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Google TV

It looks like Google is making moves towards TV. According to the Wall Street Journal, the search magnate has approached media companies with regards to licensing content for a service that would not only stream programming but also integrate on-demand applications as well as search.

If successfully launched, this has huge implications for traditional TV as we know it and might, ultimately, create more robust competition for a segment already undergoing rapid change in the wake of new technology and diversified consumption.

Among Google’s competitors are Intel, Apple and Sony, all of whom are working on products with similar offerings. Reuters reports that Intel has allocated an estimated $2B to TV programming licensing deals but has failed to officially sign any major content companies despite offering to pay as much as 75% more than traditional industry-rates. Insiders emphasize that the $2B budget would span multiple years and is not “an upfront or ‘year one’ spend on content.”

To quote Tim Carmody of The Verge, “Internet TV is hard in ways that have little to do with technology. Striking deals with content partners is very hard. Bringing a product to market that’s comparable with what cable and satellite providers can offer, let alone more compelling, is extremely hard. It’s hard if this is what you do every day in your core business. It’s unbelievably hard if you’ve never done this before. Very few people would be surprised if Intel, like Google, couldn’t pull this off.”

Generally speaking, media companies are reluctant to rock the boat and undermine existing arrangements with distributors. While they’re open to licensing content, the best prices typically go to the biggest distributors. For Google and other would-be Internet TV companies to procure favorable rates, they would almost certainly have to accept standard programming bundles which would likely eliminate an à la carte channel offering.

That said, I can’t imagine a mass exodus from Comcast or Direct TV unless one or two things happen. The first scenario would be that Google acquires licensing rights and stacks the service with Fiber. The second, and I think this is a long shot, would be if Google offered a radically different on-demand service where content was made available as soon as it premiered, setting Google TV up with massive programming library. This would cost the company a fortune, but it would be a compelling reason to make the jump no less.

I, personally, think that application integration is a total wash seeing that TVs already come with Netflix, YouTube and Hulu installed on them. If they didn’t, I’d probably use my console. But if I didn’t have that, I could use an HDMI cable from my laptop to my TV. The point being that there’s no shortage of options here.

When it comes to the arms race for TV, the future is pretty obvious. Viewers want to watch what they want, when you want, however they want. While that might be on a tablet during your commute to work, at the gym or in the comfort of your living room, each and everyone’s preference is different. I can foresee how the first distributor who irons out all these nuances at a competitive price point might ultimately prevail in a winner take all situation.

I kind of hope it comes with super fast Internet.

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Bounce Rate + Site Optimization

Over the course of the last few weeks, we’ve shifted the focus on the Bravo Design, Inc. blog from a semi-random traffic grab to generating meaningful content for better overall engagement. And outside of gaining a regular following (i.e., growth in repeat visits), a peripheral goal of mine is to decrease our bounce rate as needed and optimize the BDI site for visitors.

“Are bounce rates and exit rates the same thing?” you ask.

No, your bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on a page and leave before navigating to the next. They might be on that page for one second, one minute or one hour, but they’re not going anywhere else before leaving.

The exit rate is defined as the percentage of traffic that leaves your site from a given page based on how many visits that the particular page has received. These visitors have landed on other pages, going from pages X, Y to Z and jumped on the last.

While it may be inferred that high bounce rates are always bad, it’s really just a matter of context. For example, if a user navigates to your site, finds a succinct answer to their question and leaves, that specific page has successfully completed its goal. It becomes a problem when the bounce rate is high at the top of the funnel (e.g., on your homepage or halfway through a paginated article).

“So what does a high bounce rate mean?”

One, you’re acquiring the right kind of traffic, and your pages are doing their job. All is well like in the example listed above. This might be true if your visitors are successfully completing a call-to-action and exiting immediately after.

Two, you’re drawing in the wrong traffic, a segment uninterested in what you have to offer. We publish an article showcasing our featured film release almost every week. And for the longest time, we were receiving tons of traffic for a horror movie called The Apparition. Yes, traffic is cool but much more so when it’s relevant.

Now that might not be the best example given the fact that we do a lot of movie marketing work, and a featured release series is right up our alley. But we know that the visitors who frequent these pages shouldn’t be misconstrued as potential customers interested in custom WordPress development of graphic design work. They want to know more about a movie, and we’re happy to oblige.

Three, there’s a disconnect between what visitors anticipate to find and what they actually see. Not too long ago, I subscribed to Ramit Sethi’s newsletter, “I Will Teach You to Be Rich.” He’s enormously popular; author to a New York Times bestseller; etc., and I was looking for practical ways to save money here and there.

One of the first e-mails I got from him was titled, “Congrats, Your 1-Week MBA on Earning More Money Starts Tomorrow.” Really? In it, Ramit goes on to say that he went from making $20/hour to $3,000 in just a few years, and that might be true. It might not be. I have no idea, but claims that seem too good to be true make me increasingly more apprehensive as do “30-Day Courses on Hustling.” As a result, I didn’t read any of the additional literature sent to me.

This also takes shape in the form of link bait. The people who frequent your site and follow you via social media do so as a vote of confidence. Don’t abuse that.

Four, your website is killing them, Smalls. This might be due to technical bugs, a lack of user-friendliness, poor design, slow load times, etc. It’s impossible to diagnose without actually seeing your site, but we’d be happy to give your site a look if you drop a line in the comment box below with your URL and e-mail address.

“Why does any of this matter?”

Imagine that you’re going out to dinner. You’ve heard raving reviews from everyone and their mom, and you’re amped to finally get the chance to try it out. Only, when you walk into the foyer of the restaurant, you see a giant rat dart across the corridor. What do you do? You probably leave regardless as to what you’ve heard and call the health department before pulling out of the parking lot.

If the homepage of your website is in any way similar, and your prospective clientele exits as soon as they enter, you have a serious problem. Bounce rates provide you with insight as to how your website is performing and will help you determine if landing pages are performing up to standard. Because in the end, vanity metrics like web traffic are pretty meaningless and a huge time suck.

If you’d like some feedback on your website free of charge, leave a comment in the box below with your URL and e-mail address or send us a Tweet with the hashtag feedback (#feedback).

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WordPress

If you own your own business, you need an online presence. That’s non-negotiable.

That doesn’t mean you need a website equipped with every bell and whistle, but your online traffic is likely to find you through organic queries, at least in part. And since search is by and large intent based where users know or have a general idea of what they want, basic information should be made available to streamline matchups with potential customers.

A locksmith might post hours of operation and a telephone number via Google Places; a restaurant its menu for customers to peruse through on Yelp or GrubHub; and a graphic design agency a blog for readers to find tips and tutorials or browse through an amazing portfolio that showcases its incredible work. That’s my one shameless plug for the week.

That’s not to say that a locksmith wouldn’t blog. It’s just that the minimum viable product requirements are different for them than, say, a brain surgeon. Primarily, because you’d want to obtain as much information as possible on surgical candidates who would potentially open up your head versus a seemingly interchangeable supply of locksmiths. For those who disagree with this point, make sure to leave a comment in the section below.

In any case, an excellent option to cover all your bases is a WordPress si

WordPress, Bravo DesignA Live Look at Activity Across WordPress

WordPress

WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) that has taken the world by storm. Known primarily for blogging, it has grown to be much more than that. It powers nearly 66 million websites, with 100,000 more popping up each day. Notable users include: E-Bay, The New York Times, TechCrunch, Reuters, Katy Perry, UPS and a wide array of Fortune 500 Companies. Each month, 371 million people view more than 4.1 billion pages on WordPress sites, and the number of posts created is continuing to trend upwards.

Posts on WordPress, Bravo DesignThe Number of Posts WordPress Users Are Publishing

It’s Cost Effective.

Because it’s open-source, it’s free to download and use, making it extremely cost-effective even if you do decide to purchase themes or widgets; whereas coding a custom CMS with similar functionality could cost a boatload. It’s robust and professional looking and one of the best ways to manage your SEO on the cheap.

Yoast is a plugin that let’s you optimize page information along with meta descriptions, using snippet preview functionality to see what it would look like in Google. If you have pages you don’t want indexed by search engine robots, you can hide them per page. And lastly, you can canonize pages, distinguishing originals from derivatives. Best of all, it’s free.

Yoast, Bravo Design II Yoast, “Why You Should Be Using WordPress”

It’s Flexible.

WordPress is extremely flexible and pragmatic. If a specific feature isn’t built-in to a template, there are currently 24,897 plugins available to enhance your site’s functionality making WordPress a serious contender as an e-commerce platform. With active members contributing from around the world, as well as developers for hire, the customization opportunities are endless.

As an FYI, if you’re a developer looking to chat with peers, you can do so via the #WordPress-dev channel on IRC or using #WordPress. If you’re new to the process like myself, sign up at WordPress.org and use the Codex and/or forums to start learning.

It’s Easy to Use.

Prior to working at Bravo Design, Inc., I had zero experience working with CMS no less WordPress, but learning is a piece of cake. Rest assured, you’ll pick it up quickly too. Everything from backend navigation to adding posts, media or tweaking metadata for search engine optimization is really straightforward.

