KidzClix is an online magazine for kids between the ages of 7-14. The purpose of the site is two fold: to create an online educational experience that is entertaining, and a safe space for children to interact online without fear of online predators.

KidzClix

The site presents a number of usability challenges. It is a site designed to be for children, yet informative to parents. How do you create an experience where children know enough to tell their parents about it?  Yet,  compelling enough for them that they want to experience more. You create fun and entertaining educational games that draw the attention of the child. Keep it fresh and simple. The constant attention will bring it to the parents radar, they will review the safety requirements and testimonials and learn of a highly credible experience for their children.

We all know there aren’t that many high quality spaces for our children online. This is a much needed step in the right direction.

We’ll share with you more about this new client as we help develop its’ online strategies and improve the quality of the experience.

200-OK Found

400-Bad request

401-Unauthorized request

403-Forbidden

404-Not Found

500-Internal Error

502-Service Temporarily Overloaded

301-Permanently Moved

302-Temporarily moved

For the purposes of this post, we are focusing on the 301 and 404 codes. Often times how to deal with server responses can be overlooked even by us.  If you search for Oh No SEO, you’ll find one of our other domains appearing within the index. This creates problems for rankings as well as potential duplicate content penalties by the engines. There are two solutions to this problem: setup a server side 301 redirect if you are not using the domain, or allow it to show a 404 error. The second scenario will eventually cause the engines to deindex that domain. Any other server response will cause a delay in removing the domain from the index.

Google also offers a manaul removal of the domain from their index if you have access to webmaster tools. If you have a domain you’re unsure how to deal with, we’re happy to offer a free consult. Happy redirecting everyone.

One of the constant worries and arguments that take place in our industry is the prevasiveness of scams.  Those promising guarantees you will rank on page one, etc.  Gaming has been going through a similar but different problem and we’re publishing a proposed gamer’s rights that I think can serve as a guide for our own problems.

The Gamer’s Bill of Rights
We the Gamers of the world, in order to ensure a more enjoyable experience, establish equality between players and publishers, and promote the general welfare of our industry hereby call for the following:

1. Gamers shall have the right to return games that don’t work with their computers for a full refund.
2. Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.
3. Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game’s release.
4. Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game.
5. Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will adequately play on that computer.
6. Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won’t install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their express consent.
7. Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time.
8. Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.
9. Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play.
10. Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play.

What would a similar bill of rights look like for our industry?

Lesson Learned: The broadcast industry (i.e. Radio and Television) has been consolidating outlets for as long as the industry has existed. The revenue model is dependent on reach. Hence, there is always a strong incentive to cannibalize competitors if you can’t beat them.

Media companies are now trying to consolidate content away from the decentralized nature of the internet. With the launch of content providers such as Hulu, a joint venture between NBC and News Corp, produced content is now being used to sell advertising. The same produced content that is distributed without any monetary return to content producers, by those they describe as pirates. The wild west character of the internet may be dying, but is it a bad thing?

[See post to watch Flash video]

We are in what has been coined as Web 2.0, a term that appears to be authoritative to the laymen since it uses the same ubiquitous system for tracking changes in software and web development to now generational changes with the internet. This is misleading since it makes an inherently flawed presumption – the internet is moving along a linear path. This is certainly not the case. Ironically it is a technology that is in a perpetual beta, as has become commonly popularized by the likes of Google, constantly tweaked and changed and improved upon yet ultimately flawed. The internet has always and continues to develop in a multidimensional and ahistorical form.

More to come in this series.

First, we all remember this…

Original Google Beta

This is from the Wayback Machine. Try it and have fun reminiscing over all the old websites that have been redesigned or perished in the .com bust. When google first started, it quite literally was a prototype that was a total hit or miss. We had such giants at the time like Yahoo! and AltaVista…remember them?

Google: Might-work-some-of-the-time-prototype that is much more up to date.

What lessons can we extract from that time?

First, you can find that many large companies were still trying to understand what it means for their business to exist online. They had a rather benign presence in the web sphere. Besides having poor design athestics during that time many companies served as informational sources. Very few if any at all considered moving any transactional business online. From the screenshot below, you can see that IBM at the time was sharing sponsored news and as expected investor information and such. Nothing particularly groundbreaking here, which happens to be the point. Companies perceived websites that exist outside of their domain of ‘Trusted Networks’ to be rogues or little more than useless personal sites that talked about nothing of value to them. There was no real ‘information’ that was being exchanged or so they thought. There was little information on what was happening on IRC and private chat rooms. The nascent movement of building online communities had been underway at that point. Companies neither realized the power or the culture that preceded their involvement in ‘shaping’ the internet.

Old IBM website - Text Only

The first truly industrious group of companies to exploit the internet were the porn companies. They understood the private nature of the internet and the latent demand for such content. Where am I going with this and why is this important for you to understand?

In the tradition of riveting cliffhangers you’ll find out in my next post.

We advocate transparency and beautiful design. Hopefully by now you’ve had a chance to look around and enjoyed your experience. It is fitting that for our first post we highlight the design and great work that went into making this website come to life. We started our search at all the typical and expected haunts to find a good designer. We looked at open source web design and bestwebgallery.com. One of our criteria was a design atheistic that favored usability and a strong creative sense. Both were difficult to find until we came across the inspired web design of Abduzeedo.

Creative Design

Fabio our designer was both gracious and excellent in translating our requirements into the design. You’ll find many of his small creative touches scattered all over the website. The idea was to make sure the site was easy to use, yet had it’s own individual signature. There is a sea of SEO blogs and websites that exist on the web today. And it seems that everyday there is a new one that comes out. We want to assure and make sure that our clientèle and readership know that we will strive to make this a unique experience. Please use the comment section below to let us know what you think of this design. And feel free to leave Fabio props on his great work.

A final thank you to Fabio.