Because of my background in technology, people come up to me all the time asking what computer they should buy. Having worked with laptop computers from most of the major brands over the years (my current 17-inch Gateway behemoth, Hewlett Packard, Compaq, IBM, Dell, Toshiba, Sharp, Packard Bell, and probably a few others)  you’d think I’d have a go-to recommendation. But unfortunately in my experience failing screens, burnt out motherboards, and overheating issues are not particularly discriminating; they’ll hit any laptop with an on button.

Best Rated Laptop Computers

Thankfully PC World has surveyed their very large user base and put together an excellent resource showing the best rated laptop computers, allowing the rest of us to benefit from their experiences.

So next time you’re ready to buy a laptop, start by checking this list. It’s sure to save you a lot of frustration and time. And laptops aren’t the only thing you can check. They also cover:

• Smartphones
• Tablets
• Desktops
• HDTVs
• Digital cameras, and
• Printers

My Experience

As for me, I’ve found the Apple ratings above to mirror my own experience. Just because I can fix broken computers doesn’t mean I want to. At the end of the day, I’ve found my iMac to be the quietest, easiest to maintain computer I’ve owned. It’s a tough call when you look at how much higher the cost of Apple computers is at the outset, but too many people are spending too much time trying to figure out why their computers aren’t working instead of just using them. A trip or two to the repair shop later and that price tag isn’t looking so bad. And that’s something essential to factor in when you evaluate how much to budget.

Finding Deals

Of course reliability is only one factor in buying a laptop. The other is cost. At the end of the day it’s not just about what you want, but what you can afford. So before you run down to Best Buy or Costco, check out a deal site real quick. It only takes a moment, and it’s another great way to tap into the wisdom of the crowd and surface deals you might never have come across on your own. Here’s one I’m using right now:

• DealsPl.us

When I hear PowerPoint the first thing sentence that comes to mind is “boring college presentation.”  I’m sure you remember the days of sitting in a lecture hall and having your professor present slide after slide of mind-numbingly boring information.  An even worse scenario, it’s your boss presenting and you have be involved almost everyday of your working life.

The days of giving presentations both face-to-face and online are far from over so I went on the hunt to find presentation software that matches the following criteria:

1. Interactive
2. Can be built and shared online
3. Can be accessed online from any computer
4. Can be integrated into a blog
5. Ability to have insert files including video
6. Communicates information easily
7. Doesn’t put audience to sleep

Tough criteria, but I was able to find presentation software called Prezi that has seemed to really fit the bill.  Developed by Adam Somlai-Fischer and Peter Halacsy, Prezi was founded in 2007 with the idea that technology (Flash in particular) can be used to spice up presentations.  (I should note we hate Flash in almost all its implementations.  Prezi is one of the few exceptions.)

My Prezi Experience

Overall, my experience was great.  I would give this presentation software a “B+” in the user-friendly category and an “A” in overall design features.  Unlike PowerPoint and some of the other presentation software available, Prezi allowed me to build my presentation on one page vs. using many different slides.  I liked this feature because it allowed me to organize my thoughts on one open canvas (I’m a visual learner), it gave my presentation movement and life, information was in one space so it was easy to see and manipulate throughout the building process.  I also found myself wanting to share this presentation with others because I felt like it was fun, different, and interactive.

Now let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.  At first the tools are a little hard to figure out.  Items have layers and if you don’t have much experience with design or computers for that matter, learning how to use the tools might be a bit challenging.  Considering I had never seen Prezi before I felt like they did a great job of building videos and offering support tools that can help you mangle your way through building a presentation if you have limited knowledge of design and computers.

Overall my experience with Prezi was excellent and I would highly recommend you use it for your next presentation.  My bet is the next presentation you give or listen to won’t be putting anyone in the audience to sleep.

Yes, I learned about his passing while listening to iTunes radio on my iMac; I saw the first headlines hit the news on my iPhone; I read the tributes on my iPad. Yes, this technology affects how I live my life every day. But this is about something completely different.

