“Neuro Web Design” (2009) by Susan M. Weinschenck, Ph.D. is published by New Riders, which publishes a number of the Web design books I have read. The focus of “Neuro Web Design” is to teach you how an understanding of how we make decisions can improve the effectiveness of the Web sites we design.

In short, we have three components to our brains, each having evolved at a separate point in time. The book cites research that supports a theory that we make most of our decisions with the non-rational, unconscious, “old” brain and the emotional mid-brain, rather than with the rational “new” brain. We all like to think that we make decisions logically. Dr. Weinscheck, whose Ph.D. is in psychology, informs us that usually we don’t. Usually we respond to something far more primal like the urge to eat, mate or flee. She goes on to detail the key points of this scientific theory, and how they relate to creating Web sites.

My gut reaction at first was that this all seems so manipulative. But I must face reality, that pretty much all marketing attempts to manipulate. If you want to compete you need to have a competitive edge. This book is all about facing the reality that neurological research reveals for us. And using it for the benefit of marketing. In the end, I really enjoyed reading this book in spite of the discomfort it gave me at times. People will go on making decisions unconsciously, so it pays to realize that – and not make the opposite assumption.

In each chapter, “Neuro Web Design” cites research about a particular psychological phenomenon dealing with how we make decisions. It then explains the psychology in clear layman’s language. Finally, it suggest how to apply the knowledge to Web design. Each chapter title is very descriptive and invites us to read text.

Here are the chapter titles, to give you an idea of the content within:

1. Designing Web Sites for Persuasion and the Unconscious Mind
2. Wanting to Belong: the Power of Social Validation
3. Feeling Indebted: How to Build in Reciprocity and Concession
4. Invoking Scarcity-If Something Seems Unavailable, We Seem to Want It Even More
5. Choosing Carefully-Given Too Many Choices, We Freeze (and Then We Don’t Choose At All)
6. It’s All About You: Speaking to the Self-Centered, Unconscious Mind
7. Building Commitment-We Want to Think We’re Consistent
8. Using Similarity, Attractiveness, and Association: Are We the Same?
9. Afraid to Lose-How Fear of Loss Trumps Our Anticipation of Victory
10. Using Pictures and Stories-the Best Way to Talk to Our Unconscious Minds
11. We’re Social Animals-Finding the Next Big Thing by Making It Social

Chapters 3, 4 and 9 seemed the most manipulative to me. But check out the book. It is a great read, and you’ll find some very valuable knowledge here if you sell stuff or build websites.

Here are the way neato links I checked out this week.

Design

Ten Things I Have Learned by Milton Glaser

Ten logo design tips from the field

How to (and not to) work with a designer

Your Logo Makes Me Barf

Web Design and Development

10 Web Typography Rules Every Designer Should Know

Funny

The Bloggess

Tremendous News

Technology

Google Wave redefines Email

Freelancing

7 Ways To Research Your Freelancing Target Markets

Here are the coolest, most interesting links I checked out this week.

Design

50 Best Sites To Get Design Inspiration

25 Sites to Download Royalty-Free Stock Photos and Textures

55 Extremely Useful Online Generators for Designers

Top 37 Design Blogs to Follow

Web Design and Development

How to Spot Quality within Web Design: Examples & Tips

25 Important Web Design Tools

8 Layout Solutions To Improve Your Designs

30 HTML Best Practices for Beginners

9 Signs You Shouldn’t Hire THAT Web Guy

Blogging

5 Ways To Stop Your Blog From Going Viral

How To Write Headlines For Google Vs Twitter Vs Digg

13 blogging lessons learned from Stephen King’s On Writing

How to Write Magnetic Headlines

Internet Marketing

5 Effective Linkbait And Link Generation Strategies

Freelancing

101 Ideas to Get More Freelance Work and Generate New Client Leads

For years, I have worked with blogging software like WordPress and shopping cart software like X-Cart. For much of that time I have been intimidated by the prospect of developing an online community. They seem to be an order of magnitude more complex than anything I’ve worked with before. That has changed.

I spent the earlier part of this past week at the NAB Show in Las Vegas. I learned many things there, and got some great visual introductions to 3D motion graphics. But the most paradigm-shifting (please forgive me the cliche) experience I had was a 3-hour seminar on Wednesday.

The seminar was entitled “Emerging Web 3.0 Technologies You Need To Know”, and it was presented by Todd Marks and Vince Buscemi of MindGrub. These guys were great. I took seven pages of notes on my laptop. I’ll talk about many of the things I learned there in future posts, but for now I am completely energized to build my own online community.

These days, people aren’t satisfied with simply reading a Web page. They want to comment on it, rate it, Tweet it, and blog about it. They want to generate their own content on your Web site. I recommend you embrace this. The free user-created content not only builds your site traffic and your page ranking in search engines, it helps build rapport with your visitors.

Todd and Vince introduced us to KickApps.com and Ning.com, both of which provide ready-to-go online communities that are somewhat customizable.

I purchased two books at the show, Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action by Robert Hoekman Jr., and Online Communities Handbook: Building your business and brand on the Web by Anna Buss and Nancy Strauss. These two books are fantastic. They really helped me see the potential in creating a social networking site.

