Seems like everyone else is reading Edward R. Tufte, so I thought it would make sense to take a peek. Pretty interesting. And the volumes themselves are completely beautiful.

One of the prejudices that’s tough to get beyond is that books older than, say, a year aren’t particularly relevant to the IT world. That’s often true, but not always. What I’ve read so far has been very applicable even though these books are from last century.

Another is that the web is so distinctly different than everything else that the old rules don’t really apply. That’s only marginally correct and, as everything matures and the web stops feeling so separate, will likely become less true.

These guys have been around quite a while.  I decided to start messing with them.  Pretty interesting - I like the stats, and they set a high bar for site usability.  I’ve added three blog feeds to them and will report in a week on what I find.

The WSJ (which requires your first born to view an article), summarized some work by Dennis Forbes.

Some interesting points from the article:

The most common word four letters or longer, though, is “home”; 719,000 domains have some sort of home in them. Given the economics of the Web, chances are that many of those involve refinancing: 114,700 URLs mention “mortgage,” which is more than discuss “science,” “nature” or “children.”

Half of all domains are between nine and 15 characters long; the average length is 13. A domain can have, at most, 63 characters, and there are 550 such domains. In fact, some people have made a haikulike art out of 63-character domain names.

While much has been made of domain names like business.com being bought and sold for millions of dollars, Mr. Forbes is dubious about the value of expensive domains. Most people now search for Web sites using a descriptive word or phrase, or else are introduced to a site by a friend or colleague who emails the URL. So, domains don’t need to be short and snappy the way they had to be in the earliest days of the Web.

This is from Dennis’ original article

Stepping up to four letter sequences, choosing among the 456,976 combinations, yields a vastly greater availability — perhaps the set is a bit too large for domain speculators and their unlikely success with random sequences — with 97,786 showing as open. A quick check verifies that most are legitimately available. “Choice” domains, such as AGJV.com, EIYK.com, GZVW.com, and QFEV.com. Adding digits into the mix and there are a massive 1.16 million open domains, so long as you’re looking for something like 7RG8.com, or U3JZ.com. Choose one and then manufacture a ridiculous backronym to explain it.

There’s a lot more in the article worth reading. Definitely worth a visit.

When redesigning your company, what better way to get a fresh start than with a fresh website.

That is exactly what our customer, BizTronic Inc., did. You can check out the new site at www.BizTronic.com.

From a local catering company.

Love the blue on red, green on red and mixture of fonts. It’s …. eye catching.

More importantly, it stands out.  And if you check out their home page, you can see how they use the red backdrop to maximum effect.  The picture really pops.