Blog Stuff we're discovering, learning, reading, watching, enjoying...

Google seem to be all about continual iteration and roll-out of small new features these days. Whether it’s visual tweaks to make the search box more obvious on their homepage, helping computers understand language or adding subtle intelligent enhancements to the search results. In the latter case, searching for “empire state height” would have highlighted “…the height of the Empire State building is…” whereas for relevant information types it will now highlight “…the Empire State building is 1250ft (381m)  to the top…”.

I guess when your core website is the most used site in the world and revolves around two pages [or increadingly one page due to the initial search box being built into browser interfaces... it took me weeks to notice the visual effects on the Google homepage] you’ve got a lot of scope to continually iterate and refine the experience.

From Wordcamp Seattle, Eric Amundson’s 5 Free Ways to Bulletproof Your WordPress Site provides a great 5-minute video overview of areas to strengthen your Wordpress site, including security, usability and user experience. We’re already using many of his techniques but two new plugins I now have to investigate are WP Super Cache to enable cached HTML pages to be served instead of server-greedy dynamic ones, and Relevanssi which allows for relevance-based search results instead of the default chronological results that Wordpress generates by default.

Don’t mistake this for those childhood ‘colour by numbers’  books where each numbered area could be matched to a colour. Google Assaults Designers With Data is an interesting report from a recent talk by Marissa Mayer, “keeper” of the Google homepage since 1998. In her presentation, Marissa outlines just how much of “the devil is in the detail”, and how running a service with a simple interface is not a matter of sitting back and resisting adding complicating features, but of gradually fine-tuning, testing and iterating. It might not be the inspirational, creative approach to design that we all love to get excited by, but it demonstrates results and proves that versatile modern day designers need a toolbox containing more than just pure creative flair.

Nice to see Thumbprint, one of our newer projects, getting a reference on Tech Guardian and that it’s rightly referred to as “embryonic”. In his article on hyperlocal information, Victor Keegan looks at how smartphones have created micro-level location awareness, ranging from discovering photos taken nearby to retracing Shakespeares footsteps!

Thank goodness for Google. Looks like they’re doing their bit to monitor and prevent the spreading of flu by using related search terms to map which US States are most affected by flu!