Best practice ideas in UI and icon design

Lukas Mathis has written a short but insightful piece on the idea that simple designs for icons and action related UI makes more sense. His conclusions also reminded me of some of the studies done on faces and body shape as it relates to attractiveness. The retention of juvenile characteristics or Neoteny suggests that the retaining the basic look or shape of the child or immature version has the outcome of making it more attractive to our visual brains.

A great example of this is the evolution of the Mickey Mouse character. In 1978, Stephen Jay Gould theorized that Walt Disney and his animators gradually discovered what it took evolutionary psychologists decades to prove: that baby-like features and proportions elicit an “automatic surge of disarming tenderness” in adults.

Simple UI or icons offer more inferred information as opposed to prescriptive. The simpler the icons the more likely we are to throw them into a general category instead of wondering which action or quality to ascribe to them. As Lukas Mathis points out, “People are confused by symbols if they have too many or too few details. They will recognize UI elements which are somewhere in the middle.”

Twitter 101: A Quick Lesson For Twitter Newbies

I just joined Twitter a few weeks ago, and was initially very confused about what was going on.  Thanks to the help of some of my co-workers, though, I figured it out and subsequently realized how useful (and addictive) it can be.  In the spirit of paying it forward, I thought I’d share some really basic information with those of you who are as Twitter-illiterate as I was:

@

If you type this symbol before someone’s name in a tweet, the tweet addresses that person specifically.  Your side navigation has an @(yourname) link which will allow you to view only tweets directed at you.

Direct Messages

Referred to as “DM” by Twitterers, a direct message is a private message you can send or receive to a user.  This means you are the only two people that can view that message.

Retweet

If someone tweets something that you really like or find useful, you can reintroduce it into the live Twitter feed by retweeting it.  This will give people another opportunity to check it out if they missed it before.  When people retweet your stuff it means it was a really good tweet!

#

Typing #(word) will ensure that your tweet will appear in search results for that word.  Searches are the way people find subject matter they are interested in tweeting about and following.  So if i wanted to index my tweet under the subject of tennis, I could use this feature by tweeting the following:  Check out this breaking #tennis news about the U.S. Open this year! Now, if someone searches the term tennis, my tweet will appear.

Follows

Click the “follow” button on a user’s profile if you like the information they’re posting, and their tweets will automatically appear on your live homepage feed.  People that you decide to follow compose your “following” (a number tally of which is listed on your homepage in the right side navigation.) Users who follow you then, are your “followers.”  You will automatically only see tweets by your following on your homepage. Managing your following and followers is is a way of filtering content.  People with more followers are considered to  have more credibility, and also have more social media power because of their large audience of listeners.

Links

To post a link on Twitter, simply copy paste the link.  If it’s too long, use a tool like tinylink.org to shrink it to fit.

So there are you are- the basics of Twitter.  There’s a lot more to learn, but that’ll get you started.

Don’t be scared– it’s a great way to get customer feedback, share knowledge about niche industries, and connect with professionals in your field.  Not to mention it has a lot of potential as a marketing tool, if used correctly.

Good luck, and don’t forget to follow me @Marisol1986. I’ll be there for ya if you need me to answer any more of your Twitter questions.

How to use the Flutter Custom Fields Options List to crop and manipulate images

Flutter, the popular Wordpress plugin, is a very simple way to add a lot of flexible extra functionality to posts and pages. It’s a gold mine of usefulness that allows Wordpress to compete with more robust CMS applications, and with some tweaking can provide some really powerful features.

As awesome as Flutter is, the documentation blows. Any new user will experience firsthand the displeasure of sorting through vague syntactic examples and soundless uninformative screencasts. There are plenty of good resources for learning how to use the plug-in, but Flutter has notable feature that no one seems to know about: image manipulation.

See that little “Custom Options List” link? This is the only indication that image manipulation is even possible. Clicking this link brings down a long list of confusing commands.

Create Custom Field options

By skimming quickly through this list you will see a boatload of useful-sounding photo manipulations, such as rounded corners, or sizing and cropping images.

Flutter's image manipulation documentation

These commands can be used to write strings that will apply edits to images on the fly, allowing users to upload photos without breaking a template’s visual style. I’ll demonstrate how to use Flutter to associate an image with each post, and print out a heavily styled image.

