Posts Tagged ‘resources’

For­give me father, for I have sinned. Actu­ally, I haven’t, but you prob­ably have. I don’t mean glut­tony, lust, et. al. Hon­estly, some of those really have their time and place. I’m talking about the things that I see over and over, on web­sites big and small, that abso­lutely drive me insane. I make web­sites for a living. If I can’t use yours, or get frus­trated by it and leave, there’s a good chance that your target market (unless they’re more technically-inclined than I am, which they’re prob­ably not) is having an even worse time. Lucky for you, I’ll tell you about it! (Just ask about the time I gave a long speech to a poor phone-line person at my bank because their web­site only sup­ported IE.)

1. Text that isn’t text.

Res­taurant web­sites, I’m looking at you in par­tic­ular. Scan­ning your paper menu and throwing it up on your web­site as an image file or a PDF is the equi­valent of cre­ating a door by drawing it in chalk on the side of your house. Never mind the fact that your SEO is going to hell, that it’s a pain to update any­thing, and it prob­ably looks ter­rible. This is just a night­mare from a usab­ility stand­point. This is pretty vital inform­a­tion, and locking it up in as an image means that the inform­a­tion becomes infin­itely less access­ible. Your users can’t copy-and-paste bits. It’s harder to see on a smart­phone. They can’t resize the fonts if they can’t read some­thing. It won’t con­form to the avail­able space, so they’ll prob­ably be stuck scrolling back and forth, or they’ll miss your great deal on Kung Pao chicken.

It’s 2011. You can use almost any font you want in a web­site now. You can do amazing things with fine-tuned typo­graphy you couldn’t do three years ago. There’s no excuse for lazy-designer tricks like these. Text should be text.

2. Flash.

I’ve said it before, and lots of other people have said it before me, but it bears repeating. Don’t use Flash. Flash is slow-loading, doesn’t work on an iAnything, and gen­er­ally is built quite badly. It gen­er­ally crashes my browser these days (poor Laz­arus­Book). Also, see above, and also below.

3. Stuff that sings, jumps, dances, or oth­er­wise behaves like an over-excited puppy.

I’m the first to admit I’m a bit of a con­trol freak, but most people don’t like it when you hijack their machines without asking first. I was vis­iting a web­site the other day that had the most obnox­ious ad I’ve ever seen—five seconds after loading, this huge man appeared in the browser window and started talking at me. It was terrifying.

Most people know better than to load up their web­sites with giant-obnoxious-talking-man-ads, but there are many subtler examples of this. Links that open in new win­dows auto­mat­ic­ally (I’ll do this on my own if I want, thank you). Music and video that starts auto­mat­ic­ally (typ­ic­ally embar­rassing people with speakers con­nected, and leaving me hunting around to find the offending site). 99.98% of anim­ated gifs, ban­ners, and ads. Let your users con­trol how they interact with your web­site, or they’ll just leave.

You can repent all you want, but if your web­site sings at me, you’re damned to an eternity of anim­ated fiery gifs. (Photo from a street corner some­where in Rome.)

4. Ugly design.

My sister’s in lib­rary studies, and one of her pre­requis­ites is a “web design” course. I told her she could save the $500 that credit prob­ably cost her, and I could teach her the whole thing in ten seconds. Hire a web designer. This isn’t a self-serving state­ment. I don’t care (much) if you hire me, or if you hire some other com­petent designer. You can’t learn design from a three-month course. There’s all sorts of crazy com­plic­ated stuff, both tech­nical and aes­thetic, that goes into design. The reason most people don’t under­stand this is because good design is like a great push-up bra: it sup­ports and enhan­cing its con­tent without over­powering it. In theory, you’re not sup­posed to notice it. But it makes a huge difference.

