If you’re a regular reader of this Blog (i.e. if you’re the author) you’ll know that I hate buzzwords and hype on the Internet. I’ve touched over the subject of Search Engine Optimisation a number of times, claiming it to not be the beginning and end of promotion on the Internet, and now I am looking to vent my annoyances with another little buzzword/acronym we all see thrown around by clients, users and developers far too much.

Asynchronous Javascript And XML - otherwise known as AJAX.

Maybe the issue is me? I’ve never taken the time to really learn AJAX and find out what it can really do for me. All I can really say is that I’ve seen it used on countless websites and very rarely does it ever impress me, especially considering that it’s been around for a good while now and developers and clients still demand its presence. I’ve known a few businesses completely throw away a good design to have a ‘minimalist’ design (code word for crap design) with some fancy all-singing, all-dancing layout that’ll throw data-driven tantrums all over your screen, and that’s if it’s working properly! Try viewing an AJAX powered website on a mobile device!

Believe it or not, but AJAX has been around in some shape or form for around ten years, so why has it only just started to take off now?

In many ways, the creation of AJAX as a dynamic technique seems like a good thing. We have the power to utilise HTML and CSS along with JavaScript, the DOM and others to create something out of what we currently already have. The functionality on paper sounds great, being able to request data without reloading the page, and in some ways it works brilliantly. Google is the only company that has been able to utilise AJAX in a way that genuinely works wonders, like with Google Suggest and Gmail.

Back in the day I remember JavaScript almost becoming a bad thing. What we wanted was grand websites containing lots of information and images to ponder over, and JavaScript was a nuisance that got in the way of browsing bliss. Now, it seems that with Web Applications becoming far more common in the browsing patterns of today AJAX is almost required at times, leaving a bad case of Accessibility issues and poor browsing experiences. The sheer lack of real alternatives to AJAX also presents a problem. With Browsers on mobile devices and desktops crashing due to heavy loading times with AJAX we seem to have hit a dead-end as some websites fight a losing battle to become better versions of desktop software .

AJAX is great when it’s core functionality is a requirement, and I can certainly see why it has taken off now with Web 2.0 in full swing and web applications becoming the new ‘website’, but with these great applications of a useful technique come the useless ones, where AJAX is used because it looks cool and makes your company look cutting-edge.

The rise of top-quality stat tracking software is a great thing for webmasters. Using websites like W3Counter, Google Analytics or self-hosted methods has become almost necessary for webmasters and I would be lying if I said that I hadn’t lost a large amount of time inside one of these scripts looking at what my users have been up to. Having a tool to collect, store and analyse this data is essential for those that own the website, but not so much for those that are viewing it.

Back in the old days fan websites and pre-hosted websites would flaunt their website statistics with little recognisable buttons, allowing any visitor to their web page to come in and see what the collective audience of that website has been up to. Much like the Internet back then this idea was unprofessional and not really intended for those wishing to bring their ideas to life.

Sadly, it seems that showing off statistics has made its way back onto websites.

Lurking on an ever-growing amount of web pages stat trackers like Feedburner and StatCounter.com, allowing users to publically show what users have subscribed to their RSS feeds and what their users like and dislike on their web page. It’s almost a rarity to see a Blog that doesn’t sport a FeedBurner button now!

The obvious reason behind this is to make their website look popular and to give themselves a motivational slap on the ass for a job well done. I’m sure there are a few visitors that’ll want to check certain stats to see if a Blog is popular enough to be recognised as a good source, but in general use it’s pretty much unnecessary. It adds very little to your web page, and nothing towards the content.

I honestly cannot see why people see the need to show off how many RSS subscriptions they have, or how many people have found their website through various terms we would never dream of choosing. I was always under the impression that the best websites are the ones that fulfil the users needs, not the ones that have twelve million visitors a second (or claim they do).

