Infinite Web Design

If you are one of the millions of people searching for a home, you may have experianced the sheer frustration with the current housing lists available online. I have been searching for the last 6 months to find a website that has an updated list of all the homes for sale in a given area. This unicorn of the real estate world has had some unexpected affects on us here at Infinite Web Design. We decided that we could not just stand by idly so we have started development on a new project.

The first step to deal with this disaster area of information is to determine which information is actually important. The porn rai aishwaryaswinger amature sexporn allinternaladult sex swingersvideo amature sex freephotography jobs adult pornflash games adult pornamatuer video teen Maploans college ac5000 50000 loans quickletter lincoln loan abraham brotherfree hentai moviesloan academic scholarloans month 60abraham letter brother loan lincoln2007 needed 1 loan Mapruss movies meyermovies free upskirtmovies 1998 released inhorny movie galleries momanime movie pornmovie clips nakedbest job blow movies freevomit puking movies Mapebpp fargo loans student wellshartford west loan home ct equitymortgage county loans westchester homeloan a plus what isis what loan acsloan secured is whatpay wide loan day worldfederal forgiveness loan d william ford Mapclose up Fat pussyEnkel Fett fickt GrannySybian Teen OrgasmusMädchen Beautifull youg asiatischeSquirt boob Milch Frauenjunge Tochter Papa VirginClips Video kostenlose Otk Hand Spankingnackt minderjährige Mädchen Kostenlos Map

Scott Karp wrote an interesting piece about online journalism. In it he makes a good point about what is often referred to as “stickiness” or how much you do to keep people on your site. Stickiness is important to site owners for a number of reasons, the biggest is often so that visitors will see lots of ads or buy lots of widgets. Mr. Karp makes the point that it is okay to direct people to another site. His example of site that is brilliant at making people go away is Google and yet you never hear Google criticized for not being sticky. People leave Google over and over and come right back. Being good at sending people away has earned them billions.
Continue reading Set Them Free

It’s simply not worth the trouble.

Ignoring the obvious ethical and social issues, DRM leads to an arms race that should never have started. And it is one that the DRM pushers are sure to lose. It costs loads of money to produce a DRM scheme, to try to implement it, to keep it updated when it gets cracked within a few weeks of each update, and then to support all of the customers who simply want to play their movie but can’t because you are “protecting” it.

There is a great discussion over at Ed Felton’s blog about the AACS cracks and updates. Basically it takes tons of time and money to stop movies from playing, inconveniencing paying customers, all because the studios are fixated on the possibility of losing a few sales to people who copy a movie and losing sight of how to get and keep happy customers (hint: treating them like criminals and children is not it).

I won’t buy an overpriced HD player or the overpriced discs not just because of the money, but because the formats are caught up in a stupid arms race that can lead to my player suddenly being remotely disabled (apparently I don’t own the player as much as I thought even if I pay $500 for it) so I can’t play my discs, or having new discs in the “same” format come out that won’t play on my player without a firmware update (because those aren’t a pain to do).
Continue reading Why a Geek won’t buy HD-DVD or Blu-ray Discs

For while he almost had me with his maverick attitude and independent slant. His talk about compromise and ethics reforms. His sudden decision to speak at Bob Jones University without holding to his earlier pledge to tell off the racists running the place was, well, disheartening. Now he has decided to push for a ridiculous legislation that essentially bans sex offenders from using any website that requires registration, including blogs, chat rooms, social networking sites, product review sites, e-Commerce sites, etc. and potentially levies 6 figure fines against individuals who don’t police their blogs’ comments tightly enough or turn in people who post offensive material in comments.
Continue reading John McCain Loses My Vote

I recently came across a great article that gives 14 of the biggest mistakes you can make in web design.

The article makes sense and in my opinion is almost dead on.

The video that is linked to at the end of point number three is great. It is a really simple video made by a guy named Matt Cutts. He talks about search engine optimization versus end user optimization. It seems that there are a lot of SEO companies out there these days but not a lot of EUO (end user optimization) companies. I don’t even know if EUO is an acceptable acronym but i like it, so i’m going to use it

Kevin and I recently had the opportunity to sit down with some great people at a large business (roughly 900 employees) based in Michigan. The whole meeting was regarding a portion of their website dedicated to a new product they launched a few months ago. The website is setup to allow users to sign up for their service online saving the time and money of filling out paperwork and mailing it. We did a cursory evaluation and found there were a number of things about the site that were causing visitors to leave before completing the sign up process.

We were essentially doing an EUO evaluation. The traffic they were getting to the site was not overwhelming but with a conversion rate around 4 percent they are not reaching their potential. The whole point of EUO is to increase your conversion rate.

Simplifying web pages by reducing the amount of irrelevant content, organizing the navigation properly, standardizing the navigation, and presenting the information on the site in an organized and well thought out manner will start to increase your conversion rate.

An important part of EUO is testing. Without getting feedback from your end users you really can’t determine what to change and how to change it. We see a lot of websites that use industry specific words or phrases that are totally unfamiliar to end users. This is because no one took the time to test whether a person who has never been to the web site and has no knowledge of who the company is or what they do; can actually navigate the site and understand what it says.

As the world wide web grows i think we are going to start to see more and more EUO companies springing up.

