Andy Li's Blog

Amazing Art, Sketch Application, odopod This is a truly amazing flash app… Wondering how the brushes can be done… It would be so great if they open source the project… But will it be???

Eye Candy Sensory substitution, to me it seems to be a whole new area for virtual reality, augmented reality and gaming!!

In these few weeks I keep reading articles on search engine optimization (SEO) and the development of the Internet (mostly Google related, but Google’s is a big part of the Internet right?). More I read SEO, more I realize the similarities between web 3.0 and the concept of SEO.

One of the proposed key concept of web 3.0 is machines will understand our web contents, or let say our contents will be formated to be understood by machines. Nowadays there is a technology “semantic web” that introduces similar ideas. The idea is like improving usability of our web contents, not only to humans but to machines too. And that is what we are doing for SEO propose: one of the reasons we use div and css instead of table to build navigation menus, is to make sure Google understand which is menu and which is content.

Maybe this will become one more reason why we should learn SEO.

In the past year, web designers/developers seem busy with web layout redesign. Here were several popular web site that were redesigned to be named: Yahoo Mail (and Yahoo’s homepage is in progress), Xanga, Facebook, WordPress (in progress) etc.

It is interesting to me that I really found some of them are using methods/techniques I learned from class. For example, WordPress is using wire-frames (here).

Redesign is a important process which web designer/developer should handle it carefully. Redesign can make web sites stay competitive and meeting requirements of continuously updating user profiles/scenarios. But if the website has already lots of old visitors, redesign may make them unfamiliar with the web site and cause problems. For instance, Facebook had token a lot of efforts to make users comfortable with the new design like its new design FAQ, but still, there are drawbacks brought by the new design like devaluing some type of Facebook app (blogged by Dare Obasanjo here).

Actually I am working on redesigning a web site too. But you know, student’s life is always filled with homework and projects. Hope I can finish it fast and show it to you soon.