Warning: You'll need to know a little HTML to do this.

1. From your facebook page (assuming you are an admin), go to "Edit page > More applications > Browse More".

2. Search for ""Static FBML":http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=4949752878", click the link to it, then click "Add to my page".

3. Return to "Edit Page" and scroll down the list of applications until you see "Static FBML" app.

4. Click the "Edit" link beneath the "Static FBML" heading.

5. Now enter your desired HTML. Be creative -- remember, ultimately, this ad is going to end up on the left side of your wall. See the image below for the HTML that I used, and the resulting "ad", which links back to heraghty.net

6. Save the changes.

7. View your page. You should see a box in your ‘boxes’ tab.

8. To move your box to the left column, just click on the blue pencil and "move to wall tab". This will give it the appearance of being an ad.

9. Finally, if you want to delete the boxes tab, click on the pencil of the boxes tab and click "Delete tab". I recommend doing this as some users visiting your page will be confused about what "boxes" are.

Social media have changed the landscape of the web over the last few years, and have even posed a threat to Google. Why? Well, the information you find on Google is OLD compared to the information that's on social media. Okay, much of social media's "information" is little more than prattle, it's value is in it's immediacy. Social media gives us the instant opinion. When we hear a rumour, a breaking news story -- it's social media we want to search, not out-of-date web pages.

Recognising the threat, Google is trying hard to catch up, and today I first noticed results from Twitter showing up at or near the top of my Google results page. Indeed, it seems that Google has been integrating social media results since December, although today was the first time they showed up on my page (perhaps they have been rolling the feature out geographically, or else I hadn't typed in a search that would trigger the results). Yesterday's Telegraph reports that traffic to Twitter has increased noticeably since Google introduced this feature.

Here's what the results look like:

Why?! Has Microsoft suddenly changed its business model?

No. Consider some other explanations: Moodle is an open-source Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) already in use in schools across the world (over 2 million installations, last time I checked).

Earlier this year, Google collaborated with Moodle to offer a single sign-in to Google Apps.

So, Microsoft's move, in this context, is reactionary. Both companies are engaged in a battle for the hearts and minds of the next generation of computer users. Indeed, for years, Microsoft has offered its software products to students at hugely discounted prices, to "indoctrinate" them in the use of Microsoft tools.

Cynical? You betcha.

The end of education will be the dawn of learning.

In secondary school, my favourite subjects were English and Physics. I still liked art ... but gradually grew weaker at maths, and lost interest. (I eventually lost interest in school generally, and was more concerned about the indie band I had joined, but that's another story.)

I did media studies in college, but I always felt that our subjects were based too much on wishy-washy academic theories, not hard science.

When I started working in a media environments like local radio and magazines, colleagues viewed me as a "tecchie" because I had liked working with computers. When I changed career track and started working with an IT consulting company, I was mocked for being an "artiste".

In truth, my passions have always straddled both worlds -- the creative and the technical. I don't see them as mutually exclusive.

I admire Google for brining science to web design and development. Google Analytics, for example, allows you to do A/B testing -- e.g. you can try out two different versions of a homepage on alternate days, and see which one users best respond to.

Google's Achilles heel, however, is that it doesn't have any sense of creativity. It sees web design purely in engineering terms. But web design is not only engineering; web design is also an art form. A true "web master" is someone who can strike the balance between the science of web design (semantic markup; usable interface design; etc.) and the art of web design (web pages that look and feel beautiful, or in other ways make you fall in love with them).

My suspicion about Google's lack of artistic understanding was confirmed in a revealing blog post by Douglas Bowman, in which he explains why he has quit his position as Visual Design Lead at Google.

I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

As Tim Van Damme comments, Bowman shouldn't be made to justify the width of a border. As a creative designer, when it's right, you know it's right -- you _feel _it's right. All the stats in the world will never give that same gut feeling.

Account hijacking occurs when reputable sellers unwittingly reveal their eBay usernames and passwords to scammers. The scammers then log in and pose as these sellers, usually offering non-existant goods at too-good-to-believe prices.

One irate eBay user explains how it works:

Dirtry no good people around the globe are hijacking innocent eBay users' accounts. They basically send them an email that asks them to log into their eBay account via a link in the email. But the link sends them to a web page that looks JUST LIKE the eBay sign-in page and when the user logs in not knowing any better, they are actually entering their password into a database that these no-good deadbeat hackers have set up.

So, how to detect an eBay scam? Barnson.org offers the following tips:

1. Check the seller's history. Not just their feedback rating, because these days so many accounts are getting hijacked, but actually what they have sold, how much they've sold it for, what their payment requirements were, etc. For instance, the feedback history on [an eBay scammer offering a remarkably cheap laptop] ... was great. But all he had ever sold were sporting goods, and he had only ever accepted PayPal. This is a sudden, out-of-character change. Even if it were legit, that sudden of a change would leave me leery.

2. No Western Union or Money Orders out of the country. It doesn't matter how good the deal is, it's not a good deal when they walk away with your $1000 and you have nothing to show for it.

3. As much as I hate to say it, check their grammatical habits. "Nigerian Scammers" have a peculiar writing style. It's an immediate red-flag to a potential ripoff.

See more pics on AmieRose.com

Professor Marcelo Zuffo of the the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, has invented a solar-powered wifi access point that works right out of the box.

Fantastic, right? Yes, unless you live in Ireland. Hopefully someone will invent a rain-powered wi-fi point...