Setting up the content type

I assume you already know the basics of flutter, so I’ll go through this quickly. If you know all about this, skip down to the code.

1. Create a new Write Panel in Flutter

New Panel Options

2. Set up basic options

Notice that I unchecked “Custom Fields.” This prevents the user from messing up the Flutter data, but you might want those turned on for development. Create a new field. Make it an image field and pay special attention to the “Name” textbox because you’ll need it later. I set this field to “Required” as every blog post will need an image.

image Field Options

3. Remember this screen?

We’ll get back to it later, but expand the “Custom Options List” and copy + paste everything into a blank .txt file for reference. You can’t get back to this list unless you make a new field. Leave everything blank and hit finish.

Custom Options List

Okay, we’ll need a test post or two, so make a dummy post using your new content type. Don’t forget to upload an image! When you’re done, we’ll move on to code.

4. Building the WordPress Template

If you look at the test blog post, you’ll see that the image you added isn’t there. We need to add it to the template file. Take a look at your loop:


<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

<div>

<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

<div class="entry">

<?php the_content(); ?>

</div>

<p class="postmetadata">Posted in <?php the_category(', '); ?></p>

</div>

<?php endwhile; else: ?>

<p>Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.</p>

<?php endif; ?>

We need to add the Flutter image code. Use Flutter’s “get_image” command with the name of the image field.

I’ll put it right before the content:


<div class="entry">

<?php echo get_image('post-image') ?>

 <?php the_content(); ?>

</div>

Voila! There’s the image. But it’s pretty blocky in the layout. If every post must have an image, all the images will need a standard look and feel. For this blog, I’ll make every photo a 600×400 grayscale image with rounded corners. That’s where Flutter’s image tools come into play.

Test post image from Flutter

There it is: the unaltered uploaded image.

5. Manipulate your images on the fly with Flutter and PHPThumb

Look through the “Custom Options List” and determine which operations to use. I’ll be using these:

w    = max width of output thumbnail in pixels
h    = max height of output thumbnail in pixels
f    = output image format ("jpeg", "png", or "gif")
zc   = zoom-crop. Will auto-crop off the larger dimension
so that the image will fill the smaller dimension


fltr = filter system. Call as an array as follows:
- "gray" (Grayscale) [ex: &fltr[]=gray]
remove all color from image, make it grayscale

Here’s the full code we’ll end up with:


<div class="entry">

<img src="<?php echo pt(); ?>?src=<?php echo get('post-image'); ?>&f=png>&w=600>&h=400>&zc=C>&fltr[]=ric|12|12>&fltr[]=gray" />
 <br />
 <?php the_content(); ?>

</div>
The final result of Flutter's image manipulation

The final result of Flutter's image manipulation

6. Cool, huh? Let’s break this down.

To generate its image manipulations, Flutter uses something called PHPthumb. Step one is to rewrite the query to pass through PHPthumb. Instead of using  get_image() we’ll need to create the tags ourselves and use the pt() function for the path to PHPthumb:


<div class="entry">

<img src="<?php echo pt(); ?>" />
 <br />
 <?php the_content(); ?>

</div>

…PHPthumb takes a query string with several parameters, the first of which is always the image source. We need to print out the name of the image using a Flutter get() command. Make sure to use the correct field name (mine is ‘post-image’) for the get().


<div class="entry">

<img src="<?php echo pt(); ?>?src=<?php echo get('post-image'); ?>" />
 <br />
 <?php the_content(); ?>

</div>

Finally, you can add the image filters. Each command is added onto the query with an “&” We’ll start by converting the image to a PNG using the “f“ command:


<div class="entry">
<img src="<?php echo pt(); ?>?src=<?php echo get('post-image'); ?>&f=png" />
 <br />
 <?php the_content(); ?>

</div>

Image manipulation commands must be separated by a “>” symbol. We’ll add on the commands to set the target width and height, separating them with a “>”:

<div class="entry">

<img src="<?php echo pt(); ?>&src=<?php echo get('post-image'); ?>&f=png>&w=600>&h=400" />
 <br />
 <?php the_content(); ?>

</div>

Next up is telling the system to crop the image so that it doesn’t have to stretch out to fit the dimensions. We’ll use the zc command with “C” as the attribute to crop evenly towards the photo center:


