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.

1. Get strategic.

Before doing anything else, you need to sit down and figure out what you want out of your website. The more clearly defined your goals are, the easier it will be for your designer, your copywriter, and you to direct the project in order to meet these goals. “I want to promote my company” isn’t a clearly defined goal! You should be thinking instead about who your audience is and what you want them to take away from the website. Do you want them to interact with it? Buy products? Send you a quote request? Come back every week to read your blog? Consider how you want them to react, feel, and interact with your website, and you’ll be closer to having clearly-defined goals.

If you’re having difficulty defining these goals, it may be helpful to work with a strategic consultant, who’ll bring an outside perspective to the project. Anyone outside of your business will see it in a very different light than you do, which will help you to get a better grasp of what your users are thinking.

2. Evaluate what works—and what doesn’t—in your current website

This is the time to be brutally honest. If your CEO designed your website five years ago, you shouldn’t be afraid to tell him it stinks—if I designed your website five years ago, feel free to tell me it stinks! I won’t be offended, it’s probably true. Five years is more like thirty in internet years, and most businesses—and people—will have changed considerably in that span of time. Once you’ve realized it’s time for change, you need to be frank in your assessment of what’s in place now.

Look at design, SEO, content, and ease-of-use (both for you in updating the site, and for your customers in using the site). Ask anyone who’ll tell you what they think. Spend a few hours poring over your Analytics to see how users are interacting with the site. Better still, drag someone in from off the street, sit him down with your site, and hover over his shoulder while he looks through it. You’ll most likely infuriate him, but it’s incredibly useful to actually watch how someone parses your site, and you’ll get an idea of what gets read—and what gets ignored—as well as any elements of the site that are currently causing confusion.

The Alliance for Community Trees website, before and after. The logo was retained, and we used the same basic colour scheme. The end result was that returning users didn’t feel as though they’d landed on some other site accidentally, and they welcomed the change.

3. While you’re at it, seriously consider your branding.

If you’re redesigning your website anyway, it may be a great time to consider redesigning your logo and branding as well. A gorgeous, well-thought-out redesign is going to have limited impact if your logo sucks. When redesigning, you often don’t necessarily want to rebuild everything from the ground up—you’re best off taking what’s there and subtly changing it to make it better. A great way to do this is to change the structure and graphic elements, but retain the same (or similar) colour scheme and typography. This way, it won’t be so jarring to return visitors as it would be if you were to rebuild everything from scratch. Basically, the more established your business is, the more established your branding will (or at least should!) be in your customers’ eyes. This means you’ll need to make more subtle changes to avoid alienating your clientele.  Realign, don’t redesign.

The DVD Edge website, however, had a less established brand and a less strong logo, so we were able to play with the logo a bit. Keeping the overall image means that it’s still not such a dramatic change, but redrawing it to be a little cleaner and more modern made it stronger.

4. Consider a CMS.

I feel like I extoll the virtues of WordPress a lot, but it’s seriously fantastic. If you’re already revamping your website, and you’d like a way to manage your content more easily, I’d recommend getting the whole thing built in WordPress (or another CMS that suits your needs). While you’re at it, you can also add a blog to the site, which is great for bringing in traffic, boosting search engine results, building valuable content, and increasing conversation with your users. Static websites are out. Websites you can update easily and quickly the moment someone sends you a glowing testimonial are in.

5. Work on your content first.

I’m willing to bet that your content could be better. If you can’t write it yourself, hire someone. Great content is every bit as important as great design, and if you’ve already got great content plotted out, a great designer will be able to work with it in order to make the whole thing come together nicely.

Fernwood Publishing went for a complete overhaul and a custom-build CMS, while they were at it. The end result is a sleek, easy-to-use website that allows them to manage their large inventory of titles.

Consider the voice of your website—too many sites read like brochure copy written ten years ago by someone with an MBA. If your audience is other people with MBAs, that’s fine, but chances are, your audience is just put off by buzzwords. If you speak to them in an honest and friendly way, you’ll find your audience is much more receptive, engaged, and more likely to hand over their money to you.

