While reading over at Daydream Lily, I learned of SOKOzine, a free, online art photography magazine. SOKOzine is truly impressive, with it’s editorial style fashion photography. As it’s a first issue, it does have a few problems, such as lacking clear themes, having a couple of lower-quality images, and it’s not very cohesive from front to back; however, there is a good bit of eye candy to be found. (By the way, there are some photos that may be NSFW—depends on your office’s take on artistic boobies.) Take a look at some of the pages:
Perhaps it’s the technical side of me, but one of the first things I noticed was SOKOzine’s sleek interface:
It turns out that SOKOzine is published through Issuu, which is a web startup that I’ve somehow managed to miss among the information overload that is the internet. Excluding a couple of usability issues (I had absolutely no clue what some of the square-box buttons represented, and they had no title tags to help me.), Issuu fulfills a huge need and quite elegantly. I actually like the somewhat cheesy page structure, but then maybe that’s me showing my age. I’d be interested to see if teenagers were annoyed by or enjoyed the very literal magazine style. Issuu does have some alternative view styles, but the magazine one is probably its strongest.
Startups like Issuu truly open up a world of possibilities to users that don’t know how to program and are unsure about their web design skills. Making something like Issuu from scratch, which, despite its minimalistic design, does actually have a number of features, would take a good amount of time, and updating it would likely be a pain. Streamlining all of this through a core provider is not only good for users, but is also a proper use of flash, which doesn’t really have a great track record for being used appropriately. The one major downside, from a technical standpoint, is the lack of search engine optimization. Magazines hosted through Issuu might find it slightly difficult to make it big in search engine results. (Maybe this contributes to my not seeing an Issuu magazine until now, even though the startup’s been around since 2008.) Turning off the page style shows one that none of the user’s magazine text will be easily readable by search engine bots, if readable at all.
While this is a problem, having excellent content can overcome it.
Hopefully you’ve not only found SOKOzine’s photography inspiring, but also have maybe been inspired to go out and make something like it. With tools like Issuu, the option is there for most everyone now.
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Tagged under: photography, new-media, art, daily-inspiration, technology
2 Comments
Martin Ferro-Thomsen on Jul. 16, 2009 at 07:10pm
Hi Lelia - what a great review! It seems you’ve really grasped what Issuu is all about. I agree that we need to work a little more on making the site easier to use for newcomers, and we’re already working on that, e.g. with more video tutorials.
I must comment on what you say about SEO: Contrary to what you seem think we’re very focused on SEO. Documents published on Issuu will be searchable on Google too. Here’s a random search for photography stuff on Google http://www.google.dk/search?q=site:issuu.com+photography - if you try ‘soko zine’ you’ll find a link to Issuu in the top 10. We even have a Google PageRank of 8/!0, which should help great magazines get the exposure they deserve.
Thanks for taking a closer look at Issuu!
Martin
Ardi on Jul. 16, 2009 at 11:07pm
Hi Lelia! thank you very much for the review!
This is our first experience with issue, and as users that don’t know too much about proggraming it’s really an easy way to show our work!
It’s great to see this review from you and it help us to go fordward for the next issue!
thanks again!
ardi
sokozine
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