<div class="entry">

<img src="<?php echo pt(); ?>?src=<?php echo get('post-image'); ?>&f=png>&w=600>&h=400>&zc=C />
 <br />
 <?php the_content(); ?>

</div>

Finally, it’s time to apply the fancy filters. I’m using the ric filter for rounded corners and the gray  filter for desaturation. ric  takes values for the corner radius, and I used 12 for each:


<div class="entry">

<img src="<?php echo pt(); ?>?src=<?php echo get('post-image'); ?>&f=png>&w=600>&h=400>&zc=C>&fltr[]=ric|12|12>&fltr[]=gray" />
 <br />
 <?php the_content(); ?>

</div>

Finish by closing the image tag. Phew!

Additional Notes

This system is really easy and powerful once you get used to it. Play around a little and read through the list of all possible image manipulations; There’s a lot of good stuff there.

When creating an image field, the “Custom” textbox allows you to enter an image filter string. You should avoid using this because there’s NO WAY TO EDIT it and the original unaltered image will no longer be available for display.

An assigned image for each post would make a great image gallery; You could even superimpose the post’s title onto the thumbnail as a teaser.

List of all available filter options

Has anyone else used this Flutter feature?? Let us know how it went and what you used it for.

Christen Those Crustaceans: Win $50

You didn’t hit your head. You read that correctly. In a random act of team-building it was decided during a recent lunch-run that Fresh Tilled Soil’s new Waltham offices were lacking. Needed just a little something extra definitely not available at Staples. Brainstorming began. We started at “stuffed plush mascot”, wound our way right through to “goldfish” and then finally settled on… wait for it now…

name-that-crab
Coenobita Clypeatus: The Caribbean Hermit Crab

Two of them, in fact. Complete with creepy, man-made, yellow kitty shells, a pimped out tank and lots of love. We’re not afraid to admit it: Fresh Tilled Soil’s Search Marketing Department loves their new crustacean dependents. They’re adorable in a shelled, prehistoric and faintly smelly sort of way. No need to take our word for it – here is a video from this morning of the larger of our little month-old friends emerging and then retreating into its Fisher-Price “My First Shell”…

We’re in a “pinch” and want you to “shell” us your crab name ideas!

As you’ve probably surmised by now, we’d like your help in naming them. Remember, there are two crabs in need of a moniker, so you can submit just one name or attempt to christen both. Leave your suggestions in the comments below and when we’ve got a good collection voting will be open to the public. First prize is a $50 Amazon gift certificate and may the luck of Neptune be with you all!

8 Clawsome Hermit Crab Facts

  1. They don’t breed in captivity. So there goes another value-add for visiting clients.
  2. Only experts can determine their gender. We’ll never know so don’t worry about basing your name submissions on a specific sex.
  3. A hermit crab with a purple claw can snap a pencil in half. Sounds like a girl I used to date.
  4. Hermit crabs are nocturnal. As if the cleaning staff didn’t hate us enough already.
  5. They can live 6 to 15 years. We’ll draw straws at FTS to see who pays for tuition.
  6. If hermit crabs are kept underwater too long they will drown. Like Natalie Wood. I think that’s why Christopher Walken isn’t allowed to have any.
  7. When hermits crabs get too big for their shells they move to another one. Note to self: Call TLC and pitch idea for a show called “Flip This Conch”.
  8. The relatives of hermit crabs are spiders and lobsters. Sounds like a girl I… oh, never mind. Submit your own crab name in the comments below!

For Your Inspiration – Our Hermit Crabs’ Very Own Gallery


Submit your entry in the comments below!

Yahoo and Bing Get Married: Now What?

If you haven’t heard, it’s official—Bing and Yahoo, two major players in the search engine world, recently merged to form one company. The marriage between these two internet bigwigs has lead inquisitive minds to wonder, from internet users, to business owners, to SEO’s: What kind of changes will result from this corporate integration?

Here are the cold, hard facts—

Press releases have issued an official statement that confirms Yahoo will control Bing’s MSN Ad center for paid links, while Bing will reign over Yahoo’s organic search results listings.

But our burning questions persist:

Will Bing and Yahoo’s collaboration create one super-powered search engine that can compete with King Google? Will it change how we (the users) search?  How much will it shake up existing organic business rankings?  How will the Bing/Yahoo partnership affect SEO practices?

