With laptops being such a commodity item these day, it is nice to see some of the Big Box computer retailers taking queue from Apple and giving the consumer more choices and better design.  According to the article, there will be 58 options for you to customize your laptop with 100 exclusive works to be offered in all.  With many people always haviing their laptop with them, it will be nice to have options to express your personal style.

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To be honest, I’ve never thought Dell’s new Studio laptops did much to befit the Studio name. Dell trumpeted personalization when it launched the Studio line earlier this year, but aside from the standard rainbow of solid colors also found on lunch-pail Inspiron models, the Studio line offered only a handful of graphics patterns from Mike Ming (one of which, Sea Sky, is also an Inspiron option). Expanded feature set aside, Dell’s Studio laptops looked like slightly more stylish versions of Inspiron laptops.

Today, the Dell Studio line further distinguishes itself from Dell’s other laptop lines with the introduction of the Dell Design Studio. There, you’ll currently find 58 options for personalizing the lid of your Studio 15 or 17 laptop.  Dell states its Design Studio “offers more than 100 exclusive and original works of art,” so expect more to be added soon.  Featured artists include Joseph Amedokpo, Jason Bacon, Tristan Eaton, Siobhan Gunning, Bruce Mau, Mike Ming, Brittany Waldner, Derek Welch, and Guillaume Wolf.

No surprise that with our current economic environment, we are seeing people pull in the reigns on their personal spending.  Uncertainy is the worst position to have our economy in, people are not sure if it is okay to spend or should they prepare for the worst for a more severe recession.  It will be interesting to see the online shopping numbers for this holiday season.  I believe there will be growth in those numbers but it will be much a smaller increase than we have seen in recent years.

News:

New research from comScore Inc. shows traffic at travel-related Web sites is plummeting as the economy worsens.

The company, which tracks Web traffic of all kinds, found travel service sites registered a 14 percent decline in October hits compared with last year. Overall, Web traffic at online travel portals was down to 38.2 million hits for the month.

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After years of rumors about Google releasing a web browser, the wait is finally over and the rumors were true.  First off, it has a very clean look.  Right off the back I noticed it put the “tabs” at the top of the browser window which seems to be an excellent place for it.

I noticed that it remembers all of your search history and visually displays in a 9-box grid when you open the browser by default, you can change it to go to a homepage, personally I like how it handles the browsing history being that my homepage is Google.  Now the address bar is now has multi-functions.  When you place a search or URL into it, Chrome searches your web history, bookmarks first to see if you have a match before you have to actually do a search.

Another nice feature is the “Incognito Mode” (Ctrl+Shift+N) which allow you to do searching that does not leave an entry in your search history.  With Google being a search engine, I was hoping this feature would be included and it was.

At the time of this writing the Windows XP/VIsta version was the only one available for download, if you use a Mac, please make sure to sign-up so they know the demand is out there for this and a Linux version.  Last is the fact that the browser renders very quick and is responsive.   Try it out and make sure to read Chrome’s Terms of Service so you know what your agreeing too.

Download Google Chrome

First off we want to thank the SEOMoz staff for hosting such an informative and high-level event.  The event covered the following topics on Search Engine Marketing & Optimization:

SEM/SEO Topics:

• Thinking LIke a Search Engine
• Elite Site Architecture
• White Hat Cloaking
• Spam Detection
• SEO Legal Issues
• Site Reviews
• Global Search
• Sitemaps
• Crawlability
• Reputation Management
• Social Networks for SEO
• Link Buying
• Enterprise Link Building
• Vertical Search Inclusion
• Future of Search Engines w/ Danny Sullivan
• Expert Q&A

It was very informative and compared to other SEO conferences I actually learned some fresh new information that will be implemented into our process.

Photos:

We have uploaded the pictures we took from the 2-day SEO event.  Please look to the left on our sidebar and click on our “Flickr Photos” links to see them.  Enjoy.

In recent times we have come a couple new project leads where we are bidding on a web development project where we were the local and more experience design shop and the competing bids were from another local development shop that outsourced the work to India (not to single them out, we have seen Vietnam & Russia).

In this situation we actually pulled our firm out of the bidding process.  We felt that it was not in our best interest to devalue our services to compete against a firm that was using talent that was under-experienced and qualified compared to our firm that has team members that hold degrees to show their commitment to their craft.  Not to say that in this fast moving web world you need a degree to produce quality work but it does help when you are looking for that quality work.

We felt if we lowered our quote to be competitive with the other firm it would actually do more harm to us and other professionals out their that work very hard to charge the rates they charge.  It is my personal opinion that I would rather support local professionals and economy than ship our money over seas just to make a profit.

My view is that you get what you pay for in these situations.  There is a place for outsourcing in the web development world but there are trade-offs you make when going that route.  Here is list of items you should think about when making the choice.

Items to consider when Outsourcing:

1. Do you need to meet face to face?

2. Do you need a designer or developer that speaks “Web Design English”?

3. Do you need someone formally trained in the fine arts for creativity?

4. Do you need to get feedback during normal business hours?

5. Are you looking to build a long term relationship with a local firm?

6. Is quality and attention to detail your biggest concern?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions then you should really consider a local (Made in America) design and development firm.  Yes, I agree you will pay more for local talent but in the end you will usually get a higher quality product in the end.  The situation were outsourcing IMHO works the best is when you know exactly what you want and you have diagrammed it to the last detail so there is not decisions that will need to be make by the outsourcing firm.

Dal

.02

It looks like this chapter is still not over.   Today I read that Legg Mason Capital Mgmnt has back Jerry Yang and the current board of directors.  This rejects Carl Ichan’s arguement that the board of directors botched the Microsoft merger talks.

Its my personal opinion that they should stay independent of Microsoft’s Live search if they are acquired either way.  Obviously some technology sharing is needed to help improve both search engines results (Live more that Yahoo).  To the public they should stay separate.   We need more choices that less in the search engine industry.

Hopefully Yahoo! in its current form can resist the massive pressure that is being put on the company and stockholders for major change that will go with its acquisition talks.

Here is a link for news on the current situation

This article was emailed to me this morning and it was a very interesting read. It talks about Microsoft using fake search spiders to generate hits on a website analytics referrer log. I would usually stay clear of rumors like this but in this case I have seen a bunch of traffic on one of my other websites from Live Search.

When I go to check the listing the supposed traffic came from I can’t seem to find the domain anywhere. This has been happening about atleast 6 months that I have noticed.  Here is some of the post on encodable.com.

“As this log snippet from VisitorLog shows, I get about 30 separate hits per day from hosts named livebot-65-55-*-*.search.live.com.  The vast majority of them are bots, not real humans, as evidenced by the fact that they have no screen resolution (and therefore no screen), which while not a guarantee of botness, is a pretty strong sign of it, especially when combined with other bot-like characteristics such as having “livebot” in the hostname.

So far this is all OK.  However, the bot’s USER_AGENT string is set to IE7/Win2003, which is bogus [the full string is: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)].  It’s clearly a bot, and possibly a spider, so it’s not a real IE7 browser; it should identify itself with an accurate user-agent string like a responsible internet citizen.”

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