I decided to jot down some observations and thoughts on launching successful social network development platforms… like the one facebook launched at f8, Bebo’s clone of facebook’s, or the one MySpace will be launching, etc. This is a list of some observations of what facebook (and Bebo) did well pre-, at, and post-launch.

1. Create a feeling of technological openness. Top-notch developers love to know the ins and outs early - seeing the early bugs, unfinished features, etc. Visiting and engaging the CTOs of pre-launch partner companies will create instant camaraderie between the platform development team and the developer community.

2. Treat developers equally, but leverage the best ones by letting them closer in. After launch, quickly giving the technically superior developers direct access to members of the platform team (via a special email address and IM), will allow them to report and help debug real-time performance problems, and further cement the teams’ respect for each other.

3. Plan and manage a community, and introduce a community manager early – ideally, these are pretty technical people that gain fast credibility with hard-core developers. Introduce a few colorful personalities to make developers feel welcome, pre-launch. These people should organize meet-ups, participate in chats, IRC channels, mailing lists, visit companies in person. The key impression to create is that someone from the platform team is on your side, ready to plead your case to powers that be.

4. Shift the support/documentation load onto the early developers. Smaller developer groups will naturally seek to help each other, they will gladly participate in joint-effort projects to document the platform APIs, support each other technically, etc.

5. Respond very quickly to platform issues, and take the early scaling problems seriously. The feeling of “this must be really important to them” will carry a lot of weight with the developer community in the early days. Developers will stay up day and night to build great applications if they know the platform team is doing the same to support them.

6. Emphasize the money-making nature of the platform. The larger developer groups are going to be at least somewhat skeptical of the platform, since they are already working hard and have many real challenges. Bible-thumping the “you will make money” point will help keep developers focused during the early platform days.

7. Make your campus a place that developers very much want to visit. The invitation to visit should be a prize, a chance to hang out with the platform team and meet your heroes. Organize hackathons and coding parties welcoming all, but invite the key developers to visit the platform group separately. Having an inner-circle developer group will help handle future PR crises.

8. Pre- and over-communicate policy changes and make major changes with at least the perception of open debate. Nothing takes away from the credibility of the platform like a sudden negative change. The greatest impact is venture investors’ fear of instability, reducing its value as a legitimate investment opportunity. No matter how much money you have to throw at this initiative, having a few billion dollars of venture money will make a difference.

9. Make the #1 measurable goal of your PR team the amount of coverage that successful (or just interesting) developers get. People will jump through all kinds of hoops to be in the papers. Double so if the article lists them next to a [your] big brand.

10. Hold frequent developer events and invite leading developers to speak at those. Elevating developers (especially the smaller ones) to a pseudo-celebrity status can create a great deal of good will.

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Web 2.0, as described by many, is often used to describe a resurgence in the web economy, a new level of technological interactivity or a social phenomena deriving from new types of online communities and social networks. In whatever ways they might be described, the new web 2.0 sites show a remarkable change in the patterns of design. Certain common styles and trends can be observed in most of these sites, that has probably included designing too as a part of web 2.0 definitions.

The basic patterns that most of the web 2.0 sites follow are:

1. Simple Layout: The layouts generally stick to 1-2 column formats. This provides a cluster free navigation and easy sorting of the contents. These pages read in a straightforward way from top to bottom, and you don’t find your eye skipping around trying to work out what to look at. It’s a much calmer and more solid browsing experience than in times gone by.

2. Centered Orientation: In comparison to the liquid layout or left-aligned fixed-width layout of yesteryears, the new designs call for a center-orientated layout.

3. Content Designing: It is often said, that the mantra of web 2.0 designing is Design the Content, Not the Page! Well, this can also be observed in quite a lot of cases. It is no longer designing a blank page to be filled with content later. Rather its about designing the content, to make the site look more in sync with its theme.

4. 3D Effects: This is another of the very commonly found designing component for all web 2.0 sites. Glossy effects, reflections, bright colors and drop-shadows, are the latest designing trends.

5. Background Colors: As already mentioned, the page backgrounds are not the main aspects of designing any longer. Rather, they are generally filled with soft natural colors, gradients or simple diagonal or horizontal stripes. These simple backgrounds help to further enhance and highlight the importance of the already designed content.

6. Cute Icons: As with strong color and 3D effects, appealing icons and buttons can add that bit of polish to help give a page a high-quality feel. But used too much, they’ll have the counter effect, cluttering the page and confusing the user.

7. Big Text: Important sections of the site are generally written using bigger texts. This is surely to attract the users attention. However, not all the text should be using the same bigger fonts, simply because then none of them would be bigger than the other.

8. Big Input Fields: Bigger input fields are seen in the recent web 2.0 sites. This probably helps to validate the content design and the bigger text part of layout. Moreover, it somehow emphasizes the user interactivity of the web 2.0 sites.

