That Final Touch: The Favicon
After writing my last blog entry here, I looked at the image I uploaded. After doing a little extra work, by the time I actually had a good screen capture shot cropped and saved, the Chrome tabs didn’t even display any letters.
Chrome is only showing the favicon (the website’s favorites icon), in the tab for each open page. The browser tab for each page shrinks as we more web pages available, and there is no room for an actual title. FireFox (the second browser app which is overlaid underneath Chrome’s tabs) also showcases the favicon, even though it displays a word or two of the title. So, your favicon is the final means of leveraging your brand and identity with a tiny rendition of your logo or some other iconic image.
Take a gander at how the favicon for each site listed in Chrome (and FireFox) is still listed. In Chrome, it will be the very last thing displayed as you increase tabs, until the tabs are so small that even the favicon won’t display.
But, when we get to that point, all those open tabs will become a giant resource hog. Yet, any modern computer with a decent amount of memory is capable of doing this, and we usually take advantage of this capability. The point I am trying to make here is that the favicon is that one lasting image distinguishing your brand from all the others.
Even though FireFox protects the tab size at some minimal size by introducing a means to scroll through the different tabs, the title of the page is reduced to a word or two and the favicon, if available, remains your website or blog’s brand showcase.
So, if you don’t already have a favicon on your website, I have a great tool for you! 😉 You can easily create one by using my online faviconvert utility!
For your absolute best results, I recommend coming up with your best 32 pixel by 32 pixel reduced size image using a quality program such as Photoshop (use the “Bicubic Sharper (best for reduction)” option to resample the image in the Image Size dialog window). Then, reduce that again to 16 by 16 for the final favicon image.
Favicon will resize your image for you if you don’t have Photoshop. But its hard to beat the impressive power of such a professional image manipulation software application if you have it available, even if you only have the consumer version (it will use the same reduction resampling engine).
The faviconvert.com utility doesn’t actually convert your image into an icon, but it uses your image (gif, jpg, png or a 24 bit transparent png file format) to convert the data into a favicon and provide it in a few formats that you can download together in a zip archive.
Web Page Titles/Names
If you are using one of the latest browsers on your PC, or browse the web on a mobile device, it is very likely that you don’t even see the name of the page your current browser window is displaying.
Why?
Web page titles and even their filenames are important assists in helping your site’s web pages search. By providing a unique title and name that reflects the content found on that particular document, you are providing more meta data to the search engines. If your title/name meta data are accurate for each page, this optimizes search. And we optimize the ability for searching the page, we optimize search for the entire website.
I would think that by optimizing search, the search engines might even be more likely to rank your site’s page higher in the search results. This is the general idea behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO), providing optimized data to enhance your listing’s rankings in the search engine results (often referred to as SERP for your ‘Search Engine Ranking Position’ or ‘Search Engine Results Positioning’).
Yet as I surf the web, it seems to me that more and more I am running across pages that are completely untitled, or all the pages in a website share the company name, or are simply titled and named inappropriately (home, page 1, page 2, page 3…). I have even seen many that are labelled “Untitled”, which seems to be the default name that WYSIWYG web page editors use.
But if you look at how we use the web nowadays, it doesn’t seem unrealistic that this is so unimportant to so many. People in the know understand fully how important these names and titles can be when it comes to optimizing search, because these particular fields, even the filename, are concise representations of what might be found on that page, and therefore, words that appear there, as well as are repeated elsewhere throughout the description, headings, content and image descriptions (maybe even in the image file names), are given more importance in search.
Because the title and name of a page usually use concise wording, even most of the very basic search algorithms place even more importance on the few words found here. And when there are fewer words used, their importance is greater for each word there, because importance is less spread-out when they are concise, as opposed to a certain importance spread between more of them.
That, by the way, is how some SEO professionals think, and I completely disagree, that using more key search words is good. It is much better to be concise and concentrate on the keywords and terms that are your focus. These can be underlined with synonyms and such in the content, but to stuff keywords in a title or filename, even in a description or keywords list (within meta tags) is just not a good idea. But that is a different subject, overusing names and titles. I just want to encourage their practical use, and even all of the major search engines like to see this, too. It’s called paying attention to the details.
Of course, any modern advanced search technology uses much more refined algorithms, but it always starts right there, with each page’s own name and title. Why do so many overlook them and their importance to search?
My answer is that the new modern web browsers are making it less important.
When I am browsing the web on my PC these days, I am in productivity/creativity mode, and I usually only have a single web browser window open. But that one browser window is full of tabs showing all sorts of different webpages for all the different online projects I am working on.