That’s the beauty of WordPress.

This last week, I uploaded my own demo WordPress to tinker around with, marking my third install ever. I’ve done one via WAMP, one through GoDaddy’s easy install and this one onto the Bravo server. While it wasn’t quite done from scratch because I had a pre-configured FTP login, hosting and a tutorial on hand, it was pretty simple. When I say “simple,” I mean a novice could do it and not “simple” as in the way Ikea describes its kitchen installations.

In the coming weeks, we’ll try and upload an easy to use tutorial for those of you who want to install their own WordPress. But for those of you who already have websites, what CMS do you use and why?

Photo Credit: WordPress.org, Webdesign.org

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Smarter Web Design

Just recently, I read an AdWeek article on the ANAR Foundation, a Spanish child-advocacy organization. With the help of their ad agency Grey Spain, they used lenticular printing for a powerful outdoor advertising campaign that offered help to abused children without alerting their abusers, even if they saw the ad simultaneously. Lenticular printing is a process where printed images are given the illusion of depth or motion and allows for different photos to be seen depending on the angle it’s viewed from.

For this particular poster, anyone over four-foot-five would read, “Sometimes child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it.”

ANAR, Smart Web Design (Above)

Those under that height would see, “If somebody hurts you, phone us and we’ll help you” along with the phone number for ANAR’s hotline.

ANAR, Smart Web Design (Below)

Seeing this made me wonder: how are we as an industry adopting smarter, more responsive design given the incredible tools that we do have?

In an article in Smashing Magazine, Vasilis van Gemert wrote: Up until not so long ago, we used to base our designs on some rather general assumptions about screen size and input type. With the rise of devices with various screen sizes and alternative ways to interact, these assumptions have turned out to be unreliable. In the ‘90s, the web was 640 pixels wide. In the early 2000s, it grew to 800 pixels and later to 1024 pixels. Then, a device with a very small screen entered the market. Suddenly, our ideas about the size of the web did not work anymore.

Something similar happened with bandwidth and page load time. We went from 14.4 to 28.8 to 56k to broadband and got faster and faster. Then people started using those very same mobile devices to browse the web more and more but expected for load times to be comparable to what they saw on PCs only to find that they wouldn’t due to compatibility and integration issues.

According to an article on KISSmetrics: Surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com indicate that nearly half of web users expect a site to load in two seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within three seconds. 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again, and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online.

At the moment, you may not be seeing much in terms of web traffic from different devices, but I wouldn’t be quick to disregard this advice. As we’ve all seen, history is filled with examples of once-thriving businesses that were wiped off the map due to an inability to adapt (e.g., Blockbuster vs. Netflix, Kodak vs. Fujifilm, Borders vs. Barnes & Noble).

As a sidebar, each of these businesses failed to read emerging markets correctly and defeated themselves. Ironically, Kodak invented one of the first digital cameras in 1975 only to put it on the backburner for about two decades because it wouldn’t be very profitable at the time. By the time Kodak decided to switch gears, it was much too late.

But going back to the point, back in March, Adobe Dig­i­tal Index posted a study after ana­lyz­ing more than 100 bil­lion vis­its to 1,000+ web­sites worldwide uncovering trends in the transition from PC to mobile device usage, which are impressive to say the least.

Adobe Digital Index, Web Design

Global Traffic by Device Type:

Adobe Digital Index, Web Design

The study goes on to say that while smart­phones remain much more com­mon, the tablet form fac­tor makes it ideal for brows­ing. Whether it be leisurely surf­ing the web, engag­ing with video or shop­ping online, on aver­age inter­net users view 70% more pages per visit when brows­ing with a tablet com­pared to a smartphone.

Adobe Digital Index, Web Design

In an article on “Responsive Web Design,” Ethan Marcotte writes “an emergent discipline called ‘responsive architecture’ has begun asking how physical spaces can respond to the presence of people passing through them. Through a combination of embedded robotics and tensile materials, architects are experimenting with art installations and wall structures that bend, flex, and expand as crowds interact with them” much like ANAR’s outdoor ad buy.

Marcotte goes on to say, “This is our way forward. Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them. In short, we need to practice responsive web design.”

Since the end of 2012, we’ve incorporated responsive web design into all of our web design projects from sites that stream movies via CDN to those with online shopping carts. If you have questions on the either its benefits or how to achieve this, please contact us here.

Photo Credit: PetaPixel.com, Adobe Digital Index

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The Good, the Bad, the Patent System

Apple's Patent War, Bravo DesignWith the first of many lawsuits between Apple and Samsung over, resulting in a $1.05B verdict awarded to Apple pending a potential appeal and a million miles of red tape, this decision represents just one battle in a war being fought between the two companies in courts around the world, which will likely continue on for years to come. For those who haven’t kept up with the suing/countersuing fiasco, in as few words as possible, Apple and Samsung, referred to jokingly as “Samesung,” are currently embroiled in 50 some odd lawsuits in 10 different countries where each alleges that the other has willfully infringed on proprietary tech and design features. At the behest of Bravo Design, Inc.’s esteemed web developer, Matthew, we’ve decided it’s time we talk about patent law and consider the direction in which it’s headed.

To provide some background on the subject, the word patent comes from the Latin litterae patentes, meaning an open letter, and it refers to those used by medieval monarchs to confer rights and privileges (Reuters). And though patents have been used in various countries at various times, they’re generally attributed to having first been established in Italy with the Venetian Statute of 1474, which encouraged “men of great genius, apt to invent and discover ingenious devices” to enrich society by sharing their genius. It goes on to say, “if provisions were made for the works and the devices discovered by such persons, so that others may see them could not build them and take the inventor’s honor away, more men would then apply their genius, would discover, and would build devices of great utility and benefit to our Commonwealth.” In return, the government would grant a monopoly for a limited amount of time that excluded all others from making, importing or selling the newly patented invention. The idea is that during this exclusion period, a patent holder would be able to recoup exorbitant research and development (R&D) costs and, eventually, turn a profit. Today, in an industry like pharmaceuticals, though somewhat contentious, the full cost of bringing a new drug to market from discovery through clinical trials to approval is astronomical with estimates starting from hundreds of millions of dollars to well past the $1 billion mark. In regards to individual inventors, well-before Forbes appraised his net worth at around £1 billion, James Dyson designed 5,127 prototypes before he perfected the cyclone vacuum cleaner and completed the DC01, the fastest-selling vacuum cleaner ever made in the United Kingdom. How long did that take? 15 years.

So if patents protect and encourage innovation by providing incentives, which in turn benefits the population at large, what’s the problem?

Well, part of that answer goes back to fundamental economics, which states that monopolies are bad for society. Generally speaking, monopolies typically maximize their profits by producing fewer good and selling them at a higher price, which creates a deadweight loss (DWL) to society as output is well below its optimal level. In a Pareto efficient economic allocation, no one can be made better off without making at least one individual worse off. If we thought of this in terms of pizzas where the going price is $10, the demand is going to decrease from a high demand if they’re free to zero demand if they cost $100. In a perfectly competitive market with many pizzerias, they’re priced at $10, and everyone who receives more than $10 worth of utility (economics’ speak for satisfaction) will buy one. But if there’s only one pizzeria, they’re probably going to charge whatever nets them the greatest profit. If hypothetically that’s $50, that excludes every consumer who receives less than $50 worth of utility from a pizza, which would pretty much be everyone I know. The DWL is then the economic benefit foregone by these customers due to monopoly pricing.

Michael Heller dubbed the term the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons to describe the phenomenon in which useful and affordable products are prevented from entering the marketplace. In economics, the Tragedy of Commons refers to the exhaustion of shared resources (e.g., clean air, water, arable land, etc.) by individuals acting out of their own self-interest, despite their knowing and understanding that doing so is suboptimal in the long-run. In the Anti-Commons, the opposite occurs. When lots of property owners have to gain permission before a resource can be used, the result is that the resource tends to be chronically under utilized. This can happen when patent thickets, “dense webs of overlapping intellectual property rights that a company must hack its way through in order to actually commercialize new technology,” stifle innovation (Carl Shapiro).Patent System, Bravo DesignWith regards to technology, because the marketplace changes so quickly, developments depend on the ability to freely and quickly reuse and combine to build on. To programmers and developers, proprietary software patents are about as appealing as patents on part of the English language would be. It prevents not only innovation, it leads to lock-ins that few can use, and no one can innovate on without licensing fees that drive up the cost of creation. The Honorable Richard A. Posner, the judge who famously dismissed Apple’s suit against Motorola, warns that: “This prospect gives rise to two wasteful phenomena: defensive patenting and patent trolls. Defensive patenting means getting a patent not because you need it to prevent copycats from making inroads into your market, but because you want to make sure that you’re not accused of infringing when you bring your own product to market. The cost of patenting and the cost of resolving disputes that may arise when competitors have patents are a social waste. Patent trolls are companies that acquire patents not to protect their market for a product they want to produce — patent trolls are not producers — but to lay traps for producers, for a patentee can sue for infringement even if it doesn’t make the product that it holds a patent on.” Horace Dediu sums this up best when he describes “legal hit squads” as what “sustains incumbents rather than facilitate[s] entry.”

