Changing your Google Password is easy!

I needed to walk a client through changing her Google Apps password earlier today. I’m posting it how to do it here for future reference.

Here’s how to change your password for Gmail, Google Apps or your Google Account:

1. First you need to log in with your username and current password. Gmail users can log in at http://mail.google.com/mail. Apps users can go to their Apps login screen. This is usually located at http://google.com/a/domain.com or mail.domain.com (replace “domain.com” with your domain name). The login screen for Google Accounts is https://accounts.google.com/Login.
2. Once you are logged in, click on your name (or email address) near the top right of the page and then click “Account Settings” from the menu that opens.
3. This brings up the user profile screen. Look for the section that says “Personal Settings.” Under personal settings, click “Changing your password.”
4. This brings up the “Change password” screen. In the first box, enter your current password, then enter the new password into the second and third boxes.
5. Hit save. That should do it!

If you are logged in, this direct link brings up the change password page: https://accounts.google.com/EditPasswd. However, this link could change at any time so it’s good to know how to get to the change password page without it.

Making the transition to web design from print design was a welcomed change for me. Although the web is far more technical, print is much less forgiving. I do still design printed materials, but the days of eating the cost to reprint a job for having a one character typo are long gone.

After switching camps I quickly noticed that I wasn’t able to use all of my pretty (and expensive) fonts on the web pages I created. This is because a site visitor can not see the font you are using unless he has that font installed on his machine. So, for many years all we could do was specify the desired font and then set a few backups, like so (a generic CSS style):

.hope_and_pray_the_user_has_my_desired_font_choice {
  font-family: "Bodoni", "Garamond", Georgia;
}

Referring to the CSS snippet above, if the visitor has the font Bodoni it will be used but if she doesn’t Garamond will be used. If she doesn’t have Garamond either, Georgia will be displayed as a last resort.

The next major breakthrough was sIFR, or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. This technology allowed a very tech-savvy web developer to implement their font of choice by embedding it in a special Flash file. The chosen font could then be called into a web page to replace the default.

However, sIFR is not a perfect solution namely because it requires the use of Flash and it can be a royal pain in the ass to implement and style correctly. Flash is unsupported by most (if not all) mobile devices so using it for anything mission critical is a very BAD idea. Also, anyone familiar with Flash probably wouldn’t use it as their first choice for doing any kind of type setting. I have implemented sIFR on a few sites and although the result was pleasant, the hassle of doing so was not.

Next, designers discovered they could load fonts into web pages using the @font-face property. I could explain @font-face here, but Tjobbe Andrews of Milton Bayer has done such a nice job already. So check out his explanation of @font-face for a very thorough introduction. Just know that to use @font-face legally, you need a web license for the font.

Well, web designers everywhere now have a reason to rejoice. Google isn’t waiting around for the w3c to solve the font-licensing issues. They went ahead a created a repository of open-source web fonts for everyone to use. Here’s a simple way to use a font from the Google Web Fonts library:

1. Include the web font as a stylesheet. We are using Buda here, but you can change it to whatever you want:

   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Buda">

2. Use the font in a CSS style. We are using it on the paragraph tag:

   p {
     font-family: 'Buda', serif;
     font-size: 12px;
   }

3. That’s it! In our example, all paragraph tags will now use Buda! For more info on using Google Web Fonts read Getting Started (Google Fonts API).

Now there’s no excuse to keep kicking it old school. Most of the major font foundries are getting with the program. They are now making web versions of their fonts and usually include them free of charge when you purchase the standard font license. And many thanks to Google for extending our font repertoire!

Hopefully, we won’t see the likes of Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman, Arial or Trebuchet until designers decades from now are looking to exhibit a retro feel in their work. I would have included Helvetica, but I don’t think designers will be dropping that one anytime soon.

Why Analytics?

If your website was built by Visual Harmony, you’re probably already familiar with Google Analytics.  In my humble opinion, Google Analytics is the best website statistics tracking software available.  And with the whopping price tag of $0.00, why would anyone use anything else?

There are plenty of paid alternatives to Analytics, but the features of them pale in comparison to what “The Big G” delivers for free:

1. Track multiple websites under one Analytics account
2. Accurate and detailed reporting
3. Conversion tracking
4. Custom reports
5. See which cities, states and countries are sending you traffic
6. Learn how long visitors are on your site and each page
7. If you have Google custom search built into your site, you can see the terms for which your visitors are searching.
8. Find out which websites are referring traffic to yours
9. Integrated with AdWords to track effectiveness of AdWords campaign

There are many other features that aren’t listed above, but you should really try Analytics and see for yourself, even if you are already using a paid statistics service.

How do I get Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free service—it’s just needs to be set up on your site.  Here’s how you do that:

1. Sign up for Google Analytics.  You will need a Google account to sign up. If you don’t yet have a Google account, get one here.
2. After you sign up, make sure you are logged in to Analytics.
3. Once logged in, you will come to the Overview screen.  Near the bottom of the page, click the link that reads “Add Website Profile.”
4. Select the option “Add a Profile for a new domain” (if not already selected) and enter the domain name of the site you want to track.  Click “Finish” when you are done.
5. Google will then generate and display the tracking code for Analytics.  This snippet of Javascript needs to be added to the source code of all the pages you would like to track right before the closing body tag (</body>).  After you have added the tracking code to your pages and re-uploaded them to your server, Analytics will be ready to receive data from your site!
6. Congrats!  You are now ready to put Analytics to use for your site.  Make sure to brag about it to all of your friends so they know just how cool and nerdy you are!

Great news for Flash designers: Google’s search engine spiders can now read the textual content from within your SWFs. Prior to this development, the content of websites designed in Flash was invisible to search engines. It’ll be really exciting when all of the major search engines implement this in their algorithms.

Google continues to impress me with its unrivaled innovation!

Read the full article on The Google Blog