I’d like you to imagine for a second that your company logo looked something like the following pictures. Imagine it hanging on the outside of your building, printed on all your correspondence and most importantly, on the business card you have to give to someone whilst looking them in the eye.

The Cheap Laugh

It’s hard to say how a logo like this gets through the design process without someone stopping and saying “wait a minute, that looks like two people bumming”. Perhaps, like a Necker Cube, you only see it if you’re looking for it, otherwise it just looks like an ordinary ‘K’. If you find this rude you’re just a tainted individual.

The It-Looks-Like-A-Penis

It baffles the mind how his could look like anything other than a penis. In fact, when anthony byrne employees hand over their business cards I’m surprised people don’t say “hey, you’ve got a penis on your business card”. Maybe they do.

The We-Let-The-Receptionist-Design-It

This is in fact the CIA’s Terrorist Buster logo. It was obviously designed by someone who has never seen a terrorist, or indeed heard much about them. In fact, drawing a relationship between terrorists and that happy chap Slimer seems in a little bad taste to say the least. We can only hope the CIA’s receptionist still doesn’t know that terrorists bear little resemblance to friendly ghosts.

The Someone-Likes-Elephants

Elephants on crack, that is. Perhaps the designer had a bad elephant experience as a child, or was the victim of an elephant stampede in which their home was destroyed. I can think of no other reason to have a rampaging elephant on your logo. No reason at all.

The OMG…OH…MY…GOD!

There aren’t sufficient words to describe this logo. I’ll only say that if anyone handed me a business card with this on it, I wouldn’t call them. In fact, I’d change my phone number and even my name to make sure they could never find me again. Safety first.

(Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Popularity: 1% [?]

Yahoo have recently improved their music search feature, allowing users to play full length tracks from the search page as well as the usual 30 second sample.

I think search like this has fantastic potential, not just for selling music but for helping people like me to find the song they’re looking for. How many times have you had a lyric stuck in your head but with no idea what the song was called or who sang it? A service I would love to see is a comprehensive lyric catalogue integrated with track samples. You type in your lyrics and get suggested songs to listen to – hey presto, you’ve got a great chance of finding the song you heard in the shop/club/on the radio. You can now go and download it (from Yahoo Music of course!).

Even better would be a service that lets you say; “it sounded sort of like ‘la la lahhh la la la’” and matches that with song suggestions. But I think that could be some way off

Popularity: 1% [?]

Google are increasingly pushing their products and services to pretty much everyone and Google properties like books, knols and news are starting to dominate the search results. It doesn’t have to be that way – you can actually get:

A nifty application that filters out Google’s own results. Find it here and enjoy search again

Popularity: 1% [?]

I was checking one of my clients’ Analytics package today to see how their traffic was doing – most of the traffic comes from natural search, with an ad campaign bringing in visits for something they don’t rank for. So far so normal. There was one referring site that puzzled me – I followed the link and imagine my surprise when I saw my client’s advert right on the product page of one of their main competitors!

I didn’t set up their ad campaign – normally I opt out of the content network, but the client was opted in so Google had chosen a ‘relevant website’ to show ads on. This just so happened to be the competitor – what’s more, the click-through rate was over 6% and the conversion rate was over 8%! The competitor obviously hadn’t seen this:

There’s a lesson here somewhere…as a website owner it may seem like a good idea to earn a bit of money from Adsense, but please please please if you sell a product, filter your competitors out!

Popularity: 1% [?]

As a Google Adwords Professional I have my own contact at Google who sends me the Adwords Agency Update every week. This tells me about new Adwords features and help I can get from my representative – it usually says things like ‘have you tried the website optimiser?’ and ‘would you like to take part in our webinar next week?’. This week’s update however contained a load of information about other Google products:

Now this is meant to be an Adwords update, so why would I want to know about the Google news archive, Google Reader and Blogger Following (not to mention the US Elections!). Call me sceptical, but I imagine that a lot of Adwords users haven’t even heard of these other Google properties, which means this newsletter is acting as free advertising to a captive audience. Adwords users might think Google Reader is relevant to them – after all, Google are telling them about it in a special update!

With the launch of Chrome on their homepage it’s pretty clear Google aren’t afraid of pushing their products. Adwords updates are just the latest victim and I’m sure they won’t be the last.

Popularity: 2% [?]

There’s been so much hoo-ha over the launch of Google Chrome I thought I’d do a direct comparison with the power user’s favourite, Firefox. Chrome is a barren wasteland at the moment – it’s literally a browser and nothing more – whereas Firefox is riddled with add-ons and tools. So how can I compare them? Well, I’ve chosen some basic key features I think no browser should be without and picked a winner in each category. Read on for the results…

The Logo

This is probably a matter of personal taste but I’ve always liked the Firefox logo. It’s striking and fun and does exactly what it says on the tin.

The Chrome logo on the other hand looks uncannily like a Pokeball. Sorry Google, but I keep expecting Pikachu to jump out.

Winner of Best Logo: Firefox

The Address Bar

Firefox 3 gives you URL suggestions when you start to type in a web address. These include your favourites and pages you’ve visited recently. Unfortunately the top suggestions are never what I’m looking for so I’m not impressed with this feature. What is neat is if you type enough letters it gives you the exact page you want – great if you’ve forgotten the address but know what it was about (it records the page title for reference).

Chrome’s address bar on the other hand is also its search box. It has access to Google’s web results so offers you search suggestions as well as relevant web pages out of those you’ve already visited. Unlike Firefox it doesn’t just search the page title, it searches the whole page to find your phrase. This makes for fantastic results.

Winner of Best Address Bar: Chrome

Web History

Firefox’s history is functional. It shows web addresses or page titles in a neat little sidebar, so it doesn’t intrude on your browsing. It’s functional and practical – no complaints here.

Chrome’s history on the other hand is far more informative. You get the time of your visit, a cute little logo for each webpage and the links look exactly like links. There’s more space and you can see the full page title – Firefox offers a simple record but Chrome offers browsing options. The one letdown is the history appears as a separate page, not a sidebar – not good for multi-tasking.

Winner of Best Web History: Tricky one this, but from a usability standpoint I think Firefox wins. Chrome’s history offers maybe TOO much information

RSS Reader

I really wanted to cheat here because I use the Sage plugin and it’s fantastic, but I’ve stuck to Firefox’s inbuilt RSS reader. You access your feeds through the bookmarks folder and get a simple list of headlines. It does exactly what an RSS reader should do – gives you the info you want without interrupting your browsing.

Chrome also has an inbuilt RSS reader and just like Firefox you can access feeds through the bookmarks folder. Forget about sidebars or lists though – clicking on a feed opens the whole thing in
your browser, presented as a complete (stripped down) webpage. It’s pretty but intrusive and defeats the object of RSS. If it doesn’t save me time I’m not going to use it.

Winner of Best RSS Reader: Firefox

The Scores!

Firefox

Chrome

Even with Chrome’s stripped-back simplicity it just doesn’t deliver on convenience of use. Firefox wins by a hair!

Popularity: 7% [?]