Often, I have a tab open for the font creation tool I am currently utilizing. Another for each of my different hosting accounts I manage. Another for my WordPress blog, one tab for Blogger and yet another for Tumblr. I usually always have my Twitter and Facebook accounts readily available, as well.
On top of that I will have the websites open that I am working on, and the next ones I want to touch-up, as well. Because we can do that with modern browsers on a fairly recent machine that has some processing power and enough memory.
So, what do I see as the title of each page in these tabbed windows? Well, since the current open tab is not enhanced above the individual tabs (as it should be) in Chrome or FireFox, I see:
[In] [In] [W] [S-] [Pr] [H] [H] [Sh] [D] [g] [W] [Bl] [T]…
Reduced size screen snapshot of my browser tabs. Chrome shows a letter, maybe 2. FireFox shows a word, maybe 2 short ones. But both are ignoring the current active title, as well as all the others.
It is the modern web browser that is masking how important those Titles are!
If the title of the page isn’t even displayed in the current active browser window, this is a huge burden in educating users the importance of the proper use of the HTML title tag. Especially when Google is declaring that what is the most important thing to it is that their search results are reflecting what the visitor actually sees and is presented with upon arrival to that document.
Isn’t Google itself devaluating these titles in Chrome?
Interestingly enough, your PC or Mac web browser’s address bar is still there by default and yet most users and even many webmasters are ignoring its importance. Site administrators, owners and webmasters ignore it with non-related domain name choices and even more poorly thought-out directory organization and file naming conventions.
However, the issue does not stop there. Because screen space is so important on smart phones and handheld devices, the page title doesn’t appear unless we are switching between different page views. In fact, the web browser’s address bar disappears as soon as we scroll down the page a little. That said, as soon as we start scrolling up, it will reappear, reaffirming its importance to navigation. But I honestly don’t think that anyone understands that importance, because I find myself frustrated not having a gadget that represents the browser bar there for me to tap and access.
My differences in UI (user interface) design vary greatly from the mobile plaftform, though. I believe in visual clues that allow navigation. Unfortunately, the mobile UI is very unfriendly in this respect. So although you do have elderly people adopting smart phones, I find them even more frustrated with the expected UI experience because they are expecting a GUI and not the touch motion technology that mobile users have to learn.
Nevertheless, despite the challenges of humans interacting with mobile device interfaces, it remains clear that Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s FireFox are abandoning the display of the all important web page title unless you actually look for it. So now is it becoming just meta data?
I have to ask myself why, and I really do think that they too, are sick of seeing unused or inappropriate HTML document titles. Since the webmastering public at large doesn’t use the title tags correctly, why should they even display them, I suppose?
But doesn’t this start down a new slippery slope where we don’t even worry about our page titles because they are so out-of-sight and therefore out-of-mind?
Or are they actually going to give SEO professionals a reason to stick around because as always, all they have ever done is tackle the obvious that a newbie webmaster or newbie web designer without a clue would miss?
Nevertheless, despite their somewhat inappropriate disappearing act from the full view of the global world wide web community, web page titles and names do have a proven impact on assisting search. So it is then obvious that these things really do require your attention when designing a website, setting up a new page, posting a new blog entry, etc…
Just remember that each name and title reinforces the key search words/terms, advertising copy and even the brands themselves that are represented on these pages and it all makes common sense, doesn’t it?
In example… If you are creating a page about the different kinds of rodent traps, you might want to name your web page HTML file as “rodent-traps.html” and title it “Rodent Traps for the Home”. Then, on that page you would discuss the different kind of traps available for different kinds of rodents. Use head tags to identify different kinds of content. Then, you will link to pages about particular traps or brands… so maybe you have another page discussing Rat Traps at “rat-traps.html” and it may discuss the differences between poison traps, concussion traps and sticky traps, then each of those may point to reviews on particular brands of traps at other pages showcasing those brands or products.
I can go into more detail, but to me this is all common sense. Of course, I am a well educated web designer, as well as an artist. I’m supposed to understand this stuff. But not all webmasters do, and so that’s why I want to reintroduce some of these common sense practices to the world, because when a page title or name disappears, we think about these little beginning design touches a lot less, and yet they are very important to the grand scheme of search.
I don’t preach Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I preach search optimization (which has a better effect on SERP because you eliminate the worry).
The Heartbleed Password Dilema
OK, the fallout from the ‘heartbleed’ bug is worse than I thought. The problem is with how we, as humans, don’t manage a ton of passwords well. It isn’t so much that we are lazy, but to avoid clutter in our mind, we re-use passwords across the internet to log-in to different websites.
