Boagworld

News and events | Designers and developers in perfect harmony | Aral on Singularity | Listener emails

News and events

Fixing your product pages

I want to kick off this week’s news with an article on Think Vitamin which I missed when it originally come out back in November. It is a post by Amy Hoy providing some basic advice on user experience design, focusing in particular on product pages.

Amy starts by giving some basic tips. These include…

Be nice to your users and customers (and potential customers).
Design as if your main goal is to inform and educate.
Be honest and forthcoming.
Help your users and customers to do what they want, not what you want them to do.
Be consistent with your message and quality of service (and I’m including software design here, folks).
Scientific, measurable “usability” doesn’t necessarily make for a good experience.
Good design makes people feel good.

She then moves on to look at specific examples. She compares the product download pages of Opera and Firefox. This is a fascinating insight into what can go wrong with user experience design.

What I particularly like about this article is Amy’s engaging writing style. She is incredibly personable and her writing really drew me in. It is a long time since I have read a post word for word.

Being inspired by newspaper design

I often talk on boagworld about looking beyond the web for inspiration. Too often as designers we look at other websites, when we should be looking to art, architecture and the world around us for inspiration.

Admittedly this can be somewhat of a stretch at times. It’s not always easy to see how a piece of art or kids toy can inspire a website. Many of us don’t even try as a result.

How about starting with an easier comparison? This week I came across a superb post that looks at award winning newspaper design and it really excited me about the possibilities when I finally get around to redesigning boagworld.

I think we have a lot of learn from newspaper designers and in many ways there are a lot of similarities. Both web design and newspaper design rely heavily on white space and grid layout. Both have to deal with large amounts of written content. Both have to copy with constantly changing content. The list goes on.

Take a few moments to read this post, even if you just look at the designs. It will definitely inspire you.

Using browser history to improve the user experience

My final news story of the day is an interesting idea centred around a users browser history. Niall Kennedy has proposed a technique where you could use CSS and Javascript to display content based on what sites a person has previously visited.

Although I am not sure I like the idea of websites snooping through my browser history, it does provide some ways of improving the user experience. If nothing else it can remove some of the clutter from our websites.

Let me give you an example of how it could be used. A website could check your browser history to see if you regularly used digg.com. If you did then it could post a “digg it” button. If not it could be hidden away. The same principle could be used to show only a RSS subscribe button for the specific news reader you use, rather than showing them all. The possibilities are endless.

Whether you can see an application for this or not, it is still a very impressive and clever idea. Definitely worth investigating further.

Feature: Designer and developer in perfect harmony

In this week’s feature Marcus is looking at the working relationships between web design teams. He brings together a few Headscape employees to discuss how to ensure a good working relationship between all parties.

These are the roles that we look at and who represents them in Headscape:

Requirements analysis, information architecture development (consultancy) – Marcus
Design, templates – Leigh Howells and Paul
Technical development – Rob Borley
Project management – Charlie Allen

These are the issues we covered…

What are the things that really make a project work well for you?
From the other perspective, what are your pet hates?
Designer and developers – should clients be able to talk to you directly?
Most projects have a habit of their scope creeping. How can that best be avoided?
At Headscape we use a number of different tools to manage projects. How do these tools work?
Particularly with designers and developers, we have set up ‘buddy’ systems. How does this work? Is it effective?
Some projects stall or go on hold for a while. Are you able to just pick up where you left off?

Expert interview: Aral Balkan on Singularity

Paul: So, joining me today is Aral Balkan. Hello Aral.

Aral: Hi, Paul. How are you?

Paul: Not too bad. It’s been a while since we’ve had you on the show.

Aral: It has been a while. I’ve missed it.

Paul: Uhm, so yeah, basically, I’ve been keeping a secret from Marcus. Which is I stoically refused to tell him what Singularity is all about.

Aral (laughing): Was he curious?

Paul: He was.

Marcus: It’s something to do with Star Trek, isn’t it?

Aral: Well I am a big fan, but no.

Paul: So why don’t you tell him what Singularity is all about.

Aral: Well, Singularity is going to be the world’s first large scale online web converence.

Marcus: Okay.

Aral: In a nutshell, that’s what it is.

Paul: So, I mean how does this work from a technology point of view, from an organizational point of view. Tell us a little bit about how it’s going to be organized.

Aral: Uh, sure! Well, basically it’s a web conference, so in terms of topics, it’s very eclectic. We’ve got a really cool group of speakers who have confirmed already, about 24 of them, from all parts of the web really. We have web standards people. We have JavaScript developers. We have artists who work on the web and they’re going to be presenting their sessions online. It’s going to be streamed through a custom interface built in Flash, based on the Flash platform, using technologies like Adobe Connect which used to be called “Breeze”. It allows the real time streaming of audio, video, and also sharing of interactions or objects through the web. Beyond that, we’re also going to have a very local character to it with local hubs where people will be able to gather and watch the audience and interact.

Paul: Oh, ok, so it…

Aral: I mean, watch the conference and interact.

Paul: Right, so people will actually get together as well, because that was one of my questions. One of the best thing about conferences is meeting up with people.

Aral: Definitely! The bit that I don’t like is the travelling. It’s being stuck in coach next to someone who’s, you know, not feeling too well or is kind slumping onto your seat or having the hotel from Hell experience that I’m currently having over here. (Paul laughs)

Aral: Don’t even get me started on that. There was techno music until 2 AM from the bar downstairs.

Paul: Nice!

Aral: Well, it was refreshing in the morning, though, because the shower went from boiling from freezing back to boiling and kept doing that. So, yeah, I think this is going to hopefully take the best parts of what attending a conference means, and maybe leave some of the bits that aren’t as great.

Paul: Are you going to leave it for local groups to set up local meetings or is that something that you can organize centrally?

Aral: I want to see it as decentralized as possible. I am talking to a few venue sponsors, potential venue sponsors. We’re talking with Yahoo at the moment. The BBC, I’m talking with Ian there. There are very interested and very excited about it. But, beyond that, I want it to have a grass-roots character. So, we’re already getting people volunteering for regional areas. I’ve called them Ambassadors. We have an ambassador from Bristol and there are people from Singapore, Mexico, all over, that are very interested in volunteering. So, we’re probably going to have regional volunteers and ambassadors who organize local groups, user groups, to have meetings around Singularity, where attendees can go and join and hopefully take it further, you know, add a local character to it.

Paul: OK, let’s cover some of the basics. How many speakers are you looking at, first of all. Let’s start with that.

Aral: Okay. We’re going to have a little over 100 hundred speakers.

Paul: Wow!

Aral: So, yeah, it is actually a large web conference.

Paul: Yeah.

Aral: And the that its online.

Paul: So when… how long is this going to be over? You know, if you’re going to have 100 speakers…

Aral: It’s three days.

Paul: It’s going to be over three days…

Aral: And it’s multiple track.

Paul: Multiple track, okay. That’s what I was going to ask.

Aral: And I think one of the things, just cut you off there, with uh… it is multiple track, but everything is recorded.

Paul: Oh, Okay.

Aral: So, its presented live and we’ve got some really great ideas for making those presentations a little bit more interactive than you can get in the real world. But, it will also be recorded. So, if you do miss something on the day, you’ll be able to watch it later.

Paul: Cool! How are you going to deal with things like time differences? Are you going to have it going 24 hours? Or, how are you dealing with that?

Aral: Well, initially, I was thinking about having it 24 hours. Just because it sounded really cool.

(All Laugh)

Aral: You know? “Three days! Twenty four hours!! One hundred plus speakers!!!” But then I thought about it. Especially the local meet ups. I want those meet ups to have a BarCamp-like character to them, you know? Where people can stay over. And I didn’t want the conference, the somewhat one-way part of it taking up part of the day.

Paul: Right…

Aral: So, I think it would be nice to have the presentations during the day and then after that, leave time for people at local gatherings to create their own sessions to talk about what they’ve been listening to, to add to it, to localize it for themselves in a matter of speaking.

Paul: Sure.

Aral: You know, to have, to do things to tell you the truth, I have no idea what they’ll come up with, which is great.

Paul: So, when is this scheduled for? What are the dates that people should book for it?

Aral: Well, we finally have dates. We’ve been going back and forth internally before we announced, but it’s the end of October. October 24th through the 26th.

Paul: Okay, that sounds good. And do you know a price yet, or are you still working on that?

Aral: Well, the pricing we’re still working on, but I think we’re going to be very positively surprised by the pricing. We’re actually working to get it even lower than we initially thought we wanted it. And we’re working closely with certain sponsors and we’ll definitely be announcing more about the sponsorship that we have as they become official, but some of our sponsors are interested in keeping the ticket price low as well and supporting us.

Paul: So, how many people are you expecting to attend this conference? Have you got any idea of what you’re aiming for?

Aral: Well, my conservative estimate right now is 10,000.

Paul: WOW!

Aral: And that’s based partly on past experience. We did 2 one-day open source flash conferences using similar technologies, for which we got about a thousand attendees at each one. Those were much smaller. One day, three or four speakers. My conservative estimate is that this will be about ten times the size of that.

Paul: That’s amazing. I mean that will be really cool to, you know, if that comes off. Are you trying to get a range of different speakers? Are you covering any particular areas of web design or are you going as eclectic as you can?

Aral: Well, the tagline that I was going with initially was that Singularity would define web 08. And I’m kind of trying to get people away from using version numbers when talking about the web. We’re getting away from using version numbers when talking about software because you know the moment you slap one on its outdated. So, I think maybe using the year would be easier because you’d at least know that you’re talking about a definite stat of time. So, my initial idea is that it would define Web ’08, and as such, I’m trying to get as eclectic a mix of speakers as possible. And also, I see that there is a lot of overlap with which to send applications for example. There’s a lot of overlap over what people using AJAX are doing and then traditionally web standards people are getting interested in applications as well. So, I want to have a real mix. I also don’t want people on the Flash platform to be excluded, as they sometimes are. But, this is definitely not… that’s not the focus of the conference.

Paul: So, where can people find out more about this? I mean obviously, some people are going to want to be signing up. Obviously, you can’t do that yet, until the price has been set. So, is there any kind of way (

Aral: Of course.) they can express their interested or find out more information or whatever?

Aral: They definitely can. The site is “singlularity08.com”. You can also get to it from “singularityconference.com”. And, basically, we have a blog there and you can express your interest. You can email me directly as well. My email address is “[email protected]”. Or just email my private address at “[email protected]”. Yes, so definitely, if you want to be kept in touch when we do release information, but there is also an RSS feed that you can subscribe to on the site.

Paul: Cool! Well thank you very much for coming on the show.

Aral: Thank you for having me, Paul. And of course you’re speaking.

Paul: Well, yes, of course. That goes without saying (Paul laughs).

Aral: Are you excited? Have you decided what you are speaking about?

Paul: I have not a clue yet, no. (Aral laughs)

Aral: Have I just put you on the spot?

Paul: Yes, totally. Thank you very much. (Aral laughs) And its going to be a weird one. It’s going to be a different way of speaking and so you kind of need to tailor what you’re doing to approach. It will be interesting.

Aral: Exactly. And we’re going have dry runs and we’re going to try out the interface as well.

Paul: Cool.

Aral: And maybe tweak it for different types of presentations. We just have so much potential with what we can do.

Paul: Mmmm. Yeah.

Aral: Because, we can actually control the medium. So, it’s really exciting.

Paul: Excellent! Excellent stuff! Really looking forward to it and we’ll get you back on the show closer to the time to see if we can drum up a bit more support for it. Excellent stuff. Thank you for your time.

Aral: Sounds great, Paul. Thank you so much.

Paul: Alright then.

Listeners email:

An alternative wireframing tool

A few weeks back I talked on the show about wireframing tools. Not long afterwards I received an enthusiastic email from Wen talking about a product called OverSite. He was so passionate about the product that I thought we should get him on the show to talk about it. This is what he had to say…

I’ve been catching up on my episodes of BoagWorld, and I just recently listened to your discussion about wireframing. As a UI designer, I completely understand the importance of mocking up a UI, and testing the mockup, before ever launching Photoshop.or Dreamweaver. So I thought I’d provide a review of a wireframing tool that I use, called OverSite. I haven’t seen many other tools out there like it, so I figured you and your listeners might find it useful.

OverSite is a shareware application that runs on Windows as well as Mac OS X; I use the Mac version myself, but am able to exchange OverSite files back and forth with my PC-using colleagues. OverSite lets you create a full or partial representation of your site structure: all of the sections and pages that make up your site. You can do this in one of two ways. The first way is fairly predictable; you add one section or page at a time by clicking a button, entering a name in a popup dialog, and clicking OK. The second way is fairly clever. You open a window that OverSite calls the Rapid Structure Creator. There, you type out your entire site structure in one text area, putting line breaks between sections and pages, and using indentation to indicate nested levels. Then you just click OK and viola! OverSite generates a tree depicting your entire site structure.

At this point, you can dive into your wireframing. Each page contains its own wireframe canvas. You can place the usual widgets on the canvas: buttons, textfields, checkboxes, images, etc. You can also place basic geometric shapes like circles, rectangles, lines and stars on the canvas. Each component can be individually styled; you can also create global styles that apply to all components, or to components of a specific type. OverSite also lets you create what it calls composites, which are complex elements that are made up of individual widgets.