None of this is to say that the patent system should be abolished altogether. That probably wouldn’t be the right answer even if it were an option, but there are some questions that need answering like, how much incentive is required to induce creators into innovating? Are 20-year patent terms really appropriate given the rate at which technology evolves? And lastly, and maybe most importantly, does the problem lie in patent law itself or with what’s allowed to be patented? Despite our anxieties and our concerns about the economy, unemployment and competition elsewhere, we should be proud that our country is a leader because of its ability to create and innovate better than any other, and that has a lot to due with how we incentivize inventive activity because innovation lays the foundations for future growth. We just need to figure out how to best protect that for inventors and consumers alike.

Photo Credits:
Bloomberg Businessweek, Smartphone Data, IHS Isuppli Research, Bayraba.com, Techdirt and ThePatentBook.com

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Why You Have One Less Reason to Use Google+

When “Search Plus Your World,” the feature that ranked Google+ content at the forefront of search engine report pages (SERPs) was initially unveiled in January 2012, Amit Singhal, head of Google’s core ranking team wrote, “Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of web pages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box… We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships” much to the ire of its competing social media networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc.).

Social graphs, a term popularized by Facebook to describe its social network and, essentially, the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related, have worked their way into ranking algorithms having been designated as an attribute based on trust and authority. And though it was expected that G+ would eventually garner more momentum, which would be reflected more heavily in SERPs, Google has announced that results would no longer be prioritized at the expense of the aforementioned rival social networks. This last Sunday, Singhal told Emma Barnett, a technology and digital media correspondent for The Telegraph, that the company had found a “better place” for results linked to G+. In defense of “Search Plus Your World,” Singhal went on to say, “I think it’s a learning process – even for us. We experiment, we learn, we improve – that’s what Google does.”

What happens now is anyone’s guess. It might be safe to say, at least for the time being, that if you had few reasons to use G+ prior to this update, you have even fewer now.

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Aesthetics and Usability

In a study by Antonella De Angeli, Alistair Sutcliffe and Jan Hartmann done at the University of Manchester, the three concluded that the perception of information quality is affected in a manner resembling the halo effect in person perception. The halo effect or halo error, given its name by psychologist Edward Thorndike, is a “cognitive bias in which our judgments of a person’s character can be influenced by our overall impression of him or her” and “can be found in a range of situations—from the courtroom to the classroom and in everyday interactions.” In Thorndike’s first study done in 1920, he tasked two commanding officers with evaluating their soldiers in terms of physical qualities by rating their “neatness, voice, physique, bearing and energy,” along with their personal qualities in terms of “dependability, loyalty, responsibility, selflessness and cooperation.” What he discovered was that “the correlations were too high and too even,” meaning that a high score in a physical quality would trend across all the other results, more specifically, those relating to personal qualities. Conversely, a negative attribute would correlate with the rest of that soldier’s results. What’s interesting is that these results aren’t limited exclusively to likeability. Attractiveness also produces a halo effect. In 1972, Dion K. K., Berscheid E. and Walster E. conducted an experiment at the University of Minnesota where participants evaluated the photos of an attractive individual, an average one and an unattractive individual along with 27 personality traits like altruism, assertiveness, stability and so forth. Participants were then asked to predict the future happiness the photos’ subjects would have in regards to marital, parental, social, professional and overall happiness. What the results overwhelmingly showed was that participants believed that attractive subjects would have more desirable personality traits than their average and unattractive counterparts.

One of the takeaways from the first study I mentioned, done by De Angeli, Sutcliffe and Hartmann, suggests that there’s a correlation between the aesthetic qualities of an interface, its perceived usability and the overall user satisfaction with that system. With a more aesthetically pleasing site, users tend to find the website more credible and easier to use. Noam Tractinsky would later prove that this phenomenon is not culture specific. According to Donald A. Norman, the writer of Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, “The result is that everything has both a cognitive and  an affective component – cognitive to assign meaning, affective to assign value. You cannot escape affect: it is always there. More important, the affective state, whether positive or negative affect, changes how we think.”

The caveat is that beauty is contextual.

Though attractive products are perceived as easier to use, purchase decisions are based on actual usability. They are conceptually at least because I still don’t know what my girlfriend bases hers on. Just kidding. But ease of use is measured as having a smaller learning curve. It’s efficient and memorable, and it requires less training and support. That being said, the frequency of error should be low, as should the subsequent consequence. Norman writes, “The human perceptual and attentional systems are tuned to notice discrepancies and problems, not that which is expected. So we tend to notice things that distract, that impair our ability to get something done, or in the realm of aesthetics, that are particularly distasteful. We do indeed notice especially attractive items (or people), but quite often the attention drawn to the appearance can be detrimental to the task. So the best designs are often the ones that are least noticed.” On a site, users want problems solved whether that takes form as an answer to a question or a product or service that makes their lives easier. The process that provides that solution should be as painless as possible. Ideally, given the option to have a do-over, a user would still opt for your product over that of a competitor’s.

It’s important to understand that how we perceive a site evokes an array of emotions and attitudes that affect our attitude towards the content, the products being sold, the company itself as well as its credibility. A site’s attractiveness will draw users in and will incentivize them to stay, but it doesn’t complete a site on its own. Without usability and substance, those very users will grow listless and move on. Joel Spolsky argues that, “Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.”

Aesthetics and usability form the user experience, and as that’s optimized, your site’s likeability and credibility increase, so does the likelihood that a user will complete a transaction. If you’re looking for some professional help, you can contact us here. We’d love to hear the details of your next project. And not to be immodest, but we’re pretty good at what we do.

Photo Credit: Buzzle.com

 

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Sequels, Reboots and the International Box Office

A question that has been on my mind of late is why are so many movie sequels released each year? And to be clear, I’m not referring to ones like The Dark Knight Rises or Skyfall. I can’t wait to see those. I mean ones I might opt to catch on network television or, you know, not at all.

In 2011, eight of the top ten grossing movies were sequels. This consisted of Harry Potter, Transformers, Twilight, Fast Five, etc. Each of those franchises has an enormous fan base, so it makes sense that they’d do well in theaters and later on when released to DVD. What I don’t understand is why a movie that underperforms at the box office gets revived and brought back for a second or third go.

Roger Ebert listed Baby Geniuses as the worst film of 1999. Its sequel, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 is considered one of the worst movies ever made, and both have (un)successfully found their way to IMDb’s Bottom 100, a list of the worst movies ever released. There’s also Return to the Blue Lagoon, Speed 2 and Son of the Mask. None of these premises seem remotely plausible, but that’s easy to gloss oA more recent example would be The Green Lantern. Production on the 2011 film cost around $200M, and the marketing budget was somewhere in the $100M ballpark. To date, the film has grossed a total of $220M. But despite generally unfavorable reviews, and the $80M loss, a sequel has been announced, albeit unofficially. That’s not to say that the next movie will bomb by default; Warner Bros. can turn the franchise around. It did with Batman & Robin, a 3.6 on IMDb, to Batman Begins, an 8.3, so it’s certainly not improbable.

None of this is to say that Hollywood’s creativity is waxing or waning. I want to point that out because this argument is inevitably brought up when it comes to talk of the overwhelming number of pending sequels. I don’t think that’s the case given the release schedule through the end of the year, which looks amazing, but Hollywood’s down numbers are often attributed to a lack of original work. The basic claim being that a shortage of compelling material results in dips at the box office.

While that can certainly be the case sometimes, the fact of the matter is that unoriginal movies are typically made because numbers are down and not the other way around. Building on an existing franchise is a safer bet than starting from scratch, especially abroad in the international box office.

In 2011, the foreign box office accounted for 69% of overall sales according to the MPAA. When box office receipts in North America slipped to $10.2B, they were somewhere at or around $22.4B internationally. And for a number of films that had less than spectacular openings and runs stateside, several were able to gain traction abroad and recoup costs. Underworld Awakening made $62M domestically on a $70M production budget. Abroad, it raked in just under $98M bringing it to a total of $160M. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance earned $51M domestically and about $81M internationally. Wrath of the Titans made $83M in the states but $218M overseas. Most impressively, MIB: 3, which was released at the end of May, has generated $169M stateside and $429M in foreign territories.

So if each international region experienced box office growth in 2011, with China leading the pack by 35% growth in 2011 alone, will this affect which movies get released here and abroad? Maybe. Stephen Saltzman, a Hollywood lawyer who has handled several Chinese film deals, says, “People are trying to design projects for success globally, but producers today really have to make a judgment call about if their films can really appeal to both the Chinese and English speaking markets.”

So what translates well and what doesn’t? Very generally speaking, special effects driven films consistently do well overseas because explosions and fist fighting translate pretty seamlessly from one language to the next, as does the fear of giant robots. Transformers, Underworld, Wrath of the Titans, and Nicholas Cage vomiting fire in Ghost Rider each fit that bill. What doesn’t make the jump nearly as much is American comedy. I won’t say that’s always the case, but something tends to get lost in translation (e.g., with Will Ferrell movies). They typically fall flat overseas leaving audiences more confused than anything else.

