Monday February 9th Roundup

Spring like sunny days, followed by snow and wind and hail. What has happened to the city where the weather is always the same? Oh yeah…

This week we have more of my rants about design and usability, PPC hilarity, an awesome screencast of the jCrop plugin, and more!

• Last week Search and Socialstarted complaining about Social Media Marketing Guru’s. Good, about time. Maybe next people can point out the prominence of “personal websites” before blogs; Slashdot, FARK, etc. before social media sites; and now we’re talking about Web 3.0 and expert-community generated content… well, I’ve never seen that before.
• Click Equations interjects my complaining with some hilarity byexplaining one reason why exact match ads aren’t always exact. I’m not going to explain it, that would ruin the humor.

• Sitepoint has a wonderful article on image replacement. Their technique uses JavScript, and
• Nettuts has a gimicky but awesome screencast of working with the jCrop plugin. I never thought of this before, but this would be really really useful for our blog…

• Tony Adams blog—imaginatively calledSEO Blog by Tony Adam— has a wonderful how-to on Checking StumbleUpon Referrals and Reviews to specific URLs. Of course you need the Stumbledupon toolbar for this, so if you’re one of those minimalist geeks like me who hates adding new toolbars, then this might not be for you.
• Zeta Interactive has a nice tutorial on setting up multiple keyword filters in Google Analytics. Simple stuff, but the kind of thing everyone should know.

• Good Usability has some good advice for all you webdev’s out there: tell your visitors what your website does. This should really be a no brainer. However, I do think its worth noting that telling someone != telling some one. That is to say, that you can communicate the intent and function of a site through imagery and multimedia just as well as through text or speech. I really recommend more people in the read up on semiotics (and then note that my choice of hyperlinks are utterly horrible signs). Of course I say this, then notice that today Apple has a big block of text telling their users what they’re doing. Guess they’ve been reading Good Usability.
• Touching on something I don’t think about nearly often enough, Erova discusses how interface design does not equal experience design. As they point out, no matter how great your website is, if you aren’t delivering on the users end, then people aren’t happy. And hence why Comcast does poorly.

• Good news for Mac fans last week: mac fans win, with the courts ruling that Apple did indeed abuse its copyright in order to stop Psystar from selling clones.
• And bad news for windows users (me) Windows 7 starter will only allow you to run two programs at once. Why is it that Microsoft these days seems to be run by monkeys?