Seriously though, Zuffo's invention may help bridge the global digital divide:

Prof Zuffo believes the self-contained unit will prove popular with schools that lack a reliable electricity source to power access points or computers that students can use to surf the web.

Sweet.

We've created another Wordpress theme called Popsicle, which you can download for free from our web design site.

Popsicle is based loosely on the design of the Heraghty.net website.

The theme comes in five different colours. The demo shows just one of the colours; to see the others you'll need to install the theme to your own Wodrpess blog.

Upload the Popsicle files to your themes folder, and you’ll automatically see a management page in Wordpress. From there, you’ll be able to choose between the gray, green, brown, pink and blue versions.

Download the Popsicle Wordpress theme.

Almost all of our client projects are written in PHP and use the standard LAMP architecure. I love open source products such as Wordpress, which despite some flaws is very usable -- especially more recent versions.

Unfortunately, that's not the case for most open source software. Moodle is a case in point. With great functionality, and used by millions of people across the world, Moodle sounds like the perfect open source LMS (learning management system).

Moodle is far from perfect! For example, Moodle homepages tend to have too information, and to be poorly laid out -- cognitively overburdening the user.

Another popular open source system is YaBB (Yet Another Bulletin Board). But it's impossible to create a unique homepage first, and then to plug YaBB in. Instead, homepages for each app look samey and inherit large chunks of HTML. This problem is shared by Moodle.

This shouldn't be the case. After all, these are back end applications. Why should they dictate what the front end looks like?

I could go on (and on). Bottom line: These applications have got usability cancer.

Why are Moodle and YaBB so unusable? Why is open source software, in general, so unusable?

Matthew Paul Thomas has the answers in his article: Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it.

According to Thomas, open source software offers weak incentive for usability; there are too few designers; and design suggestions often aren't welcome or inivited.

Initiatives like OpenUsability seek to address these problems. But considering that Moodle is by far and away the leading open source app in such a popular domain as online learning, I'm afraid open source usability has a long way to go.

Sorry Moodle, but I can't give you the thumbs up until you start making life easier for users -- the course designers, the content creators, and most importantly the students who take courses.

The course went really well. All 30 places were sold out.

I have realised that, in Ireland at least, there is much more interest in SEO now than when I first wrote my e-book "Website Findability".

I'd really love to write an update to that book soon. I've removed it from my website because some (only about 10 or 20 percent) of the information is out of date.

The problem, of course, is finding the time to write the revised version. My business is now five years old, and this year we have been busier than ever. Nevertheless, I hope to devote some time to revising the book within the next 12 months.

I just discovered this diagrammatic representation (PDF) of the various elements that make up the User Experience on a website.

It was created by James Garrett in 2000, and is still just as relevant today.

That constant change keeps me on my toes, and makes me job challenging. As if that weren't enough learning to be getting on with, I also have to learn about our clients' businesses. I have to learn about their industry and its recent trends; what their business model is; how their internet strategy fits into that model; what their competitors are doing; etc.

Meanwhile, we're faced with another challenge: getting the client to learn what we need them to know. The more open clients are to this "mutual education", the better chance we have of success.

One lesson we try to teach clients is that the homepage is not (necessarily) the most important page on their website.

It's a mistake to assume that users will always, or even most of the time, access your website via its homepage. Consider this: when you search in Google, does it return a list of homepages? Not necessarily: Google returns a list of pages and other documents on the web that best match your search query. This is list is by no means exclusive to homepages, or even weighted towards homepages.

For example, if you've published an provocative article on your website, and a lot of people link to it, that article may tend to get found more in Google than your homepage does. Hence, more people will access your website via this article page than via your homepage.

Similarly, if you have a page on your website that contains a biography of your CEO, many people will access your website via this page, because they Googled your CEO.

Gillian Carson illustrates this point well in an article in Vitamin magazine, entitled Turning Your Visitors Into Users:

Quoting Ryan Singer of 37Signals, the article explains:

I don’t visit YouTube and click around. But I see blog posts with cool videos all the time. I don’t think of YouTube as a site. What draws me in is a blog post, IM or email. Then, when you end up watching a video on YouTube’s site, you realize there are more cool videos there, and might start clicking around. In this way the root of each visit is a permalink, a particular video, a certain experience - not the home page. The video is the epicenter of the permalink, and the permalink is the epicenter of the whole site. Everything revolves around the videos you love, not the farm that feeds them.

The homepage is not the only door to your website. In fact, when you review your analytics data, you will most likely find that less than 50% (probably fewer) of visitors access your site via the homepage.

So what do you need to do?

1. Make sure that the user experience is positive and consistent throughout the website.
2. Design the navigation in such a way that it's clear to the user where they are within the structure of the site (e.g. provide contextual cues like a different colour such for menu items that are currently selected; add a "breadcrumb" style navigation trail).
3. When setting up your Google Adwords or SEO, direct users to the most appropriate landing page for the phrase you're targetting
4. Spread the love: try to make sure you get just as many links to important landing pages as to your homepage. This will help your site's overall Google ranking.

Effective landing pages are crucial if you want to attract significant numbers of visitors to your website. Once you grasp this concept, you'll be well on the way to increasing your traffic.

You can see it at smallestad.com ... the only problem is, you'll have to find it first.

The ad is 1×1px; i.e. one pixel high by one pixel wide.

But hey, the dot-sized ad is animated and changes colour, so that might help (disclaimer: it doesn't).