Ever since Internet Explorer 7 came out of the depths of Microsoft the browser has tried to distance itself from the basic attitude to browsing that same with the Operating System. The reason for such a shift was from the underdog that likes to make itself known as the underdog, Firefox!

Photo by Brett Taylor. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

I don’t want to get started on the browser wars in too much depth, but Firefox completely trounces the efforts made by Microsoft to create a browser. As much as people like to tout Open Source as the reason for its success the average user does not give a shit who was behind the code and development of your browser, nor do they care that “mIcRo$oFt” is an evil monopoly that makes you wake up at 3am in a cold sweat every night. The reason for its success is FEATURES! Not only does its basic toolset beat IE hands down, but anything you could possibly want added on can be! I recently decided that I needed a dictionary extension for Firefox whilst reading some eBooks, so after five minutes I was met by around ten different choices to choose from! Not only that, but before the time of IE7 Firefox was the first mainstream browser to introduce tabbed browsing by default.

One of the reasons I use Firefox is out of principle. The majority of websites on the Internet have been scripted very badly, and the broken standards introduced by IE are mostly to blame. Firefox isn’t exactly perfect in the standards department, but it’s a thousand strides in front of IE!

Firefox, whilst still not having the largest share of the market right now, is dominating Internet Explorer with sheer user love. Not many IE users love their browser and choose to spend the majority of their time within it, but Firefox users often wish that the faithful browser could be with them for every other task they wish to do, including email, documents, you name it, the Internet now wants to become part of it.

Eventually, all the bells and whistles will have been tried out, and what browsers will need to focus on is improving what they currently do, and that’s when standards could win the war. What future does this leave Firefox if IE is still the majority holder of users?

After a quick search on Google I was able to uncover a tool named ExplorerXP that allows a tabbed interface over the basic Windows Explorer on Windows Operating Systems. Being a fan of tabbed interfaces I decided to download it, and then decided not to. Why bother using this when Firefox can be used instead! Using the IE Tab extension I was able to integrate Windows Explorer into Firefox and use tabbed browsing to navigate all of my files in one window.

Whilst this method was ingenius (and thought of before, so if you find this don’t give me credit for it) it only made me long for a real replacement for Explorer. In many ways Firefox has taken the number one spot on the browser podium, but why not create an extension that branches out Firefox into the desktop browsing world? A few are in the works but seem to have been discontinued, which is a shame! Firefox has great potential to take over the desktop and provide an experience for browsing files that hasn’t been achieved since the first taste of GUI and/or the command line interface.

A few days ago Jason Powell from 37signals posted a piece titled “Why We Skip Photoshop“, only for it to be met by almost utter disbelief by other designers around the world.

To be honest I fell in love with the whole article. It is bold statements like this that have made their Blog Signal vs Noise one of the most popular design Blog’s in the entire universe, and definitely one of the most controversial. The people behind 37signals deserve all the success they’ve gathered through their web applications and the Ruby-on-Rails framework.

Most Web Designers work to a very similar schedule that has been instilled into them from the beginning whilst learning their trade. Even though Photoshop as an application isn’t catered in the slightest for Web Design for the majority of designers out there Photoshop IS Web Design. Once analysis and rough design stages are complete (if they existed in the first place) the user will move straight into Photoshop and come up with a design for the web page. This design will then act as the ‘prototype’ of the finished web page, albeit it being completely static and unusable aside from being an image. Once this is done the layers of the image are split into separate bits and coded into a web page. It all sounds easy enough in writing, but it is hard work for many out there, including me.

The recent post by 37signals implied to many that they simply do not use Photoshop when creating a Web Application or any other site. Many others have taken it as a message that they shouldn’t use Photoshop to create their web pages!

What some people seem to forget is that they are NOT 37signals.

The reason they have chosen this approach is because their creative and functional aims require time to work on the actual product and for less time to be ‘wasted’ in creating a mock-up that won’t even be needed. When you’re a company that prides itself on your simplistic approach to designing applications for the Web, that already has a design that most likely existed within Photoshop for a period of its life, then why would you need to use Photoshop or any other graphic editing program?