In the near future, studios will undoubtedly continue to be incentivized to produce flicks that appeal to the widest demographic. Stateside, the box office ebbs and flows because it’s very much cyclical. Sometimes, it’s great. Other times, not so much. In countries around the world, the box office is booming. And if it continues to, I would expect to see major studios concentrate on more inclusive films and less so on ones with highly specific followings.

That’s not to say that great films won’t be produced independently or otherwise. Despite the large number of sequels produced last year, some which may have been lacking in substance, also released was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Artist, The Descendants, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life and War Horse. This year, the box office is estimated to be up nearly 14% according to John Fithian, President of the National Association of Theatre Owners. Maybe that’s enough for now. In any which case, this is definitely a reminder that we have a responsibility to support really great art whether that’s a summer blockbuster or an indie flick. It’s certainly possible to love both.

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Actionable Metrics vs. Vanity Metrics

Throughout advertising’s history, drawing a line from a traditional asset to a sale has been notoriously difficult, but the Internet changed that. Early on, it offered a distinct advantage over its older, offline predecessors: measurability. But despite the enormous progress made, measurement is still one of the major challenges facing both the industry and business owners. Unfortunately, the majority of data made readily available by analytics packages are vanity metrics that scrutinize at a superficial level. They’re useful in the right context and will tell you if your site is engaging or not and how visitors interact with it. But vanity metrics don’t necessarily correlate to more important numbers like cost of new customers acquisition, lifetime value, revenues and profits nor do they affect overall marketing or business goals. Vanity metrics are only focused on because they look great in press releases. The analytics that entrepreneurs should be more concerned with are actionable metrics that help them make decisions.

Think about your most recent website traffic report. What have you done with that? Do you know what drove those visitors to your page? Do you know what actions to take next or how to leverage that traffic? A business that only cares about its daily hit count is the same as a store that only cares about the number of people who come through its doors but not necessarily that they purchase anything. Generally speaking, marketers and advertisers tend to believe that whatever they were working on that immediately precedes a spike in traffic (i.e., new products, promotions or policy) probably caused it. We infer causation from correlation. We aren’t, however, quick to jump on the sword when the numbers go back down. The reality is that a response to a marketing program may often be the result of the cumulative effects of an entire campaign rather than a response to a single advertisement or promotion.

Moving forward, goals should be reoriented not just to validate that you’ve built something people want but also to confirm that your efforts to grow your business are fruitful and paying dividends. This is where you establish and define your product’s unique value proposition. So what should you be focus on instead? Listed below are ways to finding metrics you can act on that will impact your bottom line.

Not everyone who comes to your website will make a purchase or complete your designated call-to-action. That’s a given. Conversion funnels reveal when or where visitors drop-off and are used to mitigate this on a page-by-page basis. An analysis of visitor flow path diagnoses the problems that derail conversion, leading to improved usability and/or the implementation of more effective calls-to-action at each step of the way. Remember that users will almost always opt for the path of least resistance so make it easier by simplifying the process for them. The only problem is that they don’t track long lifecycle events, and almost all of them use a reporting period where events generated in that period are aggregated across all users skewing numbers at the fringes of the funnel.

That’s where cohort analysis comes in. This involves segmenting your users into smaller groups, using shared common characteristics or experiences within a defined period, to compare against one another. As an example, let’s say that you’re wanting to increase sales on an application on the Android Market. To do so, you group together users who download the free demo on week one, those on week two, those on week three and so forth. From there, you might find that of the first group, X% went on to purchase the application. Of the second group, Y% made purchases. Of the third group, Z% went on to make theirs. At that point, you’re able to evaluate any changes made which correlate back to your results and fine tune from there. This prevents influxes in traffic due to blog updates, PR/advertising, your competitors or extraneous variables from skewing your numbers.

In A/B split-tests, you have two versions of an element and a metric that defines success. To determine which is better, say it’s a new homepage layout, you randomly split your website traffic between two groups and measure their performance based on visitor flow, bounce rate and/or whether or nor your designated call-to-action is satisfied. At the end of testing, you can select the version that performs best for real-life use. Split testing is effective because it definitively confirms or denies if changes in layout, copy, design, etc. are beneficial not.

Figuring out which metrics to use, and which ones to discard, is difficult because every business is different, and the process is one that iterates itself over and over again. The best solution for you is the one that works best for your customers and/or users so don’t assume too much upfront. Measure what matters. It’s easy to think that more reports is better, but it’s not. The key is to have as few as possible. When in doubt, remember that users seek out sites in a goal-oriented fashion (e.g., to learn more about a company, to sign up for a newsletter and/or to shop). Provide a great first experience, and they might just come back and make a purchase.

If you have questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the fields below. To learn more about how Bravo Design, Inc. can contribute to your growing business, click here or fill out a contact form by here.

Photo credit: Doug Savage of www.savagechickens.com

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Klout

Average Klout ScoreFirst and foremost, to those of you who have been checking this blog regularly over the course of the last few months, we want to say thank you. It’s been a goal of ours to provide resources that help small to mid-sized business owners, marketers and designers run their businesses as best as they can. If you think we’ve been successful there, do us a favor and let us know. Conversely, if there are things we can improve on, feel free to drop us a line. We’d like to hear what you have to say.

Last spring, Sam Fiorella interviewed at a marketing agency in Toronto. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford and Kraft, Fiorella was confident in his qualifications. But during the interview, he was caught by surprise when he was asked about his Klout score. Fiorella initially hesitated before eventually confessing that he didn’t know what a Klout score was. The person conducting the interview pulled up the webpage for the service, that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100 based on “the ability to drive action,” and turned the monitor so that Fiorella could see the result for himself. His score was a modest 34. While the average score is at or around 20, the company ultimately ended up hiring someone with a score of 67.

Klout is an algorithmic system that purports itself as the “standard for influence.” It’s calculated using variables that includes follower count, frequency of updates, the Klout scores of your friends and followers as well as the number of likes and shares your updates receive. And if you have a public Twitter account, you’ve been assigned a Klout score. That is unless you’ve opted out on the website.

Before you start worrying, Klout might not be the accurate representation it’s hyped up to be, and it can be manipulated. To put the scoring distribution into perspective, Warren Buffett has a 34. President Obama has a 93, and Justin Bieber is the one person with the full-score of 100. By Klout’s measure, the Oracle from Omaha and the leader of the free world each have less influence than the 18-year-old pop star, which can’t be right.

But maybe more importantly, outside of marketers, most people probably don’t know what Klout is. And for those who do, many of them just don’t care. When it comes down to it, if a prospective employer is reluctant or unwilling to hire you because of your score, you probably don’t want to work there anyway.

So if it’s not everything and making major decisions solely on it is silly, why mention it at all?

Because we all benefit from ranking signals. PageRank helps us find better data by tallying inbound hyperlinks that act as votes of confidence. AuthorRank carries attributes based on trust and authority. Trending subjects reveal the most talked about topics in real time. None of these social graphs, Klout included, is perfect, but they do help us make sense out of all the noise around us.

Additionally, businesses can use Klout Perks to measure their social media success. Klout and its partners offer rewards, better known as perks, for third party products and services based on score, expertise, location, etc. This most often takes shape in gift cards and free samples. Brands like Virgin America, Audi, Red Bull, along with 3,000 some odd applications and partners, use the program to prioritize, segment and engage influencers who will subsequently create thousands of pieces of user-generated content and millions of impressions for a brand’s new product, initiative or campaign. They do so conceptually at least.

So should you use Klout?  It’s really up to you. Everyone uses and leverages social media differently. Some have a larger reach than others, and each has varying degrees of authority on disparate topics. If you do decide to, remember to take it with a grain of salt.

Beyond the metrics, the goal of building, or optimizing, a web presence should be to complement existing marketing and sales efforts. James Howe may have summarized it best when he said, “Popularity may mean someone has influence, but you definitely don’t need to be popular to have influence. Connecting with one person or a small group can change a neighborhood, a community or go a long way to make our world a better place to live.”

If you are still totally and unequivocally against it, you should check out Klouchebag.

Photo Credit: Klout, Rework Engine

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Author Rank

The SEO community has been buzzing with speculation over Author Rank, Google’s biggest rollout since Panda that pairs authors and their content together regardless as to where the latter resides on the Web. Author Rank serves two purposes. First, it establishes the author is a real, living, breathing human being. Second, it allows Google to compile and rate the quality of content that author is providing.

Listed below is the specific language from the patent application.

Assuming that a given agent has a high reputational score, representing an established reputation for authoring valuable content, then additional content authored and signed by that agent will be promoted relative to unsigned content or content from less reputable agents in search results.

Similarly, if the signer has a large reputational score due to the agent having an established reputation for providing accurate reviews, the rank of the referenced content can be raised accordingly. Agents whose content receives consistently strong endorsements can gain reputation. In either implementation, the agent’s reputation ultimately depends on the quality of the content which they sign.

