Happy Friday, MetaFans! We’re starting up a new segment on the MetaBlog that we’re calling “The Friday MetaBits.” We’re planning on keeping this as a quick, weekly post where we’ll share a few of the great links that we’ve been collecting over the course of the week. So let’s round em up!

1. Do You Want To Succeed At Social Media Or Social Media Marketing?

   It’s not such a simple question if you don’t understand the difference. Thanks to Chris Poterala for this one!

2. New Digg: Tips for Marketers

   If you haven’t heard yet, significant updates were recently pushed to Digg that digital marketers will definitely want to take note of.

3. 5 Web Design and Development Tools I Simply Can’t Live Without (and Why)

   My old MSU web professor put this post together! Great picks, Ethan! :)

4. Eye Tracking Study Shows Importance Of Search Snippets

   So it turns out that search result snippets are fixated over more than the result title and URL combined. So don’t forget to write your meta descriptions!!

5. The 4 Hardest Things About Conversion Optimization For Local Search

   Conversion Optimization is becoming the “industry benchmark” but there are still a lot of problems with tracking and optimizing conversions. This post gets the discussion going by reviewing some of the more difficult issues that arise.

6. How to Bluff Your Way Through Every Conversation About Which Programming Language is Best [Comic]

   And here’s a fun one for all you programming junkies! This comic involves dinosaurs AND Ruby On Rails – what more could you ask for?!?

7. The MetaSpring Blog Carnival: Issue 8 – Web Marketing

   And now it’s time for a little shameless self-promotion, if you didn’t check it out already – please head over to our most recent Blog Carnival for the a run down on some of the biggest news in Web Marketing for the month of August.

Well that’s all we have for you this week. Keep checking our Twitter and Facebook feeds for more daily news and updates!

Have a great weekend!

The world famous Ann Arbor Art Fair is here! With booths and displays setup throughout Ann Arbor, we’d like to get in on the action and showcase some of our artwork from the past few months. When the cruel weather of the midwestern winter and spring lured us back to bed each morning, these were the projects that kept us motivated.

More On the Way…

We’re well into Summer now with some great projects in the works. Make sure to follow our latest musings, launches and news on our Twitter account or Facebook page!

Our first MetaSpring blog post in February of 2008 promised that our blog would act as a hub for communications between our company and the rest of the world. Since then, we’ve tried to stayed true to that commitment while also implementing some changes improve this communication.

The majority of these improvements have been pretty abstract, in terms of how we approach blog posts and what content is discussed. Well, we’ve recently launched a physical evolution of the blog in order to help our readers find the information that’s most relevant to them.

Our Creative Director, Ian Wilson, who oversaw most of the changes, explains:

We do a lot of different things for our clients and we like to share our knowledge and experiences in those fields with our readers through the blog. As our readership grew and we began to dedicate more energy to keeping the blog up to date, we quickly realized that breaking our blog out into more discrete categories would help our readers to more easily get to the content they want. On top of that we were also itching to update the design of our blog, so with that in mind we put together the three sections to focus on their specific topics and give our readers a little more eye candy.”

As Ian mentioned, the MetaSpring blog will now be broken up into four distinct categories, each with its own RSS feed (we’ll still have the cumulative feed available on the blog home page – so make sure to update your subscriptions):

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  Design

  The design process involves a lot of hard work and dedication in a constantly evolving industry. In this section, we’ll share advice on overcoming obstacles and keeping up with trends in the design world.

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  Development

  New trends in web and application development are constantly popping up, so in this section, you’ll find posts on new trends and technologies, code snippets, industry news, and a lot of Ruby-related goodness.

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  SEO & Marketing

  We are constantly exploring the marketing aspects of the web, and this is the home of our ruminations. Posts in this section will illustrate ways to capitalize on new methods to market your website or yourself on the web.

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  Company

  Are you a MetaFan? One of the best parts of a company blog are the conversations that spark up between the public and the organization. This portion of our blog will highlight some of the great things happening at MetaSpring, such as new job postings and site launches.

This new layout is designed to facilitate better discussion so if you are having any difficulties, please let us know. As we continue to adjust the style of the blog, you can look forward to the same high quality content. We’re happy that you’re here and look forward to many great conversations. Talk to you soon!

The iPad didn’t create the mobile web, but after it’s debut on April 3, it sure felt like it. Amidst the hyperbole, jokes and festivities surrounding the iPad’s release, some very real questions were raised regarding the future of web design from a mobile perspective. What skills will designers need in the future?  What is the future of Flash?  Is my website ready for mobile?

Of course, with so many questions, the blogosphere was happy to respond. Designers from all over the globe pondered the ramifications of the iPad’s release and we rounded ‘em up in our 6th Blog Carnival.

Mobile web design goes far past just the iPad. Hopefully you’ve been keeping up with mobile trends so far, but if not, there’s always time to catch up with these posts.

The Mobile Web vs. the Objective-C Web

As Cameron Moll contemplates the affect of the iPad on web design he poses the following question:

As the adoption rate of iPhone increases and if iPad follows suit, it will become increasingly difficult to argue in favor of a starting point other than iPhone OS.

What do you think? Will there be a time when designers start out with mobile versions of the site and then move on to your typical web browser version as a secondary task?