But with the heartbleed vulnerability, the problem becomes worse because of our conservation of brain cells and the repeated username and password combination becomes yet another vulnerability.
You see, most people don’t come-up with a unique username and password for each site they have become a member of. Most people reuse the same username over and over so that they can be identified as themselves by friends and acquaintances across networks. Now, that would still be OK if the password used was unique for each and every website that user logged into using that username. But because we are trying to make things simpler we usually only use a small index of passwords from which we draw our passwords, so that we don’t have to remember so many, because we know what it feels like to be locked-out.
It all has to do with username and password pairs.
So if a user logs in as “Gibraltor5” with a password of “1Ydd/R247” on a forum website that is compromised, the problem then becomes that the username and password pair are entered into a database and some malicious hacker will eventually try to use that username & password pair at other places, such as Yahoo, Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, Chase, CapitalOne, Amex, etc…
So eventually, someone will make a program that will actually try to login to all sorts of websites using “Gibraltor5” as the username and “1Ydd/R247” as the password, possibly even on a global scale. Once more, they may not stop at one attempt. They might wait a year or so and try again, just to check if the user had protected his accounts, but then gone back to his lazy ways.
So from now on, you have to create a unique password for every single site that you have ever accessed.
Even though Google may say that your Gmail and Google+ accounts are safe, they aren’t if you have ever used the same username and password combination ever before or afterwards on any site. You can’t be sure that any certain site was or wasn’t compromised. The username and password pair could have come from a site you don’t even remember joining. So if you have a tendency, like most humans, to use the same password over and over, you have to stop that right now, go back to all the sites that you have ever been a member of, and change your password to something unique.
Now, if you are like me, you have lots of places that you frequent. That means you will require so many passwords you won’t know how to keep them all straight without writing them down. But if you write them on plain paper, or in a little black book of passwords like I used to do, you open yourself to having them ripped off and hacked that way, by your very own hand.
The best way to do it then, is use a password program that will keep all your passwords safe and handy. Since I don’t always have my PC with me, but I try to always have my phone on me, I have to recommend Kuff’s Password Safe for the Android. It allows you to generate unique jibberish style passwords on the fly, comes with 128 or 256 bit encryption to protect your entire catalog of passwords, categorize them, and more. The one thing is that you must remember the password you will use to access the application, because there is no back door and without that one password, you will not be able to access the application again. The good news is that you only have one password to remember, again.
Now, to top that off, you can also get another version for Windows, so that you can update and access your password data across platforms, as well as backup your data to remote servers such as Dropbox, SkyDrive & Google Drive, or to your local Windows machine.
Kuffs Password Safe on Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.kuffs.free.passwordsafe
The developer’s website for Kuffs Password Safe (Android & Windows):
http://www.kuffs.co.uk/
If you do not have an Android smartphone and/or tablet, and you do not expect to upgrade to a smartphone, or if you prefer a Macintosh supported version, you will have to shop around. But this little utility, a password safe, to secure all of your username and password pairs and other private information, encrypt the data to protect it from malicious hacker idiots, is now an important and vital component in the life of anyone who has or had an online lifestyle (meaning anyone who ever has done anything online).
Yahoo!’s Domainapalooza
Yahoo has decided to release some of its premium domain names to the public through an auction at Sedo…
Yahoo!’s Domainapalooza …(This link was updated on November 16th, 2013)
This premium domain name portfolio auction started today, November 14th, and runs to November 21st, 2013. Although there are quite a few names that I feel are not very good (especially for the reserve price indicated), there are some great domains in the bunch…
- AV.com
- WebServer.com
- Sandwich.com
- Sled.com
- VoiceMail.com
- Crackers.com
- Freeby.com/.net
- BlogsPort.com (or brand it as BlogSport.com)
Now, please note that the above is merely a sampling of some of the best domain names in the Yahoo Domainapalooza premium domain portfolio auction. But that portfolio is listing over 500 names on its first day, and Yahoo! also indicates that it will also be adding even more domain names throughout the auction.
Can you walk away with a great brandable domain name that you could develop into a profitable website or business? Very likely, considering the quality of some of these names. Especially with names that have an excellent second meaning. For instance, even though winter is coming and sled would make a great name to sell winter snow sleds, “sled” is often how I refer to older muscle cars that had great power but lacked the handling of a sports car. These beasts will never have sports car handling because they double as grocery-getters and transportation to work. And if you are into muscle cars like I am you would see the opportunity in that street rod slang name.
As of this writing, there are 517 domain names available for auction and with Yahoo planning to add even more this may become the most watched premium domain name portfolio auction in history.