You’re a large organization with divisions and departments and teams. You have vice presidents and managers and team leaders. You have a web team that manages your massive public web site. They have designers and developers and a manager. So, I ask you, who should decide what content goes on the website? Do you let anyone send content to the web team for posting. Does the vice president from Marketing call the shots? How about the manager from customer relations? Or the team leader from product development? Perhaps the manager of the web team? What is the right answer? Who should be the gatekeeper for the website? Should you even have one?

The answer is not so simple. If you put one person in charge and choose wrong you could end up with a jerk with a God complex running everything, crushing good ideas and suffering from a major case of Not-Invented-Here syndrome related to any ideas they didn’t come up with. On the other hand the right person can supply a unifying vision, provide a firm hand to keep the website from becoming confusing and cluttered or a political battleground for company infighting. But how can you pick the right person? We can learn from America’s Founding Fathers on this one and create a division of powers with checks and balances to keep people from getting power crazy.
Continue reading American History 101

(via Yahoo News)

Is really hard to see if you are blind.

“Links list dialogue.” “Links list view.” “Your Account — Two of 164.” This is what the Internet sounds like to Chris Danielsen. Danielsen is blind. He’s using a software program called Jaws that converts the text on a Web page into a computerized voice that comes out through a speaker, allowing him to surf the Web using keyboard commands instead of a mouse — the same way lots of blind people use the Internet.

But I’m more interested in the lawsuit facing Target. Apparently the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) is suing Target due to their websites poor accessibility. The idea of accessibility on the web is not exactly a hot topic; but If the NFB wins this suit accessibility may be the next buzzword to make everyone forget about “Web 2.0.” Kevin has been preaching about accessibility to our clients for years, but I’m sure not one of them has any idea what it means or why it’s important.
Continue reading One Small Step For Man….

Brad posed the question of whether spending money for quality design work is a good business decision. I’ve been thinking on that this week and in my biased opinion it absolutely, without question, depends on the business and project in question.
Continue reading Good Design IS Good Business

Google’s Vincent Cerf testified before Congress on the issue of Net Neutrality. His testimony is well reasoned and insightful. It is available as a PDF file. I recommend that everyone read it and think long and hard about this issue. It affects everyone who uses the Internet. There is a push by companies that own networks to try to determine what content moves over that network. Mr. Cerf makes the argument against this quite eloquently so I won’t try to duplicate it. However, I would like to emphsize a few points that he doesn’t hammer home as much as I would like.

When the network providers (the cable and phone companies) pick what Internet content flows across the network it interferes with free speech. This is really a 1st Amendment issue. The phone company has never been allowed to provide better service to people that say things they agree with or that call the right people. Yes, they own the network, but at the same time there are some public good issues here that trump that.

Network Neutrality is vital to ongoing innovation and invention on the Internet. Giving preferential treatment to content from one place over another as it travels through the network destroys the democratic, free spirit of the Web. The web is currently an open, free marketplace of ideas, information, and services. It should remain that way.clips long sex moviemature movies beastmovie mature milffood movies messy sexfucking milf moviesmilf sample moviesmovie nude rogers mimimovies monster dildo Mapcredit and tax adhd disabilitycredit auto 411 directcredit group consulting griffin 2007aaa travel credit miles air carddermatology accreditedholder credit merchant account card coloradohomeschooling schools accreditedin coaching life diploma accredited Maptommy the movievoyeur movies sexporn gay movies xxxanal trailers movie sexmovie teen anothertheory auteur movie directorsbisexual movies pornmovie blade tattoos Mapporn me eat outeating out porneatting out pornebn pornporn ebonicporn ebony aanalebony anal pornbeastiality porn ebony Mapplyphonic free ringtonesreal free ringtones for verizondownloading free program ringtonemp3 ringtone s freefor cricket phones ringtone sites freefree my on guitar ringtone teardrops17 free ringtonesand download free ringtones Mapus cellular for motorola ringtoneringtone changing v550 caller motorolaringtone mp3 composerringtones for mobile mp3ringtones a mp3 m1 on sanyomusic music ringtonesgirl little my ringtoneringtones wolff nat Mapsalary administration manager loansalie ma loansparent loan mae sallie student plusloan mae parent sallycollateral day same loansproposal business loan samplespecialist resume sample loandiego business san loan county Map

The world is not always the way we wish. I wrote a few days ago about how the state of Digital Rights Management (DRM) for music and movies is not where we want it. Andrew McLaughlin, senior policy counsel at Google, write today about the launch of Google.cn in China. He wrote about the fact that Google will not be offering Gmail and Blogger in China and will be filtering search results to remove some content at the behest of the Chinese government. Google is not happy about making this choice.

I had a long talk with Brad yesterday about my disappointment about not having the perfect solution for distributing online media while protecting the content from illegal copying. I’m an idealist about these things while Brad is a pragmatist. he pointed out that a lot of bright people are working hard to find that solution, but that consumers can see some benefit from using what is available right now. When I read about Google’s decision to offer limited service in China I thought about his arguments about DRM. We can’t always get where we want in one step. Sometimes we have to make a compromise and offer less than ideal service to get things started.
Continue reading Tough Choices and Making Progress