This just in: Sandra and I have been asked to speak at the upcoming Voices That Matter web design conference taking place in San Francisco from October 22-25. Sandra will be presenting a session called Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers and Prospects into Leads, which also happens to be the title of our upcoming book. I’ll be giving a talk called You Can Have It All: Designing to Please Users and Search Engines Alike. I just gave a similar talk called Balancing Design, Usability and SEO at Web Design World in Seattle and it seemed to go over pretty well, so I’m looking forward to fine-tuning and updating that with some new material for this event.

Here’s the official announcement about the conference:

You’ve read their books.
Now grab the chance to listen to, learn from and mingle with your favorite New Riders authors and the most respected professionals in the Web design industry at Voices That Matter: Web Design, a conference hosted by New Riders.

At Voices That Matter: Web Design, our lineup of speakers will teach you new techniques; some will show you how to avoid the potholes and pitfalls in how-to sessions; still others will inspire you to try new pathways in creative, energizing, thought-provoking, idea-driven sessions.

Entertaining, informative, authoritative, but most of all, inspiring, Voices That Matter: Web Design will bring you face-to-face with the authors whose books have shaped your career.

Speakers: Corey Barker, Dan Brown, Andy Clarke, Curt Cloninger, June Cohen, Brendan Dawes, Robert Hoekman, Jeremy Keith, Peter-Paul Koch, Steve Krug, Eric Meyer, Steve Mulder, Sandra Niehaus, Derek Powasek, Dan Saffer, Nathan Shedroff, Dori Smith, Stephanie Sullivan, Charles Wyke-Smith, Jeffrey Zeldman.

I just realized they left me out of this list. How crushingly disappointing…

We’re actually pretty excited about this event, as this will be our first post-book-launch speaking opportunity (assuming all goes as planned between now and then).

So if you’re based in the Bay Area or you’ve been looking for an excuse to visit San Francisco, this could be your big chance. October is the best time of year to see San Francisco…

We hope to see you there.

Update: Leave us a comment if you’d like to get $100 off this conference.  The organizers have given us a discount code for our clients, prospects and fans (we have fans?).

SNAPSHOT:

• Search revenues are projected to triple to $44.5B over the next 5 years (Piper Jaffray). Google is already positioned to capture a significant majority of those revenues.
• But Search only represents ~50% of all online advertising revenue (current & projected)
• This deal is about positioning Google to go after the other 50% of revenue projected to come from non-Search ads

PROJECTED GO-TO MARKET STRATEGY:

Google is most likely going to bolt the DoubleClick ad server platform and ad network on to their existing AdWords system over time. By doing so, Google will open up a lot of additional graphic/rich media/video ad inventory for AdWords, addressing a big hole in their current offering. While they’ve had the ability to serve up banners and video ads for a while, non-text ads currently account for only a tiny slice of their overall inventory and revenue. When this happens, Google will not only be serving those ads – they’ll be selling that inventory.Why? Because Google’s huge network of 500,000 advertisers will help publishers monetize that inventory better than they can themselves. And if Google needs to partially subsidize some of those high-value publishers by paying guaranteed CPM’s for some time, they can do that. They certainly have the cash. And that will quickly become a moot point as the big brand advertisers (and their agencies) who are currently buying that inventory directly at high CPM’s will realize they’ll need to buy that inventory via Google or risk losing it to a higher bidder.

They will probably continue to offer the DoubleClick ad server product as a standalone product for quite some time so as not to alienate existing advertisers/agencies or publishers, but the real goal will be to make participation in their marketplace a no-brainer for everyone by offering better distribution and accountability for advertisers and better monetization for publishers. As Google gains more advertisers and publishers, the holdouts will have a harder time resisting the gravitational pull.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR:

Advertisers - Win
Online advertising gets more efficient. With Google as the primary hub and marketplace, advertisers get to deal with one entity and cut one check for most of their online advertising. Managing those campaigns will be very complex, but will still be much more straightforward than dealing with individual publishers with different pricing and deal structures.

(Read the full article…)

There’s a disturbing trend emerging in the world of usability. More and more, clients are conducting their own “usability” tests and claiming those tests justify what is clearly a suboptimal, or even unusable, design. Equally unnerving is their conviction about the longevity of these results; once they’ve “done usability”, they can’t be persuaded to re-open discussion on the topic. Putting aside the initial and obvious question of why they hired me to conduct a usability assessment, I’ve been left to ponder the larger question:

Why has this trend surfaced?

And the answer that occurred to me is based on scenarios I encountered circa 1998 when I talked to people about why they needed to take the Internet more seriously. At the time, many people I spoke with didn’t understand the Internet or the opportunity it presented. Thus, they preferred to treat it like a “checkbox” item. While few of these people would admit it now or then, their actions belied a thought process that looked like this:

“Do we have a web site?”

“Yes.”

“We can check that off our list then.”

The problem with this process, of course, was that not all web sites were (or are) created equal, a lesson which has only recently become conventional wisdom. Companies and the individuals responsible for web sites now generally understand that to compete successfully in the online space they have to provide a decent online user experience with a design that reflects how people really use the Web.

(Read the full article…)