Happy domaining! I hope there will be many domainers taking advantage of this opportunity to add to their portfolio and domainate the market with domainating names. 😉
Yahoo!’s Domainapalooza …(This link was updated on November 16th, 2013)
-Doug
…”Domainating”
(I’m going back to check out that list!)
Theme Upgrade Crap
The theme for this blog, Andreas04, was upgraded to “Able”. I personally think that Able is crap and is the absolute kind of theme I am trying to avoid, one that lacks creativity of any sort.
To that end I have been strained trying to find a new theme. Which also keeps me from posting anything new, because I arrive at my dashboard and am presented with a problem indicating that my theme won’t work well, or might not even be around, for much longer. hence I go look for themes and get lost in a sespool of muck & mire.
Why FF4 is so Slow
After Twittering that FireFox 4 was incredibly slow I was met with disbelief on Twitter and elsewhere that I mentioned it. I was told how fast FF4 is, now.
I seriously do not like FireFox because it was so pathetically slow and because it ignores good user interface experience strategies. I was actually baffled how anyone would think that the thing was any faster, as it was so slow that it nearly crashed my Asus EeePC netbook.
Well, I finally fired-up that little Windows 7 netbook again yesterday and discovered what the problem is. FF4 is allowing multiple and simultaneous video streams to run all at once. What? C’MON MAN! Who the hell designs anything with multiple active video streams on the same page?
To further complicate this issue, FireFox 4 is allowing these simultaneous video streams to run even though the page it is loading isn’t active. Huh? C’MON MAN! That is uncalled for.
Why would anyone want to load multiple pages at the same time, you may ask? Why not? If you are loading a page from an African web host (which have notoriously slow connections), you may load another website in another tab while you are waiting for the African website to load over seemingly slow dial-up speeds.
This isn’t even close to being every case. I am a webmaster, a hostmaster and a web designer. As a part of my daily duties I like to insure that my sites, as well as my client’s sites, are loading as expected each day. So my “Home” page button is a collection of all the sites I have to check. I need to ensure that the various hosting solutions I am offering are performing well, that my websites are loading quickly and correctly, that my sites have not been hacked, that the system is working correctly for myself & my clientel.
As it happens, a variety of those websites each have video on them, and as a part of the marketing it loads and plays by default. Anyone may pause the play. And until FF4, only one of these sites were streaming video when the web page they reside on wasn’t active (in focus).
But FireFox 4 has changed all that. And because FF4 is loading all these different video streams in the background, the browser slows to a crawl. As I press buttons, maybe something will happen, eventually. The user interface is nearly useless. The multiple videos that are playing are completely broken-up as the system races to deliver all the data, including those out-of-focus video streams on tabs that aren’t even viewable. And it runs every single video stream as if they all needed to be run at the same time.
C’MON MAN!
As designers we can do much better jobs of designing apps that work. The user is robbed of any ability to navigate. The video stream is corrupted, the user experience is destroyed through excessive stupidity in implementation.
C’MON MOZILLA! Get your head out of its ass.
BApps.com up for Auction
BApps.com is available for sale to the highest bidder at Sedo.
This domain WILL BE SOLD at auction as the reserve price has been met.
The auction for BApps.com will conclude on May/05/11 @ 05:51 AM Eastern Standard Time.
When the nameservers are reset by the new owner (or the transfer authority @ Sedo), the old blog will expire. It could be replaced by another should the new owner want one at the same old address, but that, of course, will all be up to the new registrant.
I have moved a couple posts to blog.widgetdroid.com and most of the rest I have moved here to domainating.com. Still updating a few with Categories and Post Tags.
Had to rant…
I just had to rant, I am getting sick and tired of the pathetic state of our industry…
http://blog.abitofallright.com/2011/03/illogical-web-standards.html
If anyone wants to take the reigns and contact me about revamping our current web standards, and has the muscle to make it actually work this time, please contact me immediately.
This is no joke. Our industry is crap and I am ashamed of it. We appear to be engineering in nonsense just to secure our positions as online media experts, and that is just plain wrong. The reason that business needs to hire web designers is not because they can’t do these things themselves, it’s because they simply don’t have the time to dedicate to the project.
I want to change how websites are designed and developed. I want to make it easier, more logical, easy. And it is such a simple thing to do, but it requires someone with push. The push I don’t have, and very few do.
It is long past time. Things are getting worse and they are already bad… really bad.
Why Rip-off an Artist?
I am so tired of the current state of society. Humans no longer matter and we take a corporate attitude of greed and protect-your-own-ass because no one else will.
Actually, there are real people who will stand-up and fight together and stick-up for each other. But that’s not the point. The point is that it should have never gotten this bad.
