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And that’s just what Carson Workshop’s newest community site is striving for. It’s a resource for designers, developers, and entrepreneurs to read and discuss issues pertaining to themselves and their businesses. Look for this to be a great resource.

Site-wide topics include:

- AJAX
- Business
- Design
- Development
- Blogs
- Mac
- CSS
- Ruby
- Web Apps
- Rails

And then there’s the advisory board. Maybe you have heard of some of these people:

Dan Cederholm - SimpleBits
Thomas Fuchs - Script.aculo.us
David Heinemeier Hansson - 37signals
Cal Henderson - Flickr
Molly E. Holzschlag - molly.com
Shaun Inman - Mint
Jeffrey Kalmikoff - Threadless
Eric Meyer - meyerweb.com
Mike Rundle - 9rules
Dave Shea - CSS Zen Garden
Ryan Carson - Carson Systems
Guest: Jason Fried - 37signals

This should inspire a great community and I can’t wait to become an avid reader.

tags: web design, design,business, development

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I use several web applications on a daily basis and have narrowed my use down to several great applications. Feature reqests often become annoying but I feel like they do serve an important role in product development. Although there are situations when feature requests often contain language that belittles the entire application as a whole because this one feature is missing. 37Signals had an excellent post on this recently. To users like this you want to say, “Obviously this application creates value to you, or you wouldn’t be requesting a feature.” That being said I have the following feature requests for my favorite web applications.

Delicious
- Much better daily post implementation
- Daily post by tag

Technorati
- RSS based search results

GMail
- HTML in signatures (please!)
- SPAM Auto-Deletion
- Writely integration

Wordpress
- Setup Wizards

Writely
- Document Versioning

Basecamp
- More calendar integration - Outlook, Google Calendar

FeedBurner
- RSS Statistic Delivery

Google Reader
- Better feed management

I’m sure there’s more - I’ll keep you posted

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• Study: 15% of Brand Searches Stray from Company’s Site
  fter searchers type in a brand-name query on a search engine, only 85 percent end up at that brand’s Web site, while the rest are diverted to competitor’s sites, comparison shopping engines and affiliates. That’s according to a new study released by Hitwi
  (tags: daily article)
• TechCrunch » Shopify Was Worth the Wait
  Shopify is a hosted ecommerce solution with integrated payments. People who sell stuff online, or want to, are going to like it. You can set up a store in moments, add items to sell, upload images, add tags and group items, and integrate paypal or a credi
  (tags: daily article)
• Web services: Microsoft’s Path
  (tags: daily reading)
• Techdirt: Expensive Dark Fiber Becoming Cheap Lit Fiber
  (tags: daily article)
• Tailrank - State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
  (tags: daily article)
• How to Design for Different Browsers
  Most web authors agree that the biggest challenge (and headache) in web design is dealing with a multitude of browsers and their varying support of web standards. Does a page that is designed to be functional on all browsers necessarily need to be boring?
  (tags: daily article)
• Church of the Customer Blog: Advertising on citizen marketing
  The Center for Media Research says companies in 2005 spent about $20 million advertising on citizen marketing (nay, user-generated media). The center projects that amount will grow at a compound rate of 106% per year, reaching $757 million by 2010.
  (tags: daily article)
• Software engineering makes a comeback, despite outsourcing
  A couple surprises for me in Money Magazine’s list of hot jobs. First, despite all the concern about software jobs migrating to India, software engineer ranks as the number-one job. Jobs are expected to expand in the U.S. from 800,000 to 1.16 million by 2
  (tags: daily article)
• Seth’s Blog: Q: How do we do flip?
  Lots of mail from people who want to flip the funnel. The obvious beneficiaries of this sort of strategy are organizations that need traffic, that make a wide range of products or have new ones all the time, that want to grow, that doing something newswor
  (tags: daily article)
• Functioning Form - Visual Explanations of Ideas
  In It’s Simple -Design Communicates, I pointed out that companies that recognize the strategic value of design know the power of design lies in communication. These companies and their processes include designers and design artifacts when communicating
  (tags: daily article)

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In a recent article on Clickz, an internet marketing site, they discussed a study on search trends and branding. The result was that 75% of searches in their study in February were for brand names, up over 17% from last year. But surprisingly 15% of brand searches strayed from the actually brand being searched on.

