Notes from a wireframe world

Tab Candy, a forthcoming addition to Firefox (you can get it built into a version of Firefox 4 beta here) is to Tab’s what Tab’s where to pages.

Tab Candy, lets you group tab’s together, name them and share them with others. why is this important? Well if your like me you’ll likely have a few browsers open, and a number (+10) tabs on each browser open which is fine except when you come to look for anything.

Just where did you put that cool NFAWW blog post you wanted to read?

But with Tab Candy you can organize your tabs so that all the cool blog posts you need to read can be kept together.

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Just a quick note to introduce ab-testing.co.uk, what hopeful soon will be a ab testing framework written in PHP.

It is an outstanding book, if your it’s target audience. There is a lot of information here, but its fast-paced, colloquial writing style make it digestible. What’s more, the book is well thought-out, balanced, well structured and accurate. It’s an excellent combination of fact, anecdote, theory, analysis and practical advice. The interviews alone make it worth buying and reading again and again.

Selecting the right keywords, words you will ensure are in your pages so search engines find them, can be at best a hit and miss adventure, how do you know the words you select are going to be the ones the majority of people looking for your site are going to search for?

And even if you pick words people are looking for, how do you know if they will find your site? Thankfully Google of all people, provide a free and easy to use service that you can use to do just that.

Firstly point your favorite browser to https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal
This is designed as a tool to pick the right adwords for your campaign, but we can use it to find good key words as well.

OK put in some words you think are useful, words that will you think people looking for you site will use, then click on the “Get Keyword Ideas” button, then open the CSV files (links to them appear at the bottom of each keyword) and sort them in order of number “Global Monthly Search Volume“ once you’ve done so delete anything with less than about 100,000 searches per month.

Then open up a new tab/window and do a google search for each key word. When the results are returned, you will notice near the top of the screen on the right hand side something along the lines of “Results 1 – 10 of about 203,000,000 for social media. (0.12 seconds) “ copy and paste the number of searches into the cell after “Global Monthly Search Volume” and repeat for all your key words.

Now finally you will be in a position to see what keywords are useful to you, and which are not

For each key word divide the “Global Monthly Search Volume” by the number of Hit Google finds for that keyword, the higher the result, the more chance there is some one will find your site via that keyword, there are of course a lot more things you can do to improve your ranking, and I’ll go through some of them in the next article

When I first heard about “Design Through Dialogue” I was a little sceptical. Firstly the book is aimed at architects not webdesigners, and secondly “Design Through Dialogue” makes me think of designing by consensus which, as I’m sure you all agree, leads to the most dull, boring and generally user unfriendly sites out there.

However far from designing by consensus “Design Through Dialogue” is about taking hold of the conflict that exists when a client wants one thing and the designer (an architect in this case) wants another and seeing it through, and not taking the easy option of a compromise but forming a new third way that doesn’t compromise and is acceptable to both, it still sounds like compromise to me, but the buildings produced via this methodology (e.g. the Supreme Court building, Jerusalem (see http://www.theodora.com/wfb/photos/israel/israel_photos_37.html ) are far from dull compromise designs.

While not directly about webdesign, “Design Through Dialogue” does offer a way of dealing with throes difficult client – designer relationships, without leading to dull compromise designs and while designing we pull on inspiration for all sources so while should we not pull on ideas from other design disciplines when dealing with clients?

“Design Through Dialogue” is currently in both hard and paperback, in the UK, and is due to be released in the US in December 2009.