Many have made arguments from within the Blog post itself that bring up several good points like being able to share paper sketches with others from around the world? Well, for the time it takes to jump straight into coding a web application that has already had a thought-out design sketched out then the time difference won’t really matter. Should we really need to design structure that will purely come from coding in the first place?

Just because an extremely popular web application company decide that they want to do something it doesn’t mean that you have to jump on the bandwagon. Bandwagons in Web Design/Development are fantastic, but only when they can benefit you or your knowledge. If you want to ditch using Photoshop then go ahead and try it, but don’t expect your experience to be exactly what Jason claimed it to be! We’re all individuals, and what works for them will most likely not work for you.

As someone who designs and develops websites for the Internet I have become involved in another field that’s more related to marketing than actually creating a website. This field is Search Engine Optimisation, a loose subset of Search Engine Marketing. For around five years I have worked towards standards-based development in my own free time outside of my full-time education, leading to regular late-night readings of W3C specifications, constant following of news on Web Development forums and generally keeping on top of my game.

For those that lack knowledge of Search Engine Optimisation, I’ll fill you in on one of the basic fundamentals of getting a good page ranking on Google, and that is good content. Google loves content, and as far as Google is concerned content is king. At the moment Google uses keywords to check relevancy and validity of web pages, along with very extensive and complicated algorithms to decide what pages match up with respective search terms. Whilst this is potentially the best way of going about this it provides us, webmasters of the Internet, with a problem.

That problem is black-hat SEO methods.

I’m using black-hat in its worst term at the moment. As far as I’m concerned a lot of black-hat research into security needs to exist, as otherwise no progress would be made with anything. I do not believe in the warrantless destruction of websites for fun, but the compromising of ones security is not the problem, only the vandalism of their possessions. That being cast aside, these bad methods of SEO have existed for years, even though the widespread usage of the term SEO hasn’t existed for long. SEO analysts and consultants have found countless ways to ‘game’ Google and provide content and web pages tailored solely to getting a high rank on Google under a certain term, whether it be by keyword stuffing, providing themselves with thousands of links to their own websites, the list is endless.

Now, there seems to be technology that could prevent this.

After a lot of hype around Web Development and SEO circles of the Internet an online search tool named Powerset has been unleashed. Powerset is unique in the sense that it compares the natural language of content, not related keywords. At the moment it only crawls and understands articles from Wikipedia, but the idea is not just that the search engine should not be used elsewhere, just that Wikipedia is a perfect testing ground in terms of rich content. Whilst this article praises the efforts of Natural Language Processing, this is in no way what Powerset is currently aiming to do. To understand this, you have to understand a bit more about Google.

In many ways, what Google does is automated based on statistics. In easier terms, Google does not understand a web page or its content. It is just looking for patterns that work, and these patterns are what black-hat SEO methods are targetting. All Powerset is introducing is a method of understanding each and every term within its crawling domain (currently Wikipedia) and using this data as a means of coming to conclusions about what is relevant. In many ways, you could say that it is adding knowledge to search!

Being a new tool, despite years of development, it is obviously a bit weak compared to established engines like Google for searching websites. The quality of searches does not do the potential technology behind it justice, but we can surely expect that to change in the near and distant future. To some this may not be all that impressive, but if this technology were to ever take over and produce great results it would completely change search engines and the web for the better.

Many webmasters and SEO analysts out there will rejoice if this were to take off and become popular. Whilst statistical methods that are currently being used by the majority of search engines are proving effective they are in no way perfect, not in the slightest. Natural Language processing could mean that relevancy in search engines could improve tenfold and websites will finally be judged on the quality of content to the actual language, not statistically what the search engine believes to be the best.

I’m sure you’re all very aware that the powers of the Internet are shifting from sharing information to providing services. It’s a trend I noticed early on after trying out early versions of Housecall by Trend Micro for some of my anti-virus needs.

