Responsive Icons: The Next Big Trend in Web Design?

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All of the big design trends of the year have settled in to the point where they no longer seem new. Responsive design, flat design, responsive typography, and even longshadow design have all reached wide awareness in design. So, obviously that means it is time to find the next big thing. Last week, Paula Borowska asserted that is going to be responsive icons.

What is It?

Responsive icons aren’t what you probably imagine. These days, responsive usually indicates a design element that responds to screen size, but responsive icons are only based on the size they are presented in. Because they can be shown in different sizes multiple times on the same page, screensize is irrelevant to determining the appearance of the icons. It is all about the actual size of the icon itself.

Source: Designmodo

Source: Designmodo

The difference between icons is the level of detail. When you’re gifted with a huge icon (500px by 500px), you’re able to squeeze in a lot of detail. But, as you shrink it, you will want to take away a bit of that detail at a time without losing the intended message. At 250px by 250px, you want to keep the general form, but cut some decoration, while a 25px by 25px icon needs to be as simple as possible to keep the message clear.

Why Does This Matter?

With the rise of incredibly high detail screens on all of our devices, it is necessary to make sure every aspect of our pages maintain uniformity while also working in every size. While a responsive icon doesn’t always respond to screen size, a responsive site with responsive icons may resize the icons as it needs while keeping everything looking great.

Font icons, responsive websites, and minimalistic designs have not only raised the popularity of using icons in design, but it has changed how we use them entirely. This gives us the opportunity to take our icons a step further and improve the entire experience of your site.

Borowska offers some deeper analysis on the icons as well as discussing groups attempting to make responsive icons easier to create; right now they are pretty tricky. It may seem like a small unnoticeable flourish, but in web design the details matter most. I’d keep your eyes on these icons going into the next year.

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Matt Cutts Weighs In On How To Use Links In Comments and Not Look Spammy

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matt-cutts

Google’s Matt Cutts

With the big crackdown on spammy link building practices over the past two years at Google, there are still many webmasters left with questions about what exactly constitutes a spammy practice. Google has previously advised against using links in forum “signatures” as a means of link building, but what about using a link in a comment when it is topically relevant and contributes to the conversation? That is exactly the question Matt Cutts answered in a Webmaster Chat video on Wednesday.

The short answer is that using links to your site in your comments is fine the majority of the time. Everyone who actually contributes to forums has a habit of linking to relevant information, and that often includes their own blogs. But, like everything, it can be abused.

Matt gave some tips to ensure your comments don’t get flagged as spammy by Google or the sites you are commenting on.

  • If you can, use your real name when commenting. Using a company name or anchor text you want to rank for gives the appearance of commenting for commercial marketing purposes, which raises the spam alarm.
  • If you are using leaving links in blog post comments as your primary means for linkbuilding and the majority of your links come from blog comments, Google will probably flag you.

You can see the video below.

 

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Google Adds Click-to-Call to Estimated Total Conversions

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Click-to-Call Ads

Source: Search Engine Watch

Google announced advertisers will find that phone calls from mobile click-to-call ads are now listed in the regular Conversion columns of AdWords, as of Tuesday. This is one of the first steps since Google made their October 1st statement that they would make it easier for advertisers to optimize their bidding strategy for click to call. They are working to make phone calls an important conversion type within AdWords.

With the new update calls made by customers from an AdWords ad, for both mobile and desktop searchers, will be reported in a new column within Estimated Total Conversions.

Before now, click-to-call ads were found under a “Phone Call Conversions” column, but now advertisers will be able to integrate many free automated bidding tools from AdWords to optimize their bidding campaigns and improve performance.

This is a great move for advertisers as 70 percent of mobile searchers call businesses directly from the search results. Google estimates over 40 million phone calls are made every month from Google search ads to advertisers.

At the moment, the new click-to-call conversions are available in countries where Google has forwarding numbers available. This includes the U.S., UK, Germany, and France.

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Google Offers Short Site Reviews This Monday

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Google Hangouts IconThis Monday, site owners looking for advice will have the opportunity to have their website briefly reviewed by Google, as John Mueller announced on Google+. The short site reviews will be taking place November 18th at 10am EDT and will last one-hour. Search Engine Land suggests the event will be lead by Mueller, though no one is quite sure the format this event will be in.