6. Hire great people, and let them do their jobs.

Who you hire for the project is up to you, but I recommend at least a designer—obviously! A copywriter and a strategic consultant, as mentioned earlier, will also be a great help. When you’re looking to hire someone, you obviously want to be sure they’ve got a great website already. Unfortunately, while many people in the website-making industry suffer from pretty severe cases of “carpenter’s house”, their websites are the best way for you to determine their abilities. Past projects, of course, are also quite telling, as are client testimonials. Once you’ve found someone that seems like they may be good, send them a few emails. Ask questions. Make sure that they respond within a reasonable timeframe, answer your questions to your satisfaction, and know what they’re talking about.

Then, hire these great people. Send them your strategic plans, your content, everything you’ve already worked on—and let them build you something great. Design is very much a collaborative process, and a good designer should lead you through the process, keeping your goals in mind at all times, making suggestions for improvements. Remember you hired these people for a reason, and you should be able to trust their professional guidance! If you allow the process to play out like a partnership, rather than a dictatorship, you’ll find yourself with a much stronger end result.

And I recommend that you hire Triggers & Sparks.

1. WP-Typography

This plugin does magical stuff that’s previously been kind of hard to do on the internet: hyphenation (now I can justify my text!), making true small caps, smarter punctuation, turning ampersands into prettier ampersands. It performs well straight out of the box to improve your typography, and is also full of fine-tuned controls. I haven’t had an opportunity to play around with them yet, but when I’ve got some time to spare (this will happen eventually, I’m certain), I’d like to go over this website’s design with a fine-tooth comb. This plugin (and quite probably Lettering.js) will be a big part of that.

2. WordPress.com Stats

This is the statistics engine used on wordpress.com sites, and I’m considering using it over Google Analytics, mostly because its stats are all readily available from your WP Dashboard. There’s sometimes just too much clicking involved for my liking in checking out my stats via Google. (Seriously, can someone just skip over that big blue “Access Analytics” button for me already?) There’s the Google Analytics Dashboard, but it’s just so unsightly I can’t quite bear to look at it.

What the widget looks like on my dashboard. See, this one is pretty! It doesn’t tell me my bounce rate, but it doesn’t make me feel like someone’s offended my Poor Design Sensibilities, either.

3. eMob Email Obfuscator

This gem (in spite of its terrible name) of a plugin finds email addresses in your content and protects them from spambots. My previous solution was a plugin that made use of a shortcode to obfuscate email addresses, but I rather like this one for being automatic. This means that my clients don’t need to learn what a shortcode is, and I don’t need to search through their content to make sure they aren’t vulnerable to unnecessary spam. That’s important to me, and, though many of them may not realize it, to my clients as well.

4. Quotes Collection

While this one isn’t a must-have for every website, I’ve used it on a great variety of websites. It’s a highly flexible plugin that allows you to collect and display quotes of any kind on your site. I use it for testimonials, ideas, or random snippets of information, all of which can be tagged and displayed in different places and manners.

5. Contact Form 7

I think I tried out every contact form plugin available before settling on this one. I like that it’s super-simple to use but quite flexible, uses elegant Javascript, and will send an autoresponse to everyone who’s submitted a form. It will allow you to make everything from the simplest contact form to a complex series of form elements, including file uploads. You can then customize how the information is sent to you, and the whole thing generally works like a charm.

6. Disqus

Comments on steroids! They’re prettier straight out of the box, they integrate with social media in ways I’ve yet to fully understand. It’s starting to be used on quite a number of websites, which means that, since it makes use of a universal profile, users who’ve already registered with Disqus (or another site that uses Disqus) won’t need to re-register to comment on yours. Ideally, it should facilitate conversation among your users.

7. Back Up WordPress

Backs up your WP data on a regular basis and emails you a zip file of database contents. I’ve never had a WordPress site that suddenly lost all its data, but I suppose it’s not impossible, and there’s certainly no harm in keeping a backup!

8. After The Deadline

I just came across this plugin, and it seems like a super-smart little proofreader. Not only will it find your misspelled words (and allow you to perma-ignore the non-dictionary words of your favour) it will also catch double negatives, clichés, jargon, the passive voice, and all sorts of other stuff (if you want it to). I’m thinking I’ll even start using it myself, although I haven’t used a spellcheck in years.