Let’s say that you have a search form that will appear on a few different pages. You can create a composite representing this form. The composite might contain a few labels and text fields, maybe a checkbox or two, and a couple of buttons. If you want, you can tell OverSite to automatically draw a border around the form elements. Once you’ve created that form composite, you can drop it into your wireframes where ever you want it.

OverSite does lack built-in, complex widget types, such as tables. You can create them out of the widgets that OverSite does provide, but it would be nice for OverSite to create them for you.

While each page has its own wireframe canvas, so does each section. The purpose of a section’s wireframe is to create elements that will appear on all of the pages within that section. For those who have used server-side-includes, it’s kind of like that. As an example, say you had a navigation bar that should go on the top of every page in your Products And Services section. You would create that navigation bar once, in the Products And Services wireframe canvas. Then the nav bar will appear in every page within that section. In addition, OverSite provides tools to modify that nav bar in specific pages, for example, to change the color of a specific link in the nav bar when you’re actually on the page that that link refers to.

Static wireframes are fine, but I prefer being able to test the interaction between screens before I actually build the site out. OverSite lets you link any widget or composite to another page. If you don’t want to do the work yourself, you can also tell OverSite to auto-generate a simple navigation bar. Then, you can use OverSite’s built-in web browser to test out your site’s navigation.

Another useful thing I’ve found is OverSite’s notes. The notes functionality lets you provide details about specific widgets. That way, when you print or export your wireframes, you can include more information to whomever you’re handing them off to.

As an added bonus, OverSite will also create a graphical sitemap based on your website structure. You can tweak the appearance of the sitemap… the operative word being “tweak”. Fonts, colors, spacing, and icon sizes are under your control, but not much more. Here’s where I think the application could do better to allow you to fully customize the sitemap. Still, it’s created automatically for you without your having to lift a finger, so that’s something. Plus, the sitemap can be exported into a number of formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, Scalable Vector Graphics, and others.

Once you’ve finished your wireframes and want someone else to be able to play around with them, you can export them as web pages for non-OverSite-using people to click-through. You have two options here: export your stuff as pure HTML, or export them as imagemaps. The trade-off between the two is fairly obvious: pure HTML will provide you web pages that looks more “real world”, but won’t look exactly like your wireframes do, and they’ll look different in different browsers. Imagemaps ensure that you know exactly what your pages will look like, but it’s typically not going to look like a real web site.

As a UI designer, OverSite’s become a pretty indispensable tool in my software arsenol. You can get it at the developer’s website.

A vertical rhythm calculator

In the same show we also had Jason Beaird talking about vertical rhythm (among other things) and this promoted an email from James. He wrote…

Hi I’ve been listening to your podcast for about six months now and really enjoy the mixed style of content and witty banter.

With all the talk of CSS vertical rhythm and em based layouts I thought I would point you in the direction of a vertical rhythm calculator that I built in Flex to help people work out all of those nice em values. My own site has been developed using the same principles with all typography and measurements set in em’s for an elastic layout. I am developing an AIR version that has an integrated browser so that you get visual feedback of your calculations, I remember one of the John’s comment on how useful such a tool would be on the fabulous Rissington podcast.

I have checked it out myself and have to say it is very impressive. What is more he has now created that desktop version. Check it out.

110. The mighty Meyer

Posted in Classic shows on February 6, 2008 by Paul Boag

On Show 110: Eric Meyer on version targeting, the business benefits of usability testing and do I have to have a blog?

Podcast: Download (36.0MB)

News and events | The profit and loss of usability | Eric Meyer on version targeting | Listener emails

News and events

Before we kick off the news section today I should point out that I actually link to many more articles, tutorials and news stories than I ever include on the show. If you go to boagworld and click the links in the header you can receive all of these posts by either email or RSS.

CSS reference library

Raise your hands if you have ever used the W3 School. Okay put your hand down now because you are looking kind of stupid. For those of you who didn’t raise your hands the W3 School is a comprehensive reference sources for almost every web language around. It really is very impressive.

The problem is that it doesn’t provide the nicest user experience. If you are looking for CSS reference information then a possible alternative is the new Sitepoint reference section. At the moment it only includes information on CSS however they are obviously looking to expand.

Its design is a lot more attractive than W3 School and although it is not as comprehensive it will provide you with all the latest information on CSS properties including CSS 3. It also provides you with an indication of which browsers support that property.

Stay on :target

Talking of CSS 3 there is an interesting article by Brian Suda over at Think Vitamin entitled Stay on :target. Target is a new CSS pseudo-class being introduced in CSS 3. Although it has yet to be implemented by Internet Explorer it is supported by many other browsers.

Essentially what target does is allow you to style a target element in much the same way you can style on hover. So when you click on a link that goes to a fragment identifier (what used to be called anchor links) then it styles that fragment.

So for example a good use of this attribute would be to highlight the content that you have just been jumped to (like the fade to yellow technique) or to hide and show content when the user clicks on a tab.

Of course many of you might be asking why I bring this up when it isn’t supported in IE. Well, not only is it an interesting glimpse into what is to come, it can also be used right now when the functionality provided isn’t crucial. For example you wouldn’t want it to hide and show content but it might be okay to highlight linked content with it.

Read the article and you can see the potential yourself.

Search behaviour patterns

Another article worth reading is Search behaviour principles over at Boxes and Arrows. This article looks at how people search and the different types of searchers there are. It also looks at what things affect the way people search and techniques that can be used to accommodate their approaches.

As I have said before on this show, not enough attention is given to search and this article will really get you thinking about how to better accommodate it. Best of all there are still a lot of hints that can be applied here even if you are lumbered with an inflexible search mechanism that cannot be customised or tweaked.

10 principles of effective web design

Talking of search usability brings us nicely on to our final story of the day which is a post from Smashing magazine. We haven’t mentioned them in a while but this week they are back with another top ten list. This time it is the 10 principles of effective web design.

Personally I think it is a misleading title as actually the post is about basic usability techniques. That said, it is a very good list and contains some really solid advice. It also contains lots of examples which really helps you get your head around the issues.

I don’t think the post has a lot to offer seasoned usability testers but if you have always avoided the subject in the past then this is a nice simple starting point.

Feature: The profit and loss of usability

We have looked at the subject of usability testing relatively recently on the show and have mentioned it countless times before. However, never have we taken a step back and asked the fundamental question: why is usability testing important? This week we look at how usability testing can be presented to clients and dispel some of the misconceptions about it.

For more detail on what we cover read my post The profit and loss of usability.

Expert interview: Eric Meyer on version targeting

Paul: So on last weeks show we discussed Internet Explorer 8 and some of the plans Microsoft have for it and joining me this week is Eric Meyer. Hello Eric, good to have you on the show.

Eric: Cheers, hello.

Paul: Cheers, very British of you.

Eric: I try to localise my content.

Paul: Yes, very good. Most impressed! We’ve got Eric on the show really because this whole news surrounding Microsoft and what they were planning to do was broken on the A List Apart website, in 2 articles, one of which Eric wrote. The reason I think I wanted to get you on the show to talk about it is because I was kind of struck by the honesty of your article that a lot of what you were saying was very much ‘I really don’t want to like this idea but…’ kind of attitude. Which is the kind of attitude that I think goes down well with the people that listen to this show. So I was wondering Eric, could you kick off by giving a brief explanation of what it is that Microsoft are proposing doing, just so that we’ve got a bit of an understanding of it?

Eric: Um, well pretty much what they’re proposing is that Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 8, and in the future will recognise a single element, a meta tag which can be used to say ‘This is the version of Internet Explorer that I want you to act like’ so that Internet Explorer 11 can act like Internet Explorer 8 did, or Internet Explorer 7.

Paul: Right.

Eric: So the idea basically is well they call it Version Targeting so that you can have your page actually targeted to a certain version of Internet Explorer even if newer versions have come out.

Paul: Ok. So, I mean at face value that sounds very much like browser sniffing, which is obviously something that has kind of become considered bad practice. How does it differ?

Eric: Well my perspective is that it differs because it actually reverses the direction of sniffing. Browser sniffing To date it has been a case of authors trying to figure out what browsers they want to sniff for and what should happen as a result. This was sort of the reverse side of. It would be the browser sniffing the page to say, ‘What do you want me to do?’, at least in the case of Internet Explorer. It should be clear that Microsoft has so far as I am aware anyway not proposed that anyone else has to do this, or that this has become any part of any sort of standard. They’re saying if it is what we want. This is what we’re planning to do on the browser. So they have the same echoes. I really feel like they are not the same thing. There are a lot of people who disagree with me but they are really very different because one of the reasons that browser sniffing by authors has become viewed as a bad practice is because it becomes fragile over time. First of all there’s a case of people saying ‘If this is Internet Explorer do such and so’, and they don’t consider that there might be a version this version of Internet Explorer that might change what I’m trying to work around. Another reason is that people make guesses about what will be in user agent strings which is usually what people browser sniff on and sometimes those guesses turn out to be wrong as when Safari first came out its user agent strings had the phrase White Gecko in parenthesis.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: A lot of people had done browser sniffing scripts that looked for the word Gecko so all of the scripts thought that Safari was Mozilla, Firefox or whatever and so some of them broke. In a way it is hard to fault the authors because how are they supposed to know a browser from Apple, not based on Gecko, would have the word Gecko on it’s user agent string and yet that happened so this would be much more controlled it seems to me were it would be browser saying ‘What do you want me to act like?’ and that’s the other reason this has varied from browser sniffing usually tries to predict the future, whereas this version targeting that looks like it will happen in Internet Explorer it actually has to predict the past which is inherently easier to do.

Paul: Why has Microsoft decided to take this position? It seems to me like in some ways they’ve created a rod for their own back in the sense that they are producing I don’t know, Internet Explorer 11 and in that has got to be the rendering engine for 10, 9, 8, 7 and all the way back. Is that not just a lot of work on their part? What’s driving them in this direction?

Eric: I think it will be a lot of work on their part. I do not believe that the idea is to have completely separate rendering engines for each of those browsers, but to have effectively if then else statements in the rendering engine or cases or switch statements for a little more program language savvy. The reason that they’re doing this is that they really have a problem, well they have a dilemma, and they need to get out of the dilemma. The dilemma that they face is basically this: There are a lot of pages out there both on the public web and in private intranets that were developed to IE6 or IE7 let’s say and weren’t developed in an open standards way they weren’t developed the way a lot of people in the standards movement develop sites which is to code to the standards and then figure out how to work around the problems that they encounter. If you have an intranet, a massive intranet site, and your company standard is IE7 the default tendency is to develop it to IE7, you use behaviours that are not correct according to the standard, but are the way that IE7 acts. You have all these past mistakes which every browser makes past mistakes. IE7 it can be argued has made more mistakes than others, not an argument I want to get into. They have that situation where there’s this large legacy of pages. So they can’t have those break for a number of reasons, many of them business reasons, actual monetary reasons but at the ground level you could look at it as if the browser changes enough that those pages start to break it becomes a bad browsing experience for users of that browser. At the same time, the Internet Explorer team would like very much to improve their standards support. They did this for IE7; they fixed a lot of things. They went more towards the updating the browser and didn’t worry quite as much about breaking sites, and they got into quite a lot of trouble over it both internally and externally. There were people who took on the task for breaking the web. We’ve been here before as an industry back in 2000. This is how DOCTYPE switching became to be because the first few iterations of IE and Netscape did very badly at CSS support. They tried and more power too them but Internet Explorer got the box model wrong. Netscape got so many things wrong that they had to junk it and start off with a new browser. So DOCTYPE switching was basically invented as a way of being able to say ‘Given these criteria render pages the way they used to be rendered and give them these other criteria go the more standard route’. From the Microsoft prospective this is like a super DOCTYPE switch except in this case instead of hinging it on a DOCTYPE they’re hinging it on information about what the browser version is.

Paul: Yeah. It is interesting when I first heard about this and I first read your article and the other one on A List Apart, my initial reaction was oh no all this feels wrong and indeed which is what in the sense you said that you went through when you were writing the article and then we actually were discussing it on last weeks show with John Oxton and John Hicks, the same kind of thing came out that we felt very uncomfortable with this and we were reflecting on a lot of things that were said including Jeremy Keith who made this point of you’re actually in a position where you’re actively having to tell Internet Explorer 8 how to behave like Internet Explorer 8 and not IE7, which seems a bizarre set of circumstances but since then I’ve been thinking about it a little and I’m struggling to come up with a reason that I really object to this beyond a principle of the thing that I feel like I shouldn’t agree with it but I’m having trouble articulating why I guess. What kind of things are you seeing? You must have seen a lot of objections come up when you are brave enough to step up and say what you did on A List Apart, I’m sure there was quite a backlash. What kind of things are people saying and throwing against this?

Eric: Well I can see quite a few objections.

Paul: *laughs*

Eric: Well one of them is an objection that Jeremy brought forth which I think I am glad that were talking about that which is that the default behaviour is to default to IE7 as I understand. So when IE8 comes out, if it doesn’t see this version target meta tag in a page it will assume that page is to be treated as IE7 would have treated it, which again completely reverses what were used to. What were used to is when a new browser comes out the page will be interpreted according to the latest and greatest unless you’re using a quirks mode DOCTYPE switch but anyway, it’s bizarre, and yet I did go through the same thing when I first saw it I was like &#”;What!&#”; *laughs*

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: Good old WTF basically.

