by Karina Beattiger 9.April 2008 09:38
I finally landed a juicy idea for my own personal site, in part inspired by a stock photo of some dried roses I found, in part encouraged by Heather's design column theory. I compiled it all together, glee'd in delight, proudly showed it to WD Weems, who then sighed and said, "You're almost doing tables again."
... Quoi?
Well, Mister Weems, you infected the office with the plague! So nyah.
Mind, this doesn't change the fact that he's right. In an effort to use what I knew, and make up what I didn't, I did compile the images together in a table-ish sort of way. Not as bad, mind, but close. So, I asked Typhoid Mary Weems what his suggestions were. "Simple," he said. "Put the rose and shadow on a PNG, make the background transparent, then use the Dean Edwards Script to force IE to behave." Our resident plague-bearer talks about that here.
The beauty of this is that I can position it as necessary, and then, as I add more images to it, I can do what Mindfly does when you hit refresh on every page! This, I'd like to point out, is the new, hot version of <blink>. It's flashy, it's subtle, it's totally fun. It causes people like me to hit refresh for minutes at a time. (Blonde is in the heart, in case you wondered, not on the head -- I'm easy to keep occupied.)
Speaking of remaining occupied, WD Weems and I noticed a rather peculiar change to Google of late. Have you noticed yet that on some searches, depending on what you're looking for, some links on that search will show with menu items below it? We stared at it in surprise for a while and tried to figure out why this was happening. Were these websites providing a premium of a sort? Were these search terms so popular, and the results with such links so big, that it was an autotmatic thing? And even more, why didn't we have them? I was busy at the time, so I told WD Weems to do a Google search. (Do a Google search on Google? Sure, why not?)
"I wouldn't even know where to begin to phrase it right."
Bah. Absolutes are for serial disease-spreaders!
Enter the Heroine. After a brief search, I found this fascinating bit of data:
Selecting pages to appear as sitelinks is a completely automated
process. Our algorithms parse the structure and content of websites and
identify pages that provide fast navigation and relevant information
for the user's query. Since our algorithms consider several factors to
generate sitelinks, not all websites have them.
...Oh. Well. Hmm. This ties in with the topic of SEO & SEM rather nicely, but once more, it leaves it mostly in the hands of the spiders and bots crawling the pages, and we can only guess at what they're looking for. Apparently, Andy Clarke's Stuff & Nonsense really is that popular. He's like the Eddie Izzard of the Web Design world, what can I say?
On that note, I'm off to lunch. Those of us trying to fend off the lingering remnants of the black death -- thank you, Influenza Ernie -- need to eat to regain all that strength we wasted being miserable.
... Hee hee. Okay, this officially marks the end of my metaphorical brick. I'll stop throwing it at WD Weems, now, I promise. His ego needs to be fully functional in order for him to continue being the genius he is. (I'm not just saying that because he helps me every five minutes... really!)
Edit: Heather brought up an excellent point. I can actually screenshot stuff. Go, brain, go! I've thereby included a screenshot of the roses-inspired design. See what I mean about being able to swap out that roses image for other like images? Could be fun! Now, what's next on my design list? ... Oh, yes, a World of Warcraft guild site!