The golden ratio, also known as the divine proportion, golden mean, or golden section, is a number often encountered when taking the ratios of distances in simple geometric figures such as the pentagon, pentagram, decagon and dodecahedron. It is denoted phi, or sometimes tau.

The Golden Ratio is often associated with the Greeks and arts and architecture. However, Chris Pearson, the Creator of Thesis and Founder of DIYthemes, has a pretty convincing argument for applying it to typography and Web design. He said that if people relate aesthetic beauty and efficiency to the Golden Ratio, then why not use it in typography?

“There’s a whole lot of conjecture and assumption and arbitrary decisions that have been made throughout history to say this is the right way to set text,” he said. “I’m not satisfied with arbitrary choices and preferential selection.”

As Pearson explained it to WebProNews, looking at the Golden Ratio in this way gives proper placement to every single pixel on a website. He built a calculator to simplify the process to allow others to take advantage of this concept too.

“The idea is that you’re gonna produce the most aesthetically beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, and easy-to-read text that you can have,” Pearson pointed out.

He went on to say that applying this idea to a website is extremely important since content is the primary mode of communication for publishers.

“Since content is the only way that you’re communicating with people online… I don’t want to leave to arbitrary selection and choice,” he said.

Pearson also added that applying the Golden Ratio to typography also helps publishers organize their content proportionately, which is critical since people view content on so many different devices.

Are you open to trying Pearson’s idea for your website? Let us know.

I’m changing the platform of my blog. All old URLs will redirect to new ones. But, since the HTML code and layout of the pages are different, do you lose search engine rankings?

“Well, search engine rankings can change when the page changes itself,” Cutts responds. “If you’re doing the 301s correctly – a permanent redirect from the old site to the new site, and if you’re doing it at a page level – so from the old page to the new page – you should be in relatively good shape, but it’s not just incoming links.”

“It’s also the content of the page itself,” he continues. “So if you had a really good layout with a really clean design, where all the text was really easily indexed, and you move to something that was a lot more confusing, and maybe the text wasn’t as easy for us to extract, that could change your search rankings for the downside, or for the negative.”

“In general, we’re relatively good about changing layouts and still being able to discern what that page is about, but here’s one test that you could do: as long as you haven’t done the transition yourself, if you can try making a few tests, where you can take the layout of the new page or the new site, and see if you can apply it in some very simple ways to the old site, then that’s a way to isolate those, because it’s just like any scientific experiment,” he says. “If you do two things at once, and your rankings go down, you can’t decouple what caused it. Whereas if you can change just the layout – even if it’s only on a few pages, to try out and see whether your rankings change with that, then you’ll know – was it more likely to be because of the redirects or because I was changing my HTML layout.”

In terms of layouts, you may also do well to consider the role design plays in how Google determines quality content. Would people be comfortable giving your site their credit card info? Design can play a big role in this. Another question on Google’s list of “questions that one could use to assess the ‘quality’ of a page or an article,” is “Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?” Then there’s the whole load time factor. Google does count page speed as a ranking signal.

Do you use Adobe’s Creative Suite? Tell us what you like about it.

According to Scott Fegette, Adobe’s Senior Product Manager on the Creative Suite Web team, CS5.5 “helps Web pros work more efficiently and quickly without having to go back to school and learn a whole new slew of skills or technology.”

While CS5.5 includes updates to Adobe Flash Catalyst, Adobe Flash Builder, Adobe Device Central, and Adobe Acrobat X Pro, the biggest updates come through Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Flash Pro. Through CS5.5, both Dreamweaver and Flash Pro enhance the workflow and sharing experience for Web developers.

“We really sort of tried to gear all of our work in CS5.5 just to make it much more easier for Web professionals to either transition their existing projects, sites, and applications to a multiscreen experience, or in some cases, just literally start from scratch with a green field, dedicated mobile project,” said Fegette.

In terms of Adobe Flash Pro, CS5.5 provides a new feature called Scale Content with Stage that allows users to scale proportionately and quickly. In the past, it could take a long time for users to convert animations and movie clips. Through this feature, this same action could take a matter of seconds.

Adobe also made significant advances in HTML5, specifically its authoring tools and its support of jQuery mobile framework integration for browser-based content. In addition, it allows PhoneGap integration for the development of native and mobile apps. In other words, these improvements eliminate extra steps for developers and make their experience more seamless.

The company has also revamped its pricing and subscription models to give customers the latest versions of their software without being locked into 18-month cycles. Adobe is giving customers both long-term and short-term options with prices starting at $89 per month.

“The hope is that, literally, as soon as people get it installed and take a look at it, it’s just immediately going to feel like a natural extension of the skills they already learned,” Fegette added.