From the looks of it, Author Rank won’t replace Page Rank. The implementation of Author Rank means that the social graph, the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related, suddenly carries an additional attribute based on trust and authority. The higher the Author Rank, the better the ranking. Conceptually, this might reduce or eliminate the impact of manufactured link building efforts that manipulate ranking on Google search engine result pages (SERP).

While this may just seem like conjecture, the evidence for a big move towards social within SEO is mounting. The fact that Google+ is built around circles means “sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles make it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life.” One of the upsides is that even if spammers invent hordes of Google+ users, they’re useless outside of your circle. To further elaborate on that point, Google writes:

Content recommended by friends and acquaintances is often more relevant than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from a friend who shares your tastes can be even better. Because of this, +1’s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search quality. For +1’s, as with any new ranking signal, we are starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.

Therefore, as Google+ picks up momentum, we expect to see the signals it creates reflected heavily in search results. Teddie Cowell, SEO Director at Guava, says, “The value of social signals actually depends heavily on user authentication, which is a complex problem often overlooked… Fundamentally, search engines need to more reliably tell who you are, whether you are real or not, and combine that with your activity online; or else even with all the hype, without authentication mechanisms social signals actually are nothing but noise and have negligible value.”

That’s where the rel=author markup comes into play. To pair authors with blogs, articles, etc., Google checks for a connection between the aforementioned as well as a Google+ profile. Authorship markup uses the rel attribute, part of the open HTML5 standard, in links to indicate the relationship between a content page and an author page. Think of it as a digital signature. A.J. Kohn of Blind Five Year Old, an online marketing firm, has a comprehensive guide on implementing the markup onto your website which you can find here. Google’s guide is listed here.

“What does this mean to me?” you ask. It means that the growth of Google+ and use of brand pages will become increasingly important for companies wanting to cross-pollinate search and social activity. It’s difficult to say when Author Rank will be rolled out in its entirety, but there are some things you can do in the meanwhile. These tips are listed in a Bravo Design, Inc. entry on “Sustainable SEO,” but they’re worth reiterating. First, markup pages for search engines. There are two guides listed above. One is by A.J. Kohn, and the other is by Google. You can also check out Schema.org for other miscellaneous content element tags. Second, develop quality content, build links and promote. This is self-explanatory, and it never changes.

If you’re not following Bravo Design, Inc. on Google+, you should do so ASAP.

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Sustainable SEO

If there’s one thing that’s certain when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), it’s probably the fact that search engines are in a constant state of flux, continually evolving to keep up with users’ needs. PageRank, used by Google, determines a page’s prominence by tallying inbound hyperlinks that act as votes of confidence. High-quality inbound links provide context about the subject matter of a page and serve as an indicator of its quality and popularity. The more votes cast for a page, the higher it rises on a search engine report page (SERP). While it isn’t the only factor used, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of Google’s web search tools.

As long as this remains so, there will exist a market for purchasing inbound links that artificially inflate page ranking. There has been, and will likely always be, networks geared towards spinning out content and building hundreds, if not thousands, of links for this exact purpose. BuildMyRank.com (BMR), one of the more well known networks that offered thousand of low-quality links at a reasonable price, announced its closure this week after the “overwhelming majority of its networks” were removed from Google’s search index.

If you’re wondering whether using a network like this is in violation of Google’s terms of service, the answer is yes.

Companies seem to not mind or know about the risk/consequence associated with getting caught (e.g., devalued rankings, possible deindexing, etc.) or even acknowledge the fact that the originating site might have nothing to do with their own or, worse, be obscene. In the coming weeks and months, we’re likely to see additional closures as well as the collateral damage for sites that employed companies who peddle similar services. While it may have seemed like a viable strategy to optimize your search engine ranking, beforehand, companies that generate countless numbers of links for this singular purpose really aren’t providing a service of value to anyone. They create artificial online relationships for the sole purpose of optimizing said ranking. So while it may not explicitly be black hat in terms of the quality of the content, it’s definitely not creating value for search engine users. And while that may have worked well in the past, Google is quickly learning to find and remove these networks, their clients and their affiliates from its listings.

A more sustainable SEO strategy centers on using techniques that will survive the test of time regardless as to what criteria search engines change. Afterall, who wants to get delisted from any given SERP?

Develop Quality Content, Build Links and Promote
One of the best ways to improve your ranking, as well as shape your branding and how your audience your audience perceives your company, is to invest in unique and relevant content development. The more useful it is, the greater the chances are that a reader will share it. The easier it is to share, the better. As search engines work to more effectively incorporate an individual’s social graph into SERPs, the more heavily your social back links will weigh in. If you’re creating content in-house, whoever is developing content for the site should have a clear understanding of the business, its target audience and its goals and objectives. Before publishing content, ask, “Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

After publishing, promote it aggressively. Link building through traditional efforts like outreach, guest contributions, social media and leveraging partnerships is a great way to obtain SERP prominence. Focus on a few important social networks, rather than spreading yourself thin over too many, and engage and interact. Share your articles to your community by posting links of your important posts or content but try and avoid overwhelming your followers.

If you prioritize your users before your page ranking, the latter will follow in suit.

Markup Pages for Search Engines
Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is rendered into HTML, it becomes difficult to recover the original structured data. Search engines can benefit greatly on-page markups that enable them to more readily decipher information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web.

Schema.org provides a collection of tags that webmasters can use to mark up content elements in ways recognized by major search engines, like Bing, Google and Yahoo!, that rely on markups to improve search results making it easier for people to find the right web pages. Additionally, there are geo-specific schema tags that can be leveraged to further send signals as to which audience the content is intended for including organization names, addresses, contact information, geo-coordinates, etc. Not only does this improve the user experience, but it also helps attract a searcher’s attention to your content and will likely increase click-through rates.

Stay Current and Competitive
This should be the most intuitive point but to be a serious contender, you have to stay current. Current is the minimum. Two steps ahead is better. Know what’s going on in your industry, on your own website and in the SEO community. Because the competitive landscape is constantly shifting, you’ll need to continually monitor and adapt your SEO strategy as problems arise so pay attention to your website metrics. If you’re using Google Analytics, you’ll know how many unique visitors are scoping out your site, how much time they’re spending on it, what content is most frequently being read, what keywords are being used to organically find your page and much, much more. If you’re not, you need to. Agility will help you turn on a dime but only if you can see where you’re going.

Yes, that requires a lot of time and energy or one intern. Just kidding. But there are a countless number of forums, articles and other free resources for SEO professionals to learn about more about the trade. If you’re managing your business’ SEO and marketing campaign(s), there’s no reason to not leverage this.

Lastly, focus on the long haul and decide where you’ll be one, five or ten years from now. Inevitably, there will be goals that can be further broken down into milestones that must be completed along the way to make progress. The purpose isn’t to create a concrete plan that will ensure your company’s passage into the coming century. It’s to address your strengths and weaknesses, so you can leverage and mitigate them respectively. As was the case with BMR, the problem is that short-term decisions have a habit of contaminating long-term success. One of the best ways to not only succeed, but to flourish, is to not shoot yourself in the foot.

Photo Credit: www.searchcowboys.com

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Cross Channel Marketing

Social media marketing has evolved into a global phenomenon as it continues to become an evermore important communication medium for businesses to promote brand awareness, customer engagement and enhanced service. This effort largely revolves around creating content that resonates with an organization’s target audience while encouraging readers to forward said content through their social networks. It’s advantageous on the grounds that it appears to come from a trustworthy, third party source, as opposed to a company itself. Improved customer relationship management (CRM) along with increased visibility, familiarity and credibility are all enhancement mechanisms connected to social media marketing. Additionally, it’s a relatively inexpensive medium that serves as a platform for organizations to build marketing campaigns. While it is a good way to knock on the door, it’s not the be-all and end-all of sales, marketing nor is it a one-stop shop that fixes businesses overnight at little or no cost. It requires a real time investment with a firm grounding in well thought out strategy. It’s important to remember that social media works by driving traffic to your website where it can be converted into a sale not the other way around. A survey done by Demandbase and Focus indicated that a company’s website was the top online source of new sales leads and seven times more effective than social media.

One medium that has become increasingly underestimated is outdoor advertising, an effective adjunct to advertising; especially, when coupled with other media. Unlike newspapers, TV, direct mail and/or online advertising, it doesn’t have to be invited into the home. It works at all hours of the day and night, seven days a week. People are exposed to it when they walk by or drive past and, whether they like it or not, they can’t turn it off or throw it out. It, literally, has a captured audience, and its messages work on the advertising principle of effective frequency. Since most messages stay in the same place for a month or longer, the multiple impressions made reinforce the presence of a product or company making it more memorable. Without a doubt, billboards will continue to be successful in the future. The simple reason for this is the very nature of them. They are large posters in public places that can’t really be avoided.

