What does the iPad mean for web designers? What about users?

With Apple’s new product the iPad coming out in April, there has been a lot of discussion about the product itself like the intricate details of the OS and some new technology that is getting introduced (for example the IPS display that gives you 178^o viewing angle with bright, elegant color / contrast) but more often than not, the reviews for the iPad are less than positive.

For the longest time, I mean going as far back as 1994, the standard width of a website was 800px. The rationale behind this was that in the olden days of the Internet, most user's monitor screens were as small as 800px by 600px, and even users who had wider monitors displayed their browser in a window that didn't take up the full screen. 

Then around 2001 I remember reading somewhere (no, I don't remember where) that 1024px was a new comfortable standard due to increasing average monitor size and standard resolution settings (better video cards). This allowed 800px for main content and 200px for side content (ie. menu, advertising banners). This has remained the standard in web design since.

But now nearly 10 yrs later, does that logic still hold? According to the Steam Hardware Survey 85% of screen resolutions are now larger than 1024 x 768. Similarly, the Browser Display Statistics analysis by W3 Schools indicate 36% of users have a display resolution of 1024x76 ...and 57% have higher. As a web designer/developer here's my take on it all.

Website Design still should use no more than 1024 pixels of width. Even though the average resolution size is growing most people still don't view individual content wider than 1024. So sure you can use a "liquid" layout that can expand or contract to use more or less space, but it should not require more than 1024 pixels to display.

The bulk of your content should fit into the leftmost 800 pixels of width.  Especially If your audiences are left to right reading and you are displaying graphics or multimedia. You want to follow the natural path of the eye whenever possible. K.I.S.S. 

Make sure you consider smaller resolutions for mobile phones and similar apps. The cell phone industry is growing at exponential rates. Data transfer speeds double every year and with this new speed more and more people are going online via one of the various mobile Internet devices on the market. Most new Content Management Systems have technology built into them to determine user browser or device resolution and adjust the web site accordingly.

In my opinion there are only guidelines when considering site size though many new sites are pushing the boundries of width and height standards. Here's a few:

http://www.thehorizontalway.com/

http://www.180degrees.co.uk/180degrees.html

http://deanoakley.com/

http://www.faub.org/

Google first announced Search History in April 2005. By July 2005, Google Personalized Search was linked to My Search History and was monitoring what people selected from search results and refining their search results going forward based on their search habits.

Now with the most recent iteration of Web History, Personalized Search is working in the background even if you are not signed in to one of your Google accounts like Gmail.

In their official blog on December 4, 2009, Google said: "Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we're doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well."

This is what Google says about Personalized Search:

+View and manage your web activity. You know that great web site you saw online and now can't find? From now on, you can. With Web History, you can view and search across the full text of the pages you've visited, including Google searches, web pages, images, videos and news stories. You can also manage your web activity and remove items from your web history at any time.

+Get the search results most relevant to you.Web History helps deliver more personalized search results based on the things you've searched for on Google and the sites you've visited. You might not notice a big impact on your search results early on, but they should steadily improve over time the more you use Web History.

+Follow interesting trends in your web activity. Which sites do you visit frequently? How many searches did you do between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.? Web History can tell you about these and other interesting trends in your web activity.

Personalized Search then, changes your results by using data based on the types of sites you select from any and all of your searches. This may have an interesting effect on your Search Engine Optimization efforts as sites that a person typically searches for, or that Google determines they would be typically searching for, get a boost in rankings.

If you don't want this, next time you search in Google click on Web History link in your results page. It will have a link that you can click called "Disable customizations based on search activity" and that is the one you want.

There are many reasons you would want to turn Personalized Search off.

