Thoughts from Stephanie Sexton » Design Stuff

ask gets site redesign

Steph — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 03:08:15 +0000

I had heard a friend talking about ask dot com coming out with a site redesign, and she had said that search results would pull a graphic preview of multiple pages within results, giving a similar look to results like I would imagine the microsoft surface or iphone graphic navigation. I did not see this feature the way I had envisioned it. Perhaps I did not know where to look.

I did like the new options at ask.com – it seems to offer many more options for narrowing down search results, and the binocular preview of sites that can be obtained similar to what snap preview does is really cool. I like the buttons and options. I did notice some straightforward, easy to change options like to search or not to search within adult sites and such was very easy to use.

Looking for my girl Jackie Melon by doing a search for big boobs, and then doing a blog search for Jackie Melon did not turn up the results that I had hoped for. Perhaps I should have tried the blog search with quotes. At this point I think that having more suggestions like “try your search with quotes” in order to return those kind of results just may make this my favorite search portal.

I really like this way of searching, I am very impressed with the options, and keeping the sidebar I believe will help newer web users filter down results better. This should definitely be something to send to friends and see if they enjoy using it.

My only complaint is when I did a search for big boobs, there were some sponsored results displayed and I could not see any kind of separation between what was sponsored results and what wasn’t. This is an issue I have with LCD screens and especially affects me with google when searching on my laptop. I assume that there is some kind of slight variation in background color that just does not show up well with my dell LCD or my gateway notebook lcd screen. This could be fixed with newer, better screens int he future, or maybe the search engines will fix this another way. Time will tell.

design adaptaions

Steph — Sun, 20 May 2007 04:49:11 +0000

As things progress I consider changes and having to adapt the surrounding design to life’s changes is an intersting thought. I consider how it is when we want to add things to our lives and to our blogs and how the design is is need of adapting. Sometimes it’s a prettier thing, sometimes the design changes we want to make do not fit well in our current environment, or change other things in ways that we don’t want.

Sometimes we have to deal with the design we have so matter how mixed up it has become.

Fluid designs seem to be best and it appears to me that changes with blogs are easier to get things to fit into.

Whats going around the web

Steph — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 06:17:56 +0000

Well it seems alot is being launched on the web these days my friends are creating site that sell everything from handguns to diamonds and some of my family members are creating sites selling things from adult sex toys to adult dvds. All these people I know creating websites I decided to create a couple fo my own websites to work on in my spare time while things are slow here. What I decide dto do was create a directory of websites adn then sell ad space on the side, I know it sounds like I wanna be Google but this is just something I want to do at first I am going to dump my favorites list into the direcotry and add my own reviews then I ll ask my friends for thiers and then I ll start taking public subbmissions. I figure I would make a directory of everything on the web instead of just trying to focus on one particular area.I will post what domains I decided to buy and run with in the coming weeks when I find the perfect name for what I plan on doing ofcourse if you know of any for saleÂ please let me know or just have a clever name.

Bored but happy

Steph — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 21:59:39 +0000

Being a web develper you run into alot of unique individuals overtime weather from conventions of events andÂ many for the most part are focused on one type of industry, which is great because most are employed but a single company but alot of self employed web developers like myself take jobs when we want and based on, alot of times ease of creation. When you have reached a level of the web where working from home at anytime you want the world is much differnt then for those that have to clock in and report to a boss and are assigned work.Just not dealing withÂ rush hour traffic to anf from work is pricless butÂ whenever I take a project on these days I always tell my clients that a web site constantly changes over time and over that time you will want changes and things added nothing is perfect for atleast a year in my mind or from what I have seen over the many jobs I have taken and even then that is when alot of flash and video work come in because everyone wants the prettiness if there is such a word if not I just made one up. But one thing I tell everyone is give a chance for the dial up users and search engine spiders to crawl the home page and put any video or flash on sub pages that way it does not affect there ranking of your web site in the engines and believe it always does. Adding video or flash files alwaysÂ slows the load time of the page and is very complicated in making standards commpliant which is what everyone wants now a days.Anyways just wante dto ramble on a little bit since it is a slow cold day any body with anything cool to say please go rght ahead and let your voice be heard and text be read I guess would be a better saying. Being able to be around my family more makes me so much happpier even if the do drive me crazy every once and awhile.