Gaffney3.com

Several non-related posts today got me thinking about the seemingly endless challenges that we as online marketers struggle with to keep both our own and client’s websites highly visible.  Obviously we’re in this space for a reason.  For me, after years on the traditional printing side of newspapers I fell in love with the speed of delivery of online and the allure of not being tied to a legacy system.   But there are days where I wish we would slow down.

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With my recent speaking gigs across the country on how to start an online initiative and the art of effective marketing,  I’ve been trying to focus my thoughts and writing on online marketing and the specific technologies that support those efforts online.  I’ve always attempted to write about the online industry as a whole, however now with every post will I ask myself the question, “How would one use this information to either introduce or enforce a brand online?”

With my renewed focus, I was glad that I found Wordle:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

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Courtesy: The MyBlogLog Blog

MyBlogLog has finally unveiled its new design which is a good upgrade in aesthetics and user experience over the previous. Unfortunately, the redesign is solely that - a redesign.  There are no new features.

…[N]ow everything is framed with shiny shadows and rounded edges! Also notice that on your profile we have moved the most recent visitors module, up on top, not down below the fold so you can quickly see who’s been checking you out.

The redesign does give the impression that the team is committed to giving it the professionalism that it deserves to solidify its role in site metrics and building community online.  However without serious attention to the functionality rather than the “funsies,”  they run the risk of becoming irrelevant as people migrate to  FriendFeed and Google Friend Connect.

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CSS naked day has arrive and as a reminder, Gaffney3.com has stripped itself naked of its CSS for the common goal of promoting web standards. Gaffney.com graciously using a CSS created by the prolific Lokesh Dhakar, but even without, the site structure and layout is still functional and appropriate for a myriad of devices, browsers and platforms because of its usage of XHTML.

As a note, I will be taking some time today to delving into the Zemanta plugin to determine if I can aid them in making their plugin produce validate XHTML, because they are currently breaking my validation.  They did release an update and I’m anxious to read its ChangeLog.

Image via Wikipedia

On April 9, 2008, Gaffney3.com will strip itself naked of its CSS for the common goal of promoting web standards for the day. Without the CSS, which on Gaffney3.com was created by the talented Lokesh Dhakar, visitors will see the site free from formatting.

For those of you unfamiliar, I’m a huge fan of XHTML having felt the pain of reformulating HTML for some of the sites I’ve worked on over the years for cross-browser, -platform and -device functionality. Also, with the nuance differences between the varied user-agents and parsers “correcting” HTML, a more restrictive or rigid subset is necessary to more correctly render the design which is in the best interest of both the web designer and user.

Having said this, Gaffney3.com currently does not validate since the introduction of the Zemanta plug-in which has been tremendously useful, however will need to clean up their markup if I am to continue using it.