9. Stars and Badges: Last but not the least, comes the bright stars and badges that have almost created a revolution in the web 2.0 designing. Almost all the sites that claim to be web 2.0 essentially include a bright star or a badge somewhere on their site. Mostly seen in their declaration of a beta release, the stars and badges can also be found in buttons and contents.

In addition to the orthodox definitions, these new, classy and smart web-designing trends also help to define a new breed of websites, the ones known to us now as the web 2.0 sites.

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So you’ve optimized your website, done the keyword research, got the backlinks and everything is ethical. You’re sitting proudly on the first page of the search results. Or you’ve set up a pay per click campaign, bid on your keywords, created some ads and performance tracking is in place. Again, you’re at the top of the pile. Either way, you’re visible and people are visiting your website. But visitors aren’t converting into leads, prospects or customers. What’s going wrong? Well your website may be visible, but is it connecting?

Having attracted visitors to your website through prominent search engine placements, it is vital not to lose them by failing to connect. Different visitors will have different priorities and levels of satisfaction. In order to reach and retain as many as possible and to maximize the chances of conversion, you should consider your site’s usability and accessibility.

Web Usability

Usability is all about providing your visitors with an effective, efficient and satisfying experience. It’s common knowledge that visitors tend to glance at, and scan, pages rather than study them in any great detail. If the message and options are not clear, they may leave. If they don’t leave, the chances are that they will click on the first link that seems to be most relevant — it may not be the right one. Repeat the process a few times and soon a visitor can be lost, confused and frustrated. Either way the result is the same — missed opportunity and little likelihood of a return visit.

The more self-evident your pages are, the greater the chance of converting the visitor into a prospect or customer.

12 simple tips for a more usable website

1. On the home page make it clear what the site is all about.
2. Make the purpose of each page obvious.
3. User hierarchical headings to give clear structure to the copy.
4. Make the navigation and links obvious.
5. Make the options and next steps obvious.
6. Use clear unambiguous wording.
7. Remove any wording or imagery that is unnecessary, confusing or distracting.
8. Use consistent conventions throughout.
9. Include site search and a site map.
10. Make the pages printable by including a cascading style sheet for printing.
11. Make information such as contact details, pricing and delivery charges clearly accessible.
12. Don’t allow careless errors to make your site look unprofessional.

Browsers create their own set of problems

One more tip — just because your website works fine in your browser of choice, do not assume that it will work equally well in all browsers. In fact it is not even safe to assume that it will work equally well in different versions of the same browser. Web designers who have had to cope with the incompatibilities of IE5, IE6 and now IE7 will no doubt testify to this point. It is vital to be sure that your website works on all the popular browsers. As well as IE and Firefox, don’t forget Netscape and Opera on Windows and Safari on the Mac. And just to muddy the waters a bit further, Apple have recently announced Safari for Windows.

So now your website is usable, but is it usable by everybody? For some, usability is just a small obstacle when compared to the barrier of accessibility.

Web Accessibility

All businesses in virtually all countries have a legal obligation to make their websites accessible to people with disabilities, otherwise they are discriminating. Given that something like 15% of the population have some sort of disability, that’s a sizable market proportion. If you’re not reaching them, your competitors probably are.

One of the many myths surrounding web accessibility is that blind people are the only ones who need to be catered for. Whilst blind people and their use of assistive technologies to read web pages are an obvious and important example, consider also people with other visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive and neurological impairments.

• How does a color-blind person cope with page colors?
• How does someone with a mobility impairment manage without being able to use a mouse?
• How does someone with attention deficit disorder make sense of the pages?
• How does a deaf person gain access to auditory content?

Web pages should be accessible to all of them. And it’s not just disabled people who will benefit. Older people, people with low literacy levels, people who are not fluent in the website language, people with low bandwidth connections, people using older technologies and people with short-term injuries and illnesses will also benefit.

9 simple tips for a more accessible website

1. Provide all images with an alternative text description. If the image does not convey any information, provide null (blank) text rather than no alternative text at all.
2. Provide transcripts of audio content.
3. Ensure that the contrast between text foreground and background colors is sufficiently strong.
4. Do not use color alone to convey information. There should also be some other form of visual indicator such as additional characters, images or font changes.
5. Place column headings in the first row of a table and place row headings in the first column. If headings are ambiguous, use the HTML scope attribute to clarify.
6. Never use the HTML blink and marquee elements. For animated GIFs or other moving objects, the flicker frequency must be less than 2 Hz or greater than 55 Hz. But better to have no moving content at all.
7. Provide an option to skip navigation on all pages. This will save screen reader users from having to repetitiously listen to the same navigation, and keyboard users from having to repetitiously tab through every item. Use hierarchical headers to provide the same benefit and to enable navigation through copy.
8. Link text should clearly state the purpose and destination of the link. Phrases like Click Here may mean nothing to someone listening to a screen reader.
9. On forms, always associate prompts with controls so that each control is adequately described. Use the HTML fieldset and legend tags to give structure to complex forms.