Every channel has unique communications attributes, and every customer his or her own profile, that marketers must be aware of in order to effectively present consistent and coordinated information to customers. Cross channel marketing involves tracking a user across multiple channels, listening and engaging with him or her at the right time and place. While some are quick to say that content or context is king, the fact of the matter is that opportunity resides in engagement. Content refers to a carefully crafted message. Context deals with all the details surrounding its deployment; especially, in regards to its timeliness. Cross channel marketing can lead to higher conversions and higher customer loyalty. Both are steppingstones towards generating more revenue, but the caveat here is integration. If there is dissonance in the message(s) delivered, goals are misaligned or it’s executed too early or too late, a campaign will fall into shambles. Over the next several years, making the move to true cross channel marketing will be more critical than ever before to a company’s success. A company’s capacity to integrate, manage and interchangeably use both traditional and emerging technologies will enable businesses to reach customers in motion and optimize the user experience from beginning to end. A strong advertising campaign will integrate as many of these channels as possible.

The introduction of the Internet has changed advertising and marketing. It has vastly altered the ways in which people view, use and interact with media. This has, in some ways, changed the effectiveness of certain techniques and channels, but it has also created new opportunities. While there is no doubt that the media landscape is moving towards a digital future, it doesn’t mean that print and digital are mutually exclusive. It doesn’t signal that traditional media is on the brink of extinction either because social media marketing is not a replacement for the traditional marketing framework but an extension of currently existing marketing strategies. Ultimately, businesses that have their finger on the pulse of what customers want will always have a competitive advantage.

If you have any questions as to how Bravo Design, Inc. might contribute to your growing business, please fill out a contact form listed here or leave a comment on this page, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

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The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP [Intellectual Property] Act (PIPA) Explained

Wired Censored (Bravo Design, Inc.)
www.wired.com

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP [intellectual property] Act (PIPA) are anti-piracy bills which, if passed, would expand the ability of US law enforcement and copyright holders to fight the piracy of intellectual property and counterfeit goods by seeking court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Its main targets would be “rogue” overseas sites like the Pirate Bay, a website based in Sweden, which hosts magnet links and torrent files that allow users to download digital media and software illegally. While the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) lays out enforcement measures, it’s not enforceable against sites based in other countries. SOPA goes further by stopping companies based within the US from providing funding, advertising, links or other assistance to sites that facilitate copyright infringement. The legislation would also require search engines to remove websites from search queries altogether which opponents of the legislation liken to methods employed by regimes that suppress political dissent. Additionally, SOPA includes an “anti-circumvention” clause, which makes providing instruction on how to sidestep SOPA nearly as bad as violating its main provisions. Ultimately, this clause may be extended to cover tools like VPNs and Tor that are used by human rights groups, government officials and businesses to protect their communications and evade online spying and filtering.

Opponents of the legislation worry that the bill is so broad that it would allow content owners to target US websites that unknowingly host pirated content. This has been a particular concern for Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube, all of which depend heavily on content uploaded by users. In the case of WikiLeaks, a site thats posts the internal communications of governments and private corporations alike, it’s hard to imagine how it wouldn’t qualify for blacklisting. Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and author of a treatise titled “American Constitutional Law,” argues that SOPA is unconstitutional because, if passed, “an entire website containing tens of thousands of pages could be targeted if only a single page were accused of infringement.” For SOPA opponents, one of the most alarming qualities, in its original form, is that it lets intellectual property owners take action without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off. All it requires is a single letter claiming a “good faith belief” that the target site has infringed on a copyright. While filing false allegations is a crime, the process would put the burden of proof and cost of arbitration on the accused. Once a search engine or payment processor receives a quarantine notice, it would have five days to either comply or contest the claim in court. In the most recent version of the bill, the five day window has softened. Companies now need a warrant issued by a federal judge, but the potential for abuse still poses a significant threat as rights holders face little penalty for filing allegations without doing due diligence or considering fair use. Opponents of SOPA and PIPA believe that neither does enough to protect against false accusations. While provisions in the bills remove liability from payment processors and ad networks that cut off sites in the event a claims turn out to be false, the brunt of the blow is taken on by the site itself. Red Hat, a company that creates open source software, writes, “In a single generation, the Internet has transformed our world to such an extent that it is easy to forget its miraculous properties and take it for granted. It’s worth reminding ourselves, though, that our future economic growth depends on our ability to use the Internet to share new ideas and technology. Measures that block the freedom and openness of the Internet also hinder innovation. That poses a threat to the future success of Red Hat and other innovative companies. The sponsors of SOPA and PIPA claim that the bills are intended to thwart web piracy. Yet, the bills overreach, and could put a website out of business after a single complaint. Web sites would vanish, and have little recourse, if they were suspected of infringing copyrights or trademarks.”

Lamar Smith, SOPA (Bravo Design, Inc.)
US Representative for Texas's 21st congressional district, Lamar Smith

For the moment, SOPA has been tabled. It’s unlikely to recover in its present form. The most controversial portions have been excised, and may altogether be dead, but the battle still wages on. Lamar Smith, the Texas representative who first introduced SOPA, derided Wednesday’s blackout and has gone on to say, “It is ironic that a website [Wikipedia] dedicated to providing information is spreading misinformation about the Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill will not harm Wikipedia, domestic blogs or social networking sites. This publicity stunt does a disservice to its users by promoting fear instead of facts. Perhaps during the blackout, Internet users can look elsewhere for an accurate definition of online piracy. It’s disappointing that some SOPA critics appear not to have read the bill. The Stop Online Piracy Act only targets foreign websites that are primarily dedicated to illegal activity. It does not grant the Justice Department the authority to seek a court order to shut down any website operated in the US. This bill will not censor the Internet. [sic] But it will protect American workers, inventors and job creators from foreign thieves who steal our products, technology and intellectual property.” Smith has since promised to reintroduce the bill for discussion in February. He and the bills’ supporters dismiss accusations of censorship as the freedom of speech doesn’t include and/or protect criminal behavior. While SOPA’s critics accuse the bills’ backers of failing to understand the unintended implications and collateral damage which may result from the legislation being considered, both sides will have to come together in finding a resolution that protects copyright holders and innovation here and abroad.

To see SOPA in its entirety, click here. To read more about PIPA, click here.

Photo credit: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

Update – 01/20/12 @ 11:20am : SOPA is dead.

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Ergonomics and the User Experience

User Experience, Bravo DesignWhile this should go without saying, your website has a huge impact on your sales and the number of clients you can, and will, close. How your website looks and performs will determine how the public perceives you and your business and can decide how successful a new marketing campaign can do post-implementation, so design is an essential part of any marketing campaign and a necessity to compete in a media driven world.

Furthermore, it will serve to develop your authority as a trusted provider. Whether you actually sell your products and services online or not, your website exists to initiate and catalyze visitor conversion. This might take the form of an actual checkout, the filling out of a subscription form or a free quote. In any case, conversions are taking place on your site.

If you’re considering a redesign, this blog should supply you with some of the considerations necessary to making the decisions that will facilitate an overhaul while positively impacting your overall profitability.

The usability and user experience (UX design) both affect the conversion rate of your site and will directly have an impact on revenue generated. Neither hinges completely on specific details like color theory or font selection as much as it does aspects like cross-browser and mobile compatibility, content management systems, site architecture and so forth. The scope of the UX is directed at affecting “all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used” (Norman).

UX design begins by learning about a business, doing market research to understand its users and understanding how a service can be developed that would affect them in a meaningful way. Thus UX design has become a critical turning point in defining business strategy and provides a baseline for said decisions, but a UX driven process doesn’t end at implementation. Its focus extends into ongoing testing and continued development down the road. The easier potential clients find it to connect to you, the more likely they are to turn to you for their needs.

Moving forward, below are simple tips to better usability and UX.

1. This point should be the most intuitive. Critical elements; especially, those that aid navigation, should be emphasized. The site’s capabilities and limitations should be easy to discern. High contrast between text and any background used should increase legibility. That typically means using dark text against a light background.

2. While being unique and standing apart from the crowd is normally considered good, sometimes you have to follow conventional wisdom and do what everyone else is doing. Usage patterns, behavior developed from extended web use, expect that links be blue. It expects for navigation to be straightforward. Users should be able to find information quickly and easily despite the length of a document. This can be utilized with search functions, indexes, table of contents and so forth.

As a sidebar, Jakob Nielsen performed a usability study on search boxes. While this might not sound fascinating, it found that the average search box length is 18-characters wide, and that 27% of queries were too long for it. Extending it to 27-characters would accommodate 90% of queries.

3. White space, or negative space, improves comprehension and builds hierarchy between elements on a page. As information gets densely packed into a document, it can become difficult to comprehend and/or unreadable. What is a cipher eventually leads to abandonment. Employ margins, padding, scale and spacing. When repeatedly and effectively utilized, it helps develop an identity and rapport between you and your user.

4. Usability testing and diminishing marginal return tie in together on this point. A second study by Nielsen found that five test subjects would reveal around 85% of all problems with a website. It would take an additional ten testers to reveal the remaining quirks. In the smaller group studies, it was found that the first one or two users discovered the larger problems. The other testers would find smaller ones and confirm what the first one or two had already found. While the biggest delta is going from zero to one tester, any testing is better than no testing.

Michael Smythe, winner of the Designers Institute of New Zealand Outstanding Achievement Award, gives this definition for design, “Design is an integrative process that seeks resolution -not compromise- through cross-disciplinary teamwork. Design is intentional. Success by design simply means prospering on purpose.” In the long-run, effective design is an investment that increases the bottom line by capturing new market share and bolstering customer retention.