Paul: *laughs*

Eric: And when I first saw this it was at the beginning of January when Aaron Gustafson submitted the first draft of his article, I hadn’t actually heard about this before then, and I started arguing with him about it in the A List Apart editing forum and very quickly came to realise, &#”;Why am I objecting to this?&#”; and I took the time to step back and say &#”;What’s the deal here?&#”; and that’s were my article came from with the two of us going back and for and it was like, could you write an article about that because that’s what a lot of people are going to go through. So there’s the default behaviour, you have to have the meta to have the latest and greatest, yeah, I would like to see that changed, I would like to have Internet Explorer act the way browsers always have because that’s what I’m used too, but at the same time I have to be realistic about the problems that they face, that I was explaining before.

Paul: Yeah, because that wouldn’t solve their fundamental problem which is that people that aren’t aware of working to the latest standards aren’t going to be aware that they have to put meta data in there pages either.

Eric: Right, so people have said that Microsoft, of anyone, are in a position to educate people who are not aware of the need to do that one thing and that’s the point I made when I was talking to a member of the IE team about this. There are other objects that I think mostly have been related to that for example Bruce Lawson posted just in the last few days, the default behaviour means that from an accessibility point of view any page that doesn’t have this meta tag is stuck with IE7′s accessibility support which apparently is not were it should be, so he’s made the point that freezing pages to IE7 in the absence of any other information freezes them in this inaccessible state, I’m not an accessibility expert so I don’t know how best to categories that but, will have accessibility problems and keep them for years and years as opposed to, ya know, as accessibility problems improve in Internet Explorer, getting those benefits and that a very real objection and a very real concern, and I think one that needs to be made to the Microsoft people because accessibility is very important. There are other objections from the javaScript community, it’s actually been interesting in the javaScript community, there’s been a real dichotomy, there have been some javaScript library authors who’s been like &#”;Yes! Finally, thank god somebody is talking about versioning!&#”; right, and there’ve been others who have been like &#”;Oh my god, are you kidding, libraries will have to support all these backwards engines&#”;.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: Again, I’m not an expert to know what side of that certain dichotomy I would come down on, in my own blog posts I’m saying, wouldn’t you just use object detection and not worry about what the version number is?, but I guess that doesn’t fully address the problem, or at least that’s what I’ve been told. Again it’s something that needs to be figured out, because there have been some fantastic javaScript libraries and fantastic things that can be done with those and if this is a move that will hamper the growth of that field then that’s something else that would also bother me. There’s also the security objects, the idea that every backwards versions that you have your complicating your ability to keep your security holes closed, that’s the kind of thing we’re I have to say &#”;Look that’s down to the browser maker to figure out&#”;.

Paul: I guess that the problem with the whole default behaviour thing is how badly it’s going to break things, how many sites are going to be broken if the default behaviour was the latest browser and how badly are these sites going to be broken, are they going to be unusable? Are we talking about some small changes? I guess there are a lot of websites out there as well that just aren’t supported at all, content has been put online, nobody is checking them, nobody is checking when a new browser comes along, and if when IE8 was released and those websites became completely inaccessible and unusable then obviously there’s a big issue there because your loosing vast amounts of content on the web. I guess a lot of it is unknown entities at the moment isn’t it? It’s guess work.

Eric: Yeah. There’s a lot of guess work and that’s part of the problem, I think if we knew, if there were some kind of statistics, like if the IE team were to come out and said we built a version were the default behaviour was latest and we tested it against these 1000 QA sites and 20% of them broke, 5% were completely unusable, that would be one thing, or if they said we tested and 2 sites were broken, you could still read them but they look a little weird, that would be different and nobody does really know and at least nobody outside of Microsoft and maybe not even them, I don’t know if they’ve done that kind of testing yet. And, I’m sorry, there is one other objection that come from a couple of other browser manufacturers that this is in affect, anti-competitive, whether it’s meant to be or not, but it has that effect because Internet Explorer has such a large market share they have to worry about what it does and so to them it becomes a lot harder to do that, so if they are going to keep up this effort it’s going to become a lot harder to do in this version targeting world after a few releases, of course the question is whether they would need to do that or not and there’s a lot of debate about that, there are people who are like, &#”;Just stop, stop making reference to Internet Explorer and just let it strangle itself to death&#”;. I don’t want to get into all the back and forth that’s happened but that is another objection.

Paul: I guess, is there some danger here as well that once you’ve got this version targeting in place Microsoft could go off on some complete tangent and start introducing all kinds of proprietary functionality into their browser that isn’t supported in the other and we end up in a situation were we’re having browser wars again with different browsers implementing different proprietary tags and stuff like that, or are we truly beyond that do you think?

Eric: Umm, It is certainly a risk and how much of a risk influences were people stand on this. I don’t see that personally as being much of a risk, because yes, the Internet Explorer team could introduce a load of proprietary properties that let an author change the colour of the browser kernel right or replace the backwards and forwards buttons in the browser, whatever, and if nobody else supports that, I think those efforts will largely support them strangling themselves, I mean, colours scroll bars we don’t really hear about anymore, people will still do them, but nobody else really cares.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: So, I would not claim to be smart enough to see everything that could possibly be done but I think in a lot of ways that might not be a bad thing, because it would let Microsoft experiment with less constraints, they can do initial implementation of things that are in CSS3 and if the behaviour of those things changes, in a later version they can fix what they did, they can change to match the spec, and then still have backwards compatibility for pages that took assumption of that, there are people that would say &#”;Well they should never implement anything that hasn’t been completely nailed down&#”;, but that doesn’t really work, because one of the ways that you get yourself out of the candidate recommendation stages at the W3C is to have implementations and the only way to have implementations is for someone to implement them and if they find out during that phase, and this is what the candidate phase is about, if they find out in that phase that such and such property that has been specified, doesn’t work in the real world for whatever reason, they’re then able to go back and change it, but in the mean time if your Internet Explorer and 11′ty billion pages have been implemented to your particular version of the property.

Paul: So, you wrote this A List Apart article that went out of the 21st of January, and we should probably say that we’re recording this interview on the 29th of January and it’s not going to go out for another week, so things might move on in-between but there’s obviously been a lot of discussion since you released that article, have your views really changed in any way, are you still in favour of this approach or have there been more concerns raised that have made you doubt it?

Eric: Hmm, I’m still in favour of the general idea, the implementation I’m a little less, I guess I would say I’m more agnostic about, but the general idea of backwards compatibility so as not to break sites, whilst still being able to change and improve and fix the browser I’m all in favour off. The default behaviour still bothers me, and I’m still having trouble working out if there is a case of honest to goodness technical reasons or it just feels wrong, there has to be something, how’s it’s gone about is a different question, if the IE team and the people that they have to answer to effectively can be convinced that having the default behaviour switched and then educating people whole want to freeze their sites, on how to freeze there sites using the meta, they can be convinced to do that and that that will fix the problems that they face then I’m all for it. Accessibility concerns do bother me and I think that that’s another argument in favour of switching the default behaviour but at the same time I also have to recognise that switching the default behaviour, as you said earlier, from a certain prospective, completely negates the entire reason to do this, given a certain set of circumstances if they’re going to switch the default behaviour it might almost as well not even do it. Again though that also depends on how much breakage on how many sites and what kind.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: The other unknown that we’re facing here is we don’t yet know just how different the IE8 behaviours are compared to IE7, we have a clue in that we already know that there’s an internal build of IE8 that can support the ACID2 test, which they weren’t even really very close too, well I guess that depends on who you talk to, but they didn’t support it before so in or to support ACID2 they have to have things like generated content with CSS which we completely don’t have in IE7 they have to have fixed some of there parsing bugs and so on and so forth that hints at a very large change, an even bigger change than that between IE6 and IE7, but we don’t know at this stage, it could be, and this has been one of my objects to ACID2 or one of my discomforts with ACID2 over the years, it could be that they’ve just implemented exactly the things that were needed to ACID2 work and not more, which is the wrong way to go about supporting ACID2 and I don’t know that they’ve done that, but it’s possible. So I may be that it’s not such a huge change, but those things came about as sort of a broader push towards implementing more advanced selectors and fixing bugs and implementing area content and really pushing into the areas of CSS2 that they don’t support and the areas of advanced CSS modules that they don’t support yet, then that could be an enormous change and in that case there’s more chance of them breaking a ton of sites if they don’t have a mechanism like this in place to deal with them.

Paul: So I mean in some senses, after discussing this for however long we’ve been discussing it, there’s very little at this stage that we can really do about this, for the average web designer, Internet Explorer 8 isn’t going to be out in the immediate, one presumes and even when it does we’re talking about relatively minor changes that they’re going to have to make to their site, I guess the biggest immediate concern is maybe how you think about building sites at the moment, do you worry so much about things like progressive enhancement if maybe the way that Internet Explorer works in the future, I guess they’re still good principles.

Eric: Yes, absolutely they’re still good principles and that is how I have developed sites and will continue to develop sites and really I think what it comes down to here is who’s going to have to add the meta tag.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: Is it going to be people who do forward development, ya know forward compatible development, is it going to be standards aware developers or is it going to be people who aren’t in that sort of craft. It’s not fair in a way, that the people who have been doing things in the right way will have to take that on, but on the other hand it could well if you look at the numbers, there are a lot less of us.

Paul: And in some ways we’re much more equipped to do it.

Eric: Right, to understand why it’s needed and how to do it the right way and when not to do it for that matter.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: Because when you develop a site for someone and it seems like a one off and they really not going to be keeping it up, you might want to keep the meta tag off because you know that that will default to IE7 and that’s what you want or you might explicitly include it because you want it to default to IE7 and IE8 or ya know on my site if this happens I’ll probably use the edge keyword of IE equals 1024.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: So I’ll always get the latest and greatest and so that’s for me personally, but for a client I would have a much harder time justifying that because clients don’t care if it’s forward compatible development or not they just care about whether their site works and will continue to work right and so the point has been made, as you did, that in a lot of ways people who are sort of more clued in are better equipped to take this on as opposed to somebody’s grandmother who uses Dreamweaver or whatever to put together a site for her poetry circle and this happens all the time, they don’t even look at the mark-up let alone would understand why this would need to be done why there would need to be some kind of meta tag, first you would need to explain the concept of tags etc, etc, etc.

Paul: I mean a lot of these people don’t even realise that there are multiple versions of a browser, or indeed that there are multiple browsers.

Eric: *laughs* And those are also issues that will need to be faced, somebody is going to have to do this. A lot of these advances that IE8 seems to have ready to go as indicated by passing the ACID2 test may well have to come back out.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: You can always back changes out of a code base and that really seems to me to be the dilemma and I’ll want to say again, there are people who reject that as being the choice, there are people who feel very strongly that that isn’t in fact a choice, even if you except that’s a choice that they should keep the changes in but be willing to break sites because sites always have to be updated anyway and that’s how browsers have always done it, so there’s a large amount of history that says that can happen but browsers can still advance.

Paul: We will see won’t we, that’s what it boils down to. We will have to wait and see. Okay, Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking that through, it’s an interesting area and I think it’s an area that will have significant impact on how things develop in the future, so it’s good to have your perspective on it. Thanks very much.

Eric: Paul, thanks for having me on, I really appreciate it.

Listeners email:

Basic CMS options

As in last week’s show I so badly bastardised the name of our textmate reviewer, I decided it is only fair to allow him another go this week. He asks:

I have a friend who wants me to build a website that they can update. They don’t know how to write HTML or CSS. What is the best way to solve this problem?

The obvious solution is to use a content management system of some type. Indeed this is something we have covered before on the show back in show 24. If you were building a relatively big site that needs constant updating, then I would definitely encourage you to check out that episode. However if your needs are simpler a full blown CMS might be overkill. In such situations you should consider a simple blogging system like WordPress.

One final option maybe to use a tool like Contribute. That way you could build a nice simple static site but your friend would have a WYSIWYG tool to edit it.

The importance of blogs

Our second question is from Lauren:

My question is about starting a blog. Right now, my nights are filled with homework, but once I complete my program, I can truly dedicate my time to building my portfolio. Are blogs really that important now? I don’t know if I can come up with meaningful content to make my blog stand out. Does this mean that I won’t be able to find a good job in the industry without one?

You talk about a portfolio and blog as if they are separate things, but I would suggest they should be combined. As somebody who regularly hires web designers, I have to say I find portfolio websites frustrating. At worst they show me some pretty pictures, at best examples of fully functional websites. However, what they don’t tell me is the thought process behind the designs. Why did you choose the colors you did? Who is the target audience and how did this affect the design?

A blog can also be used as a portfolio but allows more depth into the designs you are presenting. Also, a blog allows you to link to other content on the web and express your views on that content. This shows me as a potential employer that you are well read and interested in what is out there.

As a student looking for your first job I wouldn’t expect your blog to include new CSS techniques or innovative approaches to user testing. However, I would like to see examples of work fully explained and evidence that you are reading other web design sites and have opinions on what you are reading.

109. Rissington?

Posted in Classic shows on January 28, 2008 by Paul Boag

On Show 109. IE8 divides the web design community, Anton Peck talks about imagery, and the Rissington Podcast crew stand in for Marcus.

News and events | Anton Peck on imagery | Listener emails

Unfortunately Marcus is not yet back on active duty but does thank you all for your kind support. However, do not fret. You do not have to endure another show of me waffling on by myself. Stepping into Marcus’ still warm shoes are two giants in the world of web design and podcasting. From the infamous Rissington Podcast we have Jon Hicks and John Oxton.