Unfortunately there aren’t any definite answers to these questions; but there are certain elements to keep an eye on in 2010 that will likely reveal crucial clues about the changes taking place in the realm of search engine marketing:

Look out for:

Search engine algorithm changes—

These are the contributing factors that affect search engine results.  For example, it’s been hypothesized that the birth of Google Caffeine will alter the criteria for organic rankings.

Blended searches—

We’ve recently seen that Google search results have become much more blended, incorporating different types of categories into results pages; multimedia, real time news, and social networking content is now being indexed with written content.  It’s likely that Bing/Yahoo will follow suit due to the publics’ increasingly influential role on marketing and product branding (thanks to the popularity of interactive online media.)

Content Format—

The old rules still apply for SEO-related content in 2010– relevant, high quality writing is always of utmost importance.  Content structure will likely be of special import in 2010, however, since there is a much higher volume of content being indexed on the whole (thanks to blended search results.)  Make content index-friendly by maintaining an organized and hierarchical structure with pointed keywords. This will let search engine spiders more quickly and easily index your site content.

Where visitors come from–

It’s more important than ever to gather information about where your site visitors are coming from since there are so many available SEO leveraging resources. Collecting and analyzing information about where visitors come from will allow you to pinpoint your target audience and effectively concentrate your SEO efforts, identifying the most valuable strategies for your particular business.

Stay tuned for more updates and exciting revelations in 2010…

How to Increase Wikipedia Link Retention

Ever wondered out loud why it’s so fanatically difficult to facilitate a link from Wikipedia to one of your websites? Were you simultaneously embarrassed because someone caught you talking to yourself at a red light? We feel for you deeply and there are indeed simple ways to make this task easier. Read on for some suggestions which have given our team a serious leg up when it comes to traversing this frustrating hurdle of search marketing.

lastcrusade-knightEven with the variety of <NoFollow> tags now in place, a link from a prominent Wiki article can be the Holy Grail of both relevant referral traffic and algorithmic relevancy bequeathment for your most valuable keywords. Not to mention, there’s a lot of debate within the SEO community as to whether the tags truly negate link juice benefits as was previously thought. You’ll want to rethink spending the first month of a new client engagement obsessing over PR sculpting from now on. Will you choose… wisely?

Wrapping up my incredibly amusing preface, I’d like to start off with a quiz meant to hammer home a crucial point. Please bear with me…

Question: If you haven’t put in your time and developed a reputable profile on Wikipedia, adding links to your site from one of their articles is about as useful as:

three-legged-cata) Teats on a bull.
b) A screen door on a submarine.
c) A cheese sandwich to a drowning ferret
d) A chocolate kettle
e) Shut up and get on with the article, Dave

If you answered “e” – then I already don’t like you. Regardless, I’ve still made my case. It’s darn near impossible to get a new Wiki link to stick if your profile makes you look like an SEO, social media marketer, blogger or anyone with something to promote. Sure, you may get lucky. An established Wiki denizen may see your resource in passing and add it to an article “naturally”. Likewise, you may catch the first individual to review your change on the same day his wife gives birth to healthy twins. Realistically though, in both cases you’ve got a better chance of seeing a three-legged cat bury a turd on a frozen pond.

Wiki is Picky – Build Trust
Why so cynical? Simple – there are oceans of Wikipedia power users who like nothing better, not even World of Warcraft LARPing, than to delete the “contributions” of self-serving online marketers (regardless of what you might want to call yourself). That’s what you are to them and they hate you with every fibre of their being. It’s easy to increase your odds of successful link dropping resource inclusion on Wikipedia by making contributions over an extended period of time which improve the quality of their articles. Your level of trust then increases exponentially with every objective edit that you make within their kingdom. This isn’t hard to do once you’ve figured out the basics, nor does it take a lot of time. Consistency is the crucial ingredient, and here are a few tips to help maintain your momentum.

  1. Every time you edit something in your own interest, work on at least one other article for no reason other than improving the resource.
  2. After you make your calculated edit, hit the Random Article link in the navigation sidebar if you’re feeling low on inspiration.
  3. Contribute to subjects you enjoy and are knowledgeable about. Books, authors, movies, directors, cars, countries, pets, houseplants – there’s an article for absolutely everything!
  4. Link to well established sources of information you see sticking on other articles – news sites, reputable blogs, guides, manuals, etc. Keep a list of these for future reference.