If you have any questions as to how Bravo Design, Inc. might contribute to your growing business, please visit us at http://www.bravodesigninc.com/contact/ or leave a comment on this page, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

  1. Donald Norman: Invisible Computer.
  2. Jakob Nielsen & Hoa Loranger: Prioritizing Web Usability.
  3. Jakob Nielsen: Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users.
https://vimeo.com/bravodesignince

WordCamp LA 2011 – Design, SEO and Selling WordPress

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to speak at Los Angeles’ WordCamp about my experience with WordPress and how we’ve developed countless websites for individuals and businesses using this amazing platform.

WordPress Design

While talking about design, I used one of the latest websites that Bravo Design, Inc. created for World Wide Digital Services, a film rental equipment company that commissioned a new website for their expanding entertainment industry connections. This website was used as an example of what WordPress can do and how it can break the mold of what people have come to expect from the open-source blogging CMS.

This WordPress theme was custom designed and developed by Bravo Design, Inc. starting from WordPress’ basic Twenty Ten theme.

“Oh, that’s like a blog isn’t it?” Yes, but that’d be like saying: “Wow, that’s a pretty nice Maserati… that’s like for running errands isn’t it?” There is much more to WordPress than the platform’s original blog functionality.

WordPress Search Engine Optimization

So we know that WordPress is ideal as a blogging platform, and it’s true that WordPress is already pretty optimized for search engines straight out of the box. So let’s just have a quick recap of what the search engines like, and what they like about WordPress, shall we?

Search Engines Love Keyword Relevance. Probably more than anything, search engines love finding people results that are extremely relevant to their search query. But the trick, well not really a trick, is finding how the search engines rate/rank relevance. So here’s a breakdown of where to put your keywords throughout your site.

  1. Domain Name / Subdomain
  2. URL of a webpage
  3. Title of a webpage
  4. Meta data of a webpage (description, keywords)
  5. Tags on the webpage (h1, h2, a)

So while these are some good places to put a small and specific assortment of your keywords (usually no more than 5-6 per page), the search engines (primarily Google) place a greater importance on a website’s traffic, PageRank (the number of quality websites linking to it), and how frequently it’s updated. Important stuff to remember.

Using WordPress puts you in a great position to compete on the search engines: 1. Blog = Frequently Updateable 2. Keywords / Custom Themes = Great Keyword Placement / Usage 3. SEO = Great plugins for updating search engines about website changes. All that’s left is providing your website visitors with interesting and useful content they’ll enjoy and share with their friends (Traffic / PageRank; it’s not all easy but it doesn’t have to be hard).

Selling WordPress

Probably the greatest way to “selling” a client on WordPress is simply providing them with a demo. The biggest hurdle that a lot of young designers and new upstarts have trouble with is finding the right client. Selling WordPress should not be hard, finding the right client is what will take up your time.

I’m a fan of the soft sell when dealing with WordPress. Does the client need a new website? Does the client need a new design? How is the client competing on the search engines with other businesses in their industry and approximate location? Once these questions have been answered you can make your judgement on client. Not everyone needs a website (well, that’s not true, but not everyone realizes that they need a website) and trying to force a website on a client is counter-productive. Oftentimes, I’ll meet with a client, we’ll talk about websites and WordPress but they’ll pass on the job. Maybe a month will go by and the client will get back in contact with me ready to get a website going.

Plant the seed, give it a little water and let it grow into a stronger desire and understanding of websites and the internet environment. Provide them with resources to do more research on their own; be helpful; not forceful.

Finally, be nice. That’s it. Be patient with your clients. They don’t know as much as you (that’s why they are coming to you), and it’s your job to show them how they can improve their business with a customized and focused web presence. Your job is to help them, and convert them to the web way of life (sometimes easier said than done).

The slides from my WordCamp LA 2011 Presentation are available for download, here.

https://vimeo.com/bravodesignince

HTML Basics For Beginners: Part Three Image Styling

In this series of tutorial articles, we’ve covered HTML basics like how to Embed Links In Your WordPress Website, and How To Style Text In Your WordPress Website. Now we’re taking a look at our <img> tags (for images).

WordPress allows us to simply upload and manage all our media content, but sometimes we need a little extra style thrown into the mix. We’ll be taking a look at how the <img> tag is used, and how we can make a few simple styling modifications on-the-fly.

So let’s first examine how WordPress inserts the <img> tag when an image is uploaded and Inserted Into The Post. Here is what the HTML will usually look like after “Insert Into Post” is selected after an image is uploaded. I have also chosen not to include a link, and the none option was selected for the alignment.

<img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="photo_helicopterbunny" width="450" height="333" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-725" />

What will be
displayed:

If you’ve already read the previous two articles, one thing that may stand out about our <img> tag is that there is no </img>. This is because the <img> tag isn’t surrounding anything other than the attributes contained within the tag itself (i.e. href, width, height, title, alt and class). We will notice, however, that at the end of the tag there is a /> that closes the <img> tag specifically. Let’s mess around with some of the attributes to see how we can change the image…

<img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="Cutest Bunny Ever" width="225" height="166" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-725" />

What will be
displayed:

Please take note of the changes made to the title, width and height attributes. The href was left the same, still linking to http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg, but let’s make a change to a different (perhaps even cuter photo. Hit it!)

<img src="http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/11_03/RabbitKit2NSPA_468x316.jpg" alt="" title="A Bunny Under A Pile Of Kittens" width="468" height="316" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-725" />

What will be
displayed:

Here we see that I’ve changed the href attribute to link to another image that has not been uploaded on our server (hence, no http://www.bravodesigninc.com/… in our href attribute).

Most likely, you’ll be using your images around text in your WordPress posts and pages, so let’s see how we can have both displayed properly.

<img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="Cutest Bunny Ever" width="225" height="166" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-725" /> Pardon my Greek, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis placerat mauris ut sem auctor ut consequat nisl dignissim. Maecenas aliquet, nisi eu elementum porta, orci mauris porta urna, euismod condimentum urna ligula vel urna. Integer eu turpis ac ligula adipiscing bibendum ac ut sem. Aenean vestibulum felis lacinia augue laoreet congue. Phasellus ultricies convallis lacus, nec pharetra tortor commodo sit amet. Sed imperdiet, magna facilisis dignissim eleifend, mi felis sodales mi, et rhoncus turpis nulla a tortor. Integer pretium lacinia facilisis. Maecenas vitae tempus nulla. Duis hendrerit, nulla quis tristique fringilla, sapien odio convallis odio, eu hendrerit dui odio iaculis odio. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.

What will be
displayed:

Pardon my Greek, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis placerat mauris ut sem auctor ut consequat nisl dignissim. Maecenas aliquet, nisi eu elementum porta, orci mauris porta urna, euismod condimentum urna ligula vel urna. Integer eu turpis ac ligula adipiscing bibendum ac ut sem. Aenean vestibulum felis lacinia augue laoreet congue. Phasellus ultricies convallis lacus, nec pharetra tortor commodo sit amet. Sed imperdiet, magna facilisis dignissim eleifend, mi felis sodales mi, et rhoncus turpis nulla a tortor. Integer pretium lacinia facilisis. Maecenas vitae tempus nulla. Duis hendrerit, nulla quis tristique fringilla, sapien odio convallis odio, eu hendrerit dui odio iaculis odio. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.

You’ll notice that the class attribute in my <img> is has ‘alignleft,’ the alignment option that I selected before I inserted the image into my post.

Let’s see what is displayed when I have my image in the middle of the text…

Pardon my Greek, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis placerat mauris ut sem auctor ut consequat nisl dignissim. Maecenas aliquet, nisi eu elementum porta, orci mauris porta urna, euismod condimentum urna ligula vel urna. Integer eu turpis ac ligula adipiscing bibendum ac ut sem. <img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="Cutest Bunny Ever" width="225" height="166" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-725" /> Aenean vestibulum felis lacinia augue laoreet congue. Phasellus ultricies convallis lacus, nec pharetra tortor commodo sit amet. Sed imperdiet, magna facilisis dignissim eleifend, mi felis sodales mi, et rhoncus turpis nulla a tortor. Integer pretium lacinia facilisis. Maecenas vitae tempus nulla. Duis hendrerit, nulla quis tristique fringilla, sapien odio convallis odio, eu hendrerit dui odio iaculis odio. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.

What will be
displayed:

Pardon my Greek, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis placerat mauris ut sem auctor ut consequat nisl dignissim. Maecenas aliquet, nisi eu elementum porta, orci mauris porta urna, euismod condimentum urna ligula vel urna. Integer eu turpis ac ligula adipiscing bibendum ac ut sem. Aenean vestibulum felis lacinia augue laoreet congue. Phasellus ultricies convallis lacus, nec pharetra tortor commodo sit amet. Sed imperdiet, magna facilisis dignissim eleifend, mi felis sodales mi, et rhoncus turpis nulla a tortor. Integer pretium lacinia facilisis. Maecenas vitae tempus nulla. Duis hendrerit, nulla quis tristique fringilla, sapien odio convallis odio, eu hendrerit dui odio iaculis odio. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.

