Its been a while since my last post here, and for that I apologize. Been working on various design projects, and my own webapps i mentioned earlier. With that aside, one of the issues I’ve been pondering lately has been that of the search engine start page/main page. There are various degrees of this, you have your Google, your ask.com, your yahoo, all with different takes on what the default domain should show.With Seekum, I decided that we needed to reach a blend, a cross so to speak between the two. On one hand we want to retain the maximum speed we could, but on the other, I felt it would be neat to see that the search engine is a living organism. So with that in mind I decided to take a page from technorati which lists their top searches on the front page, and also play off the tag cloud phenomenon. My thinking was, that these two bunches of information would provide that little extra that maybe 10-20% of the users would appreciate (remember at this point our vast majority of users are techies who hear of us from blogs), but wouldn’t interfere with the rest of the users interactions.The fact that we’re doing this to intrigue this small percentage of people might surprise some of you, but when you think about it, it shouldn’t. If you follow Umair Hague, and more recently Bradley Horowitz’ piece on the content creation pyramid you’d understand that most content is produced by the minority, but enjoyed by the majority. The examples they reference are all what I would refer to as easily identifiable content, whereas with Seekum, it is more of an intangible content this same group is contributing to. It is this whole user defined search that I’m talking about, the simple actions of voting things up and down are in fact a participatory content that the group is contributing to. The other way to look at it is that the search results are the content, and the users are contributing to it and helping create/recreate it.So now that I’ve bored you with the content facet of the search model, I have to get back to the reason you are all here: the design aspect. If you take a look at one of the protoype screens for Seekum’s new results page, you’ll notice how we’ve decided to lay out the content. Right now it doesn’t look that spectacular, but I’m hoping that it is exactly that which gets people accustomed to it. Although there is alot of stuff going on in the search results (tagging, voting, and such), we are trying to make sure that it doesn’t interfere with the actual search results, what you came looking for in the first place. This might strike you as just some run of the mill html, but it takes alot of thought to structure everything in such a way that you get exactly what you are looking for, and not alot of what you aren’t.In case you were wondering, or read this far down, the new seekum design should be rolling out this week. So stay tuned

One of the biggest problems that most small businesses face in this day and age, scratch that, throughout time, has been that of getting paid for their work. Billing or invoicing, whatever you want to call it, is one of the most important things you have to keep track of as a small business person. As an entrepreneur your goal is to collect as much money as you possibly can within a resonable amount of time. What this means is that it is your job to make sure you get paid for the work you are doing.As a small business owner, I think that the current solutions out there leave much to be desired in the way of functionality. There are two basic choices for invoicing for small businesses: Quickbooks (or its equivalent desktop software) or an online tool like BlinkSale. There is one major problem with all of these options (and this isn’t a jab at blinksale btw, i think their stuff is great), they only function in one direction. What I mean by this is the following: the invoicing process is only accessible to the business owner, the client can’t see their invoices unless they are sent to them. It becomes a one way street, with the service provider controlling the gates to the information.So with this in mind, you might be asking yourself: “well what the heck are you doing complaining, we don’t see you doing anything about it?” Well thats exactly what I am trying to do, so as of this moment I am announcing infiniBill, my new invoicing service. It is still in private beta, but you can go on over and enter your name and email, and I will send you the details on how you can sign up.Why should you care about infinibill? Aside from the fact that you’re reading my blog, thus meaning you are either interested in small business issues or technology, well it probably means you have money you need to collect from time to time. So with infinibill you can give your customers access to their invoices so that they can see them at any time, and you can track all of them quickly and easily from the web.So what does this mean for your small business? Well you will be able to centralize your billing in one place, create and send your invoices, track what people owe you and how long its been (this is the biggest problem freelancers face - reducing the collection time as much as possible), and much more.While I have your attention, I’d also like to see if there are any special features you are dying to see in a billing solution. So if you think of anything let me know. In the mean time, get on the mailing list: infinibill.com

So as some of you may know, or not know, I recently became a part owner of a little startup based in texas, Seekum.com. I’m only a minority stakeholder/shareholder, but I am the new creative director for said startup. With that in mind, I am going to create a tangential series here on the designing of a search engine (from a GUI/interface perspective, not code, that I leave to Mike and Ramsey to discuss that end). Seekum for those of you not aware is a social search engine that uses continuous live user feedback to help refine the search queries you get from standard searches.Anyway, this is going to be a multi-part series, in each section/installment I will discuss the different parts of the site and why I chose to design it that way. I will also try and discuss the business reasons for each design choice as they become relevant.In the meantime, you can play around with the unstyled version of seekum.com by clicking here.