One of the ‘greatest’ services of the past couple of years is Social Networking. Websites like MySpace and Facebook have allowed us to keep in touch like never before. Other websites have come and gone, like Digg, Netscape and Stumbleupon, but MySpace and Facebook were always the strongest. I’d argue that their very existance has helped shape the future of the Internet, no matter how awful MySpace looks or how evil Facebook may be. They’ve definitely contributed in their own ways, for example, MySpace helped bring streamable music to the masses and made their mainstream audience aware that music could and should be available immediately from the click of a mouse.

Facebook had different plans.

It’s safe to say that MySpace is still king of the Social Networks, even though a lot of us have grown up and realised how truly awful it is. The reason it is still king is because of what made it popular in the first place (considering it stole all its ideas from other websites (Blogging from early journal websites, Music from PureVolume, etc). Primarily, music and the media will make sure that MySpace is still alive and kicking, even though without a gigantic rewrite and redesign of everything on MySpace it will surely fall to the hands of Facebook or the next best thing. Facebook decided that functionality is where it would win, and win it did! It crawled out from the depths of a world-class university to a worldwide application for millions.

For those that jumped from MySpace to this website that everyone had been talking about, we met with a strange realisation, and that was the lack of a username field. For very smart reasons Facebook had decided to do away with the unprofessional, childish username and stick to trusty, occasionally-disgusting email as an identifier. To the public, we were discovered by our name, and it worked wonders! By searching up the names of friends one can find anyone they know (under the assumption that everyone is on Facebook); much easier than trying to do a wide-area search and matching photos with faces. Considering a large majority of the people I know on MySpace and Facebook have profile pictures of themselves and some form of alcohol in their hands/stomachs it sometimes gets hard to tell them apart.

In a way, it feels like the Internet is growing up with a lot of us. I remember spending hours of my life just surfing the Internet, talking to people on forums, participating in online communities and so on. Back then, your username defined who you were, so being a kid mine changed every year! Sure, by having our names we open up a large can of worms when it comes to user privacy and what companies like Facebook wish to do with our information, but right now a name works wonders when it benefits the user.

Now, the ideals of Facebook and loads of other websites that I am sure have removed usernames from defining users. On a Blog or professional social network it is very common to see users posting under their full names, or at least their first name. In essence, we have learned that usernames are a part of the Internet we don’t wish to remember, and with some of the awful usernames I’ve seen in my time all I can say is good riddance!

To be honest, I’d expect these changes to soon be implemented in software, with usernames being disregarded in favour of the users’ email. Email addresses are so easy to obtain nowadays that it is almost impossible for someone to not have their own or not be able to set one up for themselves. Whilst I do not believe that the online world should be mixed with the desktop world (because not everyone uses their computer for online use) I do believe that a username is not the best way to go about authenticating a user. A full name will work wonders when the functionality of the service requires a name, and an email will suffice for now. Who knows what will be the next wave of authentication on the Internet. It might even be OpenID!

Picture this: You’re fresh from graduation and you’re in a job earning money. Great! You’re very passionate about your work and landing this job is the start of a fantastic step in your life. However, you feel that you are being undervalued as an employee. Your daily tasks are typical of an entry job and your skillset wishes to be tested. You may want to take that brand new project that the mid-level employees seem to be fighting over, but believe it will come down to nothing but rejection. You now start to wonder about your role in this company, and whether you’re getting paid and respected as much as the rest. Perhaps management see your job as low-level grunt work.

Why are people getting paid more? Do they have more experience? Are they more skilled than me?

I am a university student, but I occasionally work within Software and on the Web, sometimes dabbling with marketing. Due to the nature of my previous education I have a instilled respect for those in high educational positions, such as lecturers and authors of the books I read. I might not necessarily enjoy their methods of lecturing but these people command my respect for the knowledge and position they hold within my fields of interest.