On the iPad and Web Design

Web Design didn’t change when the iPad came out, but many of the changes within the industry are evident now that the device is out. In this post, Soma Design of Winnipeg, Canada says hello to some new trends that are here to stay, while waving farewell to seemingly “timeless” truths like the computer mouse. It is their belief that it’s “business suicide to have poor experience in the mobile sector”.

Designing for iPad: Reality Check

Early rumors and leaks led many digital media creators scurrying to develop applications for “that tablet thing from Apple” months before the world even knew what the product would be called. In this post, the world renown design team from iA (Information Architects) relays their difficulties in designing multiple programs for the iPad months before they had even held it in their hands. The thorough article also points out lessons for designers to follow as new iPad apps are created each day.

You need a mobile version of your site…Now!

In this post, Techexplorer declares the days of 1024×768 resolution over – meaning, it’s time to put mobile display at a high priority. Even if your site visitors aren’t on the iPad, they might be on the iPhone, Droid or other mobile browsers. If you’re wondering if your site is attracting mobile visitors, this post mentions several great analytics services used to track referrals and visitor sources. There are a number of other metrics mentioned to help you decide if your site should be designed as two separate websites: one for high bandwidth browsers and one rich in content-only for low bandwidth visitors.

iPad-ready Web Design: Is it worth it?

This post is for the business owners wondering if they need to optimize their website for the iPad – ultimately, it depends on your target demographic. Trackers suggest that in it’s first month of sales, Apple has sold around 1,000,000 iPads to Apple fans, media aficionados, tech gurus, and the like. If your market falls within these descriptors, this post form Ben Jisa Design Studio has some key advice.

40 Ravishing Scenery iPad Wallpapers

And now for some eye candy! Apple has sold almost a million iPads in it’s first month and that’s a lot of wallpaper space to fill. For those looking to make their device unique, here are 40 scenic wallpapers sure to make your iPad smile.

Next Month’s Issue: Web Development

Thanks to all the authors of these great posts and being a part of the Carnival! Mobile web design is just getting started, so this will be an issue we’ll keep an eye on for sure.

Next month’s Carnival will focus on an issue near and dear to our hearts at MetaSpring: Web Development! There are so many areas to explore when it comes to Development, so make sure to check out the post. And if you have any articles to submit, send ‘em on over to media@metaspring.com.

What good is a website if it isn’t user-friendly? At MetaSpring, we make website usability one of our biggest priorities, and as you can see by the contents of this post, many other designers are doing the same. It’s one of those elements of web design that can always be improved on. This MetaSpring Blog Carnival features six usability perspectives from some of the industry’s best.

Five Simple but Essential Web Usability Tips

This post from Brujo Owoh, one of the many great bloggers at Six Revisions, covers a few points that would be especially important to a web designer taking on big projects for the first time. Brujo covers some key usability points like search features, page organization, consistency, web forms, and help features. He also includes some great real world examples and detailed descriptions for how they might improve usability.

Life, Below 600 Pixels

We took a page from Paddy Donnelly‘s book (and blog) and placed this post below the sacred website page fold. You’re still reading this aren’t you? Paddy makes this poignantly sharp point right off the bat in this post about life below the fold. So if you’re worried about users not learning how to scroll, this post will give you something to think about.

How Browsable is Your Blog?

As Heidi Cool points out in this recent post, “sometimes navigating a blog can feel like wandering through a maze.” How often have you tried to find a related post, or get more information from a blog only to give up after a few frustratingly-failed clicks? The fact of the matter is many blogs suffer from extreme un-browsability, leaving users on a goose chase for content. Use the 6 tips discussed in this post to make sure your readers get what they’re looking for.

The Myth of Usability Testing

We’re thrilled to feature this post from Robert Hoekman Jr. of A List Apart. Robert helps us understand why development teams often run into problems when they run usability evaluations. These tests, while good for many things, are a tad unreliable when it comes to addressing the right problems on websites. Robert points out several reasons why this happens, as well as some areas that usability testing must be implemented.

Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment

Ever wondered anything about Agile Software Development? Anthony Colfelt provides all the answers in this post on bringing Agile and User Centered Design (UCD) together. In the Agile development process, requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. I’ll let Anthony take it from there.

Is Your Website Accessible?

User-friendliness consists of many factors. Sometimes the usability buzz dominates designs to a point where you forget other important factors of a user-friendly site, like accessibility. Occasionally you’ll find a website design that uses too many flashy gadgets, which can marginalize parts of the population due to one obstacle or another.

Nathan Olmstead, a freelance web designer right here in Ann Arbor, urges fellow designers to fulfill their moral responsibility to make sites user-friendly to all. He illustrates a few specific details designs must adhere to if they are to appeal to all demographics. For example, color contrast ratio for text to background should be around 4.5:1. Check it out for other tips to keeping your site viewable by everyone.

Next Month’s Issue: Web Marketing

Thanks to everyone who submitted posts and feedback for this month’s carnival. We had a blast connecting with each of you and look forward to continuing the conversation in our upcoming carnivals. Next month’s theme is Web Marketing, something we encounter daily here at MetaSpring. Marketing your product or service on the web is becoming a crucial factor to business success no matter how big your business is.

With such an important topic, we can’t wait to see what you all have for us. The deadline for submissions on BlogCarnival.com or through our email is March 21st. If you have a Web Marketing post or a suggestion for a topic that you’d like to see discussed, make sure to let us know at media@metaspring.com.