To have your site reviewed, you have to add the site to this Google Moderator page. Then, if Google has the time and chooses your site, it will be reviewed live this upcoming Monday via Google+ Hangouts.

You can also RSVP for the event by going to this page and add it to your calendar.
John’s statement explained the event, saying:

For this hangout, we’ll review sites that are submitted via the moderator page and give a short comment on where you might want to focus your efforts, assuming there are any issues from Google’s point of view :).

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Choosing The Best CSS Measurement Unit For The Situation

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cssCSS has so many measurement units that it can be difficult to keep everything straight. Each measurement system has its own benefits, and it is easy to find yourself wondering which one is correct. Many designers just decide to use a single unit for everything, but you are limiting yourself by not putting some thought into the units you decide to use in CSS. Thankfully, demosthenes.info put together a great list of guidelines to help you pick the best measurement unit for the task.

Pixels (px)

Pixels are best used for hairline borders and general elements when creating fixed-width designs. It is also a good choice for CSS shadow displacement. But, when using pixels as your unit you need to avoid @media breakpoints, because they break pages when zooming – use rem or em instead.
Don’t use for: typography, except when setting a base font-size in a CSS reset.

Percentage (%)

This is great for making responsive images and containers, as well as setting height on the body in certain situations.
Don’t use for: typography, except in a font-size CSS reset.

em, ex

Use em or ex or typography and elements related to it, such as margins. However, as the guidelines point out, em and ex have subtle “gotchas” when used in complex layout. In this case, rem should be substituted.

Points and picas

These are only good for print stylesheets. Seriously, don’t use them for anything else.

rem

This is a more capable and predictable replacement for em and ex, that is best used for the same purposes, as well as @media query breakpoints.

Viewport units (vh & vw)

These are best for responsive typography and so-called “perfect” responsive containers.

Character (ch)

Use this for sizing and adjusting monospaced fonts, though browsers do have some issues with this unit.

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Google Rolls Out New Card Layout For Local Listings

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A few weeks ago, select Firefox users noticed a new “card” layout in the About page for local listings. Beginning Tuesday, it appears the layout has begun to roll out world wide. Mike Blumenthal explained the new layout, saying:

The big difference is that the page now can be displayed in either a single, two or three column layouts depending on browser window width as opposed to the current fixed two column display. Reviews will now follow the same columnar structure as the rest of the page and will not be limited to a current one column display. While this view is not yet visible in mobile, one assumes that if the view were to become universal it would likely push to mobile as well.

The page adds three iconic based calls to action near the top; review, directions & photos. The review summary has been moved up the page and photos have been moved down the page. Geo information including street address, category, hours, description and map are now consolidated into a single card near the top titled “Contact Information. “Similar Places” from around the web no longer show and “reviews from around the web” have been moved up the page to be nearer the top.

But, with the change has come an issue with reviews, at least temporarily. As of Tuesday, the number of reviews listed in the information for local businesses has dropped or begun to show wildly inaccurate review counts. It is unclear whether the actual reviews have disappeared or whether the counts are the only aspect to be affected, but users are reporting as much as a 30 review count drop. It is safe to assume the issue will be resolved quickly as the new layout is ironed out.

You can see the new layout below:

New Local Layout

Source: Mike Blumenthal

 

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Bing Adds New Music Video Search Results Page

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Bing Featured VideoOn Monday, Bing rolled out a brand new music video search results page. The new feature allows you to search for a music video by song title, artist, or album, and users will see a box at the top of the results that highlights the most popular music videos related to the search, and a list of “Top Songs” for the query.

Bing’s result page collects videos from “leading sites including YouTube, Vimeo, MTV, Artist Direct, and more.” The videos listed beneath the featured video are ranked based on relevancy to the search, so an artist’s name will only mostly show their videos, while a search for a specific song returns more covers and amateur music videos.

Bing Videos Screenshot

Users are able to preview song’s without clicking by simply mousing over.

You will also notice a sidebar to the music video search results page which includes a related artist or related albums list so you can more easily find music in the same vein as you enjoy.