When working within a field you love, you tend to define those who hold greater knowledge and power as experts. However, the term expert is entirely subjective and is rarely used by those who hold such titles. Why then, are many of these ‘office experts’ earning so much more than you? It must be experience, or could it be skill?

The Democratic Nominations have circled around the news worldwide for the past couple of months now, with both remaining sides building up a staggering amount of momentum. Hillary Clinton claims experience and ability whilst Barack Obama fights for change and unity within the United States of America. Easily the most powerful drive has come from the Obama camp, where hundreds of thousands flock to hear his messages online, as well as those lucky enough to see the man. What people like about him is that he is incredibly down-to-earth for a Politician, and the charisma he outputs is second-to-none.

After watching his speeches from YouTube and on the TV I’ve come to the realisation that through my logic he qualifies as an expert in his field, Politics. In doing so, perhaps we can all learn from public figures and celebrities on how to better ourselves in our own lines of work.

Take Software for instance, how have developers like Mike Davidson, Jeff Atwood, Steve Yegge and Joel Spolsky are so widely recognised as experts in the fields? Where do their ideas come from?!

I’ll tell you where. It’s a little something called PASSION.

To the person in the first example I gave, I now pose a question to him/her:

• Should be ask for a raise? As well as more responsibility, how about a promotion?

OR

• Should he look elsewhere for a new job, where he/she will be respected for their ability and love for the job

If this person were passionate about their job, they would do both.

At the end of the day, passion is a major underlying factor of success in the workplace, as well as life in general. It’s a stepping stone through a career, as well as a decider for your future. Find yourself constantly reading about famous Architects, studying building plans, and reading up on beautiful buildings? Go become an architect! Spend countless hours reading the musings of your favourite developers, read countless old papers and new journals on HCI? Go study Computer Science!

This is something I’ve already realised with my work and it’s quite a painful realisation, until you start to see the alternative picture. The ‘experts’ in a field exist in many companies as their skills have become important to the company. Every expert I have come across in areas are those that will get the job done, and get it done well with little fuss. They are also extremely passionate about their work and will work to the greater good of their profession, even if it means helping those out around them. They are needed by the company and without their presence productivity will be down. Is that not an expert?

This article stems from an idea I have stuck in my head that’s trying to stop me from heading to bed, but also because passion is something that is going to become a much-needed ingredient to peoples lives in the future. With a recession looming, job cuts, unemployment, and jobs heading overseas perhaps we all need to gain some passion in what we do. I know enough people that lack it, and they’re the ones that lack happiness. Who knows? Perhaps passion is what the world needs to rebuild itself from gloom and doom to happier times?

For the past couple of years I have been using Linux on and off for basic development and to get accustomed to Operating Systems other than Windows, something that anyone who is serious about development work should do.

Don’t get me wrong! Linux is a fantastic OS and the development that has gone into it is almost unrivalled by any other piece of software. However, despite all the claims that “Linux is ready for the desktop” or “This is the year of Linux”, if you are not comfortable with another OS then you will struggle somewhere along the line. Not everything can be accomplished without having to dive into the command line, and not everything works perfectly out of the box.

When you’re in trouble the best place to go is on the Internet, because there aren’t that many tech-support companies that’ll support you if you’re running Linux. The advantage of this is that it’s free, and the Linux Community can be very friendly when helping users that wish to stick with their favourite OS. From personal experience the best place to go for Linux help is the Ubuntu Forums or Linux Forums, although you’ll most likely be better off attempting a Google search for your problems first and picking up a forum that suits your needs.

That being said, as a regular on a number of forums there are certain rules that people need to abide by, and with the Linux Community this is no exception. Like any tech-oriented community many top users are very elitist, but will help those that need it, as long as they ask in the proper way. Here are a few pointers to help get the most out of your chosen Linux community.

Read the Manual!