When I got home, I looked into KickApps for a couple of hours. You run your community on their servers and simply point your domain name to your affiliate location there. This is known as Software as a Service (SaaS). They run ads on your community site, but you can pay them so that you can remove their ads and place your own and make a little moolah. I do want to make some moolah. I was uncomfortable with not running the software on my own host. I feared I couldn’t really get at the source code like I am used to. And I had no idea how much they might charge to strip their ads out and run my own.

Then I found this article:

Dolphin vs phpFox vs Joomla vs Drupal vs Ning vs Kickapps for Your Social Networking Site by “Codernaut”

This article was a god-send. It helped me see that although Drupal has a steep learning curve, it’s free, has great online support in the form of other Drupal users, and is extremely customizable. I had heard of Drupal before but thought it was essentially the same as WordPress. Wrong.

I’m willing to learn how to build my Drupal community from the basic installation up. Hey, I’ve found there’s a strong demand for Drupal designers at eLance.com. Luckily, my Web host WestHost let me automatically install the Drupal core (the installation itself probably was not too hard anyway), and I am working from there. The quantumcritics.com article above helped me figure out which add-on modules I needed to acquire and install as a next step. I did much of this, but I am still overwhelmed but the complexity of this monster. I haven’t even started customizing the look and feel yet.

I’m keeping the Web address and topic of my new venture under my hat for now, but I will be working on it feverishly for the next month or so. Then I will invite Beta members to help me test it and build some initial content.

Now I’m off to Borders to buy a copy of About Drupal from O’Reilly Media. Good Sunday reading.

I’ll be heading to the NAB Show in Las Vegas on Sunday, staying through Wednesday. One of the seminars I plan to attend is called, “Emerging Web 3.0 Technologies You Need To Know”.

When I saw that seminar title, I thought sheesh I’m still trying to figure out what Web 2.0 encompasses. It turns out that a lot of people are still doing that. Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, once said “I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means.”

This is a great article that attempts to define the differences between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. It even offers what Web 4.0 and beyond may look like:

“How Web 3.0 Will Work” on howstuffworks.com

Here’s a quick summary I compiled of the suggested distinctions:

Web 1.0 Sites

(1992 – 2001)
“Web 1.0″ refers retroactively to the time between when the World Wide Web was first released in 1992, and when the “dot-com bubble” burst in 2001.

• Static. Pages contain information that might be useful, but that does not change regularly.
• Not interactive. Visitors can visit, but cannot impact or contribute to, the site.
• Proprietary. Companies develop software applications that users can download, but the users can’t see how the application works or change it.

Web 2.0 Sites

(2002 – 2011?)
Purportedly begun in 2002, the term “Web 2.0″ was coined by Dale Dougherty (of O’Reilly Media) and Craig Cline (of Seybold Publications) in 2004.

• Dynamic. The site content is always changing and worth multiple visits. Example: a blog that owners can frequently update.
• Interactive. Visitors can contribute to the site. Example: wikis and Amazon.com’s customer reviews.
• Open source. The source code for the program is freely available, and users can see how the application works and make modifications or even build new applications based on earlier programs. Example: the Firefox browser provides developers with all the tools they need to create new Firefox applications.

Another major innovation of Web 2.0 is social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Social bookmarking sites like Digg and Technorati also make connections between people and information, and rely on large groups of people to create content. In addition, the concept of a semantic Web is building.

Web 3.0 Sites

(2012 – 2021?)
Web 3.0 is expected to take the concept of the semantic Web and build a sort of gigantic database of interconnecting information. Quoting the article “How Web 3.0 Will Work” linked above:

Internet experts think Web 3.0 is going to be like having a personal assistant who knows practically everything about you and can access all the information on the Internet to answer any question.

They give the following scenario:

Let’s say that you’re thinking about going on a vacation. You want to go someplace warm and tropical. You have set aside a budget of $3,000 for your trip. You want a nice place to stay, but you don’t want it to take up too much of your budget. You also want a good deal on a flight.

With the Web technology currently available to you, you’d have to do a lot of research to find the best vacation options. You’d need to research potential destinations and decide which one is right for you. You might visit two or three discount travel sites and compare rates for flights and hotel rooms. You’d spend a lot of your time looking through results on various search engine results pages. The entire process could take several hours.

According to some Internet experts, with Web 3.0 you’ll be able to sit back and let the Internet do all the work for you. You could use a search service and narrow the parameters of your search. The browser program then gathers, analyzes and presents the data to you in a way that makes comparison a snap. It can do this because Web 3.0 will be able to understand information on the Web.

Web 4.0 Sites

(2022 and beyond?)
And here’s what some experts envision after Web 3.0 is fully developed:

• Aesthetics and usability. Focus will return to the front end of Web sites after Web 3.0 reinvents the back end. Designers will be able to take advantage of new advanced capabilities of Web 3.0 browsers.
• 3D. The Web will evolve into a three-dimensional environment: the Web could become a digital landscape that incorporates the illusion of depth.
• Artificial intelligence. Some people believe the Web will be able to think by distributing the workload across thousands of computers and referencing deep ontologies.
• Mobility. Everything from watches to television sets to clothing will connect to the Internet. Users will have a constant connection to the Web.
• Blending. The Web will merge with other forms of entertainment until all distinctions between the forms of media are lost. Radio programs, television shows and feature films will rely on the Web as a delivery system.