With Google’s new live search, I thought it would be fun to search for each letter in the alphabet to see whose domain laid claim to that one character search term. Below are the results.

These results may vary. They may be directed to the location that I am searching from, which is Indianapolis, IN. And this is starting from google.com. I’ve tested searching directly from Google’s toolbar, and it displays different results.

Feel free to test these search results yourself, and post a comment if you find that you get something different.

See the results after the break. (more…)

Overlooking your own bias and making sure you accommodate your client base is often a challenge. When I visit websites looking for a way to contact a potential vendor, I consistently avoid contact forms and look for a direct email address. Any site that does not offer an email address or a phone number and only confronts me with a form will never get my business. For this reason, my web design business has not had a contact form in the years we have been in business and I am sure I have missed out on business because of it.

Just like my biases toward an email address, which to me feels more direct, there is a whole audience that feels that having to leave the website and move from the web browser to their email program is a chore. Some users might also be doing research on a guest computer at the library, an internet café on the road, or at a location that (more…)

At some point in the course of every web design project, the client will be offered the opportunity to view a fully functional version of his site before it goes live. In this late phase of the project, the client is usually reviewing content that has been passed around multiple times in the form of Word documents. Clients often proof the text in a more relaxed manner because of this and are exposing themselves to typos, coding mistakes, and text they don’t even know is present.

Where is the hidden text?

Sighted users are not the only visitors to your site. Vision-impaired users and search engines cannot interpret photos, and while you may not be aware of it, your web designer has the ability to put descriptions of the photos (or Alt Tags) that help describe the photo. A photo of the city of Indianapolis might have an underlying description that says “Indianapolis skyline.” Each page of your site should also have a unique Description tag and Title tag.

You can see the Title by looking at the top of your browser while visiting the page. The only way to (more…)

View the press release.

Dan Finney Design, Inc., a website design firm located in Indianapolis, IN, launched the Key-Leader.org website today for Kiwanis International. This site marks the sixth in a series of web redevelopments by Dan Finney Design for Kiwanis, including Kiwanis.org, BuildersClub.org, Store.Kiwanis.org, KeyClub.org, and CircleK.org.

The new sites give the Kiwanis Web team the ability to allow multiple contributors to author text, update photos, and submit content for approval to managers who can revise and manage the websites’ content via a user-friendly CMS (more…)