The word that keeps coming back to mind is “vision.” Steve Jobs was a man consumed by vision. He was a gifted leader, an outspoken visionary and an eloquent salesman, but all of that was fueled by his passion for his vision. His drive came from a riviting approach to life. In his own words:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Having vision is not in and of itself all that amazing. I meet people all the time with great ideas and the best of intentions. It is the drive and the courage to pursue those values you say you believe in, to lay everything on the line for them, to say “no” to any lesser distractions that is exceptional and rare. And when it comes down to it, I suppose that is what the technology Steve Job’s company developed represents for me—it’s a visual reminder of what it means to live life purposefully and richly. And that’s why I will miss Steve Jobs.

You can see the rest of the speech from which the above quotes were taken in this video (it’s worth watching if you haven’t seen it before):

Each community mourns loss in its own way. Here’s are some of my favorite expressions from the creative community:

You can find more here.

It’s easy to look at an illustration, enjoy it (or in this case give it a quick chuckle), and click on to the next thing, all the while being completely oblivious to the craft and time that lies behind it. This video shows the process of creating a custom vector illustration for a tshirt, compressing 52 minutes of drawing into just three. It’s a pretty cool look at what a digital artist does and how much complexity and detail even a simple vector illustration involves.

1. Lafayette College Website

2. Biola University Website

3. Middlebury College Website

4. University of Puget Sound Website

5. Georgetown University Website

Bonus: Warner Pacific College Website

A (very) honorable mention goes to Boston University’s Bostonia website. (The reason I didn’t include it in the list above is because, as a magazine website, it is structured to meet completely different objectives than a college/university website.)

Now in putting together a list of the best college websites I’ve only included websites that represent a whole college, and that’s because re-designing an entire college website is such a large undertaking. Working with multiple departments, accounting for the needs of multiple audiences and structuring large numbers of pages makes it a significant challenge to ensure consistent quality in all of the many pieces that make up a website. That said, there are of course many colleges who have great homepages and there are also individual departments with beautifully designed sites of their own. In fact, eduStyle is a great resource to explore more of what’s out there.

Even so, from what I’ve seen there seems to be a dearth of higher education websites that break out of the cookie cutter mold and do both user experience design and beautiful visual design. But you can bet that will change over the next few years as more colleges begin to understand the importance of user experience design and start to take advantage of content management systems, HTML5, and CSS3.

So what are the best college websites you’ve seen?

But second—and more important for those of us who don’t speak Chinese—the top websites, the ones we use most often, are the easiest to use. In fact, some are downright simplistic.

Google is the most obvious. The world’s most visited site is just a single form field in the middle of your screen. We take it so much for granted that we wonder what else they could possible put there, as if they were having trouble coming up with good content. But Google has gobs of products. So many in fact that you haven’t even heard of all of them.

And then there’s Facebook, YouTube, and Yahoo, also at the top of the big-bubba-websites list. Facebook won out over once-dominant MySpace for its cleaner, easier to use interface. YouTube speaks for itself: millions upon millions of videos, but its homepage is simpler than most blogs. And Yahoo—who once reigned supreme—started removing content from their homepage as soon as they lost the #1 spot, not adding more.

And that’s the paradox. Shouldn’t adding more information make a page more useful to more people? The answer is sure… back in the mid-nineties when pages loaded on slow 1200 baud dialup modems. (Ah, those were the days.) But the equation has changed: these days we aren’t so content to savor our coffee while we wait for a page to load. These days we are inundated by an unending waterfall of information, and it’s the websites that have figured out how to bring us the right information at the right time that are winning.

In fact, the average visitor to your site won’t even read 28% of what’s on a page. So as you work on your website, take a cue from the big guys with the million-dollar teams and put in the hard work to keep things simple.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Ready to learn more about website success? Here are upcoming posts in this short series:

1. Learn from the Winners
2. Know What a Website Is For
3. Know What a Page Should Do