Video of the day 2/11/11

You ever take on a project and said 'Don't worry I know what I'm doing' just for it to blow up in your face? Well this one is for you!

The great Gawker suicide.

Among my many sins is 15+ years of working with HTML and developing websites.
My approach to a website is not unique in that my first priority is ALWAYS usability. I'll wireframe, layout a site 10-15 times over, have that critiqued and then go to coding one of them. It's important to make an attractive site but no matter how good it looks usability is King. Especially when the good you are selling is information and your site is now making it harder to access said information.

Go check out the redesign for Gawker. Click here. Go! I'll wait.

Still waiting...

See! SEE! That's what I'm talking about!


Now that's what one would call all flash and no substance. It's barely usable, I'm sure it'll up the number of ad exposures for them because it now requires 70 clicks to go through a days worth of posts.

I've not checked Gizmodo or Lifehacker today. The layout just makes my teeth grind. I'm assuming their UI guy was kidnapped and is being held at an undisclosed location, I can't think of any other explanation.

Qualifying: AdWords

Smart companies know that today marketing and R&D have to be attached at the hip. Why is that? It's simply because you have to make sure there is a demand for the type of product you are trying to produce and that there is a cost efficient way to create a marketing mix for the product or service.

I'm involved in working with a small nutritional supplement company on their first product launch. Other than preparing their website and on-line infrastructure AdWords became very important to us before there was even a product.

Video of the Day 2/3/11

This is by far the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Quite simply amazing.

Google Launches Location Check in via Latitude

If you are anything like me you probably woke up this morning and thought "This world could really use yet another location check in service to compete with FourSquare, Facebook, Gowalla etc. etc."

You are in luck! Google has decided to join the fray in the check in services with its newest addition to Google Maps. This is another example of a disturbing trend Google has shown were rather than to innovate something they show up late to the competitions party, check out out the party favors the host is providing. Then they go home and next week throw a competing party with similar party favors and better hors d'oeuvres. 

When I think about it, this has been a trend for a while...