The Google Webmaster Central channel has the following introduction.

This is the official YouTube channel for Google Webmaster Central, your one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.

I am impressed that Google is continuing in its effort to be more transparent and is becoming more SEO and developer friendly. This comes after Google making their ‘Beginners Guide to SEO’ available back in November last year, I talked about it here.

Here is the first video from Google’s Matt Cutts.

24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December we publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring you all a little Christmas cheer.

Previous years have seen first class tutorials and tips from some of the top minds in web development today including Paul Boag, Cameron Moll, Veerle Pieters and Jonathan Snook

It really is beginning to feel like Christmas!

This document first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but we thought it’d be just as useful to webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their sites’ interaction with both users and search engines.

Its pretty basic in fact but is a very good primer for people who are trying to understand the concept for the first time. Here’s a direct link to the Google SEO Guide.

Seriously though I have been playing around with the various Magento beta’s over the last few months and I am seriously impressed. This really is e-commerce evolved!

Update – Its arrived!

Check it out here and in my portfolio.

I was approached by AEG Worldwide in June about a proposed design for the Los Angeles Galaxy MySpace profile that was to go live in time for the David Beckham press conference. With important time constraints on the project and a complete brand redesign ready to be implemented it was an exciting time to be working with such a prestigious company.

The profile is live and I hope demonstrates what can be done with MySpace and a great brief. Take a look here Official LA Galaxy MySpace Profile.

Considering usability was a big part of the brief and AssistIT.net offers ease of use in any number of different browsers and readers. Take a look.

So far they have used Curry’s and Dixon’s websites as a comparison of sites with similar purposes. Interestingly the retailers are both part of the same group, aiming at the same market yet they have achieved quite different results. It would appear while both are offering competitive deals the structure of the Curry’s website with the ‘Top 10′ column along the left hand side would appear to draw the most focus. While advertising the best sellers and drawing viewers attention to them, it appears to be at the detriment to the rest of the site. Meanwhile Dixon’s heatmap displays a less concentrated viewing, while still attracting viewers more evenly across the rest of the page.

This technique can be invaluable to e-commerce sites in particular in gauging how successful a sites design is, but extensive testing has drawn results that can be applied to all websites. Jacob Nielsen‘s, the highly regarded usability expert, has drawn conclusions from extensive testing using eye tracking, that users habits when browsing bear a resemblance to the letter F.

“Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.

Users appear to read first across the header part of a site, traditionally the logo and navigational areas of sites. Next the move down and horizontally again followed by vertically down the left hand side of the page.

This implementation of these trends should really be considered when developing websites. Maximising the design of your next site considering these critical areas could be the difference between making a success of your web presence and losing your reader to another site that’s only a click away.

This I hope to be the first of many themes I produce for WordPress and I intend to make these freely available for download in the future. Satin will be available when I have made the theme a little more manageable.

Please contact me if you are interested in having a (we)blog for any number of reasons. I will be happy to consult on the best course of action from technical issues to designing a custom appearance for your blog. Whether designing a blog for business or personal use or to integrate into your existing site, blogging is a quick and easy way to communicate effectively with your audience.