Silberbauer Says:

I got this message from the CEO at eLounge - the e-book store entirely made in Flash that I posted about some time ago.

Now the site has been rewritten in good old html. I’m sure that eLounge will experience an increase in revenue almost immediately as the search engines are now able to see the site.

I still feel that the visual design is a bit confusing with too many details, but that’s beside the point. Now eLounge is a real website that may be accessed from search engines, bookmarked and deeplinked into, and we like that! Welcome to the web, eLounge.

Hello WordPress! Why? Because it’s niftier. The admin-interface is so Web 2.0 that we almost wet ourselves. Forgive us the default template.

And oh yeah: The Blogger RSS Import plugin by Ady Romantika really rules.

- and a brand is not a style guide.

To most professionals these are obvious statements. But definitely not for a lot of website owners who still think that online branding is all about Flash and nice graphics, and forget that branding is in every aspect of the site: The choice of features, the tone of voice, the response time, the ease of navigation (or lack thereof), the feeling of real value. And, of course, the looks.

I’ve even heard the top 120 pixels of a web page declared as “the branding area”. BS! Online branding is about using the web medium the right way – it’s not just about putting the right logo and the right colors on some out-of-the-box web solution.

You can’t limit your branding effort to a isolated part of the page – it’s an ongoing process. Your website oozes branding from every pixel, so you better in control of what kind of branding it’s oozing…

Your brand strategy must govern your web strategy and affect all important decisions in the design process – but on all levels, not just on the visual one: A website which doesn’t provide the user with any real value but only wastes the user’s time (or downright annoys the user by being stupidly designed or coded) is bad branding – no matter how beautiful and by-the-styleguide it is.

Now grab 10 minutes of nice, visual branding fundamentals and remember that they all apply to the web too.

Source: http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap

Göran Karlsson On Search And Web 2.0

moblogging from Børsen: Göran Karlsson from Fast is so right: Search and web the 2.0-paradigm is closely connected. Specialized search technologies are the backbone that creates value from the user generated content.

Web 2.0 Seminar At FDIH

moblogging from Børsen: Thomas Madsen-Mygdal talks about the real values behind the web 2.0 hype. It’s about real change, not technology.

For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals
Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination
We learned to talk

Pink Floyd: Keep Talking (The Division Bell)

Speaking about social networking and e-commerce at the Danish E-business Prize 2007 someone in the audience expressed his feelings about social networks and communities as nothing more than a hype. ‘Who’, he noted, ‘will spend time discussing and reviewing products on the web – I know for sure I wouldn’t’.

I guess people who haven’t participated in the buzz themselves don’t understand why someone feels the urge to talk online.

Neither did I until a couple of years ago. Being a true child of the generation of one way communication this social networking thing seemed foolish to me. Of course, as a web professional I quickly learned to appreciate community features and social navigation as nice tools for enriching the user experience. Later on my brother and I launched this blog to be a part of it all and felt the blog-urge.

But maybe I didn’t really grasp the emotional power of web 2.0 for real until very recently when my wife started blogging about what she loves the second-most: Gourmet food.

Left: Trine in our weekend cottage – outside the April sun is shining bright, but… must blog… must blog…

She’s not watching TV anymore, she’s not reading magazines – she’s always in front of her laptop working on the next post. That is, when she’s not out photographing restaurants and chefs for the blog or busy reviewing cafés or gourmet restaurants on the (excellent) community site www.mitkbh.dk

It has been quite an experience for me to see her suddenly realize to the full extent what web 2.0 is all about. It made me realize how simple it is: It’s not about AJAX, round corners or bubble design. It’s not really about the web or the internet at all. It’s just about communicating. It’s about telling other people what you like or don’t like and about experiencing the sheer thrill of meeting new friends that share your likes and dislikes. I spend more than a day creating the template of this blog and, from vanity reasons, getting Blogger.com to ftp the pages to my own domain. Not giving a rat’s ass about the technology Trine spent exactly 10 minutes picking a WordPress template and she was on her way.

Neither TV, newspapers, nor web 1.0-sites will give you that nice feeling of contributing and being a part of it all as do blogs or community sites. That’s why old school corporate websites or web-shops that don’t hook into the buzz in any way soon will be things of the past.

For designers (and our clients) it’s important to understand that the true web 2.0 aficionados out there do not care about the fancy tech-stuff of it, or the term web 2.0 for that matter. Screw the hype and the bleeding edge technology – keep it simple. They just want to keep talking.