For those who don’t know this already: a public beta of Internet Explorer 7 is available for download.

There’s also a developer toolbar available for Internet Explorer (works on 6 and 7). Microsoft gives the following overview of it:

– Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
– Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
– Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
– View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
– Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
– Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS Web feed links.
– Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
– Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
– Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
– Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
– Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align objects on your pages.

There are websites that are designed minimalistic.Take Web Standards Awards as an example. There isn’t really much going on on the frontpage. No ads all over the place, no colums with the latest submissions, user comments and all that stuff.

There are also sites that do have all of this. Take a look at CSS Beauty. Although it also has a clean and nice design, there is much more going: news and announcements, latest gallery, archives links, recommended section, advertisments, job openings, latest discussions, and features.

Why this comparison? Well, when I surf the web for information I always have the impression that the sites with more buzz on their pages are the sites that are more established, have a larger user-base and are more likely have interesting and more things to say I might want to check back for. I don’t know whether this is just me or a general feeling more people have though. If my impression is shared by many people, it would be an advantage to create your site with a little more dynamism in order to have users evaluate your site as more imortant.

Recently Gitte Lindgaard found that “internet users make up their minds about the quality of a website in the blink of an eye”. So even if both types of websites have the same quality of content, they are potentially evaluated differently in the first 50 milliseconds. Speaking for myself and combinig things, I probably judge a site with a “busy” layout as more important in those first few milliseconds.

However I don’t know if I’m alone with this. If this accounts for most people it’s certainly a factor to take into account when designing a site.

One factor in the yahoo search algorithm seems to be where your server is located. If you want to test this, search for “dissurion” in yahoo.com and yahoo.fr. The latter one is geographically closest to my server. With the higher importance of location, less importance is set on the keywords in an url, it seems.

Now, I for one don’t like this splitting up the web according to geo-location. Note that google also has this to a lesser degree (which I will rant about in another post). I just want the most relevant results for my search, not the closest to home.

Perhaps the reason for this is commercial. Say you are looking for reviews on a book and you are located in England. Then it’s in your and especially amazon’s interest that amazon.co.uk shows up above amazon.com. For advertisers it’s a waste of resources if they show up in a search where the person that is looking for something will, with 99% certainty, buy somewhere else (closer to home). The person from England encountering an amazon.com book might visit this site, only to order it on amazon.co.uk later. So from that perspective localised results make sense.

But the internet isn’t all about buying and selling things. A large part of it is. But most of it is information. At least when I search. And when I do that, I want the best info for my search. And I wont get that best info if local sites are stuffed on the first pages of results when there are better ones out there.

Maybe I am old-fashioned. Maybe getting information has lost it’s first place to commercialism.But I like to be informed before I buy. So I’ll have to get that information first, buy next.