News and events

Microsoft to automatically roll out IE7

First up I was sent an article by several listeners which seems to indicate Microsoft is intending to do an auto-update of Internet explorer on the 12th February.

When IE7 was initially released Microsoft made the decision to make the upgrade to their latest browser optional. So even though a user had requested automatic updates they would not receive IE7 unless they specifically approved it. This decision not to force users to update frustrated those in the web design community who wanted to wave goodbye to the evils of IE6.

However, it would now appear Microsoft has decided to take the plunge and will be rolling out IE7 as part of the automatic update. Not all users are signed up to receive these updates but those who are will be using IE7 from February 12th (if they are not already).

Expect to see a significant decline in IE6 users to your site very soon. Perhaps it will not be long before IE6 follows IE5.

IE8 divides the standards community

Talking of Microsoft and Internet Explorer, probably the biggest story of the week is Microsoft’s plans for IE8.

IE8 promises to be a huge step forward in standards support and has been significantly rebuilt in order to enable this. However, such dramatic changes in their rendering engine comes at a cost. They fear that by becoming more standards compliant they will break many websites which are not built with standards in mind.

The way they have dealt with this problem is to introduce a small piece of code that you drop into your pages which can be used to specify what version of IE your site is designed to work with. The browser then renders the webpage as if it was that version of the browser. So for example you could specify that a page was designed for IE7 and a person viewing the page in IE8 would see the page as if it was rendered in IE7.

If no browser is specified then it defaults to rendering the page in IE7 that way no matter what changes Microsoft make in future browsers legacy sites are still rendered correctly.

What on the face of it seems like a very sensible plan has caused uproar in the web design community. A List Apart and Eric Meyer seem to be generally supporting the principle while many others including the likes of Jeremy Keith strongly object.

One of the main sticking point seems to be that this approach breaks progressive enhancement. In other words I may choose to implement a piece of functionality on my site knowing that it wont currently work in IE7 but does work in other more compliant browsers such as Firefox. If i don’t add this special code when IE8 comes along it will look at my page see the code is absent and so render it as IE7. That means even if IE8 supports the functionality now it wont use it because it is rendering my site as IE7.

Its a complex issue with good arguments on both sides. In next week’s show Eric Meyer and myself will discuss it in more depth.

HTML 5 is coming

Still on the subject of the future of web design we now turn to HTML 5 which has just been released in draft format. Sitepoint provides a nice little summary of what is in and what’s out. There is also a summary of the differences between HTML 4 and 5 which is very useful as well.

I cannot claim to have read the entire specification yet but I have to say what I have seen contains some exciting stuff. Having HTML tags to define common areas like headers, footers and navigation offers some interesting possibilities and its good to see built in support for video and audio.

The big shame is that practical application of this is still a long way off but its nice to know that there is potential there.

Career advice for web designers

Of course all these upcoming technologies wont matter to you if my predications of a couple of weeks ago come true and we all find ourselves without a job! This week I was pleased to discover I was not the only one with a pessimistic attitude towards the coming year. Robert Scoble has posted a entry entitled “what to do if you are laid off in 2008 recession“, which I thought was a particularly cheery title.

Actually it is a really good post with some excellent advice. What I like most about it is that the advice applies as much to a student trying to break into web design for the first time as it does to a out of work professional.

In fact if you are considering a career change of any kind (or have had one forced upon you) then this is a good read.

Advice includes…

Spend at least 30% of your day job hunting
Start a blog
Share your knowledge with the world
Demonstrate your skills on youtube
Networking
Contact web start ups because they are hiring.
Volunteer
Prioritise friends and family

The list goes on and is definitely worth reading.

Expert interview: Anton Peck on imagery

Paul: So joining me today, as I said at the start of the show, is Anton Peck. How are you Anton?

Anton Peck: I’m doing great Paul. Thank you.

Paul: It’s good to have you on the show.

Anton Peck: I know. It’s about time isn’t it? *laughs*

Paul: It seems like it’s been a while. We haven’t actually had you on BoagWorld before have we?

Anton Peck: No, no. This is the first time.

Paul: But I’ve known you from… Where did we first meet? Was it South By Southwest?

Anton Peck: Yeah. I think we had sorta done virtual communication before then through email, IM or whatever. But we actually first met at South By Southwest last time.

Paul: Cool. So Anton, tell me and the listeners a little bit about yourself. How do you describe yourself? Do you primarily describe yourself as a web designer or an illustrator?

Anton Peck: That’s a tough call. The illustration is more my fancy, my hobby. It’s where my passion lies but the design is what I’ve been doing for a long time. So it’s sort of my trade of skill.

Paul: I see. So you’re kind of torn between two worlds.

Anton Peck: A little bit.

Paul: But fortunately those two worlds do overlap quite a lot which is why we have you on the show today. We thought it would be good to get Anton in really not to just talk about illustration but to talk about imagery on the web generally as that’s kind of his thing really, amongst many others, because you have a growing reputation. You do art-casts don’t you which are like illustration tutorials? Is that a good way to describe them?

Anton Peck: Yeah, that’s probably a good way to describe them. That is the rumor that I do those isn’t it. I don’t do them as often as I should but I do manage to get them out every once in a while.

Paul: And they are excellent. I have to say, I really do enjoy watching them. So let’s talk a little about imagery on websites and the use of imagery on websites. Let’s start off with a really nebulous and broad question that I guess is pretty impossible to answer but I’m going to ask anyway, which is what makes good imagery for a website? How do you go about picking imagery for a website?

Anton Peck: Well there’s a few things and some of them might seem obvious. First of all the images should complement the content of the website so that the substance isn’t too diluted from its original intent. I know that might seem kinda out there and obvious but it’s probably disappointing and surprising that there’s a lot of website owners that would want to put an image on a website because it’s really pretty or cool.

Paul: I guess it’s important to have imagery that relates to the branding or message you are trying to communicate.

Anton Peck: Right because imagery is meant to support the content rather than take away from it. You don’t want to pull everybody’s focus right away to the images but at the same time you want to support what’s already there. The images should have some interesting quality about them which could mean how well they have been cropped or resized. They should be saved at a pretty decent quality if they are JPEG’s or GIF’s. Not over compressed as they can sometimes diminish the personality of the website. When you go to a website and you see that it’s over compressed it really doesn’t look very good.

Paul: So for a relative newbie, an amateur that’s getting into web design, there’s always this question of GIF vs. JPEG. What do you use and when?

Anton Peck: Well for photographic style images that have a lot of… I would say colours but that’s not quite accurate but more photographic style images I would use JPEG’s. Then for images like logos, things that seem very flat and have a limited palette, maybe go with the GIF’s. Although I tend to do that a little bit less now that PNG’s are finding a little bit more broad support among browsers.

Paul: So do you use PNG’s very much?

Anton Peck: Every so often. They compress nicely especially when you use the adaptive palette which is similar to a GIF format but they can actually get a little bit smaller.

Paul: Cool, yeah. That’s been my experience as well.

Anton Peck: It just gets a little tricky when you are trying to do transparency.

Paul: Yes, exactly.

Anton Peck: That’s a whole other discussion.

Paul: Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to open that can of worms today. So any other tips for selecting good imagery?

Anton Peck: Well I would say it’s got to be appropriate and tasteful of course. So that way you can minimise the risk of offending someone or losing possible business. If you might have a certain sense of humour and want to put something on your website, you might have to watch out for how that might appear to someone else.

Paul: And I guess cultural considerations come in there as well. It’s easy to forget that the worldwide web is worldwide.

Anton Peck: Definitely.

Paul: The next big issue that a lot of people face is this whole kind of stock imagery kind of question. You reach a point where your website’s becoming relatively important to your business or you’re a web designer that’s working for certain clients. At what stage do you say that actually stock imagery isn’t the way to go, perhaps I should be getting something specifically commissioned whether that be commissioned illustrations, commission photography or whatever. It’s a difficult line. What’s your opinion on stock imagery? Is it the devil’s spawn or does it have a place? What do you think?

Anton Peck: No, I think it definitely has a place. It offers a great solution for those trying to find a good quality image when they can’t afford a commissioned photograph.

Paul: So what kinds of site do you use for stock imagery?

Anton Peck: I’ve been a fan of Crestock.com lately.

Paul: Ooo! I haven’t heard of that one.

Anton Peck: Yes and actually they have this huge contest going on where you can win a Mac Pro and all kinds of equipment. It’s a Photoshop contest and I happen to be one of the few judges on that particular site.

Paul: Ahh. So what’s this website again?

Anton Peck: It’s Crestock.com.

Paul: OK. I’ll check that out. Sounds good. So does that do both illustration and photography or…

Anton Peck: Yeah. They have a wide range of different material. They have background textures and you can search for pretty much anything there. A lot of it is user supported so if you even feel that you are a good photographer you can submit your work and see if you can even sell it and make a little bit of money off of it.

Paul: Oh cool. So when selecting stock photography, what should you look for? What should you avoid? The trouble with stock photography is a lot of it can look really similar to one another. What advice would you give about selecting stock imagery?

Anton Peck: Well there’s no real secret to it. There’s not a lot of advice either other than just go through a lot of it. Don’t try to find the very first searches you come across as that would be a higher chance it would be used somewhere else. You want to get a unique image, something that’s probably not as commonly found. It’s always a little disconcerting when you come across a new image that you see on 13 different sites like, “Oh that’s the same image used there”.

Paul: Yeah. It becomes obvious that it’s stock imagery.

Anton Peck: Right. So you want to find that unique image.

Paul: Yeah, couldn’t agree more.

Anton Peck: And the only way to find the perfect, unique image is to just go through a lot of it.

Paul: Yes! Which does take time doesn’t it.

Anton Peck: Certainly.

Paul: When it comes to commissioning stuff is there any particular advice you would give there in regards to briefing the photographer or the illustrator? I mean when somebody commissions you to do a piece of work, what kind of information are you after from them?

Anton Peck: Since they would commission me as an illustrator rather than an actual photographer, I’d mainly look at what they are trying to achieve for their website and how they expect it to support what they’ve done. One of the things that I was gong to talk about for commission photography, even though I’m not one, was the benefits for the websites because you can have a one of a kind image that fits exactly what is needed for the page. A photographer can come out to the business and take photos of the staff and location which is obviously something you can’t do with stock photos.

Paul: Yeah, which obviously makes a huge difference. I think often at times people actually want to see that kind of stuff because on the web you’ve got no way of judging what the company behind the website is really like. So to be able to see real imagery of real people and real locations does add some credibility and trustworthiness to a company. It’s not just somebody working out their back bedroom or whatever.

Anton Peck: Exactly what I was thinking, yes.

Paul: OK so you have a budget. How much difference does it make actually commissioning imagery rather than getting stock imagery. Is there really a difference? Is it really worth going out and getting stuff specifically commissioned?

Anton Peck: I would say if you are looking to get high exposure and if you were a big enough business I would definitely say do it.

Paul: So why is that? What difference does it make?

Anton Peck: Well that’s exactly what I mentioned earlier. It’s the one image that you are going to own or the website is going to own and it’s not going to be found anywhere else. Completely unique.

Paul: You do feel that when you go through these thousands and thousands of stock images that “Well, it’s pretty much unique. Who else is going to use it?” but it’s amazing how often images turn up. I’ve got a little program that changes my desktop image on a regular basis and I’ve had this really nice one that I loved and kept for a while which was a cityscape of London that had been made all futuristic and I thought “Wow! What a great image”. And then I’m going on the tube and there’s the same image plastered across the wall. It’s amazing how often they do turn up again.

Anton Peck: Yeah it’s takes away a little bit doesn’t it?

Paul: Yeah definitely. Definitely. You’re an illustrator, let’s get onto the role of illustration. What advances or disadvantages do you think that illustration has over photography. When should you be using photography, when should you be using illustration?

Anton Peck: Illustration’s gonna provide a whole different type of personality to a website that you can never find in a photo. You can create situations, objects, environments that would either be too expensive to reproduce or they just don’t exist in the real world. Things that you just can’t do with a photograph. Again, that’s going to have to be through the interview of the illustrator trying to describe whether the job is appropriate or not. Actually that would be up to the art director trying to commission to decide whether they need an illustrator or a photographer. But custom website illustrations are so unique right now. When you do have a custom illustration it stands out a great deal more than a photograph. I think one of the greatest examples that stands out on the top of my mind would be Andy Clark’s website with Kevin Cornell’s image that he did of that scooterboy, the guy on the scooter.

Paul: Yeah, it looks superb. That’s stuffandnonense.com, if I remember.

Anton Peck: .co.uk

Paul: Oh .co.uk. Well check that out.

Anton Peck: Just try to imagine if Andy would have reproduced that with a photograph. It wouldn’t have the same personality I don’t think. He wouldn’t have been able to pull it off.

Paul: So do you think that photography has less personality generally or is it just the stock photography that has less personality?

Anton Peck: I wouldn’t call it a more or less personality thing as much it would be a different type of personality. It depends on what you’ve going for.

Paul: Do you think there’s some situations where illustration just isn’t appropriate because it would create the wrong kind of personality or is illustration flexible enough to be able to work in most situations?

Anton Peck: No I think illustration is not appropriate for everything. I think there’s probably a time and a place where an illustration is not going to do the job of a photograph. The photograph tends to look a little bit more… I was going to say professional but I don’t think that’s the word for it. There’s a sort of business approach… I don’t know. Illustration is very personal. It’s one of a kind. It seems that if you have a corporation maybe an illustration isn’t going to work unless it’s a certain kind of illustration.