9. Validated

My clients are unlikely to ever use this one, or care what it does, but I install it nevertheless. It runs through every page on your site and spits out a report about what validates and what doesn’t (and how many errors exist on each page). Way easier, and faster, than doing every page at once, and it allows you to be extremely detail-conscious in your adherence to standards.

10. WP-IE6Update

Remember how I hate IE6 and am officially rejecting the concept of developing for it? This helps by putting the IE6Update code on your site. If anyone dares visit using IE6, they see a friendly message prompting them to update their browser to one that’s been released in the last ten years and isn’t the spawn of Satan.

11. One-click Plugin Updater

When you have this many plugins, this is a godsend! What I’m doing is keeping a folder of all these plugins on my local computer, then uploading them to every fresh WordPress install. I’ll undoubtably have four or five at any given time that need updating. With this plugin, it’s just a matter of hitting one (very obvious) button at the top of the screen. Generally speaking, this makes it easier for my clients to keep their plugins updated too, since there’s a notice at the top of every screen to advise them.

Admittedly, not everyone will click the “Upgrade all” button, but it’s STILL easier than clicking on each plugin individually, especially if you maintain lots of plugins. I find most WordPress sites that I built make use of at least twenty plugins, which can be an awful lot to maintain.

12. AWS Easy Page Link

It’s long bothered me that there’s no simple way of linking to an internal page from the add/edit link popup, other than actually entering the URL. This can be on the complicated side for less tech-savvy clients, and I’m always trying to find ways to make WordPress simpler still for them to use. I have searched for a plugin with this functionality for ages, and I still can’t believe it isn’t built into WordPress. Essentially, it adds an element to the add/edit link popup that allows you to select, from a simple drop-down, a page on your site to link to.

I’m working on three new WordPress websites these days, so I expect this list will be refined considerably as I find better plugins or drop ones I’m not using. There’s such a huge number of plugins out there, too, that I’m quite certain there are brilliant finds I just have yet to chance across.

What’s on your list?

I love you, WordPress! Thanks for (almost always) making my life a little bit easier.

It got me thinking about how often companies misrepresent themselves, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes accidentally. In a world where we all have less “face time” with companies—I’ve worked with all kinds of clients I’ve never met, and some whose locations I’m not sure about at all—it’s easy to see where our potential clients might not be as trusting of us as they ought to be. If a customer doesn’t trust a company, he’s unlikely to give the company any business.

So, how do you go about establishing your credibility?

1. Answer your emails, please!

This has got to be one of the most valuable things that you can do for your business, especially if your sales are mostly generated via the internet. Email is the method by which most clients will reach you, and if their first few questions go unanswered for lengthy periods of time, they’re going to think that this will always be the case. If you’re working with someone who’s halfway across the globe, email communication is suddenly tenfold more important, and if you don’t respond to your emails, your clients will simply assume that you’ve run away with their money and projects. I emailed a company a simple question about their product three days ago and have still heard nothing; at this point, I’m highly unlikely to purchase anything from them. Even a simple “we got your email, we’re looking into it, and we’ll be in touch soon” might have sufficed, but it’s simply irresponsible to ignore an email for any more than forty-eight hours.

2. Make it look, and sound, good.

Yes, it sounds self-serving for me to say this, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. Which of these two companies would you buy from?

Sorry, Gracious Indian. I love your roti wraps, and the delivery guy who rides around on a scooter, but I HATE your website.

Not actually my favourite place for sushi locally, but their website, though still a little rough around the edges, makes me want to buy sushi from them. (Note the inclusion of a testimonial!)

That’s right. Professional design makes you look credible in the same way that spelling your words properly and using capitalization makes you look credible. Nobody wants to buy from a company that might just be a ten-year-old playing with his basement computer. If it looks like your website has been built with care and consideration (which typically, but not always, mandates a budget), people will be more likely to see your company as credible.

3. Give information.

A photograph of yourself will help, as will personal anecdotes. People are still highly social creatures, and we trust one another more if we get a feeling for one another. This is why my local clients like to have a face-to-face meeting to begin with, but then are comfortable with email-only communications. North Americans are quite brusque about our social connections, but in a great number of other cultures, it’s commonplace to develop a social relationship with a person—going for coffee and dinner several times—prior to even discussing business.

