colin nekritz

While Microsoft (FINALLY) is trying to put the blight of the internet known as IE 6 it unleashed on the non-standards caring and sheep-like consumers before the world knew they have a choice, and the not-so-small country of China keeping cluelessly hanging on to that atrocity, Gawker Media did the future-forward thing, a redesign that felt like a breathe of fresh air. Their new site and it’s partner sites all felt like you were using an iPad app, interactive, scrolly, mostly intuitive, and due to their innovation of going where the web will probably be in 2-3 years, it got slagged for it.

So what happened? Under no uncertain terms, people holding back technology is what happened. Gawker’s new format allowed for easy hopping back and forth between articles and the always expanding table of contents with some VERY cool web 2.0, pulling-out-all-the-stops, javascript tricks based on content regions, and as anyone who’s seen my talks, content is king! As a fan of apps on my iPad (highly recommend the NPR iPad app) the ability to casually sit and scroll and interact with articles feels so refreshing, you get to actually experience websites, it’s actually what interactive is all about, not just simply clicking around a scrolling site. Alas, it’d seem people don’t like change, even if it’s essentially ‘free’ for them, case and point this spot-on cartoon by The Oatmeal.

From day one that it was seeded to Jalopnik as the first trial site, the only Gawker affiliate I frequent with any regularity, the bitching began; loudest by the older contingent maybe not surprisingly as there’s a correlation between age and trying new things (yours truly being one an exception, I [heart] new!). It appeared that people enjoyed scrolling more for content and, if given a choice of going far down a page, and hitting “read more” or “next page,” by george, that was their right to keep clicking more and more pages, progress and ease-of-use be damned!

In an attempt to appease it’s viewership rather than fight the good fight, Gawker decided to implement a large area of real estate for those who wanted to view the content the old way (1) – which should make them, and us, thankful the joys of CSS and CMS – and went a step further of adding a scroll bar in the content section (3) in spite of the fact now you have a scroll bar next to a larger scroll bar the controls a region opposite of it (2). The complaint, it seemed, is people don’t know how to use trackpads or mouse scroll wheels. Granted, yes, not everyone has newfangled technology, and to that end, my mind, it’s boggled, really. These people are probably still clutching to a 3.5 floppy drive.

For those who’ve not experienced touch-screen computing such as what Apple has heralded into the mainstream with it’s iPhone and iPad, with now a slew of competitors as usual, the Apple leads, everyone else does it’s best to keep up, well, your future is going to get even more frustrating as you fight an inevitability. IE 6 will, thankfully, die. As person who works with web development, IE 6 is nothing short of evil and most of us on the technology side of the internet have, gleefully, made decisions to stop programming for IE 6 a long time ago, it’s not compliant, programmer OR user-centric browser. IE 6 is the equivalent of if we continued to put leaded gas at fuel stations, or, maybe more apt, using horses for intercontinental flight (yes IE 6, and really all versions of Explorer, are that bad).

One can’t (thankfully) fight progress any more than you can fight off an avalanche with an umbrella you angrily shake at it barreling down on you. These things which will be to most of us early adopters truly self-evident and you can’t delay the inevitable march of technology, even if you’re the size of China, or Microsoft for that matter. Props to Gawker for trying, eventually, your site will be talked about in a “I remember that, they were one of the first” way.

Like many of my ilk (marketing, design, branding, etc…) I tend to watch the Super Bowl mostly for commercials. You Tube Ad Blitz compiled them all so for those not excited about watching [spoiler alert] Green Bay Packers beating the Pittsburgh Steelers, here’s your one-stop shop to see them all.

Like most years, my and others takes were mixed.

Doritos® I felt had some of the stronger of the ads, for humor “House Sitting” gave me and the person I was watching it probably the biggest chuckle.

Car commercials were everywhere, Hyundai’s “Sonata Hybrid” was perhaps the best executed for being quirky and keeping one’s attention span. GM’s marketing is any indicator of how they build cars… okay, that one is too easy. Eminem would have been fine even though he was merely pimping a redesigned [shudder] Sebring in the Chrysler 200 (coming to rental fleets near you, and people who lack taste in cars) which was an emotionally powerful commercial “Imported from Detroit” about the much maligned city, but his Brisk commercial, implying he wouldn’t sell out unless demands were made, oddly negated the Chrysler’s positioning by essentially Eminem selling out. I’d mention Puff P Diddy Daddy’s cameo in the Mercedes commercial but, of course, Sean Combs sold when he made Big E Smalls’ death into his own career catapult. Though not a car maker, CarMax’s “Kid in a Candy Store” has merit, funny always is a good route, when it works that is.

