Why originate when you can emulate?

“Emulation means never having to visualize and describe…. it’s cheaper to borrow rather than buy.”, According to nerdless.com.

**** All sarcasm from here on out, people… but the content in quotes is actually from their website. ****

Finally,  folks, you no longer have to take any ownership in your presence on the web.
Too busy to spend time working with a web company to develop your corporate site?
Only want to be as good as your competition?
Don’t want to be unique or stand out among the crowd?

Then we have the perfect thing for you!

Now you can just  steal borrow from those who have already done it.

That’s right, kids!
“Emulating an existing design eliminates a lot of back-and-forth between you and your site builder, saving time.” You’re a busy person. You don’t have time to waste talking with a professional website design company. C’mon, nobody cares if your site is user friendly, standards compliant or that all your page titles are the same! As long as you LOOK like those other guys who are making the money, you will too! And you just KNOW that if YOU think that other site is “cool” then everyone will think YOUR site is just as awesome!

HEY! “Get over your worries about being an imitator. Unless you emulate a direct competitor, it’s unlikely that anyone will ever see both the original site and your emulation.”

See kids… it’s O.K.to steal borrow what other designers have created as long as no one will ever see the original AND your copy side by side. So, copy that design… download those cool photos you found on Google Images… and use that copy you hacked together from those other sites…and you’ll have yourself a brand new website you can call your own. Won’t you be soooo proud to show this off? And what a time and money saver. Gosh, why didn’t YOU think of it? Yes, proud website owner… don’t bother trying to be the best, when you can just look like the best?! (let’s see how long that will work.)

OH, by the way… those other websites you’re stealing from… who do you think designed them? I’m pretty sure they didn’t copy from someplace else. Do you suppose they maybe took their business seriously, dedicated some time and resources to their investment, and worked with professional web designers and developers to create a website that actually caters to their goals and needs. Yeah… probably more likely.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” - Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832) … but when it comes to the web, imitation is just bad business.

“Past investments are over, lost, gone forever. They are irrelevant to the future.”

Seth Godin’s recent post “Ignore sunk costs” shows a photo of a store front sign with the largest word spelled incorrectly, and suggests that “just because the guy spent a lot on the sign for his store doesn’t mean he shouldn’t spend more to spell the biggest word properly. The amount he already spent is irrelevant. What matters is what the benefit of spelling ’stationery’ properly will be.”

The same concept can be applied to your website. Yes, you may have sunk several thousands of dollars into having your website built 5 years ago,  but a lot has changed since then. More people have hi-speed internet access, better monitors, web browsers are more sophisticated and above all, web users are way more savvy and have higher expectations from websites that they visit. So, what have you done with your website since you had it done 5 years ago?

I know. You paid good money to have all that fancy Flash® animation done, and made sure that Pachelbel’s Canon plays on every page, but who cares? No, really, WHO CARES? Does it convert? I mean, are people actually going back to your website and saying, “OMG, I LOVE all those Flash® animations! I think I’ll buy more of their products!” NO! And I’m not speaking just about the “design” of your site, I’m talking usability, conversions, and yes… SEO.

Simply put, just having a brochure-type website and hoping that “If I build it, they will come” just doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to rethink your web presence. Don’t think about how much money you spent to have it done. That initial investment has already paid for itself. If it hasn’t, all the more reason to do something about it.

Like Seth says, “When making a choice between two options, only consider what’s going to happen in the future, not which investments you’ve made in the past.”

The latest web browser offering from Redmond has been released today. This coincides with Microsoft’s web developer conference, MIX09 (there’s also a live site), being held in Las Vegas. From this version of Internet Explorer, you can expect better web standards support, increased security, and a tweaked look.

Internet Explorer 8 has been in development since sometime in 2006 (as well as being in public beta for over a year) and is purported by the dev team to be one of the most standards-compliant browsers on the market. And it’s true that an early beta version of IE8 passed the Web Standards Project’s ACID2 test (although it’s worth mentioning that other browsers have been passing this test with ease for quite some time already). That’s good news for web developers (like us) who typically have to wrestle with various versions of Internet Explorer to get it to render standards-compliant web pages correctly. We probably have our favorite browser - Mozilla’s Firefox - to thank for that, since their standards-compliant browser has been steadily eating into Microsoft’s share of the browser market.

Some of the improved security features include private browsing and better (the best?) malware blocking. Also touted are new features such as web slices and accelerators. Web slices allow users to save just a portion of a page that IE will keep updated (although I think this is dependent on the page developer marking a section off as a “slice”) and accelerators are a way for page developers to automatically include links to web services or sites in a context-sensitive way. I’ll have to check those features out more to really get a handle on what they can do.

Now I just need to figure out how to install IE8 side-by-side with IE7 for testing…

Links:

• Internet Explorer 8 home page
• Direct download for Windows XP
• Direct download for Windows Vista

Well, the BBC got wind of a Microsoft project that’s been talked about for a while in some tech circles.

Codename: Midori (everything needs a codename, right?) is what looks to be the new direction in a post-Windows world. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Microsoft dominates PCs all over the world. All this legacy code and thinking has come with some significant baggage when it comes to the way that people now want to use technology. More and more I find myself wanting to be able to access everything from a central location instead of emailing myself reminders to do things on the computer when I get home. Virtualization, Terminal Services, Remote Desktop, GoToMyPC, VNC, Box, Orb, Google Docs, synchronization software (remember the ‘briefcase’ icon on old laptops?), online project and client management software, even online email access… The list goes on and on of software and services that are either centrally hosted or that provide ways to easily access systems that have the stuff you want.

Thin clients were a great idea for corporations in the past, but have been waning in popularity - until recently. It may not be too long before you can access anything you want from work, home, phone, or maybe even public-access internet kiosks.

So… do you think the death of the OS as we know it is inevitable? Is Google going to end up dominating the new computing world with an online version of an operating system? Are the computers of the future just going to be dumb terminals that can only access the internet?

I was reading an article published on www.AIGA.org recently called Ever Notice? – A dialogue between Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg about the importance of being aware and the advantages of tapping into your “super-noticing power” in practicing design and specifically in user research. It reminded me of my days as a student of graphic design and the noticing exercises we practiced. I still employ the same noticing tactics today but I had forgotten how important this fundamental principal is to marketing and visual communications.

In the field of online marketing the act of noticing goes into hyperdrive. Information across the World Wide Web is experienced differently than driving down a road, walking through a museum or reading the morning newspaper. A loading web page is an onslaught of text and images battling for attention. Web surfers consume hundreds of lines of source code and decide which data they like/dislike or need/don’t need in a split second. Quantitative and qualitative analytics gives us insight to surfing habits, tracks our goal conversions and referring links but the power of noticing contributes to our ability to respond, adapt and deliver.

It all begins with the fundamental art of noticing that Portigal and Soltzberg discuss. Soltzberg says “There’s another classic Zen concept that everything you need to know and experience is already happening and present, but you need to get your old ways of thinking out of the way so you can experience it. Doing contextual research is like using “super-noticing power” to peel back those layers of preconception, culture and habit. When you do that you get to something fundamental and then you’ve got a really solid platform for developing new concepts.”

Maybe you have never really consciously exercised “noticing power” or maybe you have forgotten how important it is. Try some of the noticing exercises mentioned in Portigal and Soltzberg’s discussion. You will be surprised to realize how many things you are actually experiencing but not really noticing.