4. Show how much people love you.

Testimonials work, and they’re vital if you’re running a business online. It can be challenging collecting positive references from past clients, even those who were thrilled with your work, but your persistence will pay off. Use them in as many places as you can. Put one in your sidebar somewhere, and make sure it randomly loads a new one every new page. Insert them into blog posts, or project or product descriptions where appropriate. Have a whole page full of all of them—people tend to notice testimonials more when they’re included on other pages—but there’s nothing quite like a great big list of your clients singing your praises.

5. Be involved.

Write a blog. Beyond boosting your search engine rankings, which everyone loves so much, it will also help to establish you as a credible source who knows your stuff. Read everything you can, and get involved with industry forums or mailing lists. Write articles of interest for other publications. Teach a class at your local business centre or free-school. Present at conferences and unconferences. Answer people’s questions on Twitter.

In short, anything you can do to show that you’re helpful and knowledgable will help. Learn to communicate well, make sure everything that you put out is polished, and you’re on your way!

I will, instead, be using the fabulous IE6 Update script on all of my websites. (There’s even a WordPress plugin. It’s going to be so simple, it’ll almost be automatic. In fact, if you run a WordPress site, could you just run out an install it, right now? I just did. It feels good.) I won’t even bother trying to check what I’ve created in IE6 any more (though I’ll admit I didn’t often).

According to Netmarketshare, almost 17% of the internet still uses IE6. That’s utterly insane, given that IE6 is nine years old, three versions out-of-date, and famed for being the scourge of the internet. If you’re bored one day, sit a web designer/developer—or whatever hybrid you prefer—down and mention IE6. I can almost guarantee you’ll get a frustrated or sickened face, and maybe a string of expletives, if you’re really lucky.

I came across this wonderful article called Stop Developing for IE6 that lays out a number of excellent arguments for the cessation of the practise, primarily:

1. It’s saving you money.

Because developing websites that work properly in IE6 requires more work, it costs more money to make a website that works. My new policy, then, will invoke a surcharge for IE6-compliant sites. And I really, really, really hate even looking at IE6, so it’s going to be a lot.

2. It’s making the internet better.

Most of the problem is due to the fact that developers used hacks in order to make sites that behaved properly in IE6. This meant that their code didn’t follow best practises, because it had to resort to hacky methods in order to trick IE6 into displaying its content properly. Continuing with these practises holds the web development community back.

3. Even Microsoft actively wants it negated.

This is more true now, with IE9 in the works. Microsoft’s been trying to rid the universe of its deformed little creature for years, and there’s really no reason to update. Typically, the rationale that has been used (and that still is used, especially in government and other large organizations) is that some proprietary internal sites are built only to support IE6, which is a whole other problem in itself. These organizations really ought to invest the money into fixing their systems—they’ve over five years old, anyway, so it’s probably high time for an update. If they can’t, it’s entirely possible to run multiple versions of IE on one machine, and it’s even easier to use IE6 only for internal hacky sites, and use Firefox, Chrome, or any of the other well-built modern-day browsers for everything else.

So I’m decided. It’s high time. No longer will I bend to the reign of tyranny that was IE6. And I’m going to spend as much energy as I can encouraging everyone I know to upgrade their browsers, move to better browsers, or generally get on board with Not Being a Part of the Problem anymore.

Are you using IE6? Please upgrade.

Why?

1. It’s open.

Compared to similar platforms—Movable Type being the obvious example that comes to mind, which all is proprietary and messy and hard to work with—WordPress is a dream. Their website puts it best:

Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 500 web site without paying anyone a license fee and a number of other important freedoms.

So instead of building you a customized system (which I still do where the project warrants it), we start with a totally free, full-featured system (with fancy-pants features like revision history and autosave and such already built-in), then build on it. And whenever the core system upgrades, you can upgrade your installation at the click of a button. Essentially, instead of having a static system that never changes, you get one that is constantly being improved and worked on by a huge team of developers.

2. It’s flexible.

Once you’ve got the core system up and running (so about five minutes after you start, because it’s super-simple to install, too), you can customize it to behave in exactly the way you want.

