Archive for the ‘The internet’ Category

We’re really enjoying the changes at google. We’ve often thought that google need to move away from their ‘no-design’ graphic philosophy into something that feels a little less outdated and a little more sophisticated…and they seem to be listening. (Ha, that’s right, we spoke, they listened…! NOT)

The interface is becoming much smoother to operate, from the fade in of your account settings from the default screen, to the new look google images.

Gone are they thumbnail borders around each photo with the originating URL, the file size and dimension, it’s now a photo gallery. Roll over each photo to get an enlarged lightbox effect with all the aforementioned information in place.

It feels, contemporary, modern and is beautiful. Well done google…see what happens when you listen!

The last few days have seen a change in google’s homepage. Their ‘no-design’ aesthetic, of a simple logo with some basic default html blue links seems to have morphed into…well, bing?

I have often regarded google as a no design company. By no design, I mean, no aesthetic consideration. Clearly they are concerned with design, but I think its pretty much left at engineering design. However, aesthetically, and to some extent their user interface has always been exceedingly stark in their use of graphics or style.

Beyond Bing’s large photo homepage format, I haven’t found much of anything to convince me to use them as a primary search source, (outside of facebook that is, which is who power their web searches from withing the facebook castle walls).

Oddly enough, as someone who has always called for at least some graphic consideration at google, I find myself feeling a little non-plussed at this new direction. Perhaps the starkness of their interface in some way prepared me for the onslaught of the search results I was about to wade though.

Google has updated their user interface this week, thats the bit you use, and a ton of stuff that you don’t see. You may have noticed a subtle change in the way it looks, (that always throws me, my first reaction is that i have some malware installed, which has redirected me to a scam site!).

Really, the update brings some of the features that were ‘snuck’ in last time to the fore.

Type in a search query and you get the same set of results in essentially the same format. This is google’s ‘everything’ set of data. What’s new is the left column.

At the top you have, ‘everything’, all normal so far. Below that, they have moved the Maps, Images, Videos, News, Blogs etc to a much more prominent position. This means that its going to be more likely that people are going to perform subsequent search variations, from their original entry search.

As a real estate agent, you should make sure that your online strategies try cover all of these bases. Make sure that your website and blogs are loaded with local images, town images, development images, videos of the above, (even quickies from your smart phone) and blog posts.

Below, the ‘everything’ navigation is another category, More Search Tools, this is where users can find the most up to date information posted to the web. You can sort your results by the time they were updated such as latest, past 24 hrs, past week, past month, past year. Latest may show your twitter tweets!

I’ll say it again, you have to be blogging!

If you haven’t already done so, I would highly recommend downloading google chrome today. It’s simply the best browser we have used to date. I like it for a series of very subtle reasons, the tabs, you can change their order, you can break them out into their own window, the fact that you can search from the same place you type in urls.

The fact that it just seems to know what you are looking for. I rarely get more than two letters into the url i am looking for and chrome pops up suggestions which are usually bang on.

I am sure my every click is being monitored somewhere, by something for all this to happen, and perhaps I am sharing stuff I don’t know that I am sharing, but frankly, I’ll trade that for a great user experience.

I can also sync by bookmarks from one computer to another.

Did I mention too that it was fast? Check this out…

I can’t see Microsoft having as much fun as this…and it shows in their product.