go.

Don’t get me wrong, I can stay afloat and move in the direction of my choosing. However, I don’t know “proper” techniques, and I’m sure I could be much more efficient. My girlfriend, Heather Thielen, spent every summer working as a lifeguard before graduating college and joining corporate America. So, she is my teacher.
I haven’t […]

I made a few changes to the site today.

changed links to normal weight, underlined and green
added the subtitle “covering the life and likes of David Benton”
made post titles larger, and moved link from the title to an explicit permalink
reformatted posts to emphasize the information I imagine readers care about
made global navigation text larger

I hope that […]

I spent the evening watching BookTV on C-SPAN2 last night. Yes, I’m a square, but that’s not the point of this post. I tuned in during a speech by Thomas Frank, whose book, What’s the Matter with Kansas [henryholt.com], discusses the shift in middle America from radical populism to conservatism. He attempts to explain why […]

So, this is probably egocentric, but I’m afraid I’ve offended Seth Godin. In his recent post Better living through hyperbole, Seth complains a bit about responses he had to his not-quite-as-recent article The problem with search engine optimization. He sums up his feelings by saying:
So, if I go a little overboard (as I did, intentionally, […]

I just read an interview [cioinsight.com] from CIO Insight with usability virtuoso Jakob Nielsen. I’d recommend reading the whole thing, but I’ll list a few things that jumped out at me.
“Bad search continues to be a problem today… It’s usually not unified search—no one search can search everything.”
“The other problem about search is […]

Not Good Enough?
As a web designer working alone, SEO (like hundreds of other areas of knowledge) is of interest to me. Seth Godin, marketing pundit, wrote today about the The Promlem with SEO.
Basically, he says that SEO is:

potentially shady, and
may not produce results

The first, I agree with wholeheartedly. SEO buyers need to be made aware […]

Excluding friends and myself, I made my first Jon Stewart for President bumper sticker sale. I’m writing this mostly so that when the buyer, one Leah Digilormo, googles herself, she will come here and I will have an opportunity to say:
Thank you Leah! If ever I can return the favor in some way, let me […]