So to sum up what we’ve covered, let’s take one more look at the <img> tag and it’s attributes:

<img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="Cutest Bunny Ever" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-725" />

What will be
displayed:

  1. The tag starts with: <img
  2. src=”http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg”, is the URL to the image file.
  3. alt=””, alternate text visible if/when an image doesn’t load properly.
  4. title=”Cutest Bunny Ever”, title that will appear when the user rolls over the image
  5. width=”225″, width in pixels
  6. height=”166″, height in pixels
  7. class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-725″, the class that WordPress applies to your image based on your options selected before inserting into post. (e.g., alignleft, alignright, alignnone, etc.)
  8. The tag ends with />

I hope this has been a helpful article regarding updating the images in your WordPress website. We’re always looking for ways to enhance our tutorials, so if you have an idea, or an issue let us know!

https://vimeo.com/bravodesignince

HTML Basics For Beginners: Part Two Text Styling

If you haven’t already, check out our first article in the “HTML Basics For WordPress Beginners” series, available here.

Part Two: Styling Our Text With Tags

In our first lesson, we covered how to use the <a> tag to embed links on our webpage. Now we’ll be looking at some quick and easy ways to style our text on the fly. Let’s dive right in…

This text is about to be <strong>bold</strong>.

What will be
displayed:

This text is about to be bold.

We just made use of the <strong> tag that will make our text elements bolder and help them stand out. Again, like the <a> tag we reviewed, there is an opening tag: (<strong>) and a closing tag (</strong>). Let’s try out making something italic

This text is about to be <em>italicized</em>.

What will be
displayed:

This text is about to be italicized.

Again, we can see the effect that our <em> tags have on the text that they are surrounding (as always, being sure we use both the <em> and </em> tags to wrap around the text to which we want to apply our italic style. Now let’s underline some text…

This text is about to be <u>underlined</u>.

What will be
displayed:

This text is about to be underlined.

We are able to underline text using the <u> tag. I’m sure that by now you are seeing a pattern of how our tags, wrapped around our text elements, are creating the various styles we’ve seen so far. Just as I did in the previous article, I’ll emphasize how important it is to close our tags (i.e. <b></b>, <em></em>).

Let’s take a look at all our styles in one line:

I'm <strong>important</strong>, while I'm <em>sarcastic</em>, and I should be <u>remembered</u>.

What will be
displayed:

I’m important, while I’m sarcastic, and I should be remembered.

So what if we want some text to be bold and italic? Calm down, I’ll show you right now…

This text is<strong><em>bold and italic</em></strong>.

What will be
displayed:

This text is bold and italic.

Notice how the <em> tags are nested within the <strong> tags. Imagine that the tags represent a box, and each style is its own box. We are putting our text into our italic box (<em>) and then taking our text in the italic box and placing it in the bold box (<strong>). Now let’s have a look at the <font> tag…

This text is<font color="#0000CC">red</font>.

What will be
displayed:

This text is red.

Ok, so if you’ve had very limited exposure to HTML, you’re probably asking yourself “What exactly does #FF0000 mean?” First things first, looking at the <font> tag we see that similar to our <a> tags we have an attribute (color) with a value of #FF0000. #FF0000 is a hexadecimal color value that all browsers will recognize (and yes, the # sign is important). For more information about HTML colors, check out: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_colornames.asp; it’s a great resource.

We’ll also find that we’re able to use actual color names as well, like ‘blue’, ‘red’, ‘green’ and ‘honeydew.’ Again, the full list of color names and their HEX values is available at: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_colornames.asp; definitely worth clicking into and browsing for a minute. Let’s try some colors out.

All the colors of the rainbow: &#60font color="red"&#62Red&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="orange"&#62Orange&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="yellow"&#62Yellow&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="green"&#62Green&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="blue"&#62Blue&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="indigo"&#62Indigo&#60/font&#62 and &#60font color="violet"&#62Violet&#60/font&#62

What will be
displayed:

All the colors of the rainbow Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet
Don't matter if you're <font color="black">Black</font> or <font color="white">White</font>

What will be
displayed:

Don’t matter if you’re Black or White
What's the difference between <font color="greenyellow">Green Yellow</font> and <font color="yellowgreen">Yellow Green</font>?

What will be
displayed:

What’s the difference between Green Yellow and Yellow Green?

So now you have acquired a great deal of power from learning about the <font> tag, but with great power comes great responsibility. Do Not Abuse These Tags on your website. Color styles are neat, but you don’t need your professional website looking like the Rainbow Connection. So please, as a professional web designer I am asking (maybe even begging) you not to overuse these tags. Practice moderation in life and design. That being said, have fun!

https://vimeo.com/bravodesignince

HTML Basics For Beginners: Part One Embedding Links

If you’re reading this post, chances are you were referred to it by the Bravo Design team regarding your new WordPress CMS website. I’d just like to take a moment and emphasize, probably again, how incredible the WordPress CMS platform is. Faster load times when compared to Joomla and Drupal, and optimized more efficiently than any other CMS right out of the box. Bravo Design Inc. primarily uses WordPress for all of our website commissions because we are all about empowering our clients. So how can we empower our clients further? By showing them some quick and easy HTML basics for making their websites easier to update and keeping them looking great.

Part One: Using The <a> Tag To Embed Links

Let’s get started with the HTML tags you’ll be using the most, starting with the <a> tag. Every time you’d like to insert a link in your post, you’ll be using the <a> tag.

Let’s take a look at how a link is coded in HTML, don’t worry this’ll be painless.

<a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>

What will be
displayed:

So we see that the only thing visible is the text that is surrounded by the <a> and </a> tags. This is a fundamental concept of HTML; making sure you always close your tags. Forgetting to do so can have some pretty hairy results.

Let’s take a look at an example where a client has forgotten to close their <a> tag.

One of my favorite websites that I use to search the internet is <a href="http://www.google.com">Google. I use it all the time, and I definitely prefer it to using <a href="http://www.bing.com">Bing</a>.

What will be
displayed:

One of my favorite websites that I use to search the internet is Google. I use it all the time, and I definitely prefer it to using Bing.

You’ll notice that the link for http://www.google.com is active for all the text until the next <a> tag is called around the word “Bing.” So we see how forgetting to close our tags can have a drastically adverse effect on our code, so if you take one lesson from this series: Remember to close your tags!

We’ve covered how to use the <a> tag, so let’s take it a step further and make a link open in a new window. Take a deep breath, it’s only an additional 15 characters.

<a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">Google</a>

What will be
displayed:

The output looks exactly like our first example, but when we click on the link (go ahead, click it) the link opens in a new window (or tab, depending on how you have your browser configured). The extra snippet of code, target=“_blank” tells the browser that this link should be opened in a new window. By default, the target attribute equals “_self”, meaning that the link will open in the same window that you are browsing.

A good practice is having links within your website (i.e. http://www.mysite.com/services, http://www.mysite.com/about) open in the same window, and having links that lead off of your site (i.e. http://www.google.com, http://www.bing.com) open in a new window.

By now you’re feeling pretty confident about putting links into your website, so I’ll show you just one more cool feature before we move on. What if we’d like to show some more information for our links without taking up more room on our web page? We can do this easily, with use of the “title” attribute in our <a> tag. Let’s try it out.

<a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank" title="The internet's most used search engine">Google</a>

What will be
displayed:

Doesn’t really look like much, until we roll over the link with our cursor. After holding the cursor still over the link for a moment, we’ll see the title that we entered in our code. So this is a cool way to add some extra information to our links without taking up too much space on our web page.

https://vimeo.com/bravodesignince

VLC, the Only Video Player You’ll Ever Need

The internet is filled with a lot of junk.

If you haven’t been presented with some shady online media player demanding that you download some Xvid codec to watch a water-skiing squirrel video, chances are you’re a n00b. And if that’s the case, there’s an even better chance that you’ll actually download the shady Xvid codec only to realize that it’s some crappy virus or spyware designed to steal all your passwords while a bouncing Charlie Sheen head laughs hysterically and verbally mocks you.

VLC player to the rescue! If you’ve already downloaded and installed the VLC player feel free to pat yourself on the back and grab an ice cream. Those of you who have yet to experience the empowering glory of the VLC player, brace yourselves.

Multi-platform (Mac OSX, Windows, GNU/Linux and many more), open-source sweetness engineered to eliminate the need to download countless codecs and juggle multiple media players (sorry, Divx, Quicktime and Windows Media Player). Since downloading VLC player in 2007, I’ve played every video format that I’ve come across: .mpg, .avi, .mkv, .flv, .f4v, .mov, .ogg, .3gg, and a few others that escape me at the moment. If VLC doesn’t play it, you probably shouldn’t be trying to watch it in the first place (“why isn’t TRON_LEGACY.docx playing?!”).

Developed by our friends at the non-profit Video LAN Organization, VLC player has brought about a new standard for watching videos on your computer.

Go ahead, check it out and download the free program that will only make your life easier.*

*Your life may actually get harder depending on the amount of time spent watching videos on your computer instead of focusing on work and responsibilities.