web design and web development are two elements which, like most things online, evolve constantly. New ideas and trends emerge on a daily basis, causing thousands of people to post articles such as this one explaining their views on the subject.

In reality, it is impossible to pin down the direction in which web design and web development are going. Many of the designers who were playing with Dreamweaver 10 years ago now no longer design but merely talk about how to do it and contemplate what it will become. This is what makes it a fascinating part of the online industry.

Who’s to say what will happen in the next year, two years or even 10 years? As technology evolves, requirements become far more complex. It is equally fascinating to think that those designers, who once spent days and nights in their bedroom learning code, now do not actually need to work in the traditional sense. Instead, they talk about how they think other people should work.

The most intriguing aspect of web design evolution is the manner in which it often comes about. In many instances, new trends and methods emerge as a direct result of a client requirement. It isn’t necessarily the design focussed, innovative designer; it is the person who could not design to save their life who views html code as a language for aliens.

Web designers sometimes see themselves as visionaries and it can be tempting to dismiss ideas from the simpleton who just doesn’t understand. However, in actual fact, many advances online occur as a result of initial ideas from the most unlikely sources.

So, who will force the change of the next generation of websites? Will it be a designer, a developer or just an average Joe who needs an online presence?

Why Competition and Comparison Aren’t Always Healthy

Six Reasons why Flash should be Avoided at all Costs

Infinite Path — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:31:36 +0000

If you’re designing and running your own website, you will probably have heard people advising you to avoid flash at all costs. This is all well and good but do you really know the reasons why it should be avoided? The truth is that there are far more than six good reasons to avoid using it but the main ones are as follows:

1. If you have a Flash intro on your site, every single visitor will be annoyed. This may be a generalisation but, on the whole, nobody is interested in Flash intros, particularly if they have to view them each and every time they visit your site. With SEO, you want to encourage revisits as much as new visits and Flash intros are likely to contribute to a decreasing revisit rate.

2. Flash files come with timing issues. They take ages (in relative web terms) to load and in this day and age of speed and impatience when it comes to websites, people may click away instead of waiting. People want to find good information on the web but, more importantly, they don’t want to waste time looking for it.

3. Human beings are not the only ones who get annoyed by Flash. Websites that only use Flash are giving the search engines a really hard time. The search engines find it difficult indexing and searching through these websites and this makes the whole process of SEO extremely difficult.

4. Websites which just use Flash may not have unique URLs for each page. This causes problems with regards to indexing individual pages in the search engines, bookmarking, and inbound linking. A good website should have an abundance of internal linking but this will not be possible for Flash websites. Furthermore, if you’re trying to get back-links from other websites, you will only be getting links to your homepage since there are no deeper links to be found. This is tantamount to SEO suicide.

5. These websites have basic issues with usability. Simple actions performed by visitors commonly are impossible on certain sites using Flash. These actions include highlighting text in order to copy and paste it somewhere else or trying to alter the font of the text.

6. Access is a major problem with Flash. Whilst Flash will be installed on most browsers, you cannot guarantee that your visitor will have the latest version installed. Very few people will bother updating their version just to access the content on your website.