One nice little feature is that Bing has collected certain videos as they were originally ordered on an album. Search Engine Land reports a search for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon results in Bing listing the songs in the original order along with the featured video.

Bing-music-video-Dark-side-of-the-moon-600x192

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Widespread Reports of CTR Dropping in Google AdSense

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Google AdSenseIt seems something odd is happening over at Google AdSense. While there is always a pretty much constant stream of complaints coming in about drops in CTRs (click through rates), they are usually isolated cases. Most often, an individual is simply experiencing a problem and their issues are easily resolved.

But, over the past week there has been an unusually large number of people complaining at both the Google AdSense Help and WebmasterWorld forums that their CTR have declined significantly in the past weeks. As Barry Schwartz noticed, not only is the number of threads enough to raise an eye, but there are some who are saying this is having a big impact on their earnings. Clearly something is afoot.

Some quotes from commenters include:

My blog traffic still increasing but adsense earnings dropped from three days. I have a message from adsense help as “Your earnings were 76% below our forecast”.

and

At the risk of getting screamed at for asking this question (yet again). My ctr went down the last 3 days (Sunday,Monday, Today) a whopping 75%!

Not everyone is experiencing the drop in CTR (Schwartz himself has seen an increase), but this appears to be a widespread enough issue to cause some alarm. The world isn’t ending, but you should probably check out your own CTR to make sure everything is alright.

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New Type of Manual Action Appears in Webmaster Tools

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Google-Webmaster-Tools-LogoThere’s a new manual action showing up in Google Webmaster Tools, according to Jessica Lee from Search Engine Watch. Webmaster Tools was updated over the summer so that site owners could be notified when a specific type of manual action had been taken against the site, and since then the waters have been fairly quiet. This new type of manual action, referred to as “image mismatch” is the first change we’ve seen since then.

Google says:

If you see this message on the Manual Actions page, it means that some of your site’s images may be displaying differently on Google’s search results pages than they are when viewed on your site.

As a result, Google has applied a manual action to the affected portions of your site, which will affect how your site’s images are displayed in Google. Actions that affect your whole site are listed under Site-wide matches. Actions that affect only part of your site are listed under Partial matches.

If you end up receiving that message, it is up to you to ensure that your site is showing the same images to users both on your site and within Google image search results. It is possible “anti-hotlinking” tools can cause the issue, so you may have to look through your site’s code on the server.

As with all manual penalties, once the problem is fixed you have to submit your site for reconsideration and wait. And wait. And wait. Eventually, after you’ve waited for what seems like forever, you’ll get a message in your Webmaster Tools account informing whether the manual action will be revoked after review.

Manual actions are penalties at real, living Google employees have placed against your site after determining that you are violating Google’s guidelines. The majority of manual penalties have related to outright spammy practices such as user-generated spam, hidden text, and unnatural links.

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Google Shuts Down AdWords Offer Extensions

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rip-offersAfter an underwhelming debut in February, it appears AdWords Offer Extensions is being sent to the grave in favor of Google Offers. Ginny Marvin explains that AdWords Offer Extensions was intended to allow advertisers to dedicate extra real estate in their search ads to promoting in-store coupons and discounts. There was little excitement surrounding the announcement, and a new alert informs users that Offer Extensions was sent to the chopping block on November 1st.

The alert was posted on the support page for Offer Extensions. It reads:

Starting on November 1, 2013, we will no longer support offer extensions in AdWords. On that date, offer extensions will stop showing in your ads and offer extensions reporting will stop showing in your account. No action is required.

We recommend reviewing your campaigns to ensure your messaging continues to fit your goals. To retain offer extensions reporting for your records, remember to download campaign reports before November 1. Consider using sitelinks or Google offers to promote your deals and offers in the future.

On the other hand, on October 24, Google announced an updated self-service tool that allowed US businesses to create Google Offers. This way, consumers can use their smartphones to redeem and save coupons and promotions. These offers are distributed through Google Maps, Google+, Google Wallet, and the Google Offers app and website. It appears Google is putting their investments into turning Google Offers into a success, rather than trying to force AdWords Offer Extensions to catch on.

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