5. Bad code.

Your web­site should be standards-compliant, semantic­ally coded, and easy to update. If your web designer/developer doesn’t under­stand what these things mean, hire someone else. Sur­pris­ingly enough, there are still web­sites using tables. And frames. And inline boxes. Remember that internet years are like dog years, except longer, and that developers need to be con­stantly learning new stuff in order to make great web­sites. Make sure you hire someone who knows what they’re doing from a tech­nical point of view, and you’ll end up with a web­site that per­forms far better—in terms of page speed, browser com­pat­ib­ility, and search engine rankings—than you would otherwise.

6. Business-speak.

A web­site is not a bro­chure. Most people reading online have the atten­tion spans of drunk gold­fish. Keep things short and scan­nable and people are more likely to read what you’ve written (says the woman who reg­u­larly writes 1000+ word blog posts). Stop using business-newspeak to make your­self sound more important. People no longer care about that sort of thing (unless they’re in gov­ern­ment, in which case, aim for as dry and nap-inducing as pos­sible). The internet is a scary place, full of fraud and Nigerian princes. Speak with a voice that’s genu­inely yours and people will be more inclined to trust you.

7. It’s broken.

About three years ago, I bought a box of some­thing from a cer­tain unnamed food com­pany with ini­tials in their name. I’ve never bought any­thing from them since, but they gave me a card and a number at the time and signed me up for their mailing list. When I tried to unsub­scribe, their web­site demanded that I submit both my email address and the number on the card that I’d never used and had lost. I put up with their irrel­evant weekly mail­ings for some time until I finally found my card and unsubscribed.

When I did, their web­site told me it would take ten days to remove my address. Really? Ten days? Is your data­base main­tained in a note­book or some­thing? That’s utterly ridicu­lous. The best part was that after two weeks, they were still emailing me, and I had to send a long, cranky email explaining how broken their system was and that I really should be able to unsub­scribe without put­ting as much effort into it as one typ­ic­ally does when get­ting a divorce. (They never responded, but I haven’t received any more emails—yet.)

This is a more minor example, but I’ve seen lots of web­sites that are broken in more major ways. Con­tact forms fail and there’s no fall­back email address. Shop­ping carts that don’t check out. Val­id­a­tion routines that main­tain “Buenos Aires” is not a city in Argen­tina (I lived there. Trust me, it is.) Test your web­sites, make sure they work, and fix them if they’re broken.

Jesus died for your sins, not so that you can throw the word “syn­ergy” around like it’s going out of style. (Photo from Tierra Santa, the reli­gious theme park in Buenos Aires. Don’t worry, Jesus later rises, in giant animat­ronic style, from the hilltop.)

So hire a designer already, and save your­self for the sins you can really take pleasure in.

As I men­tioned in last week’s post, I’m working on stream­lining a number of my pro­cesses. The most important, and I think accord­ingly the most com­plex, of these pro­cesses is that by which I develop web­sites, which is often some­thing of a mish­mash of various meth­od­o­lo­gies and tech­niques. Since I build so many Word­Press web­sites (and I do believe it’s magic), I’ve been focusing on devel­oping a sort of gen­eric tem­plate for Word­Press web­sites. This includes the theme itself (and its cor­res­ponding frame­works and depend­en­cies), but also a col­lec­tion of plu­gins that I use on every site. Akismet and All-in-one SEO Pack are so ubi­quitous as to be obvious, but I’ve been working on a list of others that are almost uni­ver­sally useful. Most of them improve upon the core func­tion­ality of Word­Press straight out of the box, and so demand very little from either user or designer.
Here’s my list (at least for today).
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Lately, I’ve found myself giving a sub­stan­tial amount of design feed­back to non-designers. While I always main­tain that you ought to leave design to pro­fes­sionals, some­times this just isn’t feas­ible for one reason or another. So, in the interests of public ser­vice (pret­ti­ness making the world a better place, and whatnot), I’d like to offer up some sug­ges­tions that should improve your design across the board.

