Being an il­lus­trated run through the ba­sics. What hap­pened was, for our re­cent South Amer­i­can tour I wanted an An­droid ar­chi­tec­ture overview graphic. I ran across, among the An­droid SDK doc­u­men­ta­tion, a page en­ti­tled What is An­droid?, and it’s per­fectly OK. Ex­cept for, I re­ally dis­liked the pic­ture — on purely aes­thetic grounds, just not my kind of let­ter­ing and gra­di­ents and...

By Jill Whalen As much as Google *pretends* to like SEOs by inviting us to parties at the Googleplex and posting on SEO forums, the bottom line is that they don’t like us — or rather, they don’t like what we do. Google wants to find the best, most relevant sites for the search query at hand all by themselves. Perhaps someday they will actually be able to do that, but for now, they still need our help, whether they like it or...

Rechecked for Accuracy Jan. 2012 By Jill Whalen What Is a Title Tag? The title tag has been – and probably will always be – one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. In fact, fixing just the title tags of your pages can often generate quick and appreciable differences to your rankings. And because the words in the title tag are what appear in the clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP),...

Written by: Janet Driscoll Miller One of my favorite things I get out of conferences is learning about all of the great tools that are available. Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance presented the Cool Tools for Search Marketers session. Christine started by sharing why she thinks tools are so important: save money and time provide insight outside of your own site identify missed opportunities does the “grunge work” for you they make you...

As designers, we often focus on the practical aspects of design above all else. We focus on what works, with little regard for why it works. And in our day-to-day work, that outlook serves us well. It lets us get our work done in an efficient, professional manner, and generally nets good results. But spending some time on the theory behind the graphic design principles we use every day can expand our design horizons. It can open up new avenues...