Having a crummy day? Sick of dealing with “the man?” Would you say, over all, you’d really just like to kill yourself? GREAT! You’ve got exactly five minutes to end it all - now make it happen!

As a designer, I spend a significant amount of time just browsing through beautiful sites others have made. I do this partly for inspiration and partly because I am addicted to the internet. Occasionally, I just stumble across an extraordinary site simply while I’m surfing the internet like any other average consumer. Such was the nature of my introduction to GorillaCoffee.com.

Fewer and fewer of my friends are working for Starbucks these days. Which means less and less free coffee for me. As long as I’m paying for it, I thought I’d play the field a bit - try some new beans.

Gorilla Coffee was my first pass. They’re out of Brooklyn, so you have to order on line, but their website is awesome and makes purchasing a breeze. I’m typically not a huge fan of sites developed completely in flash precisely because they are often a nightmare to navigate. Gorilla Coffee, however, gently leads you by your opposable thumbs through the website like a friendly sales monkey should. The site navigation in it’s entirety is always right where you can see it. The flash animation, while aesthetically pleasing, really gets out of the way of the content, supporting what your seeing instead of upstaging everything. It was designed and developed by 1 Trick Pony. If your looking for a gorgeous, accessible, smart flash website you should give them a shout.

A while back Marketing Sherpa estimated that SEO would break the billion-dollar ceiling in 2006. However, the Search Marketing Benchmark Guide for 2007 proved those previous estimates wrong by reporting a puny 6.7% SEO growth rate despite paid advertising’s year-over-year increase of 124%.

It has never been a debate over whether to do SEO optimization or not, but rather a matter of outsourcing or keeping it in-house. Based on the industry growth rate, it looks like many companies are willing to take it on themselves. Maybe that’s why our SEO clients are seeing much higher success rates than in previous years. Just kidding!
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Over the last few weeks, articles in Advertising Age and the Wall Street Journal have caused a huge wake-up call to the large traditional agencies. Nike recently shocked the advertising world by announcing that it was going to expand its creative agency roster and shop its running shoe account. Although their long-time agency, Wieden and Kennedy, responsible for the “Just Do It” brand, will keep a large part of the work, they are not even involved in pitching the digital assignments up for grabs. Nike’s executives give reasons, such as dissatisfaction with the agency’s abilities in the digital arena, for opening its arms to small digital boutique firms. Nike, already on top of the digital marketing game, seeks fresh, ahead of the curve ideas – typically not found in the polished and corporate big agency realm.
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In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a rumbling going on in Silicon Valley. Well, maybe not, because there’s always something going on out there, but it got your attention. On April 11, Google will be hosting a talk on the next generation of web usability. Some of the hot topics will be the challenges with usability since the rise of Web 2.0 technologies and what that means to a client’s ROI.

A new trend is occurring. The next time you pitch a client on strategy or usability testing, they may come back to you and say that they have already done their own usability tests. If you are a development agency, this will send a minor shock up your spine. “What do you mean you’ve done your own usability test?” But let’s be honest, many in our community have defended poor designs by saying that we’ve done the best usability test and we expect the client to just take our “expert advice” .
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You have probably heard the age-old proverb “A picture is worth a thousand words” describing the idea that a single image can tell an entire story. This is a powerful proverb but really can be quite deceiving when applied to the web. It really should read “A picture is only as good as your ALT attribute(s)”.

What does this mean?

Your ALT attribute is applied to the image tag as alternative text to those who may not be able to see your images. Now while this may seem trivial since less than .0000001% of users wouldn’t be able to see your images there is one very powerful user of your site in that 0000001% that you may not be aware of and they cannot see images. Who or better what am I referring to? A crawler. Crawlers are those robots that are deployed by the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc..) to index the pages of your site. These crawlers are focused on one thing and one thing only - Content.
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