Mobile “Phones”
Steve Jobs’s public fight with Adobe over Flash represents the barest hint of the challenges graphics artists and web development teams confront when trying to create content for this fractured world of 24/7 connectivity. The “perfect” world is promised to us all in the form of HTML5, as though this “standard” will provide platform interoperability. It’s way way too early to make the assertions currently being bandied about tools and techniques that are promised “real soon now.” What is a graphic artist or web developer to do in this environment right NOW?
We might lament the fact that Flash animations and videos won’t play on a hundred & twenty million devices and bristle at Steve Jobs intransigence. Our clients, however, take a more mercenary view and demand that THEIR content display EXACTLY the same on every platform. Errrr, Uhmmm, Uhhhh – that’s what they pay us for – right? After all, we’re the content creation experts – right?
One other caveat is that this design technique is only appropriate for the type of content that rarely, if ever changes. One example we did was for a personal trainer → and then, in turn, linked a menu choice to a google sites blog so that she could have a beautiful ‘brochure’ and a platform to easily update.
Some day our prince will come to give us platform independence. Some day. Real Soon Now. For now, we have clients to satisfy.•
Retro SEO
Search Engines Aren’t New – They Just Have New Forms
The earliest attempts to ‘game’ search engines are best exemplified by the amazing products manufactured by a number of companies all with the same name – ACME – that Wile E. Coyote used in his futile attempt to catch the Road Runner. The company name and its variety of products also makes appearances in a number of Looney Tune cartoons.
ACME? Search Engines? Indeed. While many would believe that Acme products are just a cartoon invention, in fact, Acme was the name of many companies in the 1920s & 1930s for a very good reason. First, Acme is from the Greek, the peak, zenith, prime and denoting the best of something – The name Acme was a mark of quality & distinction.
Second, companies picked this name so that they would appear in the beginning of the first business directories (phone books – another new invention at the time!) published back then. And it worked – it became a very popular name for companies for that reason. When our educational system no longer taught Greek to students, the name became meaningless. Looney Tunes’s animators picked that name in the 1950s just as Acme was falling into disuse.
Companies trying to acquire primacy in the phone book resorted to ‘manipulating’ the yellow pages by naming their companies AAA towing or A-1 plumbing supply. Again, in an attempt to get into the actual physical ‘first page of results’ of that day and age’s ‘category’ (search term). It would be an interesting exercise to discover what companies are naming themselves today; the likelihood is that AAA this or A-1 that is becoming an anachronism in much the same way that ACME company names became. Today, search engine optimization is a black art of titles, key words, descriptions, meta-tags & endless speculations of what the hundreds of search engines and cyberspace directories perceive as ‘relevant.’ It is an important component of web site design with a lot of misinformation bandied about. An excellent clear headed reference article can be found HERE at searchenginewatch.com. It’s a worthwhile read that will somewhat demystify the process. But, remember – search engine optimization has been going on for a long, long time – it’s just taken on a new form of trying to gain a customer’s attention. Remember that the next time you watch the Road Runner escape from Wile E. Coyote’s mad implementations of ACME manufactured products! Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.