Paul: Yeah I kind of know what you mean. There’s something… A photograph has a kind of… trustworthiness isn’t the right word but a realism to it perhaps that lends itself to certain circumstances.

Anton Peck: Definitely. It’s really hard to distinguish between the two. It would really boil down to the specific case that it was going to be used.

Paul: Tell us a little bit about some of the different types of illustration and why you would pick when. Obviously every kind of illustrator has very different styles but are they any kinds of broad categories you would recommend in certain circumstances?

Anton Peck: Well, let me think off the top of my head. It seems like you have a real nice vector, flowery styles with flat colours like Veerle. Her work is fabulous and it’s all Illustrator. Her style is just so unique. Then I think of Kevin Cornell. His style is so organic and painted. Then there’s styles like my own. I tend to learn for more photorealism in some cases. My own personal gallery doesn’t lean that way too much. There’s a few different styles out there and it’s hard to say when it’s going to be used properly.

Paul: Do you think that some styles date more quickly than others? You talked about that flowery style where you see a lot of art deco type shapes being used on the web at the moment. Do you think that illustration goes through more fashion trends than photograph does?

Anton Peck: I would venture to say yes and in a way. However like all fashion trends, it always comes back. Right now the big popular thing is artwork that looks like it’s straight from the 70′s. The muted brown colours and the nice organic curves, swirls and circles, things like that. Those are going over quite well I think.

Paul: It’s interesting isn’t it. I think there some sites that need to be fashion conscious and on the cutting edge of what’s going on and there are others that need to be generic and long lasting. It very depends on what kind of industry you are in as whether you should follow these trends or not I guess.

Anton Peck: Right. Or then if it seems to expire then you can just change it out and get a new one.

Paul: The glory of CSS, the separation of content from design.

Anton Peck: Absolutely.

Paul: OK Anton. Thank you very much for coming on the show. It’s really interesting that we haven’t tackled the discussion of imagery before.

Anton Peck: I did have one real quick public service announce if you’ll let me have another minute.

Paul: Yeah, go for it.

Anton Peck: For your listeners I’m wanted to just bring up that they shouldn’t take images, and I know it’s kind of obvious, take images from fountain sites or Flickr or Google Image search. That’s just bad practice and they are normally just going to get found out and it’s not a very nice thing to do. If they find images on sites that they like, they can contact the owner to obtain permission.

Paul: And it’s surprising. Often the owners are very happy and flexible to accommodate that. If you take the time to contact them they are often very flattered that you asked. Good piece of advice. OK thank you very much Anton and we’ll get you back on the show again in the future. Good to talk to you.

Listeners email:

Textmate reviewed

Teifion shares his thoughts on Textmate for the mac, an incredibly powerful text editor with a sophisticated plug-in architecture.

I have to confess that I have only opened Textmate once and found myself unsure where to begin. I do know however that Teifion and many other web developers rate it extremely highly and use it as their primary development tool. In the show I pick Mr Hicks and Oxton’s collective brains about its benefits and whether I should make the effort to learn it properly.

Javascript or JQuery

The second listener contribution comes from Will who writes…

I was listening to your last one and you said it would be important to learn javascript for 2008. I know bits of javascript but don’t particularly like it and don’t know ajax yet, however, I have been playing with jQuery and find it much simpler. Do you think it’s a good alternative to learning all of javascript and have you used it at all?

Personally I think it is important to learn a language from scratch and that relying too heavily on libraries can cause problems in the long run. Although there is nothing wrong with you learning jQuery I would suggest it should be an addition to learning Javascript rather than a replacement.

If you want to know if Mr Oxton and Hicks disagree with me you will have to listen to the show :)

To leave an audio comment for the show skype “boagworldshow” or call +44 20 8133 5122.

106. Back to work blues

Posted in Classic shows on January 9, 2008 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul and Marcus discuss common mistakes when creating your sites structure and Rachel Andrews shares her experiences of getting into web design.

Podcast: Download (29.5MB)

News and events | Common mistakes of site structure | Rachel Andrews on building your web design career | Listener emails

Just a quick little request before we kick off today’s show. I need to get some more moo cards for the boagworld podcast (I am too tight to get proper business cards). Anyway I am having trouble with what to put on the cards. I was going to put a nice image on the cards but when I thought about it I couldn’t think of anything appropriate. In the end I decided to include tiny snippets from the reviews people have written about the show. However, being typically British with our self deprecating sense of humour. I decided to use the negative reviews rather than the positive ones. I have some great stuff such as “Paul has an ego that doesn’t need boosting” and “truly crappy jokes”. However, I need more. So, if you have 5 minutes this week drop me an email with a short, witty and hopefully not too rude review of the show. Let the venom flow :)

News and events

Internet Explorer 8

So the last time we did the news before Christmas Microsoft were under attack from Opera for its lack of standards support. Well, things have moved on since then and it is looking like Internet Explorer 8 is shaping up to be a very nice browser indeed. For start IE8 has passed the Acid 2 test published by the Web Standards Project. This is a definite commitment from Microsoft to provide comprehensive standards support and should be applauded. Jonathan Snook explains the ramifications of this as well as making some predications of his own as to what IE8 will look like. According to him we can expect straightforward column layouts, grid positioning and improved javascript support. Best of all if Jonathan is right we might see IE8 out in beta by the summer and in final release by next Christmas. Maybe then we can look at dropping support for IE6.

Using CSS to diagnose problems

Although there is still a lot of CSS not supported by browsers such as IE it is incredible what is possible with just what we have at the moment. Eric Meyer recently posted an article suggesting that you might want to consider using CSS to diagnose issues in your HTML that need resolving. In his article he uses CSS to find out where markup might be choking on missing accessibility features, targetless links, and just plain missing content. For example he uses CSS to visually highlight all images that have an empty or missing ALT attribute.

This isn’t an entirely new ideas. In fact Marco Battilana proposed a similar approach to highlight accessibility issues back in July 2006. However, Eric has taken it that much further and offered an excellent way of not only highlighting problems to yourself but also to your clients who maybe editing HTML.

Common accessibility mistakes

Talking about highlighting accessibility mistakes I came across a great article that does exactly that. Basically the article focuses on the fact that website owners can often be over enthusiastic when it comes to accessibility and start overusing HTML attributes designed to help accessibility. The result is that we can often do more harm than good. The article looks at the alt and title attributes which are often verbose or repetitious. It also looks at tabindex and accesskeys that can cause confusion and conflicts with normal browser behaviour. If you are applying any of these attributes to your code then I highly recommend you cast your eye over this article.

Basic design principles

The final story this week is an amazing series of posts by Patrick McNeil over at Design Meltdown. The reason I say they are amazing is because they are immense and I confess I am yet to read all of them. As you probably already know Design Meltdown tracks trends in web design and shows examples of sites that highlight these trends. Using the same example based approach Patrick looks at the fundamental principles of design and deconstructs them expertly. He covers Emphasis, Contrast, Balance, Alignment, Repetition and Flow in a screenshot packed series of posts that are a must read for anybody starting out in design. In the past I have always recommended Jason Beaird’s book “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” for those starting out in design. In fact we have Jason on the show soon. However, if you don’t like reading books or want to save a bit of money then Patrick’s analysis is a credible alternative. Check it out.

Feature: Common mistakes of site structure

Just before Christmas I wrote my final blog post for the year on creating the structure for your site. It is a topic that I have been thinking a lot about recently because of various projects I am working on and so it was fresh in my mind. In particular it occurred to me how much harder producing a good site hierarchy is than it first appears. In fact I see the same common mistakes occurring again and again. It is these mistakes I want to look at in today’s show. Read Common mistakes of site structure.

Expert interview: Rachel Andrews on building a web design career

Paul: OK, so joining me today is Rachel Andrew from EdgeofMySeat.com. Hello Rachel. It’s good to have you on the show at last.

Rachel: Hello, Paul. It’s good to be here.

Paul: I feel like I’ve been trying to bully you to come on the show forever and ever and ever, but it hasn’t worked out for one reason or another, but we finally got you here, so that’s good news. So uhm, Rachel, when I came to kind of putting together what I was going to do, talking to you. I suddenly realized I didn’t know you very well. I’ve heard a lot about you and I’ve heard a lot of other people say good things about you, which has gotta be a good thing, but I didn’t know anything about your background or kind of how you came to be involved in web developement. So, I thought it might be quite interesting, if It’s ok with you, just to spend a few minutes talking about how you came to be a web developer. How did you get into this illustrious career?

Rachel: Uhm, completely by accident, really. It wasn’t something I intended to do. My training is as a dancer. I was going to dance. That’s all I ever wanted to do.

Paul: All right.

Rachel (laughing): So, the part where I ended up doing this surprised everyone, (Paul laughing) especially my programmer father. (Rachel laughs)

Paul: Ahhhhh

Rachel: We didn’t even have computers in school when I was in school. I’m showing my age.

Paul: Yeah, I know the feeling.

Rachel: Yeah, so, and I remember when I was, I don’t know, either 13 or 14 there were two guys that came in and said, “All of you will need to know about computers in your future careers.” And I was like, “No I won’t. I’m going to be a dancer.” and they couldnt tell me why I would need computers and so I felt quite pleased with myself. So, yes, it wasn’t on the radar after all.

Paul: So, how did you go from dance to web developement? It seems a bit of a leap there.

Rachel: Well, I know this is a fairly technical career, and I was working back stage for a quite a while and when I decided to quit dance for various reasons, I was working in the west end and I managed to my way into a back-stage techie job.

Paul: OK.

Rachel: I did work as a choreographer and I knew a reasonable amount about sound and lighting and could my way in. So, I worked back-stage in the west end and for a year and a half on Charlston and on The Mouse Trap.

Paul: Right, I see.

Rachel: So, so that was it. So, it wound up to be a technical kind of job and then I found myself pregnant with my daughter. And you cant go heaving around stage equipment while pregnant.

Paul: No.

Rachel: So (laughing), I found myself with some time on my hands. It was really that I even started using the internet.

Paul: Oh, ok.

Rachel: I was fairly young and didnt know anybody else with a child and pregnant.

Paul: What kind of… how long ago are we talking about here?

Rachel: Well, the said child is now nearly 11.

Paul: Right.

Rachel: So, quiet a while ago. ( laughing)

Paul: OK.(laughing)

Paul: So, in the relatively early days of the Web then to some degree…

Rachel: Yes. Yeah and I mean thats really so very important in that at the time there wasn’t actually that much to learn and I was chatting to people on for the parents on the forums because as I said, I didn’t know anyone with a baby and I didn’t know anything about babies. So, (Paul: Ahhh) I was using the web just to talk to other people in the same situation. And then if you wanted to put anything online there wasn’t Flickr or all of these hings. You really had to build a web site.

Paul: Right. Yeah.

Rachel: So, you know, once my daughter was born, I started putting together various HTML. So I could put together a web site telling people about her and things like that. And that’s what everyone did.

Paul: OK.

Rachel: You chat in the discussion forums and you build web sites. Uhm I don’t know… I quite liked that. That was always good fun. So, it didnt take that long before people would start asking me if I would build them a web site.

Paul: Mmhmm

Rachel: And… and at the time there was so little to know. You know, it was a bit of HTML and you had to do some basic things with images. As time went on, I realized I was actually quite interested in, what at the time fewer people were doing which was writing things with Perl which was about the only thing that anyone used to do things like guestbooks and (Paul: Yeah) posting forums to email. It was very, very limited at the time in terms of what people were doing on the server side. I sat down with the Orilley Camel book and taught myself Perl.

Paul: Oh Right, OK. (Rachel laughing) As you do.

Rachel: As you do. Obviously

Marcus: Or not, in my case.

Rachel: Yeah, well… I was bored. (all laughing) I had a baby. You know? Nothing else to do. So, that’s really how I got into doing the back-end stuff via such a strange route and I didn’t really realize what I was learning or if there was real reason to do so. It was interesting to me.

Paul: Do you think there was any advantages or drawbacks to taking that kind of route. I mean I know that most of us that entered the web in the early days did it through some convoluted route in preference to having some kind of formal training. Do you think the people that are coming along these days are going through a proper… you know, going through some kind of computer training course or whatever? Do you think their at a disadvantage for not learning it themselves and discovering it themselves.

Rachel: Well, yeah, but I think things are so different now. I mean back then, it really was a case of: You learned HTML. You learned a little bit about how to make graphics work online. And maybe, if you’re very pushy, you learned some Perl. (Paul: Yeah) And that was it. There wasn’t a huge amount of decisions. I mean, even just to start learning to do this now, you start having to think, “Well, which language do I want to learn? What is the best thing to be learning? Where should I put my time?” (Paul: Yeah, totally). You know, I was just kind of sitting with a little 486 computer and thinking, “You know… this is quite interesting. Look, I can do this!” But we were all just discovering what we could do at the time. Whereas now, if you’re looking at this as a career and what’s going to be best right from the start, before you’ve even gotten started, you know? (Paul: Yeah) So, It’s very different. And It’s very difficult when people always say, “Well, how did you get started? Have you got any suggestions on how I can get started?” And It’s so different now.

Paul: That’s probably one of the most common emails I get. It’s, how do you get started and what languages do you start with? So, I guess you really didn’t have a lot of choice. (Rachel (laughing): No…) It was Perl or nothing, wasn’t it?

