When the home page first loads, your first instinct is to type in a search query and hit enter. But the results returned are anything but helpful. If your query generates no results, you get a page that has samples of queries that SHOULD work for the site. Clearly the folks behind W|A need to re-think their design. If you are going to present a user with a search box, and then give them zero results AND tell them how they should have searched, not only are you breaking user expectations, you are insulting the user as well.

They have obviously invested an enormous amount of time and resources designing and developing this service. But it seems obvious that they haven't spent very much time on user testing. If they had, they would not need to have primer on how to use what appears to be a simple and familiar service to begin with. I don't think they have to go back to the drawing board, but they do need to reconsider what it is they want the user to accomplish and then create an interface that helps the user succeed.

I'm specifically referring to the story about the tragic discovery of 8-year-old Sandra Cantu's body that is prominently placed in the story carousel. Is it really appropriate to promote being a better bunny in light of such a tragedy? Do you think Cost Plus wants their message mixed with that kind of tragedy?

Granted, Cost Plus probably paid for the ad placement well in advance and can't control what stories will appear at any point in the day. But surely the site producers could take the ad down until the feature stories change, or at least tone it down a bit by removing the huge background portion of the ad. They could always make good with Cost Plus by extending the time the ad is supposed to run to the next day. That's what they do in radio and television when programming supersedes scheduled ad spots.

I still have to tame IE6's weird image loading behavior in my galleries. For some reason, when an image loads in the image viewer, it is retaining it's dimensions in IE6. The result is that if a horizontal image loads first, any verticals that load later retain the dimensions of the original horizontal image and vice versa. This leads to images that are scewed non-proportionate dimensions. Definitely not a good look.

I'll probably have to come up with some tricky conditional JavaScript to make IE6 behave. Anyone have any suggestions?

On the bright side, the Design Studio now has a respectable amount of work to show off. The Art Studio has most of my existing photography galleries and the blog section is working with one minor breadcrumb glitch.

I still have to create my information pages and then I will finally get to building the new articles section that will have some web design or development articles that I have prepared. So come back often to see the progress.

I just don't understand the lemming mentality of the market. Why punish Google by driving down the price simply because some "analysts" made projections that were too lofty? Shouldn't you punish the analysts instead? Don't the investors who bought on the basis of faulty analysis bear some responsibility for acting on that bad analysis?

It's as though we've gone back in time to 1999, when analysts said the sky was the limit for so many dot-coms. Never mind that many of those dot-coms had no semblance of a business plan or even any way to make money. Flash forward two years, and all those companies start to implode. It was soon discovered that some of those "analysts" were just shills trying to make money for their bosses. So why do investors still depend so heavily on the words of analysts?

Google MADE more money this quarter than they did last year! Shouldn't they be rewarded for doing well DESPITE a sluggish economy? I just don't understand.