Wow, I was actually able to get some sleep this weekend. Too bad I didn’t have any time to do freelance work or work on the redesign for my site. Oh well, at least there was a lot of interesting things that I read this week:

Image Replacement + Google
Good to know, Google won’t penalize you for using image replacement properly. This is something we all assumed but were never really clear on.
The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet
Nothing that we don’t know already, but a nice round up of basic SEO information for beginners.
Does Flash irk me?
I agree with Veerle in that it is important to evaluate the goals of a project. While most flash on the web does nothing for me, there are things like sIFR that are awesome.

A List Apart: Issue 258
Another couple of interesting articles from A List Apart: Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow and Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?. I thought the Zebra Striping article was especially interesting.
Web natives need to lead Web operations
I agree; it is very important for web people to be making decisions about the web. While one can easily become a “web person”, it is not something that happens instantly. The web is a complex place.
How Little Do Users Read?
While not surprising, Jakob Nielsen says that users typically don’t read very much on the web. This is why it’s important to use frequent headings and to break up the text into smaller chunks.

Conversely, I also thought that an article by Andy Rutledge, Volume Doesn’t Matter, presented an interesting “argument” to the other side. If a page is designed well and the topic is interesting to the user, I think they will be very likely to do more than scan the text.

Weekly Link Round-Up #30