1. You may not like the idea that Google is recording what you are doing online. This has always been an issue with Internet activity. Statistics on what we do on the Internet are now being tracked in the name of helping us as opposed to the old more obvious we want to know what to sell you approach.
2. People switching computers will see different results unless they use all 3 the same way. What's the likelihood of that? Hope your IT guy doesn’t need to spend too much time on your computer and use Google at the same time. And you thought deleting history from your browser was enough…
3. People will visit more and more of the same sites. It will become more and more difficult to find new things, original sources and small time publishers. I want to come up with the brilliant search query, not have Google tell me what I meant based on my prior history. I'm human and reserve the right to change my mind.
4. Trying to ever get closer to human intelligence, results get weaker. I may be searching for schools for my children but where to repair my car next mixed in with my wife using my computer to shop online or plan our next vacation. Track that!
5. My Internet Explorer keeps track of my history as does Firefox just fine so I don’t need a Google database somewhere in Internet land to keep a copy of my data.
6. It seems obvious that we use search engines when we don't know what we are looking for. So why would I want my past search history to limit some new and unique (to me) question I need answered? How about this approach: let me search for what I want.

I'll be clicking on "Disable customizations based on search activity" now...

The News Media Has Had Enough...Maybe

When the Internet just got out of diapers (15 years ago) it was a relatively bland whitewashed wall of information. There was some texture to the wall (the world of AOL maybe) but it was just a plain old whitewashed wall. No matter how many brush marks new Internet companies made it was just more white on white.

Then a new color came along that stood out on the wall. It was the color Google. Google made a huge bright brush mark and kept adding more and more brush marks all over the wall. The Internet began to revolve around Google and by the time the company sailed past $700 per share, it had mastered Pay Per Click ad revenue, made print media (and even their online versions) largely irrelevant, frustrated even Microsoft, and basically convinced all of us that if your web presence or Internet plan did not involve the color Google, there was no point in even getting on the wall. White just wasn’t going to stand out.

The trouble is there have been so many Google brush marks made, the whole wall is now the color Google. No one can really stand out by using a Google colored brush anymore. So it’s no surprise that big media doesn't like the color Google (and hasn’t seen much of a profit because of it either).

Recently, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp announced that he just might block search engines from crawling content. He is already doing this to a certain extent with the Wall Street Journal which News Corp owns. Given News Corp is just about the biggest content generator of big media, this just might be a brush stroke that screams a new color up against the solid Google colored Internet. He offers in his interview with Sky News editor David Speers that the fact that search brings high numbers of unique visitors to News Corps’ sites does not mean there is revenue being generated.

Wasn’t high traffic with low (or no) revenue the basis of the “dot com boom” and then the “dot gone bust” of 2000? Is the average company making that high a return off their PPC and organic search efforts (even if people are being driven to their site)? There’s a lot more to conversion than being found yet being found remains our prime directive in the world of Google. "There is no advertising, there is SEO."

A New Color

But even Murdoch’s actions may be just a nudge. It will take the rest of big media and then all the smaller media properties out there to decide they do NOT want to be found by Google for a paradigm shift to occur. Still, it’s an 800 pound gorilla doing the nudging.

NOT Wanting to Be Found

Imagine NOT wanting to be found by Google being in vogue. You would see an increase in news directory sites for the smaller media players. There would be more direct accessing of large media sites since we all know how to find the likes of CNN without Google. Currently on mobile phones, everything from USA Today to Fox News is set up in an old fashioned menu (n.k.a. Bookmarks). When I’m on my Blackberry, I don’t use Google to find news. I go to the news sites directly.

It’s nothing to imagine that your current focus and efforts (and obsession) on your company’s PPC or search engine optimization might give way considerably to old fashioned advertising on sites where people may have to go to find news -- the news sites themselves. And of course social media profiles of the news media are becoming better and more widespread along with their targeted blogs and other content that will remain searchable.

So once there is a critical mass, will there be organic and paid search within huge media sites? Will Google’s business model go from direct PPC revenues to renting out its search algorithm and a set of PPC software suites to high volume sites? Will such advertising then necessarily get cheaper for the average business? My God, will the AOL portal come back from the dead?

It’s tough to tell which form the new paradigm will take. But consider the Internet is still so young, that there is no real way to stand out now making small Google colored brush marks against a solid Google colored wall (and no money in it either for news media), and that even Microsoft can display chinks in its armor in the fast changing world of the Internet. There is every possibility that a new color will get put up on the wall which just might spread and cover up some of the color Google.