Why Have a Fold, Anyway?

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paperSo it happened again. Another client asks to have everything above the fold. Since the term “above the fold” has its roots in newspapers, I can’t help but draw the newspaper analogy.

If the goal was to have everything above the fold, then newspapers wouldn’t be folded. To ask to put everything above the fold on your website is like the newspapers switching to a half-height format.

The next thing I say is, “Yes, we can put everything above the fold, by cutting back on content.” Most clients get that I’m being sarcastic: what’s the point of having a website if you just remove all the content from it?

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Why the Marketing Folks Don’t Get Twitter

whale Ahhh, Twitter. For better or worse, the service has gained major exposure from Ellen, Oprah, P. Diddy, and its most popular user, Ashton Kutcher. Additionally, in a desperate attempt to appear young and relevant, news organizations such as Fox, CNN and MSNBC have jumped on the bandwagon as well, shoving their twitter names down our throats and creating a television format based entirely around reading tweets from their followers. Of course, with this increase in exposure, the marketing folks come pouring out the woodwork: from self-promoting freelancers to corporate twitter accounts, it seems I can’t send out a single tweet without some spambot kicking in and auto-friending me. But how effective is twitter as a marketing tool?

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links for 2009-06-12

SEO Isn’t That Important

Defeat Yesterday I got in a bit of a twitter debate regarding SEO and flash-based sites in particular.

While I will agree that flash-based websites suffer from an SEO standpoint (workarounds aside), I don’t always think that matters. And this is where the deluge of “WTF” started- largely from people that weren’t even following me.

I know, I should have expected it. Saying SEO doesn’t matter on the web today (let alone on Twitter, where the SEO folks tend to congregate) is social media suicide. But it’s true. Sometimes.

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links for 2009-06-09

links for 2009-06-04

links for 2009-06-03

Feedly Organizes your RSS Feeds to be More Reader Friendly

screenshot-01OK, I’ll admit it. It took me a long time to get used to the idea of RSS feeds. I liked the concept, I just hated the implementation. More often than not, subscribing to multiple feeds just led to the feeling that I will never catch up on it all.

Sure, I had my iGoogle start page with a few sites I followed: Lifehacker, Slashdot, and a friend’s blog or two, and that worked fine. That is, until I saw Bradley Robb speak at WordCamp in Richmond. In his presentation, he advised bloggers of the importance of RSS, and setting up Google alerts to get the latest news from the topics they’re most interested in. And my whole outlook on RSS changed.

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CandyBar for Mac Makes Icon Changes a Snap

picture-1Yeah, OS X is great. It’s stable. Its UI is quite possibly the most intuitive (well, once you get used to different things being in different places than you’re used to). But it always struck me as odd that the OS used most by designers allows the least amount of customization. Sure you can manually change each icon by hand (Select icon you want to use cmd-c to copy, select app/file you want to use it on, cmd-i to bring up the info pane, select the icon, cmd-v to paste), but that can get very, very tiring when wanting to theme out your entire desktop.

And then I found CandyBar (Shareware, $29). Candybar lets you customize not just any icon on your computer, but also your dock’s appearance.

And for those of you without the time or patience to make your own, there are many icon sets available for free at Iconfactory (You’ll want to download the iContainers)

Also check out some of these creative themes.

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Follow me on the Social Web

Twitter

Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, MyBlogLog…there are so many tools to keep virtual friends these days, it’s a full-time job just keeping up!

But I’m going to make it easier on you.

Why would you want to follow me on these sites? Why, so I can do the work for you! Many times I’ll share stories, tutorials or other interesting tidbits that don’t make it to the site on these services. I’ll also post whenever there is a new post here on Twitter, but the best way to get those is still good ol’ RSS.

So go ahead and follow me on any of these services- you’ll be glad you did!

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