The importance of web standards

Usable, accessible web pages can only be achieved through strict compliance with the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They provide a platform for consistency, compatibility, stability, flexibility and extensibility. Implementing standards throughout a website’s design will address many usability and accessibility issues by default.

Last and certainly not least

Usability and Accessibility alone will not suddenly convert all your visitors into customers. Content is vital to a website’s delivery capability. But at least those visitors may now stick around long enough to look at the content.

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Your UK website can make you an internet powerhouse if its designed effectively. The internet is the worlds largest and most accessible marketplace. Never before has there been such an equalizing force amongst international businesses. Without the internet, you are in the same old hum-drum world of limited market potential and minimal exposure. When you enter your business into the cyberspace realm, you need to ensure that you stand out in the crowd.

Unless you have extensive technical knowledge, or youre just designing a site for your personal pleasure, you may want to seriously consider employing the help of a UK-based website design company that also specializes in search engine optimization techniques. Simply having a website means next to nothing. You need a website that is designed to be an integral component of your business; an extension of its very essence. After you have such a website, you need exposure. The best-designed website in cyberspace is completely useless if nobody visits it.

Website design has become an intricate process. New technologies and techniques of promotion are in constant development. If you want to capitalize from the internet and monetize your company website, then you must embrace the magnitude of the entire concept. Here are some of offerings that you need to look for when selecting a UK website design company:

• You need a company that has a proven record of website design excellence;
• The company needs to offer various options in e-commerce solutions and online shopping;
• Graphic design, bespoke programming, Internet/Extranet standards as well as content management systems should be offered;
• Hosting solutions, database integration and web-enabled applications should be well understood by the company;
• Besides the technical aspects of the company, they should provide very human customer service. The company should never make you feel anything less than extremely important;
• which is the same for any business on or off-line.

Take your time selecting which UK website design company is right for you and dont forget the importance of search engine optimization techniques after the design stage is complete.

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Websites play an important role in ecommerce. It makes a big difference in ecommerce. A professional web design is a great deal for a successful business. The first impression is all one gets in life. This holds true to Internet also. So grab the potential customer’s attention and attract them by making a professional web design with easy navigation, new contents and attractive images.

Creating an ecommerce website design will increase sales of a business and ultimately more profit. Ecommerce websites are very easy to use but to create ecommerce website design is quite difficult. Database integration is the important aspect in ecommerce website design. It should allow you to keep track of your customers, inventory and details.

Today, online business is taking the world by storm and creates billions of money in revenue. Many companies use ecommerce software services to take advantage of this fiscal boom. Ecommerce software helps design web pages in an attracting and eye catching format. It makes the user to navigate easily on your website. It has provision to display products in the first page itself making it very obvious that the visitor is entering into an ecommerce site.

If you are searching for an affordable ecommerce solution, an ecommerce package is the one that will make you relax as the sales of your business will be taken care of by the ecommerce package website. With the popularity of online shopping and sales, many business people are trying to make their websites more attractive by placing add-ons and featured ecommerce packages.

Ecommerce packages are designed to have two important sections. They are the admin section and the user interface section. The admin section is accessible only by the administrator. The ecommerce package should have an admin section that is very easy to control, manage and edit various operations. It should have a dynamic category section, a sub category section, customer listing section, order details section and product addition section. The user interface section is for the customers or the users of the website. It should have sections such as about us, contact us, registration, account maintenance and shopping cart.

Most business owners do not know to create an ecommerce web design. With the ecommerce web site design service, ecommerce software and ecommerce packages, they make their websites possible and more profitable. To design an ecommerce website, always go in for a ready to use ecommerce package. To put up your website rent a space or store in a network based ecommerce solution and inquire a web designing company to build a website from scratch.

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What is accessible website design?

Surely if Google and the other search engines can index your site, that means it’s accessible?

Not really.

An accessible website design should be one that looks good for the majority of the population with good health but that it should also work fine for the hearing impaired and those with less than perfect eyesight (as just two examples of who you should be considering when you design your website).

One of the common “tricks” in website design is to use buttons for navigation. Switch the images off in your browser and see whether you can still navigate around your site?

Problems navigating?

This kind of problem won’t just affect those who have eyesight problems. They’ll also affect people on slow internet connections. Nowadays, this needn’t be someone in the middle of nowhere. It could just as easily be a person at an airport, accessing the web with their mobile phone as the internet connection.

Does your website need Flash to get around?