So, while it’s technically intended as a blogging platform (and at its core, it really is), there are thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes you can install in order to change its functionality. Generally speaking, I’ve found that I can almost always find something close to what I’m looking for. And if you can’t, you can edit your theme templates of write your own plugins—and since WordPress is all written in PHP, a highly popular and easy-to-use scripting language, it’s easy to work with.

(The portfolio items this website, for example, are actually entered as blog posts. They are then displayed using a highly modified template, called only for posts in the portfolio category.)

3. It’s easy.

Not easy in the “sleeping with your brother” sense, but easy-to-use. WordPress is crazy easy to use. I’ve set up systems for clients who don’t have a great sense of technology, and they get going with very little direction from me.  Even the more complex CMS-type setups are simple to use: last week, I met with a client for a training session I’d anticipate might take all day—instead, it took two hours.

I’ve seen the UI go through a number of different revisions, and it keeps becoming more intuitive and user-friendly. And as far as text formatting goes, well, if you can handle Word (which I actually cannot, but that’s a different story), you’re set.

4. It’s friendly.

To search engines, that is. I don’t know a great deal about SEO—it’s complex, it changes all the time, and there are many companies who do nothing else but SEO. Accordingly, I focus my attention on making websites that work well and look great. WordPress does all sorts of clever things automatically, like creating permalinks for your pages, that means that search engines will just naturally pay more attention to you, without you having to worry about it. (And of course, if you’d like to get more fiddly, there are quite a few plugins that will give you some extra control.)

5. It’s pretty.

Of course, for all its brilliance, WordPress would be entirely useless if it weren’t pretty. Luckily, it’s built with a mind for aesthetics. This means that there are all sorts of gorgeous themes you can download and install, if you’re so inclined, or you can hire a designer to make you a fantastic one-of-a-kind design and they won’t be pulling their hair out trying to do it for you. It also means that some nitpicky typographic elements you’ll probably never notice, but I will (like smart quotes, formerly the bane of my web-existence, although I’m still keeping my toes crossed for em-dashes, which I use like they’re going out of style, which admittedly they most likely are), will automatically be inserted into the text you type. Generally speaking, it takes great care to ensure that what you enter, no matter how nutty, turns into nicely-formatted code (which will also, trust me, save your designer’s hair).

In short: WordPress is great. I love WordPress, and so should you!

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.

When I originally designed this gallery display, most people didn’t notice the difference between the triple-border here and the single thick border unless I explicitly pointed it out. Turns out I’m a touch anal-retentive.

Can Flash go into the ground already? There was a time when it was useful for websites, but with jQuery and a myriad of other frameworks as well-developed as they are, there really is very little excuse for it anymore. There are all sorts of reasons why Flash is bad: it’s horrible for search engine optimization, it mucks with usability, it’s often slow to load, it refuses to display on an iPhone, and it won’t print or display itself in a feed reader (at least, best I can tell). While the number of websites relying on Flash has decreased dramatically in the past few years, it’s still a little too prevalent. No more Flash, okay? There’s always an alternative.

Sometimes you just need to screw up enough to find it.

I felt so refreshed the next day that I very nearly made it a whole weekend off work! After all, what are Sundays for if not catnaps and hot baths, and general relaxation? However, my photographically-inclined roommate was applying for a job, and her tumblr website was doing a terrible job of showcasing her skills.

So we sat down together, spent about half an hour combing through photographs of trees, and eventually pulled together this quick-and-dirty little website for her. It’s using the same image-display script I use for my own site, and there are still a few kinks I’ll need to work out, but it’s a good example of what can be pulled together in an evening if you’re motivated enough.

Do check out her website—she does some lovely work, and she’s looking to do more!

Your resume looks fantastic! One of the best I’ve ever seen!

So, if you find yourself facing unemployment (I’m not going to use the “R” word, or even the “D” word, but do feel free to ruminate on the current economic climate in whatever manner you’d prefer), you should invest in a custom-designed resume! It’s cheap, it’s fun, and it may even get you a job. And I get that warm-and-fuzzy feeling that comes from helping someone out.

I have many stories and photographs, which are forthcoming. For now, two new projects: the holiday cards I mean to do every year, and a redesign and rearchitecturing of Fernwood Publishing.