Now that Google’s own Google TV is here, the company is talking more about TV optimization itself. "Because Google TV has a fully functioning web browser built in, users can easily visit your site from their TV," says Google Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye. "Current sites should already work, but you may want to provide your users with an enhanced TV experience — what’s called the ’10-foot UI’ (user interface). They’ll be several feet away from the screen, not several inches away, and rather than a mouse on their desktop, they’ll have a remote with a keyboard and a pointing device."

Ohye says that text should be large enough to be viewable from the sofa-to-TV distance, site navigation should be able to be performed through button arrows on the remote, selectable elements should provide a visual queue when selected (it should be obvious what sections are highlighted), etc. 

There is an entire Google TV site optimization guide here and a checklist here. I would get familiar with these. Google actually has a gallery of sites that are optimized for TV, though it’s not very big, and very video-based. 

Google says you can get a general idea of what your site looks like on TV by using a large monitor, making the window size 1920 X 1080, visiting your site in a browser at full screen, zooming the browser to 1.5X the normal size, moving back, and looking at it. 

It’s also worth noting that people using Google TV are required to use a Google account, as Danny Sullivan points out in his review of the new Sony Google TV-ready Blu-Ray Player. Interestingly, it also asks users if they want to send usage stats to Google (this is aggregate data used for detecting bugs, according to the company, which also says it doesn’t collect any viewing history. According to Sullivan, Google still has a lot of work to do with search on Google TV.

Is your site ready for TV? 

"Now, whenever you visit the font family page of any of the fonts, you will see a link saying ‘Preview this font’ that will load your font selection into the font previewer," says Marc Tobias Kunisch with the Google Font API Team. "Here you can edit the text, change its size and line height, and add decorations and spacing among other things. You can even apply text shadow to your text."

The preview will then generate code that you can stick in your style sheet.

"If you want to see the font sample without any distractions from the font previewer controls, you can do that as well simply by clicking ‘Toggle controls’ in the upper right corner," notes Kunisch. "This will show you a nice clean example of what the font would look like in your design."

The Font API (in beta) lets users add web fonts to any web page.

As Matt McGee mentions in a Search Engine Land piece, even a query like "candy" without any geographical indicator will bring up a seven-pack of local results, but a query for "seo" or "web design" or even something as specific as "web design vancouver" will bring up no local listings whatsoever (although the organic results still heavily favor local businesses in location-specific queries).

Needless to say, some SEOs and designers are taking this as something of a slap in the face, justified or not. Search engine optimization and web design are both services after all, and just about every other type of service you can think of will yield local listings in a Google search.

While this phenomenon was originally thought to be a bug, Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick fame points to a Google Maps Help thread where a Googler going by Joel H. tells a different story:

Today, we’re intentionally showing less local results for web design / SEO queries. For example, [web design sacramento] doesn’t display local listings today. We believe this is an accurate representation of user intent. In some cases, we do show local listings, however (as NSNA/php-er noted) [web design in bellingham]. I’m sure some of you feel we should be displaying local results for queries like [Web Design Vancouver]. I understand that concern, but based on our understanding of our users, we feel this is the right decision for now.

I’ll give the usual disclaimer that we’re constantly working on improving the user experience and results will vary over time. So, this could change in the future, but I wanted to be explicit about what we’re doing today.

So if you use the word "in" in your query, you are more likely to get the local results. Some still have a hard time finding the logic in this move.

"I’m all for their interest in balancing for user intent – it’s their business, their product – but I’m missing the logic here," comments Bill Sebald. 

"I find this disturbing," says Scott Clark. "If I have a physical location in a given area, offer a service to customers in that area that is close to their query, then onebox listings should appear as they do for other creative-class industries."

Not all SEOs have such a problem with what Google is doing though. "I want to be found by people everywhere, not just in the small city I happen to live in at the moment," a content writer comments.

"But you would think that if people typed in a city name or other location, they are actually looking for local results and the maps could be useful," they add. "Although if you have optimized your website for your location, you should get found anyway. And I do all my work online, people don’t need to visit me or even know where I am located so in that sense the maps aren’t always useful or necessary."

People are saying that in some countries, they are still seeing local results for the type of query in question. It is possible that Google has just not rolled out the changes everywhere yet. The quoted content writer suggests that Google just doesn’t know the user-intent of all of its countries’ people as well as it does for the countries where the changes exist.

What do you make of Google showing less local results for SEOs and web designers? Will it hurt local businesses? Share your thoughts.

Related Articles:

> Google Adds Place Pages to Google Earth

> Google Comes to Brick and Mortar Store Windows

> Critical Local Search Factors To Pay Attention To

Ever wondered what parts of your site can’t be seen without scrolling? Browser Size shows you what portion of users can see a give spot on the screen. This is not screen resolution but the area available to the browser – as gathered from www.google.com users.

Here is what it looks like:

"In a newspaper, the most important story is featured on the front page," says Google Senior Software Engineer, Bruno Bowden. "If it’s a really important piece, then it’s placed ‘above the fold,’ which means you can find it on the top half of the first page — the bottom half is folded behind and isn’t readily seen when you first look at the newspaper."

