Copyright Your Website
A couple years ago, purely by chance, we came a cross a one-man web development shop who's website listed a bunch of testimonials that looked suspiciously like our own. In fact, they were ours - copied directly from our site, word for word, without so much as rearranging the order or making up fake names. We were so amused and astounded, we laughed about it for a few minutes and then promptly forgot about it.
At Newfangled all of our sites ship with a default copyright notice at the bottom of the screen. Is this sufficient protection? Sitepoint just posted an interesting article examining the implications of copywriting a website. Fortunately, according to Sitepoint the very act of producing and displaying content in essence implying that you hold a copyright on the intellectual property, as long as you can prove it. This has been the case since 1998
This seemed to my non-lawyer self to be all fine and good, until a case of copyright infringment actually comes up. How does one actually prove copyright infringement? And to what extent are we plagiarizing every day, when we reference or quote someone else's original article or blog post?
Filtering for Google Analytics
This blog post will discuss an important tool found within Google Analytics, Filters. Setting up Filters allows you to focus your attention on relevant data in your sea of metrics. Before we proceed, I would like to warn you that Filtering data is a very powerful tool. This powerful tool can both harm or help you, depending on if you use it properly. So, before you close this blog post and create filters galore, make sure to be one-hundred and ten percent sure you know what you are doing.
Great way to start a post, huh?
Web Design 101: Matching Colors on the Web
Question: Why don't the colors on my website match the colors of my printed brochure?
Answer: Matching colors from print to web is challenging because of the two
different mediums. Colors in print are created by visible light reflecting
off the surface of a pigment (ink). Images are produced by either CMYK
(a full-color, four-ink process of cyan, magenta, yellow and black) or
with spot colors (i.e. Pantone). Images on the web are generated by a
light source (computer monitor) combining red, green and blue (RGB) from the visible light spectrum.
How to Use Twitter well
We've had a healthy debate at the Newfangled lunch table for several months now about the value of Twitter. I've been an advocate for Twitter while Mark and Chris (like many people) are not big fans. I signed up for Twitter several years ago and felt similarly. At that time, there wasn't a critical mass and I had no clue about the ins and outs of how to communicate with other members.
In the past few months I've increased my Twitter usage and I'm getting a lot out of it both personally and professionally. Here are a couple of reasons why I'm firmly rooted in the Pro-Twitter camp at our lunch table.
One World Flag
Here's an intriguing design challenge: create a flag that would represent global citizenship. The folks at AdBusters have posted the 32 finalists from their One Flag design competition and voting is open until March 17th. My favorite entry is "Origin" if only for its originality and polished execution.
Communicating technically to the non-technical
At Newfangled, one of our most important services to our clients is helping them make sense of the web. We've gotten really good at it. Systems such as our grey-screen prototyping process are excellent facilitators at conveying complex technical systems in such a way that audiences of all experience levels can grasp important intricacies. Just as importantly, our passion for what we do gives us the drive and commitment to share this excitement with our clients.
Read more...
The State of the Web
This is a presentation by Bart De Waele of Netlash, on the state of the web, and its future.
Social Media Discrimination?
In light of a comments-convo I had with Dave on my earlier post about checking your social network privacy settings, I thought this article by Meredith Levinson, titled Job Seekers to Employers: Stop Snooping! introduced an interesting thread. Check out her concluding paragraphs...
Creative Questionnaire: Dorelle Rabinowitz
Dorelle Rabinowitz leads the Design Systems group at eBay, creating and maintaining a design system that ensures a holistic customer experience. Previously, she directed user experience design teams at Google and Yahoo!, was an experience lead at SBI.Razorfish and produced Oxygen.com's "Our Stories" site. A graduate of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, Dorelle also holds a BFA in graphic design from the Rhode Island School of Design...
The Internet is a Work in Progress
The introductory slide of a presentation that I gave at our annual winter retreat read, "The internet is a work in progress." I find myself saying this over and over to clients and coworkers alike, reminding them that there's always going to be another goal, deadline, or even bug to deal with. It's not like how things were for some web companies a decade ago, when "going live" meant the end of something. Today, it's just the end of one phase and usually the beginning of another, much longer one...