Blog | Ari Salomon: WordPress Expert

20×200: West Coast event

By Ari Salomon | Published: April 26, 2010

Join me at this free art event…

We’re heading out west for our annual Collectors Confab and you’re invited! Jen and a few members of the 20×200 team are excited to meet you—West Coast collectors—on Tuesday, May 4th from 6 – 9 p.m at Chronicle Books in San Francisco. We’ll be serving wine and beer along with a few nibbles, and perhaps have a surprise or two for you too. Many of our Bay Area artists will also be in attendance, so come say hello and have a drink on us!

via The 20×200 Blog: West Coast: You’re Invited!.

Brandstack

By Ari Salomon | Published: April 24, 2010

MissJenny turned me on to this new service that acts as a marketplace for logos. The unique thing is that designers can build an entire brand – with company name, logo and a reserved domain name – and place it for sale at a fixed price. For designers this can mean selling designs already completed that a client never used. For small businesses (and serial entrepreneurs) this means they save a lot of time and know exactly what they are getting.

Save time browsing a ready inventory.

Save money with designer-set prices.

See how logos fare in a peer-reviewed community.

Buy and talk directly with designers, not a sales person or middleman.

see them now under their new name: www.brandcrowd.com

Google search ranking: now using site speed

By Ari Salomon | Published: April 12, 2010

Speed is now a factor in you google ranking. In my tests I found these speed issues are not much to do with the web host but with the complexity of the design of a page. Some aspects of that complexity are inherited from the CMS (WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine etc) and may take a lot of work to remedy.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. … Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

via Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Using site speed in web search ranking.

Posted in Web Design | Tagged Google, Web search engine | Leave a comment

Meet me @WordCamp San Francisco

By Ari Salomon | Published: April 2, 2010

I’ll be attending both DrupalCon and WordCamp in the next few weeks.

WordCamp San Francisco will be held on May 1, 2010. Last year’s event was attended by over 700 people from 32 countries.

via WordCamp San Francisco.

Posted in Drupal, Web Design, WordPress | Tagged Drupal, WordCamp, WordPress | Leave a comment

YouTube: Five Stars Dominate Ratings

By Ari Salomon | Published: March 31, 2010

Stats from YouTube show that very few people use anything except the ‘5’ in a 5-star rating system. So they switched to a thumbs-up or thumbs-down system. But i wonder what the point of the thumbs down is? the 1-star was not much more popular than 2-4 so why not simplify further?

This is exactly the situation with my client Our Oakland, whose site I built with Drupal. They want to list most popular videos but with 5-star ratings there is a dilemma of how to balance average vs total votes. Does a video with 1 vote at “5” rate higher than a video with 100 votes at “4.9”? So for their upcoming contest we’re switching to a simple “vote for this” and we’ll rank most popular by number of votes. Done.

The Drupal “5 Star” module allows building of a sophisticated mathematical analysis of votes so you could roll your own solution but that seems like a lot of extra work to solve a common problem.

Anyone else find a good solution to this issue?

…if the majority of videos are getting five stars, how useful is this system really? Would a thumbs up/thumbs down be more effective, or does favoriting do the trick of declaring your love for a video?

via YouTube Blog: Five Stars Dominate Ratings.

YouTube’s big redesign goes live to everyone (news.cnet.com)

Posted in Web Design | Tagged Video, Web Applications, YouTube | 1 Response

GigaPan Systems: Get a robot for your tripod

By Ari Salomon | Published: March 19, 2010

New Pro version announced today. I may get one of these to explore new options for my panoramic photos.

Simply attach your camera to it, then the EPIC directs you through the steps to capture a gigapixel image. You then set the upper left and lower right corners of your panorama and the EPIC works out how many photos your camera will need to take, hundreds or even thousands, and automatically organizes them into the correct rows and columns needed to capture your panorama. The robotic arm clicks away, capturing amazing detail in a short amount of time.

…and here’s a sample of am embedded Gigapan panorama from their website (it’s free for anyone to add images to their website community)

via Gigapan Systems Online – System Page GigaPan Systems.

Posted in Fine Art Photography | 1 Response

Google Maps: Biking directions

By Ari Salomon | Published: March 12, 2010

This is exciting news for us bikers here in San Francisco…

A quick check shows they seem to have good data.

Today we’e added biking directions and extensive bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S. My team has been keeping close tabs on all the public support for biking directions that’s been steadily coming in, but we knew that when we added the feature, we wanted to do it right: we wanted to include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes. So that’s exactly what we’ve done.

via Official Google Blog: Biking directions added to Google Maps.

Posted in Product Reviews | Leave a comment

Design To Sell: User Experience Optimization

By Ari Salomon | Published: March 8, 2010

Some recent links for geneal inspiration when staring at a blank Photoshop browser chrome…

Your homepage’s primary real estate (the top left corner, middle section above the fold and the primary navigation) must answer the following questions for your visitors: Who are you? What do you have to offer me? How do I learn more?

via Focus on UEO–‘User Experience Optimization’ – Website User Experience – Entrepreneur.com.

AIDA is a well-known strategy in sales and stands for: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. It is relatively simple and describes the sequence of events you should aim for to get a sale. So, first of all, you must capture the attention of your potential customer. Once you have it, you should win their interest by explaining how your product or service can help them.

via Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert – Smashing Magazine.

5 Reasons to Kill the Splash Page
plash screens and intro pages are a remnant left over from the early days of the web. It’s typically a flash animation or an introduction graphic that users need to skip past in order to view the actual content of the site. They’re becoming extinct because of SEO reasons, but I’d say at least 50% of my clients still request one.

via 5 Reasons to Kill the Splash Page | WordPress Theming.

Posted in Web Design | Tagged SEO | Leave a comment

PIXMAVEN – The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator

By Ari Salomon | Published: March 5, 2010

I agree/disagree with some of the things that have just been said, but the optical suggestions of the purity of line visually and conceptually activates the essentially transitional quality.

…click “Create,” and enjoy your ready-made Critical Response to the Art Product (or CRAP).

via PIXMAVEN – The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator.

Posted in San Francisco Art | 1 Response

News ways to take online payments: Square and iPhone

By Ari Salomon | Published: March 2, 2010

There is a lotof buzz about the “new money” online. A classic Web 2.0 story of new technology taking on established giants – in this case the credit card and banking industries.

In February 2009, Jim McKelvey wasn’t able to sell a piece of his glass art because he couldn’t accept a credit card as payment.

Even though a majority of payments has moved to plastic cards, accepting payments from cards is still difficult, requiring long applications, expensive hardware, and an overly complex experience.

Square was born a few days later right next to the old San Francisco US Mint.

via About Square

Web Design and Development