In the beginning Google used "trust" to judge and rank a page. This trust was emphasized by the age of a link or site. Older, more trusted links and sites were ranked higher. This helped combat against new sites spamming links to improve site rankings. The major problem was that this system did not address new content. New pages that were legit were at a severe disadvantage in that they did not have trust built up with the Google algorithm. So users who sought new data about a subject might be bombarded with old irrelevant data. This issue came to its zenith when Google finance was launched and it did not rank for its own name. Enter QDF...

 QDF stands for Query Deserves Freshness and is a new model Google added to reward activity with a certain topic. Freshness is used to describe how many recently created or changed pages are included in a search. This is the center of a huge search debate. Is it better to rank fresh information or a time tested page? In the past Google gave precedence to older pages.

QDF revolves around determining if a topic is "hot". If blogs and news sites are publishing lots of new content about a specific topic QDF will determine if this topic is what users want to view. QDF is basically a measure of global enthusiasm for a topic. The QDF model takes a number of factors into account:

• search volume
• news coverage
• blog coverage
• toolbar data (maybe)

Google has a patent on the QDF methods. It gathers data including a sampling technique that allows them to gather statistically accurate data without having to trawl through all the logs for a particular query. 

QDF rewards those that build high quality sites which present viewers with meaningful and fresh content. This means a site needs to be active with fresh content. You can utilize the QDF model if you write meaningful articles and keep updating blogs. Once a page rank is up then a strong self reinforcing site has been established which ranks highly with trust as well as QDF. 

An example of QDF at work might be a site about Ehud Barak, a Jewish man born in a kibbutz. He might have been high on the search before Barack Obama came along. Then millions upon millions of new sites and articles were flooded on the net during the race for the 2008 US presidential elections. Barack Obama will now beat Ehud Barak if you search for "Barack" on Google. The moral of the story: Do not neglect fresh content or you will be neglected on search queries.
 

I learned how to make neat half-tone patterns in Photoshop this week. Here is a step by step guide on how to create neat halftone textures. I will assume you already know how to open Photoshop and make simple operations within Photoshop.

Step 1:  Open Photoshop and make a new document about 600x600 pixels. Create a new blank layer.

Step 2: Select the Brush Tool and make one dot in the center size 100 with 50% hardness 

Step 3: Load Selection of the dot by going to Select>Load Selection> click OK. Then select inverse.

Step 4: Make a new blank layer and then hit Q. The circle should now appear red.

Step 5: Now go to Filter>Pixelate>Color Halftone and change to these settings:

Step 6:  Now exit the quick mask by pressing Q again. Now make an inverse selection. You can then fill the selection and you have a very neat halftone texture.

A big part of SEO is balancing your site to meet the needs of both machines and humans. Using web standards compliant code will make your site truly optimized for both users.

For the most part sites has two main visitors. First, there are machines or robots that scan your site and index your code. These "bots" are used to rank your site on search engine result pages. If code is not written to follow web standards it can confuse robots and hurt your search ranking. Second, there are human visitors that expect to see meaningful well organized content. Websites must be designed for both of these unique users.

It is best to avoid creating a "hostile" environment for human visitors. Create useful and nice looking pages so human visitors return. Avoid spamming links or having content that looks "spammy". Write sentences that make sense and organize your information in a meaningful and logical structure. This means making the main idea of a page in H1 and the sub ideas in H2s and H3s. Place all regular text inside P tags. To improve on this it is important to include B tags around keywords, but remember to not bold too many words. If too many words are bold then your page is not human friendly.

Including meaningful lists also improves ranking using ULs and LIs in your HTML. The bots prioritize the information on these list higher than normal text inside P tags. Here too, you will have to balance for the human visitors. If a site has spam lists with 25 bullet items, human visitors to the site will be quick to hit the back button. Make lists short, keyword rich, and meaningful to your content and visitors.

The frame of mind as a designer is best in a balanced state. Designing and coding for both humans and robots will make your site the best it can be. Neglecting one will leave a site either low on search engine lists and low on visitors. Robots do not care what a site looks like and humans do not care what code looks like (excluding nerds like me). Design for both to achieve a truly optimized sites.

Proper H tags are essential to proper and efficient SEO. With SEO, I like to think that there is a little Zen involved. In Zen it is said enlightenment can be attained through meditation, self-contemplation, and intuition. So to, can you apply these to SEO to create "finder friendly" sites.