Pepsi vs. Coke wars were heated, Pepsi, as in previous years, appeared to simply get the target demographics better and won this round to all but those diehard Coke drinkers who would say otherwise, Coke spent a huge budget on an animated commercial “Siege” which most found largely forgettable.

Beer commercials aren’t worth mentioning; I get it, they’re shooting for the most troglodyte demographic who would be confused by sock puppet theatre, so I guess for people who drink domestic swill they were all a win.

GoDaddy made me wonder who would possibly want to go to their website to see Joan Rivers scantly clad anyways (I’m not even going to link them).

Movie commercials, like beer commercials, don’t really garner a mention because all they’re really doing is editing down their trailers to 30 seconds, if you like movie trailers at the movies (and I do) you either will have seen some of them or will see them shortly.

Finally while minding Twitter during the whole Super Bowl and watching people’s often hysterically funny comments, many took perverse pleasure in watching Roseanne Barr get creamed by a log in Snickers “Logging” ad. It was telling, however, how many didn’t know and/or recognize Richard Lewis, suggesting they could have cast it better, though to Lewis credit, his shtick is complaining about things.

Overall not the worst crop of ads for a Super Bowl, and probably not the best either. Here’s looking forward to 2012.

About a decade or so ago I started using wireless, aka WiFi, computing. A Powerbook with a 802.11a I would hop from cafes that had this new technology, where they’d offer it as a perk, for free, they always had my business, which is to say, my money for coffee, bagels, food, etc. If there was no cafe, often someone would have an open connection in my neighborhood, and I personally left my connection open in my home office all the time. If someone wanted to surf, it’s on me, sharing is caring, and it was like elsewhere people were returning the favor. To be fair, there was firewalls and other security, it wasn’t like myself, some of my friends, and others were trying to be sitting ducks for someone to hack their networks. At the same time, there was this openness, community, free WiFi like a cup of sugar for a neighbor, and a dream of free internet, anywhere and everywhere someday, a world of hope, of possibility, and to be part of that felt exciting.

I’m not sure what happened; 9/11, a collective loss of innocence, conservatism, fear, people feeling the intrusion coming from the government at the time and/or commercials scaring people into believe the boogeyman was lurking out there, trying to hack their data, all the above? The reality that some broadband providers do cap their supposedly “unlimited” data plans, the drag on the network Netflix creates, or big pictures, or someone using your connection for porn, or illegal downloads, I get all that. But I feel we’ve lost something as a society locking down our networks, it’s like world where everyone pulls their blinds, and a “only what’s in it for me” attitude. I still applaud any and every place that offers free WiFi, and, if you’re ever in NYC and see a network “imagewrangers,” it’s open, no password, come on in, put your feet up, stay awhile.

Imagine free WiFi, it’s easy if you try
No passwords or logins, a brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people, sharing all the world…

When I see job postings or titles that include SEO I tend to snicker. SEO, or “search engine optimization,” was a bit like this shaman and often snake oil sold to those companies who think you can juice search engines to have a higher rank than others. To some degree, this is true, but for the most part, when done, it’s not to the benefit of the consumer, merely to drive page views, which may not be what the consumer wants.

Google, Bing, et. al. have gotten smarter, for the better of you and I, the web searcher looking for the information WE want to find, not information intentionally slid in front of our eyes which may not be the right fit for what we’re looking for. Then how do we, designers, web architects create sites people want to read? Easy, comes back to content is king. Essentially, create and write web sites your target audience would want to see, fill it with content that’s compelling to your enduser… done.

Okay, so not quite that easy, the other parts of the puzzle in 2011 in terms of SEO done NOT to smoke-and-mirror audiences but simply to rather make it relevant and matter to users of the internet in general is add parts to any given web page that creates a web which search engines index and keep tabs on, hence making it more relevant to searches.

One acronym was created for this, and it’s based more-or-less on how modern search engines like Google and Bing take a look at the big picture of the internet, trillions of pages, and make some sense of it all: S.L.A.T.E.S.

S.L.A.T.E.S. was defined by Professor Andrew McAfee as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.” This said since being coined, it’s getting a bit more complex and, thankfully, more in real-time, so that if someone is searching for something and it’s an event being reported on now, the search will turn that up. If the search is for something local, due to many computers and most smart phones being locations specific, that information will be doled up, seemingly customized for that user’s search criteria. Searching is getting more and more intuitive and, as such, is nothing some snake-oil marketing person can juice easily, power to the people, it’s a good thing.