Rachel: Really, I mean, yeah, there were other things around but generally people were writing in C, Javascript, and Perl. And the web host I happened to have, had this server which you were allowed to run your scripts on. (Paul: Oh, ok) (Rachel laughing) They were still slightly nervous of it. You know, it was just one server you could run things on. It was a quite good community around that. People would help each other out on how to do things.

Paul: So what advice do you give people who do write with those kinds of questions as to what languages to start with? What do you say?

Rachel: I think the important thing is to learn something well. At the end of the day, once you’ve learned one launguage, you can usually swap to something else. It’s the concept that’s the hard thing. (Paul: Yeah.) Understanding based design or understanding just the basic constructs of any language. Once you’ve done that, you can usually swap to something else. I usually say that PHP is a pretty good choice. Just because It’s out there, everywhere. (Paul: Yeah) You’re going to be able to easily find somewhere to run it. You can set up your own development environment without having to spend any money, really. You can get that all set up. And there is lots and lots of help and there is a great community around that. And to be honest, PHP is what we tend to develop in now and most of the time.

Paul: I mean, It’s quite interesting that you talk about those early days and how you basically got into it because you became a mother. But the early days in the web, and to be honest, to some extent now, there arent exactly a huge number of female developers around. I mean, it seems to be a very male dominated thing. Did that put you off? Did that create barriers to you?

Rachel: It didnt really at the time when I was learning because I came out of a very male dominated profession anyway, (Paul: Oh, OK.) having been working back stage. So, it didnt, worry me. And also at the time, I was just interested in learning it. I think out there in the work place once I became employed doing this, I encountered all sorts of strange situations where people really couldn’t quite get their head around the fact that I was technical and not like a designer or not something else that cliquey females are doing. I was the head of a technical team and went to help someone with a computer and I was the most senior person on the team. And they said, “Oh, can you not send one of the boys down?” (Paul gasps) I then said, “I can send one of the boys down. They’re not going to fix your computer for you, but I can send them down if that’s what you want.” (all laughing) I mean, so people were a bit taken aback, I think and don’t immediately assume that I do the job that I do (Paul: Yeah.) and are much more comfortable of putting me in a designer area.

Paul: Well, that was the mistake I made, isn’t it? (Rachel laughing) The first time, I suppose. I was the typical male chauvinist pig and presumed you are a designer, which I don’t know why. I think it was the hair color, more than anything.

Rachel (laughing): To be honest, I am not particularly hung up about it. It’s not something I get terribly upset about. I find it sort of intriguing that people just assume that. I’m not… you know… I’ve work in… sort of male dominated jobs for a long, long time now and I think if I got terribly upset about these things I wouldn’t be doing it. It is interesting. But in other ways, it works for me. When I was going for job interviews, for instance, if I’m the only woman who walks in and there are lots and lots of men, they’re going to remember me. (Paul: Yeah) And in the same, you know, if I’m pitching for work it’s a talking point. You know, people are always interested as to why I’m doing what I’m doing.

Paul: Damn, and here I was thinking I was asking original questions!

(Rachel and Paul laugh)

Rachel: I think sometimes, it does work for me because do remember. They would think can’t a woman do something a bit unusual?

Paul: Do you think it’s a problem within the industry or would you just think It’s one of those things and what will be will be kind of attitude?

Rachel: It’s really hard to see where it’s a problem. I think It’s a problem if girls or young women who are looking at career choices are being put off because they don’t see female role models out there. And, there’s lots of reasons why. There are women around doing this and tend not to be so high profile. (Paul: Yeah) I mean the reason that I’m not touring around all the different events and things is because I’m a mom. (Paul: Yeah!) You know, and I think that’s the same for an awful lot of women. I talked about this on my blog once and got loads and loads of women contacting me going, “Yes, exactly!” We’re the one’s doing the majority of childcare. I know there are men in that position too, and I’m not saying there aren’t men who are having to be… going to pick up kids at 3:00 or whatever it is. But it does tend to be women and It’s often the women who make that choice or wants to spend time close to the kids when they’re very little. My daughter is getting older but even so, I still wouldn’t be happy about, say going to a different country and leaving her here to go to an event.

Paul: Yeah. I mean to be honest, even for this interview we kind of have to fit it in around you taking your child somewhere, Marcus has got to do a school run in a minute. You know, so, it’s all part of the kind of… yeah… It’s nice we’re in a position where we can kind of fit our work around our families. It’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

Rachel: Yes, it is. And I think that’s possibly one of the reasons why there aren’t so many high profile women, because it takes time to raise your profile. And without me quite looking, I’ve been able to do that through writing, which I can do at midnight or whatever. If you’re going to get out there and get around to all the conferences and things, you know, and look at what other people who are considered to be my peer group and what they’re doing. I just couldn’t physically do that. (Paul: Yeah, totally) Because, I don’t want to. I don’t want to spend a lot of time away from my daughter right now. Maybe in 6 years time, she will be very disinterested in spending any time with me.

(Rachel and Paul Laughing)

Paul: Once she’s a teen-ager, you won’t want to be with her either.

(Both continue laughing)

Rachel: Exactly, you know, so things change but there are quite a lot of people with quite young children and actually more and more so. It’s quite funny, I feel like I’ve got quite an old child for the group of people that I speak to. There are lots of new developer babies out there.

Paul: Yeah, well Marcus is old and decrepit.

Marcus: Well, just to depress you, Rachel, what happens when they get older and become teenagers, they just rely on you as a taxi service.

Rachel: Well, I get that as well. That was the case today. I was ferrying mine and two others back from the

Marcus: The only thing I would say though is, we went through a period about 6 months the beginning of this year, trying to recruit new developers. And we only interviewed one woman out of probably a dozen candidates

Paul: I think that it’s worth saying that’s because we only have 1 woman apply, rather than we segregated all the women who refused to interview.

Marcus: That’s what I meant. Yes, well put Paul. We literally had only 1 woman apply, so yeah… I don’t really know why. Maybe it just seemed like kind of a boy’s area at the moment. I suppose, from what you were saying about the fact that you’re not inclined to go out there and sort of go out on the circuit like Paul does. I suppose until that happens, and maybe younger women who aren’t thinking about motherhood yet, are the ones who are going to be out there raising the profile of women and hopefully, this sort of “boys’ club” type mentality will sort of just fizzle away.

Paul: I mean, It’s quite interesting that you say, how you talked about how you managed to raise your profiles through writing. Tell us a little about that. How did you get into writing books? Because, you seem quite prolific. I did a quick search on Amazon to see exactly how much you’ve written and it seemed to go on for quite a long while.

Rachel: Yeah, there’s quite a few. That was, again, like most things, I tend to say, “Oh yes, I’ll have a go at that!” and then worry about it later. It was a long time ago, I had written some stuff for the Macromedia Web Site about Dreamweaver.

Paul: OK

Rachel: And it was Glasshouse who contacted me and said, “Oh, would you write a couple of chapters for a book?” A couple of chapters, that would be alright, you know (laughing). (Paul: Yeah, no big deal). So yeah, I wrote a couple of chapter for a book and it kind of went from there, really. I like writing. I enjoy… I’m much more from an arts background really than technical. So, I do enjoy writing and putting things across that way. So, yeah, it just went from there. And then when someone said, “Oh, will you write a few more chapters?” Yeah, ok, that was alright. (laughs) And before I know it, I’ve got this great list of books.

Paul: Yeah. It’s a very time consuming thing to do. I mean, beyond the fact that you obviously sound like you enjoy doing it. Do you find it beneficial from a publicity angle for bringing in work?

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. I think people tend to see you as an expert if you’ve got things in print; if you’ve written things. It does sort of depend that you do know what you’re talking about. And especially with what I do, which is much more… It’s not like I have to show a nice portfolio of pretty things. This is what I can do. What people are doing when they hire me or hire my company is they are hiring us for our expertise. And they have to constant that we actually are experts; that we know what we’re talking about. So the writing does help in that because people assume that if someone let you write a book, you must actually know what you are talking about.

Paul: I mean, I get emails from people asking how do you go about raising your profile. I’m quite interested as to whether you stumbled into this. You know, you talked about you were writing for the Macromedia web site. Did you go out purposefully, intending to write for them or did it just kind of happen? How’s that come about?

Rachel: Again, that really just happened. But because I was writing on my own blog, and I was writing… you know, I was helping people out in forums. (Paul: Right) You know, if you’re out there doing things, people do notice. I mean certainly with things like magazines and books and you know, varies sites that want articles. There are people out there that are looking for people to write all the time, because there’s actually an awful lot of people who know what they’re doing but there are fewer who can express it and express it in a way that someone new to the concept is going to understand. If you are able to do that, if that’s something you can do and you are doing that on your own site or are helping people out in forums and things then it will get noticed. And there are quite a bit of places you can be submitting I suppose, to, you know, Site Point and Vitamin… There’s quite a bit of other sites that accept good content. (Paul: Yeah.) It means that you have to write a few things that you’re not paid for to get going. You can find then, that you can start putting together a body of work and say, “Well, this is the stuff I’ve done.” It’s not in It’self something that you earn a huge amount of money from. I think people who write for a living must have to work incredibly hard.

Paul: (laughing) Or be incredibly good. One or the other.

(Rachel and Paul laughing)

Rachel: Both I think, both. As something that helps raise your profile for the other things you do. If I found it an absolute chore, I don’t think I would do it because you don’t want to be sogging away at things you can’t stand in the hope that it will get you some profile. But it is one way to do it and It’s certainly a way to do it if you are in a position where you can’t get out to lots of events or you’re not someone who wants to do public speaking. I’m not keen at all on public speaking. I much rather hide behind the computer (laughing).

Paul: A proper developer. That’s what I like to hear.

Rachel: So, you know, It’s another way of doing it, because I do sort of think of the public speaking if you’re going to be thinking of conferences as being something that would really get that profile up there. No one has really met me until fairly recently at any events because I didn’t get to anything really. And yet a lot people would have known of me and the stuff I’ve done because of the lighting.

Paul: I mean, you talk about that you use this as a mechanism to you know, to increase your profile for the other work that you do. So, perhaps we ought to talk about the other work that you do. I mean, you run a company, “Edge of My Seat” which is edgeofmyseat.com. How did that start? You obviously from going… from being an enthusiastic amateur, you must have gotten a job in web design, I’m guessing. How did you go about getting that job and from there, how did you end up running your own company?

Rachel: Well, I… When I decided I actually wanted to go back to work… I’ve been doing bIt’s and pieces while my daughter was quite little and I decided I wanted to go back to work and it was really tail-end of this whole dot com era. (Paul: Oh, OK.) And so, I ended up heading up a technical team at Property Finder. (Paul: Oh, OK. Yeah, I know.) Which was very much on the technical side and we managed the servers and things like that rather than even doing any development or very much development. There were other people who were more on the development team, although we still did bIt’s and pieces. I did that for a while and the whole sort of dot com thing was starting to fall apart really, at that point. And I moved to another dot com company who built portal sites for accountants. So I know quite a bit about stage integration (Paul: Wow. What an exciting life you have). Yeah, but that’s the time where things really weren’t looking that stable and I felt, well I can actually do this myself. And at least then I would know where I was in terms of whether I was going to get paid by people. The problem is being employed in an unstable situation is that really, you can work a whole month and get to the end of the month and find out that nobody’s paying you. (Paul: Yeah.) And so I figured that actually, I may be better off setting off on my own. And so people had asked if I would take on bIt’s of freelance work and things. And so, I actually purchased a printer’s trust because at the time I was a young single mom. I’m not so young anymore but I purchased a printer’s trust and this in 2001. And they basically gave me a small grant and loan to get the company started. So, I had about a month’s money when I started. (laughing) I didn’t have the dot coms, so I kind of had to work. (Paul: Wow!) It’s a good way to start a business, you know (Paul: Yeah.) … make or break really. If it doesn’t work, we don’t eat.

(Rachel, Paul and Marcus laughing)

Marcus: I remember that feeling very well.

Rachel: Yeah.

Paul: Yes

Rachel: But it makes you really dive into it. The nice thing was, because I was paying for a child, mind you, at the time, I actually only had to earn half of what I had earned because I could keep her home with me.

Paul: Ahh, ok.

Rachel: So, I must have cut my expenses by being able sort of work around my daughter’s schedule and things. So, that kind of worked out alright and really, it went from there.

Paul: So how did you begin to win the business in that first month of, “Oh crap! What have I done?” (Rachel and Marcus laugh) You know, where did the work come from?

Rachel: Well, at the time, what I realized was that because of how the dot com was collapsing, everyone was getting rid of their developers. But they still had all these applications. And something I’ve always been good at is picking up on other people’s stuff and working on it. So, probably, uhm, September ’01, which was like a terrible time to start a company (Rachel and Paul laugh) and really for the first two or three years was taking stuff that was already built and was falling apart, or the developers had gone or had all sorts of problems with it and just fixing it or adding bits to it. And I did lots and lots of that which, during this time of recession, really, was actually, really good work because there was plenty of it. Everything had to have been built while they had lots of developers and they had money and things. And so I sort helped things limp along a lot. And what this sort of lead to really was this idea of doing development for design agencies. (Paul: OK.) And focusing on doing really good development to support really nice design. That really is what we’ve moved on to do now. Most of our clients are designers or design agencies. And they do a really good design, and then they hand it over to us and we look after it and we make sure it will work. (laughing) That’s actually a really nice way to work because it means we get to work with some really nice stuff, anyway, well designed stuff and we have people who care about what they do. (Paul: Yeah.) And we get to do the development side of things that we enjoy. Sort of working with people rather just sort of chucking things over the fence and throwing it back.

