That has changed now, and there are several designers and developers out there doing a wonderful job, helping to put us on the map and making sure that local businesses have a great look, great functionality, and are standards compliant. Using the same criteria from my last go at this, we’ll review the top 10 search results for Pittsburgh Web Design and see how everyone is stacking up.

Review the Criteria

It’s a 2 point system, I’m modifying it a little to be a bit more fair than perhaps I was last time. You either get 0 or 1 points for each of the criteria models.

• Web Standards. If your site is built using a modicum of web standards, you get a point. If not, you don’t.
• Design. I won’t let personal taste come into play, if your site has nice, crisp graphics that look like they were created in this century, you get a point. Otherwise, a tattoo of a 0 on your forehead.
• Content. Content is King, or so someone who thought that C and K were the same letter came up with, and if you’ve got a well written homepage, point, if you sound like an SEO whore, nothing.

Their were a few surprises I stumbled upon during this little revisit to my former experiment. Not surprisingly, a lot of the companies that were in the top 10 results four years ago aren’t anywhere to be found, several seemingly not even in business anymore as their websites are now those weird SPAM/link sites with a picture of a Russian girl on them. Nauticom, who I guess is now going under the name Consolidated, is not really even in the picture. They still somehow have their website up in the rankings, but it links to some type of default theme. A web design company who is using a cookie cutter theme, somehow that seems just wrong to me. Only two of the sites (myself being one of them) that were there last time still are. And for the first time in three years or so, I’ve been knocked out of the number one position for a week or more by Mr. Andy Weigel. Congrats to him for having such a nice site and obviously doing great work to get him where he is.

Regardless, it’s still nice to see that we’ve made some progress, from 2 out of 7 sites passing this little litmus test to now 3 or 4 out of 6, depending on how you look at it.

Google wants to make that available for WiFi. Lots of Internet, everywhere.

View the video or sign the petition to help make it happen.

That’s a big deal. Why? Because right now Google drives the majority of the traffic around the Web, at least the majority of newfound content (first time viewers to new sites or pages.) Everyone with a website wants to get high up in Google’s search results, specifically for the purpose of driving more traffic to their sites.

As Google improves, they may not need to direct you to sites at all. You might be able to simply type in any given question and Google will be able to answer it flawlessly.

But while Google seems to be primarily a tool for finding web pages, in actuality the company’s mission is quite different: to organize the world’s information. That doesn’t in any way imply that they intend to drive people to the source of the information, only that they’re looking to be able to provide that information to their users.

For example, type define:bananas and you won’t be directed specifically to any sites, the answers will be available right on that page. Also, queries like 10USD to GBP or 10-8 produce answers at the top of the page, rather than taking you to currency conversion or calculator app sites. These, not to mention Gmail, Google Maps, etc., are actually taking lots of traffic away from the rest of the Web and keeping it on Google’s sites.

Eventually, as Google improves, they may not need to direct you to sites at all. You might be able to simply type in any given question and Google will be able to answer it flawlessly.

Aside from the huge impact this could have on traffic to the rest of the Internet, it could be considered somewhat unethical. On the obvious end of the stick, Google wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for the rest of the Internet, and the search giant certainly wouldn’t have grown so massive without all of that content out there for it to sort through. And that’s all that Google has, really: our content makes it smarter. Without us, they’re nothing…they generate almost no original content of their own, it’s all an amalgamation of bits and pieces they’ve found from other people. Even PageRank is up to us. Sure, it’s their algorithm, but its only by us linking back and forth to one another’s websites that Google can determine how accurate a page is without having humans dissect each one.

What does this all mean? I can’t be sure. I don’t see the near future as hosting this New Google Order; for a long time to come searching the Web will still be largely a process begun with Google and ending up at some other relevant page. And from a user standpoint, who cares if you’re getting your information from Wikipedia.org or from Wikipedia.org-via-Google.com? I only hope that, as Google gets better and better at answering questions instead of leading us on to pages that can answer them for us, they don’t push the Internet into resembling old media, where instead of having millions of competing sources of content you only have a handful of guys who’ve gotten really good at dominating shelf space.

And Gmail is almost about to make it happen! According to their help center, you can now send 10 emails a year that you can update the time on, into the past!