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When I was working on my new design for this web­site, I spent a lot of time eval­u­ating my options for image dis­play, as it’s one of the most vital ele­ments of the site. I had very spe­cific require­ments for what I wanted, both in terms of the look & feel of the gal­leries, and the ease of imple­ment­a­tion. I spent forever looking through all sorts of Word­Press plu­gins, hacks, and stan­dalone solu­tions, and even­tu­ally settled (grudgingly) on a Flash-based option: WP-Simpleviewer, based on the Sim­pleViewer plugin.

Of course, after spending forever (I stopped counting some­where along the line) spent making it work pre­cisely (and pixel-perfectly) to my liking, it’s now broken. Every single image in my port­folio is now dis­playing with jagged images. Cue panic! It was fine last time I checked! What on earth happened? I still have no idea, and I hate to think how long it may have been broken before I noticed. (Note to self: keep an eye on these things, alright? Sheesh. My con­tact form plugin had also deac­tiv­ated itself without my noti­cing some­where along the line. Not good.)

So I’m ditching the Sim­pleViewer. (I am guessing that much of my weekend will be spent tweaking and imple­menting the change, so things are going to look ter­rible between now and then.) I found an altern­ative that I think will be better, and sim­pler in the long run, although of course it does mean that I need to go through every port­folio post and upload new gal­leries: Gal­li­frey, based on Gal­ler­iffic. (If you’re nerd-chic and/or British enough, you’ll recog­nize this as The Doctor‘s home planet, which rather delights me as I’ve just started falling in love with all things Tardis-related.) It works with Word­Press’ built-in gal­lery func­tions, is super-customizable, and will even finally allow me to imple­ment my triple-bordered image dis­play that I wanted ini­tially for this site. Sim­pleviewer, you were fant­astic, but it’s time for us to part ways.

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I don’t believe in showing up early for a party (after all, it’s important to make an entrance). In a busi­ness con­text, this prob­ably isn’t the best thing in the world, and in an internet con­text, it’s even less so. For instance, I just recently started making use of Twitter. I hon­estly didn’t get what the big idea was. Then I started using it.

It’s amazing. News stories break on Twitter before the news­pa­pers even have an idea what’s going on. You can see real-time photos of Stephen Fry stuck in an elev­ator. If you com­plain about a product, its man­u­fac­turers will help you out. But most fas­cin­ating are the con­ver­sa­tions: it’s like what I ima­gine The Crysalids was like. Someone makes a com­ment about the colour of the sky, and people respond; threads of con­ver­sa­tion begin spidering off in dif­ferent tan­gents. Anyone can jump in at any point and drop out just as easily, and nobody dom­in­ates because every response is lim­ited to 140 char­ac­ters. It’s the digital rep­res­ent­a­tion of the col­lective uncon­scious­ness. And it’s searchable!

Social media, I’m sure you’ve heard, is chan­ging our world. If you’re late to the party, like me, it’s time to get involved! Rather than give you a bunch of inform­a­tion that may or may not be true, I’m going to point the way to some resources from more cred­ible experts than I.

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I’ve been doing some work with email news­let­ters of late. It is, of course, a bit of a chal­lenge, given how email is even less reli­able at prop­erly inter­preting standards-compliant CSS code and the like. (Ser­i­ously, one of these days, all these com­panies will get together and start imple­menting code con­sist­ently, across the board, and web designers across the world will sud­denly find that what used to take ten hours now only takes one. Com­panies like the fab­ulous BrowserCam will go out of busi­ness. Why is so much of our eco­nomy built on busy-work? Screw the unem­ploy­ment rate, I want effi­ciency!)

Anyway. Two things I’ve learned:

• Gmail doesn’t care about your CSS text-formatting. That’s right, that means you’ll need to use <FONT> tags. Gross. I haven’t used those in at least five years!
• Out­look 2007 will make things look ugliest. Appar­ently, this is because it uses the MS Word ren­dering engine. Now, ser­i­ously? Why? If you’ve ever tried to design any­thing in Word, well, you know how impossible it is. They do, how­ever, provide this handy little “val­id­ator” to check to see how/if your code is going to work, which is nice for those of us who get the shakes just opening Out­look. And it’ll plug into Dreamweaver!