The "old school" mentality about H1 tags was that they were bad for searchability. The problem was that they had multiple H1s on a page so in fact changing them to H2s helped, but that is because they broke the cardinal H1 rule, only place one H1 tag per page. Designers would say to replace all H1s with H2s to improve your Google searchability.   If you took all those pages where people used nothing but H2s and placed in one carefully thought out H1 with those H2s then your page would be even more search friendly. With even a little thought or mediation on the subject many would have seen the variables that they left out in their H1 and H2 equations.

Like a book, SEO is about self-contemplation.  If you understand what looks good to humans then you will have a good SEO base. SEO is like a book - the title tags are the cover, the H1 tags are the title page inside the cover, H2 and H3 tags are like the chapter headings and the P tags are the content of the book. Books are structured logically for humans to understand. If you understand what is structurally good for yourself and humans then you will know a good sound base for SEO. Imagine opening a book and finding the inside title page is on every page and that there are no chapters and no story or content in the book except the title page.That is a very ugly book (web page).

The above also plays into intuition.  You just have to look at your site and go for proper, well structured content. There is no cheating the system. When people cheat the system they end up cheating themselves because they are not building intuitive sites that are easy for the viewer to use. Real SEO is built on good content and hard work.

So the rule here is to only use one H1 tag per page and make it effective and reflect the content of the page. Then if you need, place H2 tags to help organize content below the H1. Remember to always make your H1 and H2 tags reflect your content. Meditate on your SEO strategy, self reflect on what is proper content structure and make sure your pages are intuitive and you will have a good foundation for SEO.

“Diligence is the mother of good luck.” - Benjamin Franklin. This famous quote states that there is no good luck, but that luck is the result of diligence and hard work. This is something we took to heart in creating PoeticEstates.com. PoeticEstates.com is a sample website for an imaginary Realtor, Sally Newcastle.

We built this site to showcase what we can deliver in a website for realtors and real estate developers. We want clients to know what services we are able to deliver, specifically for those in the real estate industry, as well as how those services can be beneficial and increase ROI.

A personal realtor web site built by Poetic Systems can feature:

• The ability to display realtor pictures and add personal touches
• An easily managed blog that will keep search engines crawling the site
• Fully customizable colors and layouts
• The essential MLS database search engine
• Fully functioning mortgage calculators as well as other financial calculators and services
• A personalized contact page that can automatically email the site owner
• Fully customizable email addresses
• Special featured home modules
• And many more options

We hope PoeticEstates.com will better enable realtors to envision what their own site could be like. We welcome visitors to check out PoeticEstates.com and enjoy the site's many features. Please remember that this is only the surface and that the sky is the limit as far as what we can create for our clients.

There are some really interesting new design ideas about barcodes. Those completely boring and dull barcodes are being completely redone. A Japanese company named D-barcode has come up with many interesting twists to the old barcode.

Just to help you out if you do not know any Japanese, when you go to their site just click the top left image of a guy throwing away paper wads.This leads you to a screen with wads of paper which when clicked will show you some of their work.

It is an amazingly creative idea on a very creative site, although not very intuitive navigation. Ideas like these really inspire artists and designers to take their creativity to a whole new avenue.

Adobe just came out with Illustrator CS4. The new Illustrator doesn't impress you with a plethora of new tools or flashy gimmicks. It instead improves upon usability and helping the user get more accomplished. It is all about workflow and streamlining your projects. CS4 is to graphic design what windshield wipers are for cars. It just helps make something already functional get much better.

One new feature that you will already be familiar with is work tabs. These are the same tabs that you work with in your web browser. So now instead of having a million windows open and having to sift through all your projects you will have all your projects open in a tab. Of course you can still drag out a tab and work with floating windows if you still want to.

There is also a new workspace menu on the application bar. It is basically a drop down menu with saved preset toolbar and palette configurations. So if you are working with typography you could have all your typography palettes open in a saved setting then switch to a different palette option for painting just from a quick drop down.

"Yes they finally did it, transparent gradients, thank you Adobe!" - In the gradient palette you can now just slide the opacity bar and modify a certain swatch on the gradient bar. This feature has been lacking too long from Illustrator and I know personally all too often how much this is needed.

So I think that designers are rejoicing at the changes made to Illustrator. There are many more changes than those listed here and I would encourage you to look into more upgrades. The changes are really going to help speed things up and quite literally time is money, especially in graphic design. There is always a deadline around the corner and now you just saved yourself some time with the new CS4 features.