Think of the possibilities! Forgot to send yourself an email reminding you to send your girlfriend an email, now you can still do it! But don’t take my word for it, listen to some of these great quotes:

I just got two tickets to Radiohead by being the ‘first’ to respond to a co-worker’s ‘first-come, first-serve’ email. Someone else had already won them, but I told everyone to check their inboxes again. Everyone sort of knows I used Custom Time on this one, but I’m denying it.

…and more at Introducing Gmail Custom Time.

This solution no longer works, as Gmail has apparently changed the way it handles images pasted directly into the browser. However, commenter Mike mentioned that Google has finally gotten around to making their own icons show up by default. Just visit google.com/m on your iPhone, click the Gmail tab in the top navigation, and add the icon as normal (ie, using the + button in Safari’s bottom menu). You can do this for all Google Apps accessible via the google.com/m page.

One of the best things about the way that Apple has let you put web snippets on your iPhone’s home screen is that it really makes web applications seem more like native apps. For instance, there is really very little difference between checking email in your Gmail account and routing your Gmail to the Mail app on the home screen, from a web app vs. native app perspective.

Naturally, the first website that I tried to add to my home screen was the newly redesigned Google.com/m. It was pretty nifty when I noticed that back on the home screen there was a nice icon with the Google logo in it, custom built to resemble some of the native app’s icons. But when I went to add Gmail directly via Gmail.com, the iPhone simply gave me a small screen shot of the actual Gmail interface which didn’t exactly scream “icon” and if it were stuffed inside several other webpage’s icons you wouldn’t be able to easily pick it out. Now, there must be some way for websites to indicate to the iPhone where to find these specialized icons such as Google.com/m uses, but until Google makes an icon for Gmail like they did for Google.com/m, I came up with this work around.

1. In Photoshop, I created a 320 x 340 pixel gif of the mail icon from the Gmail logo, which I’ve included below. You can simply copy the image to your desktop, or get funky and create your own.
2. Right click on the image below and choose “View Image” (or your browser’s equivalent) to get the image alone in the browser.
3. Copy the image out of the new tab. Note: You can’t just right click and choose Copy Image, you need to actually drag your cursor over the image as though you were trying to select it as you would text. This was the case in Firefox at least, I couldn’t test it on IE with my Mac, but it didn’t seem to work in Safari at all. It does work in Safari, it just doesn’t look like it, but drag your cursor over the icon and copy – it’ll be there.
4. Head over to Gmail and paste the contents of your clipboard into the message of a Gmail body.
5. Send the email to yourself, then go and check your Gmail in Safari, on your iPhone.
6. When you open the message, the image inside should fill your whole screen from left to right if you’re holding the phone in the normal position (ie, not widescreen). You may need to slide the screen over to get the whole image on the screen.
7. Now just hit the little + icon in the bottom menu bar and your iPhone will ask you if you’d like to save this page to the home screen, to which you would reply with a resounding click of the Add button!

If you do it as I did, you should now see the Gmail icon, which when clicked on will take you back to Gmail. It actually probably tries to take you back to the actual message, but luckily Gmail ain’t havin’ that. Instead, it dumps you back into your inbox, though for some reason it seems to send you down the page a little bit.

A few trips later I was not quite so impressed. Let me begin by saying that yes, it is definitely better than using the Port Authority’s Trip Planner, which has a bogged down interface and doesn’t recognize addresses, only intersections. However, while Google Transit understands addresses and often even just typing in building names or businesses or even general neighborhoods, that presents a problem in itself: bus drivers only understand intersections. So if you can’t give them an intersection, the poor bastards don’t know what to tell you and therefore typically respond with a “no.” Whatever that means.

But more importantly, Google Transit incorporates walking. But it doesn’t say “Go up Walnut, turn right on South Highland, and left on Penn.” it says “Go to insert destination street address“. Which is typically all fine and dandy, I’m not above asking people for directions or just generally knowing the city myself. However, sometimes this is a huge problem.

For example, check out this route Google Transit chose for me. I was trying to get to the Carnegie Science Center. Note my final walking instructions: Go to 1 Allegheny (takes about 7 minutes.)

Given that I’m supposed to swim across the Ohio, I wonder if 7 minutes is a reality? I’m a decent swimmer but…