Not an advanced holloween party this, but mid-way through an InDesign tip during the Adobe INDESIGN WORLD 2006 Roadshow, one of the best seminars I’ve attended this year.

Tim Cole, Senior InDesign Evangelist, Adobe Systems, Inc. and Marianne Young, Solutions Engineer, Adobe Systems, South East Asia, were the Mission Mentors. I bet those who attended were every bit as wowed as I was, and will in the next 24-48 hours probably head off to the nearest pirata tiangge for bootlegs, except a kid from the UP college of IT who won a boxed InDesign software package (inggit kaming lahat!), and the Adobe group gave away shirts and idea notebooks (I got one of those).

One of the new things I learned is about Adobe Bridge … something that if I had known how to use would have eliminated the need for Picasa or Aseedcsee or whatever software that was. Fire up your Adobe Bridge (if you’ve never done so before) and you’ll see what a powerful image manager it is.

Useful URLS :

http://www.indesignsecrets.com/ - for tips tricks podcasts and everything else about Indesign
http://www.adobe.com/studio/print/ptd.html - the Adobe Print Technical Documentation
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/ - The Adobe Design Center
http://www.roguesheep.com - RogueSheep Incorporated, for some really useful plugins for InDesign

Something you should do before they wise up and take the thing down.

Go to www.google.com.

Enter “earthworm hamburger” as a seach term, with or without the quotes.

Look at the top result. Click on the link and look at the bottom part of the page, where it is all red but otherwise apparently blank.

Click then move the mouse over the blank red bottom part of the page and look at what you see.
Web/html savvy people, take things a bit further and do a “view source” on the page. Do a CTRL+F for an image named 1.jpg and look at the alt-text that comes with each 1×1 px image. Crafty, eh?

This is the work of a group that we in the office refer to as The Barnaby Brothers. You will find their company name in the meta and alt tags in the site mentioned above. What is unclear to me about their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods is did the client company know that the words “earthworm burgers” appear as meta tags on their site? Or maybe they do know and are using it to their SEO advantage?

What this company (the fastfood one) should do is take down this old site so that in time no one will find them in #1 position for earthworm burgers. As it is the cached pages in Google will serve for quite some time after the pages have been removed.

Search engines have long memories.

C:\DOS

C:\DOS\RUN

RUN\DOS\RUN

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