Marcus: The point your picking about picking up what other people have done and fixing it and that kind of thing… did that not kind of cause you problems with development platforms and having to deal with lots of different types of languages and that kind of thing?

Rachel: Yeah. I had learned ASP by that point and a bit of Java. And I tend to not have too much problems swapping from one thing to the other. Certainly, I mean then, it was a lot of Perl and my class PSP. Because that was, at this sort of time, they were really the two things that you were seeing things built in. So, I used to do either and then I started doing PHP as well around the same time. So, I’ve always been quite happy swapping between languages, swapping between databases. (Marcus begins to speak: I think the reason why…) It gets a bit much if you do too many in one day, you know, because you start putting semi-colons in the wrong place and stuff. It doesn’t really bother me too much. I mean, its nice to be able to concentrate one thing. As I said, we tend to build new stuff in PHP. But, I’m generally quite happy switching around.

Marcus: I suppose, the reason why I was asking is we’ve come across a few briefs that we’ve been sent in the past where it seemed like the perfect job for us but the development platform in particular has been something that we just don’t work on. Do we want to invest on that kind of platform just so we can go after this job and quite often, we’ve thought to ourselves, “No, we don’t.” So, I guess that’s where the question is coming from.

Rachel: Yeah, I think in terms of new stuff, you kind of do have to focus unless you’ve got an awful lot of people able to create your own libraries and things in different languages. So for new stuff, we do tend to choose PHP but at the time, what I was doing was just picking up on stuff. It was less of a problem really because I was just fixing stuff that already existed.

Paul: You seem to have done very well over the last few years and Drew has come and joined you now and you seem to be branching out a bit into the area of training. That seems to be something that’s come up.

Rachel: Yup.

Paul: I’m quite interested, you know… it’s great you’re there and you’re able to offer training courses. You do have a basic CSS training course, I think (R: Mmmhmm) and you’re talking about doing an advanced one, is that right?

Rachel: Possibly going to do that. We’ve had a few people ask. (Paul: OK) So, that’s what we’re thinking of doing.

Paul: So, I mean, the question now is who trains the trainer? How do you guys stay on top of the latest things that are emerging and how do you keep up with what’s going on?

Rachel: Well, basically, because we are doing it all the time, I think. The difference between us and a training company that just does training is that actually what we’re doing is, we’re using this stuff all the time. It’s the same as when I buy a book. I’m writing a book from the point of view of someone who has to do this. You know, who practically is doing it. And it’s the same with the training. Obviously, we’re constantly reading up on new things and trying things out in browsers and trying to get around problems and just by the day to day work that we do. So, that’s really what we’re bringing to a training course. For two or three years, people have asked me if I would do training. But until Drew joined, we just didn’t have the capacity. It comes down to one of those things that have to be arranged. So, it wasn’t saying that I really felt that I couldn’t do, but Drew was making to do it as well. Its great fun. Its an enjoyable… its actually enjoyable to be face-to-face with people. Especially writing a book and then the feedback you get as the occasional email that people say, “Oh, I really enjoyed that!” or, “Why did you say this? Its rubbish!” (Rachel and Paul laughing) Actually being face-to-face with people and seeing how they work through the course is really, really interesting and great fun.

Paul: Cool!

Rachel: So, yes. It’s been good.

Paul: Excellent! Well, thank you so much, Rachel, for coming on the show. It was really good to hear how you got into things and how your career has progressed. Even if it’s somewhat chaotic along the way. Although I can associate with that (Rachel laughing) kind of bouncing from one thing… We’d set up Headscape in January, 2002. So we were only 3 months behind you, so we understand your pain there.

Rachel: Yes, well it wasn’t the best time, really.

Marcus: We were both made redundant from a dot com in December, 2001, so it was necessity that got Headscape, I think.

Paul: Yeah. Always the best way. OK, thank you very much, Rachel, uhm and I’m sure that we will get you back on the show again if you’re willing at some point (Rachel laughing) in the future. Alright, thank you.

Rachel: OK.

Listeners email:

So just before we wrap up the show I wanted to share with you an idea sent in recently by a listener (sorry I can’t find your name)! A number of you have written in since we said we were going to change the format of the show with ideas about how things could be improved. One idea that particularly appealed to me was a new short section at the end of the show where we read out some listeners emails. These emails could be a question, comment, recommendation or indeed anything else you think others maybe interested in. So whether you have a tip for improving your sites search engine rankings or just want to tell me how ignorant we are then drop us an email. Write in soon as we need content for next weeks show!

105. Christmas Cheer

Posted in Classic shows on December 19, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul suggests some gifts to buy the geek in your life. Marcus talks about wireframes and Matthew Paterson talks about the Email Standards Project.

Clear:left winner

Congratulations to Ryan Downie who is the lucky winner of the Clear:Left training competition. Ryan will have his pick of either a place on the CSS Mastery.

If you didn’t win do not despair. There are places still available on both courses for a mere £345 + VAT. I have attended Jeremy Keith’s course on AJAX and have to say it was superb. I am sure the CSS course is just as good. Go to the clear:left website for more details.

News and events

Opera goes on the offensive against Microsoft

Without a doubt the biggest story of the week and in many ways the year is the fact that Opera is filing an antitrust suit against Microsoft. This story is huge, not because one browser manufacturer is litigating against another (something that is a common occurrence) but because of the strange ripple effect this seems to be causing in the web design community.

However, before we get into the ripples lets look at the antitrust suit itself. Operas beef seems to focus on two areas. First, they object to Internet Explorer being bundled with Windows (surprise, surprise). Second, they are complaining about Microsoft’s lack of commitments to web standards.

Call me an old cynic but this whole thing stinks of a massive PR exercise. This is especially true when it comes to the complaints about standards. As Eric Meyer points out, the timing of this claim seems odd to say the last. If the suit had been filed before the release of IE7 it would make some kind of sense. It was certainly true that standards support in IE was very poor. However, IE7 is a huge step forward and Microsoft seem to be active in its development of IE8.

To me this just looks like an exercise in pandering to the gripes of the web design community. It was as if Opera knew it wouldn’t get a lot of support for the whole “unbundle IE” argument and so threw in the standards issue to drum up some support.

However, as I have already said, the Opera antitrust suit is not the most interesting part of this story. The real clincher is the spin off discussion that has emerged sparked primarily by a very provocative post by Andy Clarke. He argues that this suit makes the position of the W3C CSS working group untenable. Andy asks how Microsoft and Opera can work together to create the next generation of CSS when they are in legal action over exactly that issue. This has led to a much wider discussion about how the W3C works and highlighted a divide between how browser manufacturers and designers see the world. Without a doubt there is huge frustration at the glacier speed at which the W3C moves. This is largely due to the challenges faced by browser manufacturers in implementing the specifications.

But the story does not end there. This frustration with slow progress seems to extend beyond even the W3C to also encompass the Web Standards Project which was setup precisely to push for better standards support. Some very prominent figures are even questioning its role.

If we as web designers want to pressure browser makers to provide better standards support then we need to invest in organisations like WaSP. They need to have the kind of funding that political lobby groups have. This will enable them to employ full time staff to constantly lobby and educate browser providers on what web designers need. In my opinion we as web designers need to put our money where our mouth is and start giving financing to organisations like WaSP so they can be more effective.

Boagworld christmas appeal

Talking about putting your money where your mouth is, I would like to thank everybody who has been kind enough to give to our Christmas Appeal. We have been raising money to support an orphanage and school in an extremely poor part of India. The idea is that you pay for anything of value you have received from Boagworld. Ask yourself how much have we taught you on the show? How much have we entertained you? Then decide how much you would pay for that and give that money.

So far we have received £465 and we are still collecting. Even if you hear this show after Christmas we are still collecting! To donate something or for more information go to christmas.boagworld.com.

The best CSS designs of 2007

Not only is Christmas almost upon us, the year is about to draw to a close. This makes it the time of year when bloggers look back at the year just gone and compile “the best of 2007″ lists. Normally I am lukewarm about such things however there is a great list over at web designer wall. They have compiled the best of CSS design in 2007. If you are in need of inspiration this is definitely worth a look. There is some truly stunning stuff here.

Talking of rating design you might also want to check out commandshift3.com which is basically hot or not for web design. When you visit the homepage you are shown two designs and you click on the design you prefer. Not only does it allow you to vote for designs it also lets you look at the best and worst based on votes received. This makes it a great site for inspiration and for learning what not to do!

Marcus’ bit: Quick and Dirty Wireframes

So a couple of week’s ago I wrote a post on the use of wireframes in web design. Marcus couldn’t come up with a decent topic to talk about himself this week so has decided to reuse my post and pass it off as his own! ;)

Paul’s corner: Geek Gifts for Christmas

For my segment of the show this week I decided it might be fun to look at Christmas presents. Specifically what you should buy for the geek in your life. In order to avoid it sounding like a wish list for myself the items I have picked are items that I own myself and can personally recommend.

Ask the expert: Introduction to the Email Standards Project

Hello world of Boag, I’m here today just to give you a really quick introduction to the Email Standards Project, a new community effort that has launched recently.

If you’re a web designer, and you’ve ever created HTML emails, you will know that getting them to look reasonably consistent across the major email clients is hair-pullingly frustrating.

At least with websites, there are only a few major browsers you have to worry about, and thanks to the Web Standards Project they are much improved from the days of the browser wars. With email you have at least 12 email clients with big shares of the audience.

Unfortunately, HTML email is still stuck back in 1998 with that Celine Dion song from ‘Titanic’ – nobody wants to be there. Over the last 10 years, web designers, and particularly web standardsy type designer, have generally taken a ‘Just Say No’ approach to HTML email. ‘Don’t send it, don’t read it, pretend it never happened’.

That approach has not been a spectacular success – millions of people still sent HTML emails, but because the designers wouldn’t touch them they were hideously ugly and just made designers hate them even more.

HTML email is here to stay. It is the default format in many clients, and sometimes it really does give a better experience for the reader than plain text. The Threadless newsletter is a great example – the send every week an email with pictures of the latest shirts. Trying to describe the shirts in text is nowhere near as useful. A picture is worth at least 1,000 words!

So here we are in 2007, and in order to get reasonable rendering, designers are having to dust off their table coding skills to get things working in Outlook, Lotus Notes, Gmail, Yahoo, Thunderbird…it goes on.

At Freshview we deal with designers every day through Campaign Monitor and MailBuild who are struggling with this problem, and we finally decided to do something about it. That is where the Email Standards Project came from.

Together with a few other people we’ve put a site up at http://www.email-standards.org (email hyphen standards dot org), and you will find a link for that in the show notes. The central idea of the Email Standards Project is that we want to work with designers and with email client developers to improve support for web standards in email clients.

It’s not one of those sites that is all talk and no practicality though – jump onto the site and you will see a bunch of tests we have done to work out exactly what does, and what does not work in all the major email clients as far as a core of normal HTML and CSS like padding, margins, floats, lists and so on.

If you’ve seen the Acid test for browsers, over at the Web Standards Project, then this is basically the same idea except for email. We’ve already had some contact with some of the big email client representatives about our results, which is really exciting. Check out the blog for updates in that area.

If you know the pain of designing HTML emails, and you want to support the project, then there is a section on the site that covers that too, and we’ve had a huge number of people offer to help, and some great feedback from people like Jeffrey Zeldman and Cameron Moll.

If you are a website owner, and you want to know why this matters to you, then check out the site for an article on why web standards are important for email, or talk to your web design firm. As is often the case, it comes down to money – better standards support means less time spent getting things to work, and more time on the actual design.

So thanks for giving me the chance to say a few words about the Email Standards Project, and I hope you all do get a chance to checkout the website, email-standards.org.

Happy Christmas!

That about wraps it up for this week’s show. We will be back with a slightly amended format as from Wednesday the 9th January. See you then.

Intranet delusions

Posted in Web strategy on November 2, 2007 by Paul Boag

Every business can benefit from some form of intranet whether it is a collection of online tools or a large corporate system. The problem is that many organisations make fundamental mistakes in how they approach their intranet.

I have been asked a number of times to talk about Intranet development and I have always avoided doing so. This is partly because I am not an expert in the field (although that doesn’t normally stop me talking about something!) However, it is also because intranets are a massive area and one in which so many mistakes are made. There seems to be a huge amount of naivety about developing and running Intranets. Against such a backdrop I am somewhat unsure where to begin.

In the end I have decided to take 5 of the most common misconceptions about Intranets and see if we can shed some light on why they are wrong.

A money pit

“The intranet is not important like the website. It doesn’t generate a return on investment”

This seems to be a common perception especially among senior management. Unlike a website, the intranet isn’t perceived as business critical. Instead it is seen as nothing more than a hole into which money is poured. The problem is that an intranet doesn’t typically generate revenue. However, it does generate a return on investment.

The real benefit of an Intranet is in productivity gains. If used a correctly it can:

dramatically reduce the time to access key information
act as an effective method of disseminating information
be a way to manage workflow
become a key component in improving communication

Accessibility free

” I don’t need to worry about accessibility because I know exactly who is using the site”

The perception that you don’t need to worry about accessibility on an intranet is naive. Just because you don’t have users with disabilities at this stage doesn’t mean you never will. Moreover, accessibility is about a lot more than the disabled. By building your intranet with accessibility in mind you can offer up the chance to deliver it to other devices such as mobiles.

