Web Design News 20/04/10
Posted in Boagworld Bites, News on: Tuesday, April 20, 2010 by Paul Boag
This week: The dying art of design, the disappearance of flash, tasks not goals, twitters developer tools and google rank by speed.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:19 — 11.3MB)
The web design news is brought to you by Webdesigner Depot. Webdesigner Depot is a popular web design blog covering tutorials, design trends, blogging and inspirational posts. You can visit WDD at webdesignerdepot.com and follow WDD on Twitter @designerdepot.
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The dying art of design
There is a great but challenging article on smashing magazine this week for all you designers.
Entitled “The Dying Art of Design” it challenges us as designers to stop focusing on tool and techniques but instead focus on creativity and originality.
The author writes…
The diet of a typical designer is low in in-depth content and high in inspirational lists, tutorials and freebies. A review of blogs and our poll of design professionals shows a clear trend in the informational diet of creatives. They consume a lot but bypass a deeper understanding of design. In-depth articles and case studies are the least-read articles. Over 75% of the articles that designers read are either design tutorials or inspirational lists.
This has certainly been my experience on Boagworld too. My most popular posts have been those light on content and heavy on inspiration.
He concludes my writing:
While modern design tools and resources certainly make our many tasks easier, they don’t always improve our work. Tools and shortcuts are temporary. Great design is timeless. The best tool available is sitting in our heads; we just need to upgrade it once in a while.
Chris Bence, Shutterstock
Twitter introduces tools for developers
At this weeks official Twitter conference (Chirp), Twitter announced a new raft of development tools that can be found at dev.twitter.com.
These tools make it easier than ever to integrate twitter into your application or website. In fact it opens up the ability to integrate in ways never before possible.
For the majority of us the most exciting part in @Anywhere that allows you to integrate Twitter seamlessly into your site with just a few lines of Javascript.
New features include…
If you make heavy use of Twitter to support your website then this definitely worth checking out.
The gradual disappearance of flash
I have developed a reputation for being anti-flash. However, when you read the beginning of “The Gradual Disappearance of Flash” you will consider me a friend of flash developers everywhere!
The author begins:
Given the widespread adoption and advancements of modern browsers and JavaScript libraries, using Flash makes little sense.
He then goes on to deconstruct just flash is no-longer necessary including…
- The improvements in standards
- The iPhone and iPad lack of support
- The proprietary nature of flash
- Progressive enhancement
- Support for video in HTML
- And more
Fortunately before he is burned alive by the Flash community he does begin to tone things down focusing on the strengths of flash. However, you can tell his heart is not in it.
Despite the bias of the article I do feel he has a point. There are fewer and fewer reasons to use flash and no excuse for building entire flash websites.
He could be right, perhaps we are seeing the beginning of the end for Flash.
Old school marketing techniques don’t work online
Talking of uncontrolled rants Gerry McGovern is on good form this week. In his post “Web customers care about tasks, not goals” he shares his experiences of trying to hire a cleaner online…
I was at a house cleaner website and this lady was smiling out at me with her hands behind her head. Hello. I need a cleaner. She’s not going to do much cleaning for me if she has her hands behind her head. And she’s saying to me: “Book a cleaner and get time for you.”
That was a big breakthrough for me. For years we’ve had a cleaner and I never really understood why. But this website educated me. It’s all about time. And then this hands-behind-her-head-big-grinning-lady asks me: “Are you looking for a cleaner?” Well, duh. Actually, no. I’m looking for a set of golf clubs, but for some wholly unfathomable reason I typed the following text into Google: “house cleaner”.
bikeriderlondon, Shutterstock
His point here is that marketeers are applying principles of offline marketing to the web. For example conventional wisdom says that you need to sell the benefits (e.g. book a cleaner and get time for you) to the consumer. However, that doesn’t take into account that web users have already recognised and acted on their need by searching. What we need to do is facilitate the fulfilment of that need, rather than create the need in the first place.
Gerry sums this up at the end when he writes…
The cleaning websites I went to told me truly useless things I already knew but didn’t tell me the things I really wanted to know: hourly rates, whether they worked in my area, whether they cleaned on weekends.
I think a lot of us still need to learn these lessons.
Google ranking now affected by site speed
We have known it was coming for a while but finally it has happened: Google now partially ranks your website on speed.
However, no need to panic yet. According to Sitepoint…
[Google says] “while site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page” and at the moment, “fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal”.
Of course as they go on to point out 1% of all Google searches would still be a huge number of sites.
kropic1, Shutterstock
Sitepoint goes on to share a number of ways you can improve the speed of your site many of which I mention in my own post ‘5 ways to give your site a speed boost in less than 30 minutes‘.
Looks like performance is going to be the next big thing.
The web design news is brought to you by Webdesigner Depot. Webdesigner Depot is a popular web design blog covering tutorials, design trends, blogging and inspirational posts. You can visit WDD at webdesignerdepot.com and follow WDD on Twitter @designerdepot.
2 Comments
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Flash has it’s time and place.
I have just built a standards compliant website about an major Australian historical event. A main part of that website is an education section with multiple educational activities both on and offline. One of the many online activities is a flash interactive game with animated tutorials, vector graphics, database driven dynamic Morse code messages, drag and drop buttons, etc now this could be done in javascript but it would be the wrong tool for the job and not be as rich as an experience for the user.
I would agree that build a whole website using flash is wrong. The argument shouldn’t be flash is evil and we don’t need to support it because we can now show movies with HTML.
Well for me although certain things can be done in javascript, the amount of time spent doing R&D is just ridiculous when doing it in flash would take half the time. Also I’m not fully set on html5 video. Looking at it from a content provider’s perspective you’d have to create the same video content up to 3 times.
Once for Safari which will only do h.264 video. Once for those that only support open source codecs. And then provide a flash fall back for people not using a browser that support the video tag.
So additional time is spend transcoding the video into different formats, then you need to store the video in these different formats to then push it to your visitors. Haven’t got time for all that I’m afraid.
And don’t get me started on audio. Personally flash has done a lot of good, and Adobe is fighting for its existence by making it available on mobile devices.
If browser vendors could agree on what codecs could be supported things wouldn’t be so bad. Not going into this one as my comment is long enough already.
Think of how horrible video streaming was before the use of flash for video content. We had a plugin for real player, a plugin for quicktime, a plugin for windows media player, and half the time it wouldn’t play natively in your browser but launch the application. I was once on the down with flash bandwagon that everyone seems to be jumping on, but I’ve slowly come to realise that in some ways it makes life easier.