This has several effects that should be noted in this search trend. What effects do brand related searches have on your company, your competitor, and your environment (businesss not ecological)?

Well, it affects your company because 15% of the searches for your company are lost. What’s worse is that the deviation is making someone else money on your brand. It’s like street vendors in Washington D.C. selling fake Oakley sunglasses. Affiliate sites are part of your Google resultset and I could make money with a properly optimized Nike affiliate site that steals users when they search for Nike.

Competitors can do a number of things as well. Imagine losing a visitor because your competitor showed up as a sponsored AdSense site in your resultset. It’s like searching for Nike, seeing Reebok as a sponsored ad and going there. You can also bid on trademarks in AdSense for search engine marketing. So I could bid on using the Nike trademark on AdSense for my affiliate site. This should be closely watched by brand managers and search marketing professionals.

Prescott suggests that brand managers need to keep a close eye on brand-related search terms and adjust paid search and affiliate marketing efforts to keep brand-related searches going to brand sites.

“Brand owners need to understand where the traffic from their brand-related search is going,” she said.

As e-commerce growth continues to grow there’s a serious competitive advantage to be gained in search engine marketing. But this environment could quickly become unstable as spam and click-fraud infiltration run rampant on these networks. That’s why the future is in localized ad networks rather than national. Why do you think (aside from the sheer size) that yellow pages are localized? Same thing. Localized advertising is the next wave (watch google) and although it will still adhere to the same side effects it is far more manageable. Plus, brand awareness is far more effective when you have a much smaller demographic per network.

Study: 15% of Brand Searches Stray from Company’s Site

tags: search, advertising, google, search marketing

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I have been looking for a script like this for awhile because the window.onload() does not handle load events as I had planned. The browser will render everything in order and your onload script will run once it gets to that point when the DOM reaches it. So, in order for something to load at the exact moment when the DOM recognizes it, regardless of where it’s at in the rendering of the entire page, you can use this script.

I decided to play around with this since the example provided below does not show why you want to use this.

The following snippet will render a segment of text even though the images before it have yet to render.

function doLoad() {
	//without this if statement 'Element Ready' will be displayed twice
	if (arguments.callee.done) return;
  	arguments.callee.done = true;
	var text = document.createTextNode("Element Ready!");
	var message = document.getElementById("message");
	message.appendChild(text);
	message.style.backgroundColor = '#296C97';
	message.style.Color = '#FFFFFF';
}

var er={
	ceasePoll:function(){
	        clearTimeout(er.poll);
        },

	startPoll:function(){
		var me = this;
		er.poll = setTimeout(function(){er.chkDomId()},50)
	},        

	cleanUp:function(callback) {
		er.ceasePoll();
		callback();
	},  

	chkDomId:function(elId,callback) {
		if (elId) er.elId = elId;
		if (callback) er.callback = callback;
		if (document.getElementById && setTimeout) {
			var el = document.getElementById(er.elId);
			if (el) {
				er.cleanUp(er.callback);
			} else {
				er.startPoll(er.elId,er.callback);
			 }
		}
	}

}

er.chkDomId('message', doLoad);

window.onload = function(){er.cleanUp(doLoad)};

View this here.

Now, your saying … cool but what is it really doing?

Well if you take a look at the exact same page without the onload callback, you will see that the ‘Element Ready’ does not appear until the pages are done rendering. View this here.

And I did one more with basically a pre-loaded image in case wanted to render an image with your text when it becomes available to the DOM. View this here. For this one, there’s a small change in the code:

function doLoad() {
	//without this if statement 'Element Ready'
        //will be displayed twice
	if (arguments.callee.done) return;
  	arguments.callee.done = true;
	var text = 'This image as loaded with the callback.’;
	var message = document.getElementById(”message”);
	message.innerHTML = text;
	message.style.backgroundColor = ‘#296C97′;
	message.style.Color = ‘#FFFFFF’;
}

Check out the article by Muffin Research Labs here.

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