S.L.A.T.E.S. broken down:

Search – More traditionally defined as a web search query is a query that a user enters into web search engine to satisfy his or her information needs. Google and Bing monitor such things, as such, the more a topic gets searched, be that a snow storm paralyzing NYC or [shudder] Justin Bieber, sites that get the most traffic from these searches and people mouse clicks will show up higher in search relevance.

Links – Simply put, the more things are linked back and forth across the web, the more Google and Bing take notice. On top of this, the more these links are clicked upon, the higher those pages will get ranked, and this has some value to the sites being linked from as well.

Authorship – Two-fold, someone who publishes to the web under the same name, that gets gravity, the more clout that person has, which could be both frequency he publishes but also people linking/mentioning is the more her or his article will rank in relevance. Welcome to the CMS/blog world, individuals matter.

Tags – Beauty of a shared language. If people tag various postings all with the same tagging, it shows up. In Twitter this is known as trending, but there’s a bigger picture. If every tags and article “iPad” iPad’s ranking in searches in general would shoot up, and more specifically, those articles tagged people may be linking to.

Extensions – Mining of user data, activities and/or transactions which allows users to be guided to initiate other valuable activities or transactions or to see other people’s social interactions. The more of these interactions happen the higher everything ranks in that set. If someone has a “like” button for Facebook with a picture of a cute kitty, and that link gets shared on Facebook 150,000 times, you better believe that entire phenomena will get some notice somewhere by the search engines, and passed around. Sometimes though this is as simple as if, say, you’re on Amazon, and you buy a book, you may get after purchase a splash page “other customers who bought [insert book] also bought [this other book].” It’s a way for Amazon to iTunes to any online store with the proper developer programming try to make some predictive guesses as to what else you might like.

Signalling – The sending of alerts to users of the changing state of an element of interest, could be from using RSS or any type of push-pull data on the web that sends it’s information to someone, or something, else. Often this can be through the signalling of information to other instant clients. This is at the heart of things the beauty of the real-time web.

A breakdown of how this all may look is below, from Time Magazine’s page. First up it has content which is still pretty high up there for anything on the web under search, words were written in such a way Google/Bing/et.al. will index it with glee. It has tags which will help internet search engines get a gist of what it’s about – in the not-so good old daze this would be in the meta data, but nobody uses that anymore, amen. It’s got authoring. It has links going in various directions including two in the body pointing to other related articles. The entire page has signals as it uses RSS/XML, then more-so as it’s using Twitter trending in a block. Extra points for having a video embedded from Vimeo regarding the story, which itself than has embedded more parts of S.L.A.T.E.S., it’s almost recursive. It has various extensions like Facebook, Twitter, and comments, yes comments could be considered extensions, signals, or even authoring. They also do a good job, not just in user-centric (not forced) SEO but in terms of getting people to sign up, potentially email or pass along the article, etc. They’re allowing a lot of customizing and SEO all within one rather easy to scan page. All-in-all, this is how content-powered SEO is done.

Most agencies, there’s no lack of creativity for how they handle the holidays every year. The fine people over at Banner Blog assemble nearly 100 such marvels up until this year, year by year. Some are brilliant, some are a bit more staid, and all tend to keep one’s attention to some degree. Enjoy these, it may not revive you from being bombarded with all the season holiday songs ad nauseam, but it may amuse you none-the-less.

2008’s list. 2009’s list. 2010 list hopefully to come.

Thanks to the excellent

In 2010 there’s just no need for overburdened UI on a website of any large business or corporation, and yet, there they are out there. Hand it to a guy like Dustin Curtis to call out one of the many, American Airlines, on what was one of the most abysmally bad, UN-user friendly sites blighting up the ‘Net.

He went one better though, rather than just complaining, he did on his own his version of what the site should look like, and it wasn’t just better, it was pretty close to perfect. It’s clean, fresh, minimal which helps potential customers, in this case airfare and flight shoppers focusing on what’s important to them and, in return, becoming customers.

In essence, all you really need to know, right there, in easy to read layout. One of the things I tell clients to students all the time is whitespace is your friend. I’ve another way of putting it sometimes, don’t put 20 pounds of shit in a 10 pound sack, and too many companies that can’t get out of their own way can’t see it. Middle managers or people who think they know design telling designers how to design mucky muck up what should be left to the experts.