I know that when you come across a problem it can seem as if the world is crashing around you, but the first point of call is ALWAYS to check any kind of documentation available to you. The easiest way to become public enemy number one on any forum is to ask a question that already has an answer. To remedy this situation read any desktop manual you have, and if that fails a simple Google search will find you many resources, including:

• Ubuntu Desktop Guide
• Ubuntu Server Guide
• Ubuntu Guide
• The Linux Documentation Project
• Agustin’s Linux Manual

Whilst these manuals are all very good, Linux has a reputation for not having a lot of top-quality documentation to boast. Whilst it’s getting pretty good now with community efforts you will often find a time when a certain problem is nowhere to be found.

Linux Forum Etiquette

If you cannot find advice on the Internet then you’re most likely going to have to use a forum to get your help. I recommend shopping around on Google first before you decide to join a forum, because the last thing you’ll want to do is to post on a forum that no one uses.

Once you’ve found the forum that you want to post to, the first thing you should do is read the rules of the forum. It’s an obvious mistake that most users make when posting on a forum for the first time, but it’s very important to forums like this that the rules are kept to. A lot of people around the world count on these forums and the moderators behind it work very hard on keeping them alive, so don’t give them any unnecessary work to do!

Once you can remember the rules off the top of your head then the next thing you should do before posting is to use the forums search page to search for your problem. Do a number of searches using loads of different quotes, parameters and words to try and find a similar problem.

Making your post

If you cannot find a similar problem then feel free to make a post on the forum detailing your problem. Ensure that you include as much information as you possibly can, such as:

• Logs. If they exist be sure to post any logs of what’s happened. If you’re posting anything long then be sure to host a text file or screenshot elsewhere with the problem instead of posting it on the forum. You don’t want to waste previous bandwidth! Pastebin is an extremely useful tool used on most Linux and general development forums.
• Exactly what you were doing once the error occurred, as well as what was running, your most recent installs, any upgrades you’ve added, and any hardware that has changed.
• The specifications of your computer, including what was once there and what you’re running on now.

If you have the need to post any code or terminal information (be sure to keep it short if putting it into a post) then you may want to use the code tags provided by most forum scripts. When posting code, do this.

[code]Insert your code or logs here![\code]

Aside from that, monitor what the most popular posts in the category have done. If users have asked for help in a certain way and loads of people have posted to help then perhaps their method is the best way to go about it.

Your thread title is probably the most important part of your post. Once creating a new thread be sure to include a good thread title that explains the situation, but doesn’t take up three lines of space, giving any error codes or file names priority.

Once your problem is solved

If your problem is solved by the community, congratulations!

Before you go off galavanting, never to be seen again until you have a problem, be sure that you add a final post, adding:

• A very sincere thank you to everyone that has helped you.
• What you had to do to fix the problem.

This is just common courtesy. If you were to spend your valuable time on this planet helping someone with their computer the least you’d expect is a thank you. Be sure you give it to them, perhaps even going further by sticking around on the forum and contributing some posts to help others.

There’s a brand-spanking-new craze on the Internet now, and it appears to be very profitable for those who execute their brand well enough. It fills a niche that people have been trying to exploit for years and years, and those behind these websites are reaping the benefits.

I am about to tell you how to make $$$ on the Intarwebs!

Are you ready?

Here goes!

MAKE YOUR OWN “HOW TO MAKE MONEY” WEBSITE!!!!

Yeah! Wait…what?

Exactly…

I do the forum and web development news rounds every now and again, eager to see what the latest and greatest things are, so I can make justified opinions on them myself. It seems that over the past couple of months the amount of websites that are claiming to know secrets on how to make money from advertising (like Google AdSense) and to achieve vast profits from websites within days!

After checking a few of these websites out I can safely say that the majority of them are full of shit. No matter how many of their eBooks you buy or how many of their tips you take from their ad-infested websites/newsletters/emails/etc you will have the same chance of making it big on the Internet than any other person out there with an average website.

It seems that the only people actually making good income easily are those actually making the money websites! So many people are concerned with putting a website up and having it chuck wads of cash straight through the monitor at them that they’ve forgot that anything worth doing in this life requires dedication and hard work.

