In Montreal because of the weather it is usually celebrated in May. These pictures were taken at the 2009 Vaisakhi at the LaSalle borough of Montreal.

When it comes to web design though, I try to be up to date with the latest trends and I also encourage everyone that has a website, to keep a close eye on what happens NOW, and what is cool NOW, on the Internet.

Why the difference?

There is fashion in technology, just as in clothing. The whole principle of gadgets is built around this, I don’t need that, but I want it because it’s cool and because it makes me feel and look cool.

Let’s take for example the iPod, this must-have gadget that makes you so proud when you stick in your ears those white ear phones. Should you have the option to chose between a first generation iPod with 10G of capacity or a second generation iPod Touch with 8G, I’m sure 9.8  out of 10 people would go with the later.

Why is that? Purely from a pragmatic point of view the first one had a bigger capacity and you can listen to more music with it, but the Touch, has a touch screen and you can play games, and even go online if you are in a Wi-Fi area. It became much more than just a simple music player.

I’m writing about the iPod and I did not mentioned the iPhone yet.

Apple understood that with technology you always have to redefine your product and never stick purely to the initial purpose. Expand your product not in a linear way, but in three dimensions. Add more features to it, not just improve the existing ones.

Same goes with websites, especially websites that are designed to be live for several years, are never finished. You might have some milestones, that are there to help a project manager define deadlines, but these are possible only because you postpone some features to a later version.

If there is always a version 1.0, 1.1, 1.2… etc., where you add a space on the homepage at the request of the marketing department, that they forgot to mention in their initial requirements, or you add little tweaks to the layout, a button here, a sub-menu there, there should be a version 2.0, 3.0… etc.

These are major changes: where you will rethink the whole layout and structure of the website, where you expand your features beyond a linear improvement.

Why follow trends, rather than standing out with a unique design?

When it comes to change and major milestones, it’s important to be aware of what is going on now on the Internet and if possible identify those elements, be that a new technology or a new way of UI design, that will make sure that your website will be outstanding and will keep it’s cutting edge aspect for the next year or so. If you fail to do that, you might end up jumping on the next major version, earlier than you can afford (change involve costs), just because you overlooked the trend.

Trends are your best friends as a web designer, if you follow them, your visitors will have an easy time navigating your website. They will adopt it faster and will trust it, because they know how to find the information they are looking for, faster than on a website with a unique interface.

I’m not arguing against innovation, introducing new concepts, experimenting with new ideas is important, but these should not scare your visitors away.

My 10 years old website looks great, why should I change it?

So, your business has several years of online presence, great!

What you have to ask yourself, is this website still representing what you stand for? How is it compared to your competition’s online presence? An outdated website design, even if it was trendy at a time, won’t create nostalgic feelings in your visitors, the therm vintage can not be applied to this field. Whatever you earn with the credibility of your long online presence, you risk loosing by being ignored, avoided and forgotten.

I could not help today, but to sketch this up in Photoshop.

Yesterday, Google has announced on their blog a new venture capital found, the Google Ventures:

At its core, Google Ventures is charged with finding and helping to develop exceptional start-ups. We’ll be focusing on early stage investments across a diverse range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and, no doubt, other areas we haven’t thought of yet. Central to our effort will be our fellow Googlers, whom we view as a critically important resource to help educate us about potential investments areas and evaluate specific companies.

There are two well known faces in the tech world, behind this venture, Bill Maris, the founder of Burlee.com and Rich Miner, a guy bought buy Google together with his Android mobile platform company.

The main Google Ventures website can be found here >

It’s a very interesting technique and I’m sure it will make our life a lot easier to most of as that are struggling to hack into the right place the right stuff when we do layout. The only problem is, again, as usually IE. It’s only IE8 that is supporting this feature, while IE6 and 7 used by the vast majority of people won’t recognize the {display: table;} property.

The authors suggest three solutions, that all sound good in theory, but less applicable in practice:

1. Ignore older browsers
OK, now try to sell this idea to any of your customer. Good luck! I don’t think they will agree to ignore 60 to 70% of their visitors. People that don’t upgrade their browsers are mostly using IE6 because they have no clue how to do it and they won’t upgrade until Microsoft will do it for them without their knowledge. You won’t convince them to upgrade by putting up a sign saying:
“Your browser is out of date, click here to get the latest version… blah blah blah”
They will probably close that website and never go back. They don’t care about technology, they don’t understand it and they don’t want to mess with upgrades and downloads and other techie stuff.

2. Provide a Simplified Layout and 3. Reproduce Your Layout with Older Techniques, both suggest using a conditional statement and creating several style sheets for the different browser versions.

Now this I would love to do, but I rarely get the chance to have enough time to do the same thing twice just for the sake of experimenting. But hey, after all I’m sure this is an interesting idea and I’m looking forward to the time when IE6 will be just a bad memory.

I would recommend this book mainly to web designers that have already messed around with CSS. This book won’t teach you CSS, but it will show you a new concept.

