Entries by Tarun

For those of you who are not familiar with the term “avatar”, it is simply a graphic image of you that goes along with content that you post up online. Many of us who like to post stuff online enjoy having an avatar as part of the content we post, but right now I am thinking: is there more to avatars than just the fun factor?

It goes without saying that visuals almost always enhance a piece of written content. Especially when you are talking about writing on the Internet, graphics can add a lot more color and life to your posts.  Anonymity works both as a pro and a con on the Internet and an avatar is a perfect way of having a unique presence online without uploading your actual picture online. Many content writers use avatars with the intension of giving themselves a more real and human feel on the Internet.

The “human” factor of adding an avatar to your blogs shouldn’t be entirely brushed aside.  It gives an interesting image of the person whose work you are reading.  And even if it probably is not an actual picture of who they are, it definitely adds to their identity. The other interesting point about avatars is that the blogger can decide exactly how they want to appear on the Internet so the image that you see of the blogger is actually the image of themselves that they choose to show to their readers. Let’s not forget that even if a photograph is used there are enough photo enhancement tools that are available these days.

Many bloggers enjoy having nicknames for themselves and avatars are mostly an extension of that identity that one tries to build online. An avatar means that whatever you do put up as a representation of yourself contributes to how people react to you and your content online.

There is this common impression that the Internet is all about quick fixes.  It sometimes is, and other times it isn’t.  All this came rushing back me when I spent hours online searching something that I couldn’t find. Web developers might smirk at the idea, but its true!

Surprised? I ask, because I certainly was. That is when I really thought about what relevancy means in for a search engine.  Because when you look at the results that you get, you realize that they are relevant to the specific keywords you typed in, but still not what you are looking for.  I think internet marketing professionals are often faced with this problem.

I think we are so used to the Internet that sometimes we forget that it is not Actually a living, thinking person (thought I can think of at least two people who might claim that the Internet is exactly that!). Anyway, my point is that we type in keywords as if we are talking to a person, completely forgetting that there are so many contexts that come into the picture when we search for something online. 

For example, if you type in something along the lines of “coffee in India”, it might give you all kinds of bizarre and unrelated results.  You could have meant you want to know about how coffee is grown in India or it could have meant where can you go to drink coffee in India.  So when you get results to do with both these contexts, is the relevancy wrong? I think not.

And to make things more interesting, the English language is full of words that are spelt the same but have different meanings.  For example, “glass” as in something to drink out of, and “glass” as in the building material.  “Black” can be the color or it can be a reference to someone’s last name.  The list is endless and would a search engine know the difference? 

All these have to be taken in to consideration and ‘tackled’ as much as possible when doing online searches.  I think most people get better with practice and trial and error.

Recently, in a discussion forum, I came across a rather shocking fact. There is an increasing trends amongst website creators to do away with the ‘Home’ link.

Most of us who were in that forum were against this seemingly rising trend, but there were some people supportive. Big names were cited as examples of this new convention.

But that wasn’t enough of a reason to follow it. To be honest, there really isn’t a very strong reason why I am against the idea of taking the ‘Home’ button off.

As a web designer, with years of experience handing the internet, I might not need the ‘Home’ button anymore but what about the user? On sites where the home page gives no relevant information this can be applied. Maybe we need to do some sort of a usability test, and get the opinion of users on this. But even with that I hardly think we would be able to get a representative sample.

Even internet marketing professionals in my company were of the opinion that it was best to keep the ‘Home’ button because many a times there is information on that page which the users would like to go back and read.

We in fact debated this between ourselves as we were creating the wire frames for a new site that we are working on. Needless to say, we chose to retain it.

I can’t predict the future, but personally, I don’t see myself designing a webpage that doesn’t have the good old harmless ‘Home’ button in its navigation.