Here’s a popular video at the moment from a “Bill McIntosh” on YouTube!

Now, I’m not going to claim that this guy can’t do what he claims, but he is an exception. Whilst I do not know much about the “3.5 Million Dollars with AdSense guy” I’m sure that if he can get that kind of money from AdSense he can do what he claims in his video.

Why? Simply because he can build from past successes.

The problem here is that every business venture is different. If Google existed a year later than they did we may be using a different search engine altogether now, and if Apple were formed a year earlier we might all be working on Macs instead of PC’s! If this guy was able to earn the money he claims he has then good for him, but it’s not all down to skill. I’m willing to bet that a lot of it is pure luck and just general information.

You see, your generic ‘make money from the Internet’ website is run by your average webmaster, and the one thing these webmasters have going for them is that they know ‘inside’ information from the areas they hang out, like webmaster forums, business forums, etc. As they are at the forefront of information they are able to be at the scene before everyone else latches on.

The problem with these websites stem from the fact that whilst they may seem legit, a lot of what they run on is misinformation. By getting clued up with the Internet and following some talented members on forums you run the same chances that any other webmaster has of making their website a success. There are NO get-rich-quick schemes on the Internet, except, of course, making a money website and using information freely found on the Internet for financial gain.

Do I blame these guys and girls for what they’ve done? Definitely not! If they can make a quick buck from something then let them! What they’re doing is of no harm to me, so why should I be concerned? The only problem I see is that gullible people will fall for a lot of false information if they don’t know better, and wonder what they did wrong with their websites still don’t rank on the first page on Google.

Besides, with all this fake information being thrown around, it makes things a lot easier for me.

Recently it seems that a few websites have been rolling out updates and new versions of their websites. Reddit is the latest culprit, and not the first to lose me as a visitor, although this time not just because of the layout. If you like the programming section of Reddit then you’ll absolutely love DZone!

I’d be lying if I hadn’t thought about updating my Blog and Portfolio layout to something that’s a bit more flashy and unique, even though I had originally taken a liking to this creation of mine. In the end it led me off on a complete tangent that I’d like to share with you now.

Throughout the recent history of the Internet there have been very few websites that have needed to change. Sure, the BBC looks a lot nicer with its new, web 2.0 style layout compared to the 90’s standards-breaking layout they’d sported before, but there weren’t any pressing issues with what they had. Social Networks like Digg and Reddit change their layouts for a pastime, yet never really need to.

When, and how often, should we be changing the layout of our websites?

MSNBC is an interesting example, and possibly the first time a website had been in dire need of a makeover. The American News venture co-promoted by MSN and NBC had lagged behind the community efforts of its rivals around the world, so they decided to buy out a small start-up named Newsvine. Whilst as a news website and social network Newsvine is very limited and dull it adds the perfect sense of community to a well-established network like MSNBC. Now the American users of Newsvine have an extra reason to stick to their News website instead of sticking to the far more popular choices.

With the acquisition of Newsvine, the design team at MSNBC worked hard on what I would claim to be the best layout for any news website I have ever seen. As far as looks and usability go I rate it a modest 8.5. The design paid off, and I’m sure that MSNBC are riding high on the waves of success with their acqusition and new layout attracting millions of users around the world.

Web Usability guru Jakob Nielsen recently had this to say in his annual report (Source: BBC).

“I do not think sites appreciate that yet,” he added. “They still feel that their site is interesting and special and people will be happy about what they are throwing at them.”

In many ways the Internet is constantly moving and changing, and the entire purpose of changing a layout/website design is to keep up with the times, and to keep users wanting to come back for more. I must admit that I visit the BBC News and Football sections a lot more now that the new layout has been implemented. To answer the original question, I would have to say that a layout should be changed every year unless it’s very bleeding-edge and original. If you’re working within a large team then you can probably go for a lot longer, and will have extensive analytics reports to come to a designated time when a design will benefit the website the most.