On a vaguely related, but mostly unre­lated, note: remember to vote, kids! This is the first year in a while I haven’t been dir­ectly involved in doing design work for a cam­paign, and as a result I’m less jazzed about the elec­tion than I usu­ally am, but it’s starting to get to me as the day goes on. Go! Vote! (Or at least spoil your ballot (though it’s illegal to do so). Or vote Liber­tarian, if you can! Effi­ciency 2008! Down with Busy-Work! Alright, now I’m excited.)

I usu­ally use Scripta­li­cious for my AJAX needs, but I’m working on a set of AJAX-ified forms on a web­site that’s already using jQuery, so I figure hey, it can’t be that hard to change over! Twenty minutes later, cue the loud cursing and growling. I mean, the whole thing seems far more powerful, but every time I’ve wanted to start imple­menting it, I’ve been turned off by how com­plex it seems to do simple things. (Like slide down a div window, which I hope to have accom­plished before I turn 30. On a side note, I’ve been feeling old because I turned 25 today, until my little sister sent me a mes­sage saying that I’m “plenty young, for a pres­ident!” Which I sup­pose is tech­nic­ally true, so I don’t feel quite so washed up anymore.)

Anyway, back to my jQuery-induced head­ache: this very helpful thing to the rescue! If I can stop being dis­tracted by the gor­geous site design, I might be able to figure this stuff out, after all, without having to spend all day teaching my brain new methods of pro­gram­ming. I do so love pro­gram­ming tutorials written for designers. Thank you, pretty col­ourful website!

Well, it’s been a long, long, long time in the making, but I’ve finally updated my port­folio a teeny little bit (not too much to be over­whelming, of course!) There’s this por­trait of my gor­geous little sister:

and a “new” web­site (that was com­pleted months ago). I really don’t like updating my own website!

But I’m determ­ined that it’s about time to do it, espe­cially given that I’m about to move again, and that means that my address as listed on the web­site will be even more wrong than it is cur­rently. (Sure, in theory it only takes two minutes to change it, but that’s not how I work…if I’m going to spend two minutes, I’m going to be there three hours trying to fix all the little things.) At any rate, all the little things have really added up, and it’s time for some major-ish rearran­ging. (more…)

I gave a present­a­tion to my BBC group last week, giving some tips and guidelines for how to make a web­site more effective. It’s aimed towards the non-technical person, though imple­ment­a­tion of much of the advice would likely require a designer or developer’s help. How­ever, I thought it might be a useful resource, espe­cially if you’re in the pro­cess of cre­ating a new web­site, or revamping an old one.

Do note that I’ve not been fero­ciously good at fol­lowing all of these guidelines myself—but it’s cer­tainly given me some better ideas about where I ought to be taking my web­site! (more…)

So, let’s say you’re having a problem with your email, or if you’ve found a bug in your web­site. Your first instinct, nat­ur­ally, is to fire off an email to your trusty web-person. But wait! Before you hit send, make sure you’ve included as much detail as possible—what you were trying to do when the error happened, what sort of error mes­sage (if any) you got, what soft­ware you were using at the time, etc. This will help your trusty web-person track down the problem far, far more quickly.

An excel­lent way of sup­ple­menting this inform­a­tion is by sending along a screen­shot. I’ll often request this of cli­ents when I can’t rep­licate a reported bug—if you’ve sent one to begin with, I can be that much more effective.

Here’s how you do it.
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Con­fused by CMYK, RGB, and the like? Got a plethora of logo formats and no idea which to use? Read on for some quick tips about how to get the most out of your colour. (more…)

A quick intro­duc­tion to the two major types of file formats you’re likely to run across, and what to use when. (more…)