"The same concept applies to browsers as well," he adds. "There’s no clear line for "above the fold" on a browser — there are many different sizes of monitors, browsers are not always full screen and other things like toolbars can take up space. Consider a ‘Donate’ button on a non-profit site. If it’s far down the page, you may not see it when you first view the page. You can of course scroll downwards, but many people don’t scroll and will miss it entirely."

To use the tool, simply enter your URL and it will insert your page into the graph showing the percentage of people who are likely to see each area. Don’t be surprised if a lot of websites suddenly start shifting to the left.

The tool was one of Google’s "20% time" projects. A post on the Google Code blog has some interesting details about how the project came about and grew to what it is.

Related Articles:

> Duplicate Content Owners Catch a New Break from Google

> Google Makes it Easier to Tell Where Results Originate From

> Google Ditches PageRank in Webmaster Tools

Ok, perhaps it is a bit of an exaggeration to assume that this is going to completely put web designers out of work. Website templates have been around for years. It’s just that the potential of Google Apps to infiltrate more and more offices may lead to more widespread use of Google Sites.

Google has just launched a new template gallery for Google Sites, and it is public. Anyone can contribute templates by simply following these steps:

1. Open up the site you want to add to the gallery (the site must be published and you must be an owner to submit the site).

2. Select ‘More actions’, ‘Manage site,’ ‘General’, and chose ‘Publish this site as a template.’

3. Choose a template name, a category, enter a description and click ‘Submit template.’

While anyone can browse the gallery, businesses using Google Apps each have a private area where employees can share site templates with coworkers. Site templates can be used not only to build business websites, but intranets and more.

"The rate that businesses are adopting Google Sites has surpassed our expectations, and templates will make Sites even more useful by dramatically reducing the time it takes to set up collaborative workspaces like employee intranets, project tracking sites, team sites and employee profile pages," says Google Sites product manager Scott Johnston. "Templates let you quickly start a new site with pre-built content, embedded gadgets, page layouts, navigation links, theming and more."

Given that anyone can contribute templates to the gallery, it stands to reason that it will grow quickly and greatly. One knock against site templates has always been that they don’t make for a unique design. These days the chances of having a truly unique design are getting slimmer and slimmer as the web becomes more flooded with content. However, the more templates that are available, the less chances you have of actually coming across different sites that use the same one. Given that this is a Google product, it’s almost certain that it will get many contributions.

Do you think designers should worry about Google Sites? Share your thoughts here.

Related Articles:

> Google Exec: Docs Can Supplant Office In One Year

> API Makes Google Sites More Useful for Business

> Google Launches New Features for Sites

In addition, users can upload photos directly to Picasa Web Albums from within Google Sites, using the "upload photo" tab in the insert dialog. It should be noted, however, that Google Apps users will not see the options, because Picasa Web Albums is not available in Google Apps.

Google has also made it easier for friends and family to follow updates from Google Sites. Announcement pages can be accessed as a feed by adding posts.xml to the end of the announcement page’s URL.

"Feeds are also available for site comments (add "comments.xml") and site activity (add "activity.xml")," says Google Sites Senior Product Manager Scott Johnson. "Announcement and comment feeds follow the permission of the site and require authentication for private sites. This means online feed readers which don’t support authenticated feeds won’t be able to subscribe to private site feeds or site activity."

Google has also added the ability to create custom page templates for a site. This lets users define default content and settings such as layout. Other collaborators can then use the templates when they create a new page.

Frederic Lardinois with ReadWriteWeb makes an interesting connection in that the insert dialog on Google Sites could be what the long-rumored "GDrive" might look like. "This mythical GDrive would give users the ability to easily store and access all of their files in the cloud," says Lardinois. "Lots of other services already offer this, of course, but few of them are at the center of our online lives as much as Google is."

There’s no sense in jumping to any conclusions, but it’s an interesting observation nonetheless.

If you are unfamiliar with Website Optimizer, it’s a free tool from Google that webmasters can use to increase conversions by making adjustments to design and text elements to see what works.

"What you put in your note depends on what stage your experiment is in," explains Trevor Claiborne of Google’s Website Optimizer team. "If you’re still designing your experiment you might include your testing hypothesis or some variations you’re considering. As your experiment is running, you might include any external factors that might have an impact on your conversion rate. And as your experiment concludes you might include some thoughts on why variations performed as they did."

"Experiment notes are also great if you have several teams coordinating on a Website Optimizer experiment," says Claiborne. "For example, your IT team might update the note once they’ve installed the Website Optimizer tags on the test page. Your creative team can then start creating variations in Website Optimizer and update the note."

The Experiment Notes feature can be found on the settings page for any experiment in Google Website Optimizer. For some tips on using the website optimizer tool, check out this article.