This story has an interesting twist. Sorta. They listened to Dustin, they even agreed, well, partly, that there was too much going on, but only after making excuses how they need this or that because this or that manager to this or that department wanted this or that in there under the worst reasoning ANY company can use; “because I said so.” Any company that puts it’s middle manager egos first are short changing the actual people that matter to the company… the customers. The clients. The people that are keeping that company afloat. Make a site for them, good things will happen, make a company site for your own egos or internal backpatting, you better have a lot of capital, repeat customers who are a suckers, and stocks trading well, because you’re certainly positioning yourself for failure.

Now, the new American Airlines site isn’t perfect, and they’re still probably cramming way too many things on the front there to appease various shareholders or whatnot, but it’s a sizable improvement over the original pictured above. If nothing else, it looks like it belongs in 2010 and not 1998. Kudos to Dustin, and somewhat kudos to American Airlines for listening, responding, and doing something about it.

Dell running Windows 7 and a Macbook Pro running OS X 10.6

Clean design will trump everything else just about every time, this goes for branding, to computers, to operating systems. Consumers to enterprise markets are catching on which is the better choice, as it’s really a bit about advertising and the human desire of less-is-more, less clutter, not having to put up with clunky design, visual blight. This even transcends every facet of a product such as laptops. One company Apple, really gets it at it’s core, this less is more aesthetic, and it rings true through most of their product lines. The others, all followers, don’t get it at all while they usually copy, weakly, poorly, what Apple is doing right, which is really simple… simple… less is more, clutter is bad, and keep it simple [stupid]. This even reflects in the products themselves, how good they are, with Apple, the leader, up on top, and all the weak imitators where they should be, at the bottom.

PC Week laptop reliability/quality/satisfaction.

Which is, as mentioned above, self-evident. Though it’s far from perfect, a college I consult with went through a web redesign, a much beleaguered overdue one. The end result is much cleaner, streamlined, easier to navigate. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing international packaging or a web page for a college in the largest higher ed system in the world (yes, State University of New York, student to student, degree for degree, buries the closest system), you’ll always have a win-win if you just K.I.S.S.

SUNY Oswego's old, undated and outmoded site verses their newer one.

The always astute peeps over at Brand New point out OnStar got a slight, maybe to some imperceptible, update to their logo, but it, like cars and their drivers, are getting, well, thicker around the edges, and cars can’t get sans serif.

All part of a much larger campaign rollout, can’t help but wonder if they’re trying to be more [shudders to type in relation to topic] “hip” or something to keep their dwindling six million subscribers hooked to their pricey per-month service. You can now Facebook from your car, oooOOOooo!

I get it, truly I do, and maybe I’m jealous I didn’t get and do the pitch for the rebranding, I’m sure this was a cash cow for the agency of record for not a lot of effort. Still, what with smart phones and built in or installed navigation, OnStar will have to do a lot more than get social and de-serif their font to stay relevant to shoppers, most of whom after the trial period, just ignore the deactivated blue button.

And not changing back.

In this world where we’re bombarded with so much information from all directions all the time at an ever increasing rate, it’s not surprising advertising is more and more done to prospective buyers in the nanosecond, or if you ever watched the way ahead of it’s time, groundbreaking TV show that ran for one season Max Headroom, a blipvert.

As when I give talks, even Twitter’s 140 words are an awful lot in the scheme of advertising. An example I recently gave to a group contrasts an old AMC ad vs. a recent Toyota ad. Arguably they both get their points across, only one does it as what worked in 1973, the other does it as our world exists 2010 for time in 2010. It’s arguable the 2010 ad would be better for any generation however, so honestly perhaps advertising has in fact gotten better.

AMC Javelin 1973 Magazine Ad

Toyota Landcruiser 2010 Magazine Ad

This TED talk by Google’s Dan Cobley really had me thinking, in at least so much when the larger the client I consult with the harder it is to get traction for them to change direction, the more mass they have.

Not explained by Dan Cobley in the video below, but something I’ve often thought of in terms of physics with companies I deal with, they can be like a giant lumbering mass, the larger that mass becomes the harder time it will have changing direction. By mass I mean the whole shootin’ match, employees, overhead, opinion makers (too many always water everything down, three or less actual deciders is the best formula), markets trying to saturate, etc. etc., the more players and capital needed the more lumbering and less potential for exciting stuff as a ratio.

There’s a reason former employer and client Coca-Cola takes months to incubate potential brands and launch them to market and then weeks and weeks to mull decisions about them as opposed to say Wet Planet, makers of Jolt Cola, who I’ve also done work for, who can pretty much go from development to product in under a month if they so choose and can turn direction on a dime if necessary. Jolt’s ability to change direction in a fraction of business time doesn’t make them huge per se, but it does make them more consumer-centric and able to shift, change, grow. One is certainly more fun than the other as well.