Finally, after years, Google News is out of Beta. While it was Beta, Google worked on multi-language support, feeds, personalized pages, etc.
Google News started in english in September 2002. More than three years later, it has 22 regional editions in 10 languages.
I guess they just wanted to draw some attention back to Google News, so they say it is now out of Beta…
I read this is in my local newspaper today, and of course it appeared in my feed subscriptions. Whitespace and ProBlogger both reported about it.
Researchers in Canada came to the conclusion that it takes only the first twentieth of a second to decide for yourself if you like a website or not ([email protected] article). Before this research the meaning was that it takes at least a half second to make that decision. Well, this is not a huge amount of time either.
And what makes it even better is that, once you came to the impression that a website looks good, you defend this impression. I can honestly say I’ve been observing this on myself. If a website looks really nice to, it just has to be good. That means for example I read something which, if it was somewhere else on the Web, would’ve not interested me.
The first impression is very important when visitor come via Google. Sometimes I click on search results, and in the same second I pressed the back button, just because the site did not look right. Of course when you read about something and another website is mentioned that is strongly related to the topic, you don’t care as much about the design, then you will read it nonetheless (… for more than a half second).
So did you encounter some moments where you really liked a site, not knowing what it’s even about? Or do you always check the whole site first, before you decide for yourself if it is good?
Happy New Year! It’s 2006 now, no more 2005. That means you should write 2006 instead of 2005 (who’d have thought? :D).
Did you already update your copyright statements? No? Here is a PHP snippet that saves you time. You never have to care again which year it is. It gives you always the current year. (Those with PHP knowledge will not continue reading, I guess, but nontheless):
<?php echo date('Y'); ?>
Just put this where you want the year (4 digits) to appear.