Konnakol should not be confused with the practice in Hindustani music (the classical music of northern India) of speaking tabla “bols”, which indicate the finger placement to be used by a percussionist. By contrast, konnakol syllables are aimed at optimizing vocal performance, and konnakol syllables vastly outnumber any commonly used finger placements on mridangam or any other hand percussion instrument. Further, all the differences which still remain between Carnatic and north Indian rhythms apply equally to konnakol and tabla bols respectively.

See here a beautiful example of konnakol performed by the great Sri TH Subash Chandran:

Avvicinatevi,avvicitanevi…si avvicinatevi
Ai iuto allu mercato a cattari nu puddiciro,ma u puddiciro ,u puddiciru fa ci ci ri ci quando lo chiamo nn vole venì (no,no,no,no,no)
Ai iuto allu mercato a cattari na iaddina,ma la iaddina, ma u puddiciro,u puddiciru fa ci ci ri ci quando lo chiamo nn vole venì
Ai iuto allu mercato a cattari nu iaduzzo,ma lo iaduzzo,ma la iaddina,ma u puddiciro ,u puddiciru fa ci ci ri ci quando lo chiamo nn vole venì…No no non vole venì,nn vole venì
Ai iuto allu mercato a cattari nu cavaddo,ma lu cavaddo,ma lo iaduzzo,ma la iaddina,ma u puddiciro ,u puddiciru fa ci ci ri ci quando lo chiamo nn vole venì
Ai iuto allu mercato a cattari n’aciduzzo,ma l’aciduzzo,ma lu cavaddo,ma lo iaduzzo,ma la iaddina,ma u puddiciro ,u puddiciru fa ci ci ri ci quando lo chiamo nn vole venì…Non vole venì
Ai iuto allu mercato a cattari nu sciccarieddu,ma scicarrieddu,ma l’aciduzzo,ma lu cavaddo,ma lo iaduzzo,ma la iaddina,ma u puddiciro ,u puddiciru fa ci ci ri ci quando lo chiamo nn vole venì…ah ah ah ah ah ah
Ai iuto allu mercato a cattari un porceduzzo,ma u porceduzzo,lo scicarrieddo,ma l’aciduzzo,ma lu cavaddo,ma lo iaduzzo,ma la iaddina,ma u puddiciro ,u puddiciru fa ci ci ri ci quando lo chiamo nn vole venì….yei
Ai iuto allu mercato a cattari nu liufante,ma liufante,ma u porceduzzo,lo sciccarieddo,ma l’aciduzzo,ma lu cavaddo,ma lo iaduzzo,ma la iaddina,ma u puddiciro ,u puddiciru fa ci ci ri ci quando lo chiamo nn vole venì..ah ah ah
Ai iuto allu mercato a cattari nu ferrabotto,ma ferrabotto,ma liufante,ma u porceduzzo,lo sciccarieddo,ma l’aciduzzo,ma lu cavaddo,ma lo iaduzzo,ma la iaddina,ma u puddiciro ,u puddiciru fa ci ci ri ci quando lo chiamo nn vole venì
Ai iuto allu mercato a cattari na trombidda,ma la trombidda,ma ferrabotto,ma liufante,ma u porceduzzo,lo sciccarieddo,ma l’aciduzzo,ma lu cavaddo,ma lo iaduzzo,ma la iaddina,ma u puddiciro ,u puddiciru fa ci ci ri ci quando lo chiamo nn vole venì
Sò stato al mercato a comprare una radiolina….ia cussi fa la radiolina,la trombidda,lu ferrabotto,lu liufante,ma u porceduzzo,lo sciccarieddo,ma l’aciduzzo,ma lu cavaddo,ma lo iaduzzo,ma la iaddina,ma u puddiciro ,u puddiciru fa ci ci ri ci quando lo chiamo nn vole venì,u puddiciru fa ci ci ri ci quando lo chiamo nn vole venì…puddiciru a de si

Through this message I’m announcing that I will delete all the users that have signed up and did not posted anything.

At first look everyone is all cheerful that this will mean increased revenues. Just go to the Google AdSense blog, where they write about this and scroll down to see the comments, most of the people seem to like this idea. They might be right, but I’m wondering if this won’t increase the bounce rate of a web page?

Of course someone might say that the whole idea behind a web site is to generate revenue and as long as the visitors click an ad the owner of the website should be happy. Bounce rate though is a sign that the website is not engaging enough to captivate the attention and interest of a visitor. Not a good thing to say about a web site.

Another problem I have with AdSense is the lack of control over the ads that show up on the website. For instance I also run a website about wrist watches at WatchPaper.com. Since Google is doing a lousy job verifying the advertisers legitimacy, I keep getting ads from websites that sell fake watches. Selling fake watches is illegal in the U.S. and Google is governed by U.S. laws. I would expect that they would reject such advertisers, but it seems that they have no problem with this.

They do have an Ad Review Center link in the AdSense Setup menu, but I never got to see any ad for review there. Ads just go straight to the web pages without my previous accord. Now with this new way of showing ads, I feel that I have even less control over the ads that appear on my web sites, because I can’t see them. Everyone of my visitors has a different interest, so I won’t be able to see the ads Google will show to them.

All this is speculation, I’ll have to wait a few more weeks to see the changes.

What do you think about this new way of advertising?