One more time for the cheap seats: Any individual or agency devoting eons of time to creating free, objective, Wiki-friendly resources must also devote time contributing to the general Wikipedia community. Set a reminder, form a habit, pick subject matter which genuinely interests you – but stick with it. In a few months the suspicion with which new or rarely-used Wikipedia profiles are regarded will have turned to trust – vastly increasing the likelihood your business-related additions will remain intact. You could say that the aforementioned elusive, disabled and incontinent feline might just become one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. However… I’m pretty sure you won’t.

Google Is Self-Aware… Well Not Exactly.

If you’ve seen the movie Terminator, than the slight mention of “Skynet” might leave you shaking in your pants. Well the day has come and Google has become self-aware!… Well I’m only kidding, partially.

If you are like the majority of us you have probably come in contact with Google at some point in your life. I use Google on a daily basis, not only to search for anything and everything I may be interested in, but to perform market and keyword research for our SEO clients. You might have noticed that Google is now incorporating a new element within the search bar that “pre-determines” topics you might be searching for.

This isn’t necessarily a “new” element/feature in Google, because I have seen this for some time, but it’s definitely funny to review some of the crazy results I have found. Take a gander…

Local Boston Business Seminar: Measuring Social Media Campaigns

At Fresh Tilled Soil, we have been overwhelmed with the amount of local events we see on a daily basis in-and-around the Boston area that are geared towards entrepreneurs, business professionals and business start-ups… so why not share these events with you?

If you are available on February 2, 2010 at 8 am (registration starts at 7:30 am) you might want to check out the following event: Katie Paine will be hosting a breakfast seminar to discuss the facets of measuring your social media campaigns. Katie will help you define several measurable objectives This event will be located at the Foley Hoag Emerging Enterprise Center, 1000 Winter St., Waltham MA.

Far to often business owners find themselves in quite a dilemma: knowing that they want to incorporate social media into their more traditional marketing approaches, but don’t necessarily understand how to measure the success/failure of these campaigns in relation to their business. Definitely a great resource for anyone who owns their own business or works in a business environment where measuring social media is important.

Learn more about the event and sign-up here (members $40 and non-members $80): http://socialmedia100202.eventbrite.com/

Xtra Xtra: How FTS Brought in the New Year

While you were sipping bubbly and counting down the last moments of 2009, we brought in the New Year with what else but the launch of a new website.  XtraXtra.com went live January 1st and is already getting “dugg” by users. We designed a personalized news site for Xtra Xtra that allows users to search for and share personal news and professional milestones with friends, neighbors, colleagues, etc..

The project involved a complete design overhaul of the existing site. We restructured the entire site to improve upon elements of functionality and navigability. The client provided market research and focus group feedback that allowed our designers to create a user-friendly, aesthetically appealing interface. Usability is always a central consideration when we implement new designs, but it’s especially paramount to the success of a website (like Xtra Xtra,) that’s inherently based on personalization and user interaction.

New features were added to make the site Xtra Xtra customized (…clever, I know). A geo-location element was added to detect the user’s location and provide highly-localized, relevant content—much like Citysearch does. A Facebook Connect feature was added that allows users to login via their Facebook account, and distribute site content around the web; for example, you can comment on another user’s “milestone” and it will stream directly to their Facebook account feed.

Lots of other changes, improvements, and revisions went down during this three month project schedule.  But let’s skip to the happy ending– check out the before/after shots below:

Before                                                                                            After

A Search Tool that Makes an SEO’s Life Easier

Often times I perform manual ranking analysis for our SEO clients. This typically involves me sitting at my computer and manually typing in a variety of keywords; searching for a websites current position based on these keywords. As I’m sure you are aware this can take some time. I do this because the keyword reports we receive can sometimes be misleading or not necessarily accurate.

Today however, I found a new tool that I’m sure is going to make my life a lot simpler. It allows you to see and compare current position rankings among Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter and Ebay. If you go to search3 [dot] com. You will be able to use this great tool. I really do enjoy it and it’s going to save me a lot of time when it comes to manual keyword search/position rankings research.

I’ve attached a screen-shot below, just to give you all a little sneak peak at this new tool. Hopefully some of you will find it useful as well.
Search3 SEO Tool

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