Realising Designs web design Canterbury Kent, Canterbury based web designer Kent, Hosting, Domain names, Graphic Designer, Illustrator and Sketch artist.

Google have launched a new feature for displaying large background images on the Google homepage, whether logged in or not and currently with no option to turn off. It seems a strange move to us, considering many of its users (such as us) enjoy the lightweight Google classic to find information quickly. Let us know your thoughts, but we certainly hope it will be back to normal soon.

Google's new background feature

In the meantime we have made our own classic page quickly this morning, so as to avoid seeing a slow loading and blurry picture of a wooden structure any more. Feel free to use it at: www.realisingdesigns.com/tools/classicgoogle/

A quick and temporary 'Classic Google' page

The Google Labs Browser Size tool overlays a visual guide to fundamentally help you assess whether your audience can see the important bits without the need to scroll (http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/).  The core problem is that while offering some degree of use vertically, if you have a centred column (as this website does) then it shows at your browser width and does not update the visuals.  The other item to bear in mind, is that with the wealth of add-ons and widgets, some people may have a crowded tool and in effect see less vertically than it suggests.  Its certainly a good point to revisit and can be useful to think again on what you want people to get from your site and whether they can see that when they first land at your site.

Google hails the 2 month entrance of Google Sidewiki a huge success.  It can be a great way to portray important information or a welcome to users of a page, or to alert them that a particular item on that page may be incorrect or in need of amending.

With public views pinned to the web page it will be interesting to see how web masters can protect themselves from unjust comments, though each wiki is given vote as to whether it was useful or not and each falls under their terms and conditions, which are likely to be quite stringent.  Google’s blog post shows some great examples of how it might be of use to your website, particularly in the conveying of accurate and timely information.

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Google content too outdated for you? Looking for realtime data and not a few hours old? If so, then head over to OneRiot.com and start viewing real-time trends and flows of the WWW.  Certainly difficult to judge the impact of such services for business, but for keeping an eye on trends as they occur it is a great tool.  For personal use it can offer access to real time news without the politics and to listen to the voice of the masses.

In search of saving myself time and with the aim of trying to be a good social site company, I went in search of a few tools to help me out.  The first I found is called Yoono and I have used it as a Firefox add-on.   It’s great, you can quickly sign up to many of your main sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Google Chat and many more are likely to be added.  From one easy side bar you can update various site status* in one go and keep on top of those updates.

www.yoono.com

Which currently supports the following social sites:

The next interesting tool is another Firefox Add-on called Shareaholic, which enables you an easy way to share sites without cluttering your browser window to your various social pages, such as Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and many many more.  Interesting features too with their BuzzMonitor:

You can now find the freshest news, videos and blogs as they emerge on the realtime web within Shareaholic and easily share that on any of your social networks.

www.shareaholic.com

* PS. Just a little note to the curious that the plural of status in English is status… and in American English it’s statuses.

With the release of StreetView in the UK, privacy concerns will undoubtably be raised once more.  The areas currently served are marked on the map in blue.

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Another nice offering from Google, with their logo artwork to celebrate the Birthday of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who drew maps from his observations of Mars in the late 19th Century:

You can do your own exploring of Mars with the help of Google Labs or watch a video made with Terragen 2 (landscape creating software) and terrain data from Nasa:

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