Google Fonts Gives Web Designers Variety
For years, designers have complained of only being allowed to use Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, or Courier as marketers and web developers forced the usage of web-friendly fonts for usability and search engine optimization. The idea of these four fonts being known as the web-friendly fonts is quickly becoming extinct.
Google Adsense In Your City: A Learning Experience
Last month, I traveled to Las Vegas to attend the Google Adsense In Your City. Since launching Vancouver Trails in 2007, the Google Adsense ads being run on the website have been the primary way of generating revenue from that site and this event offered a good opportunity to catch up on what I was doing right and what needed improving.
(Read more…)
Search Google Using an Image
Google Images now offers a feature where you can search the Internet for similar images. To do try an Image search:
- Go to: http://images.google.com/
- Find a photo on your computer in your Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac).
- Drag that photo to the browser and drop it into the Search Field on the Google Images page.
- Wait for the photo to upload and voila!
Here’s a screenshot of the Google Image page that shows the sample Starry Night image being dragged to the search field:
How can I use this?
This is more than just a cool feature as there are several business applications this can be used for.
- Copyright: If you have photos on a website you run or on Flickr, try search with one of those photos and see if any other websites are using your photo that maybe did not ask for permission. You might be surprised!
- Designing with Stock Photos: If you simply do not have photos for your website and need to buy stock photos from a service like iStock, try searching the web with that stock photo to see what other companies are using that same photo. Discovering that a competitor is using the same photo is like wearing the same outfit to a party as your friend.
- Partnerships / Linking: Sometimes websites put a logo of your company on their site but don’t provide a link to your website. Try searching with your logo and see what comes up. This may present some opportunities to follow up for link building.
It’s widely known that one of the methods Google’s algorithm ranks sites on is unique content. Will this content start to include images? Or maybe it does already.
Font Differences In Browsers
This afternoon, I noticed that one of the fonts was very “bold” in Firefox compared to Chrome. I’ve known that there are differences in how each browser and platform renders fonts on webpages (amongst the many other differences) but I was surprised to see how different a font like Arial looked. Here are the results:
Firefox appears to make the text much bolder than the others even though the code was exactly the same and using the most common font, Arial.
It is important for designers and marketers to keep in mind that web design is different from traditional designs on a canvas and what you might see in a mockup done in Photoshop may be slightly different from what the website displays in different browsers. Several options have been developed to fix many of the display issues but many of these options are often bulky, add load times to your website, and can be detrimental to SEO.
However, as a web developer, it is still surprising to see such a difference in how something as simple as fonts are rendered from browser to browser.