I see this all the time. I designed a website that not only exceeded the needs and specs of the client, but it does so well beyond any parameters, including my own. As I am just a freelance artist, it’ll never win any awards (I can’t afford to enter the webbies, etc… I am not surviving on what I get paid now) and only the client’s customers will ever really see it.
Ever hear the phrase “Charge a Corporation Twice or more what you would anyone else for the same work.”? It is so very true. Although lulled into thinking I could work with these people, they broke the original contract. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a contract in writing. So *I* kept every promise and delivered an extremely search engine optimized, user friendly, interactive website based on the MODx content management system/framework. This is the most extreme I had ever gone with CSS, Sprites, Fly-out menus, minimal graphics, reduced graphic sizes, etc…
But in the long run I screwed myself because I didn’t have a written contract. And it would have protected me, because these people were absolute abusers.
Now, let me tell you that I did bid low to get this job because I thought I would enjoy it, but I had no idea that anyone could be so rude, condescending, back-stabbing or ruthless. Instead of treating me like a business partner with a humongous stake in their online success, I was belittled and chastised as if a lowly underling employee. I had never been treated with such disdain by a client, before. The terms of the original contract agreement was breached on several occasions and the deceit I experienced was unconscionable. It’s a surprise that I was able to complete the project at all. And I had no recourse because the agreement was verbal and I trusted them.
But the project was finished, despite themselves. Not only was it finished, it was done right (despite themselves): the way I wanted it done (which was well beyond what they had asked for).
But now I know why to charge 2 or 3 or more times the price for a corporate gig. Either you are working for a committee, or you are working as a mere employee with absolutely no rights or benefits (like a slave).
The extra money covers the extra hassle of writing the contract, and in dealing with a committee or being treated like a peon. And the contract protects you from getting the shaft, spiteful delays for meetings, etc… Now I know.
I told them I would not work for a committee, that I would work with just 1 person in delivering them a site beyond what they expected. I did. But not without giving in to allowing a second person in to the mix who berated me and crucified me to “corporate”, her bosses.
These employees have “corporate” on the brain because they are so scared of losing their jobs. The girl they added to the communication chain was apparently the company bulldog. And she thought she was right, no matter what the facts are. In the end she twisted everything into lies, was dismissive and disruptive just to “show me” a thing or two, and delayed the whole design & development process, incredibly.
Today I was on the phone with her to reach the other party, the guy I actually get along with, in order to make the site live. He’s gone for the day. As I am talking to her, she grunts her displeasure with me and dismisses me by hanging up the phone without so much as a “Goodbye.”
Previously, I had always worked with the business owner and entrepreneurs such as myself where we were smart enough to understand and communicate with each other. If only the masses could communicate, they could educate themselves.
Then, I run into this article on “Smart Planet” how artist’s should watch their own asses because it really is OK to steal someone else’s artwork!: How a thief defends theft: http://www.smartplanet.com/technology/blog/thinking-tech/how-to-protect-your-copyrighted-images-on-the-web/3684/
I am so angry this guy works there, at “Smart Planet”. He’s telling us to watermark our artwork if we dare to put it online? And all we are doing is trying to give our best work. He says we could disable the right-mouse on a web page? That makes our visitors angry because that right mouse button does a whole helluva lot more than save images, it is a vital tool for any web user. He says to make a robots.txt file to steer the search engine bots away from our images… I did that once. Not only did my images no longer show-up in Google Images, but my graphic design rank plummeted, and some search engines (such as the wayback machine) showed my web pages with all the images blocked out with a gray window over them. Heck, I said stay away from crawling there, not to not show them on my pages!
There were plenty of lame excuses he gave, but they were all just excuses. But it was interesting to see the criminal mind at work, how he could so effortlessly come up with any excuse and act as if it was actually a convincing argument. Hey, fella, the reason Murdock gets away with it is because he owns Fox, not because it’s right, true or factual.
Listen, you self-centered “dogs” out there who don’t give a crap about anyone but yourself, it isn’t me or another artist that is “going to get you and bring you down”, it’s your own criminal activity and stupidity!
We artists are trying to give you are very damn best as a matter of pride in ourselves and our work. And you treat us like we aren’t worth the same as you, that we are under you, your class, your level of achievement? You rip us off for no good reason and excuse it as if we could do anything about it?
Where has morality gone? What has happened to our ethics, and why do we dismiss them in order to make a point on TV or in a blog? We used to be civil to each other. Corporate America is NOT a good thing. It seems to embrace ignorance. But no one is fooled by Sarah Palin. Being dumb is just plain dumb, no matter the excuse.
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