Not only does this stop the search engines from indexing your site, it rules out a chunk of potential users. At the very least, offer people the choice of a Flash site and a non-Flash version. Then check your logs to see which they prefer - you may be surprised at the results, that will likely depend on the average age of your site’s users.

It’s easy to make a website design accessible. Little things help, like using regular menus rather than image buttons or Java menus. Or at least the option of one or the other.

Using “Alt” tags on will help your visitors who don’t use images. It will also help tell the search engines what the images are about, so you get benefit in that direction as well.

Remember that a search engine’s spider is the ultimate “impaired” person. It can’t see. It can’t hear. It can’t use Flash or JavaScript. All it can do is “read” the text on your page. So designing an accessible website will help your search engine optimization as well as your visitors with less than perfect health.

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Bebo, the global social networking site, and Microsoft today announced an alliance to bring the Windows Live Messenger service, the world’s largest consumer instant messaging (IM) network, to Bebo users. Additionally, Bebo and Windows Live will allow users to seamlessly exchange their contact information to invite and connect through their respective services.

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Mobimii has launched another Facebook application to grant you the option of sending photos directly to your cell phone from your Facebook profile. Pix2fone is integrated with Facebook’s own photo-sharing options, letting you send photos from your Facebook album to your cell phone, or send photos to the cell phones of your Facebook friends. Your friends will receive a text message with a WAP link to download the photo to their cell phones. Hopefully they’ll be able to offer direct posting to your Facebook profile from your cell phone, too.

Mobimii’s first Facebook application was Nudgemii, which lets you text “nudges” to other users.

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Whether you call it blended search, 3D search (Ask’s name), or universal search, it has the potential to surface as many relevant results as other hot search topics such as personalization. At SES yesterday, I sat in the back of the Universal Search session. There are good write-ups on the PowerPoint and presentations, but not as much coverage of the questions.

Just to give you a flavor of the sort of questions that people asked afterwards, here are a few as I remember/interpreted them:

Q: (This was for David Bailey, the Google rep.) You showed a snapshot of metacafe.com entering Google’s search results via universal search. How can a video site get included in Google’s universal search?
A: Quite a few sites are already in there, and we would love to open that up more. Factors include things like reliable playability, lack of copyright concerns, no porn, etc. They’ll keep working to expand the sites that can participate.

Q: Do you expect to be crawling the web for videos?
A: Not right now. For the time being, you could submit your video to YouTube or other search engines if you wanted to.

Q: (for Yahoo’s Tim Mayer, I think) Do you expect to use 3rd party rating such as BizRate to help with ratings and abuse?
A: For now, we’re just using ratings on Yahoo.

Q: We have 20-30 videos on our corporate site. We wouldn’t show up in universal/blended/3D search?
A: Not right now, but you could always submit your videos to the different engines.

Q: (for Google) What other types of data do you expect to surface?
A: A good guess is the types of data that we already help search over, e.g. things like patents or code could be interesting, or Google Base has different feeds for real estate and jobs. Data that we already have is the most likely near-term, but most people probably care about well-known types of data like news, video, local, etc.

Q: Different IPs will see different search results? How can I see what someone in San Diego would see?
A: There’s not a great way right now. Some people use proxies.

Note from Matt: Google does provide quite a bit of this functionality. For example,
http://www.google.com/search?q=bank&gl=us searches as if you’re in the U.S., and returns Bank of America at #1. But http://www.google.com/search?q=bank&gl=uk does the search as if you’re in the UK, and returns Lloyds TSB at #1.

You can even look at ads based on lat/long, regions, cities, U.S. ZIP codes or U.S. designated market area (DMA). See this way informative post for more details.

Q: What future plans do you have to extract text from audio or video?
A: Everyone was silent for a while. David Bailey of Google gave the only reasonable answer that most search engine employees can give when you ask about future plans: we have researchers that work on such projects, but we have nothing to announce at this time.

Q: What are your three best optimization tips for video?
A: (various panelists answered.)
1. Choose a good title that describes your video
2. Tim Mayer from Yahoo mentioned exploring MediaRSS.
3. Erik Collier from Ask said “Make a kick-ass video.” Well-said, and a good reminder that compelling content makes optimization much easier.

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SocialMedia, the aforementioned Facebook apps and MySpace widgets company that will combine hosting, promotion and an ad network, has raised $1 million in funding in a round led by CRV Ventures, SoftTech VC and the Hitforge seed fund. More background, from our previous coverage:

SocialMedia’s founders include Seth Goldstein and David Henderson of the lofty attention-tracking service Root Markets, and David Gentzel, whose successful MySpace widgets Trakzor and Flikzor we’ve covered here before (there’s now also a Facebook version of Trakzor).

Getting $1M to build on top of another platform isn’t so rare now: RockYou and Slide.com have done much the same thing. And as these companies diversify beyond MySpace, their positions look a little less precarious.

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