Finally, many people who are not registered as disabled have accessibility issues. This is especially true with an elderly user who may have poor eyesight or arthritis. Building your intranet with accessibility in mind can improve the usability for everyone.

Browser specific

“We only need to design for Internet Explorer 6 because we use that across the entire company”

Single browser support on your intranet is a risk. Building for the peculiarities of one browsers can easily come back and bite you later. A company wont stay with the same browser forever. Even an upgrade from IE 6 to IE 7 could easily break your site. Build from a solid base of web standards and you have the confidence that changes to the browser platform will have a minimal impact.

The other advantage of this approach is that it is entirely possible to open up parts of your intranet to suppliers even if they do not share the same IT infrastructure as you.

Employee motivation

“Its not like a website, people are required to use the Intranet as part of their job”

It is true that people are expected to use things like the intranet as part of their job. However theory and reality are very different. I have seen many intranets effectively abandoned because they were just too difficult to use. It is quicker to use other methods (such as the telephone or email) to find the information required.

An intranet will only succeed if it:

has the right information
is easy to use
is engaging

Some of the most successful intranets are those that work as hard to be sticky as any website would. Adding social features is a good way of doing this as well as making sure your site has the right “killer” applications. However, most importantly you need to ensure that the site is easy to use and people can quickly find the content they require.

Unregulated content

“The idea is that everybody adds and maintains the content. It doesn’t need a web master”

In a utopian world an intranet should not need a web manager. Each employee should add and maintain their own information on the system. However, the reality is that this doesn’t happen. Some people are simply too busy to “mess around with the intranet” while others upload far too much erroneous “stuff”.

An intranet needs a web manager in the same way as a website does. It needs somebody to be a guardian for the content ensuring that the right stuff is online and organised in a logical manor.

Conclusion

Developing intranets is a huge subject and one that I shall return to in the future. However, hopefully these few misconceptions have helped challenge your thinking of how to approach their design and build. Although designing an intranet is very different to designing a website, it is actually surprising how much they have in common too.

Show 97: FoWA

Posted in Classic shows on October 9, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul proposes tactics for overcoming design by committee. Marcus talks about extracting a budget from clients and Dan Cederholm compares pixels, ems and percentages.

Podcast: Download (27.0MB)

News and events | Extracting a budget from your prospects | Avoiding design by committee | Dan Cederholm on ems vs pixels vs percentages | Question of the week

About 100th episode

We really want the 100th episode to be as interactive as possible while keeping the format of the normal show. So with this in mind here is what we have in mind for our live show…

News – This will be the top 4 news stories that have most effected web design since the shows launch in August 2005
Marcus – Most unreasonable client
Paul – The worst web design mistakes of all time
Ask the expert – Ask Paul and Marcus any question you want whether it is related to web design or not

You can either turn up on the night and contribute or send us an email or MP3 with your contribution to any of the above areas.

News and events

Gossip from FoWA

I wanted to share a little about the FoWA conference I have just attended. It was absolutely superb and I am extremely glad I attended. The speaker line up was excellent and the subject matter was inspiring. There was a good supporting expo which was great as it prevented the problems that have occurred previously of sponsors touting their wares in the speaking slots.

However, I am not bringing it up simply to gloat that I was there and you weren’t. I got to speak to some great people and leant a few things that is worth passing on. Firstly, it is very apparent that the power of podcasting as a marketing medium is really on the rise. I had a long chat with David Prager and Jay Adelson about Revision 3 the company that produces Diggnation among other shows. It sounds like things are going great for them and they are pulling in some big name advertisers. However, the advertising model is not the only approach that is working within podcasting. The other is the promotional approach where you showcase products that subscribers can then buy. This is perfectly demonstrated by Wine Library TV hosted by Gary Vaynerchuk that allows you to purchase the wines reviewed in the show. I was fortune enough to meet Gary at FoWA and it is obvious that it is passion for the subject and strength of personality that makes the show work.

Of course the real power of podcasting was demonstrated in the live taping of a diggnation episode. I estimate that approximately 1200 people turned up for the recording and it was more like a rock concert than a geek conference. Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht (the hosts of the show) were pretty much mobbed after the show by insane fans. It was almost scary and drove home the power of the medium.

I could talk about some of the great speakers I got to hear including a stella performance by Daniel Burka who gave his first ever conference presentation. However, I don’t have the time to cover it all so want to share instead a couple of rumors surrounding Google. The first is that the fabled gPhone from Google is in fact going to be an operating system rather than a specific hardware device. If this is true it could well introduce yet another platform for creating cool web based mobile applications. Finally I wanted to mention the imminent announcement of Google in relationship to its APIs. It would appear Google is about to open up its many online offers from Gmail to Docs allowing third parties to build web applications based on them. This will really open up the opportunities for developers to really innovate.

The average website visitor

The next news story of the day is yet another list from Smashing Magazine (this is getting boring now). This one attempts to bring together some general stats on website users from various sources. Although the article acknowledges that really you need to look at your own stats it does explain that from time to time you want a more general picture of the average web user.

The post therefore lists 8 facts you should know about the average user. These include (but are not limited to)…

The most popular browsers (bet you can’t guess!)
Most common screen resolution
Most popular operating system
Most popular browser family worldwide
Most popular browser in Europe
Most common browser size

Getting started with Photoshop

We know that not everybody who listens to this show are web designers. Some of you are developers, clients or students. Some of you are just starting out in web design. If you fall into any of the above but want to get a better understanding of a key tool of the web designer then you maybe interested in a new article by Sitepoint. This detailed tutorial is an introduction to using Photoshop.

This is an amazingly detailed introduction that covers everything from the user interface right the way through to working with Alpha Channels. As you can imagine it is a long read but if you have the time I cannot think of a better introduction to this hugely powerful image editor.

Waking the sleepers

Last up today is a post by the guys over at 37 Signals. The post is primarily written for those running web applications but actually the principles apply to a much broader audience. It is looking at the subject of sleepers. Sleepers are those users who sign up for your service but never use it (or stop using it). This clearly applies to web applications but is also applicable to ecommerce sites or even sites that offer newsletters or other registered features.

It asks how these users can be reinvigorated and encouraged to become active again. Using an email from StumbleUpon as an example the post suggests so good ways of breathing some life back into your users.

If you are struggling with an apathetic user base this is worth a quick look.

Marcus’ bit: Extracting the budget from clients

So here’s the situation: I receive an invitation to tender in my inbox from a potentially good client. The brief is well written and, for the most part, the requirements are clear. The first thing I do is check the timescales, second is to see what the budget is. But what if the brief does not include a budget? How do you extract the budget from the client?

Paul’s corner: Avoiding design by committee

So I have now reached chapter 4 of my book writing marathon and in line with my commitment to recycling I want to share with you some of the content from my initial draft. Chapter 4 focuses on the role of the client in the design process and one of the big challenges that they face is design by committee. Of course, avoiding design by committee is something designers want to avoid too which is why I thought it would be a good subject to cover on the show.

Ask the expert: Dan Cederholm on ems vs pixels vs percentages

Paul: So one of the most common questions that I seem to get time and time again as far as CSS is concerned, revolves around working with ems and pixels and percentages and what to use when and how to work out what you should be using and all of that kind of thing. So, I thought, “Let’s get an expert in.” And so, I have Dan Cederholm joining me. (Dan Snickering) Hello, Dan.

Dan Cederholm: Hello Paul!

Paul: Don’t snicker! You are the expert for today.

Dan Cederholm: (laughing) I’ll try to be. I’ll put on my “expert hat”.

Paul: Just go with the flow, its fine.

Dan Cederholm: I will. (laughs some more)

Paul: Okay. So Dan, like I said, this is a common question that we get asked and I’m just interested in your opinion about “When’s the right time to use what combination? Should we mainly be using ems? Should we mainly be using percentages? Should we be going pixels?” What’s your take on the discussion?

Dan Cederholm: Well I think it, in a very politicianesque way, I’d say it depends. (Paul laughing) And this call is over. I could just hang up now (Dan laughs).

Paul: Okay

Dan Cederholm: No, I’m just kidding, it depends.

Paul: Depends on what then? (Paul laughs)

Dan Cederholm: Yeah, so it depends. Now are you referring to strictly font sizing or units in general for boxes and things?

Paul: I mean, there’s lots of different things isn’t there? (Dan: Yeah) There’s kind of, do we make, you know, when we design a whole web site, should the web site be fixed width? Should it be hybrid? Should it be fluid? Should it be built so its elastic? Let’s start with that as the discussion.

Dan Cederholm: Okay. Width in general… Well, I think, like I said, it does depend. It’s a tough decision to make depending on the site and depending on what’s in the site and the design and that kinda thing. It can be tricky. I love EM based design. And that’s what I use currently on SimpleBits and a few other sites that I’ve done recently. But, I’ve actually been sort of re-thinking that because its difficult to do… to drop in say an image or something that’s fixed width in that design and still account for that fixed element to be cut off or to look odd when the text is re-sized or if the text, the base font size is different. To me, the difficulty with an em-based layout is sort of the fixed image problems. So, for instance, on SimpleBits, for my blog posts I’ve been wanting to do more visual stuff like drop in an image from Flickr or a photograph or something.

Paul: Sure.

Dan Cederholm: But that becomes difficult because its em-based. If the image is a fixed pixel width, obviously its hard to just drop that in and design around it so that it looks like its meant to be there, you know?

Paul: Mmm Hmm

Dan Cederholm: And now there are tricks that people have experimented with, with em-based and setting the image width as well.

Paul: Right

Dan Cederholm: But that, of course, gets tricky when if the image is blown up it looks, you know, it will look terrible or shrunk down or won’t look as nice as it would if it was re-sized properly. To me, that’s the biggest drawback to em-based layouts. So, depending on the site, if the site is not image heavy or if you’re not going to be doing a lot of that sort of image stuff, then em-based styles can be excellent and they can provide, sort of that flexibility, almost like zooming in and out just by changing the font size.

Paul: So would your recommend that over, say, a percentage-based layout?

Dan Cederholm: Well I think that… I like the… They each have their own, sort of pros and cons. The percentage-based layout is great as well. So that’s fluid, or liquid, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Dan Cederholm: And that, that gives a little more control to the reader, because they can stretch their window out. Now, the main problem there is the “max-width” and “min-width” in Internet Explorer 6 and below. So, the common problem with that, or why people don’t use liquid layout is if you stretch the window out really, really wide, then line length becomes a problem with readability.

Paul: Mmm Hmm.

Dan Cederholm: But, that can be solved by setting a max-width to certain things. So in IE 6 and below, that’s not supported aside from some javascript hack or something. But, liquid layouts do offer that extra control for the reader. Some people… its weird, its like a religious sort of divide. Some people hate liquid layouts. Some people love them or swear by them. Its interesting how people can get. It can be a heated debate with designers. I found… it’s interesting with uhm… so, the iPhone came out over here in the US and I found liquid layouts actually look far better in the iPhone because of that small window width and that becomes even more of an advantage on a smaller screen. As opposed to fixed-width layout or even an em-based layout, the viewport isn’t necessarily computed correctly and you don’t take advantage of the full screen, whereas with a liquid layout, it does.

Paul: So when you do, say an em-based layout or a full liquid layout, what about things like margins and padding? Do you do those in the same settings or do you do those using pixels, or how do you work with those?

Dan Cederholm: Yeah, that’s a good question. So, one of the … the tough parts of a liquid layout or percentage-based IS margins and padding, because often times you need to add extra elements to add padding around, say if you want a fixed gutter width between columns. Unless you’re specifying percentage, like let’s say its a simple 2-column layout. The left column is 70% and the right column is 30%, which equals 100%. You can’t say the 70% block has a margin right of 10 pixels because now its 100% plus 10 pixels, which doesn’t work.

Paul: Yeah.

Dan Cederholm: So, you could either… there’s a couple choices… You could do a percentage gutter, so you have like 70, uh sorry, 65% with a 5% right margin and then 30% on the other side. Or, the other option would be to add another element sort of like a div that’s inside of each and the add a pixel amount to that without a width at all. So, there’s extra markup involved there. One of the things I like about ems is that instead of worrying about percentages, ems are… you can add… its easier to add gutters and padding with ems because the math works. (Dan Laughs, Paul agrees) So, you’ve got a whole width for the layout of say, 70 ems, or whatever it is and then you can break that up doing the math properly with the width of the columns and the width of the gutters as well. So, percentages are tricky because you can’t go above 100% and you can’t take away from a percentage with a pixel amount.

Paul: Yeah.

Dan Cederholm: Take away, or add with a pixel amount. So if you want fixed width gutters with liquid layout, it often requires extra markup to do that.

Paul: What about when it comes to typography? Are you suggesting always go with ems in situation like that? Because you’ve then got to add just more complexities too. You’ve got keywords that you can kind of throw into the mix there as well.

Dan Cederholm: Right. Right. Yeah, I prefer… in my own work, I prefer to use the keyword as a base. So, I’ll use “small” as a base on the body.

Paul: Right.

Dan Cederholm: And then use percentages for going up or down from there. So, headings may be 120% for a heading or whatever and then paragraphs would be 90 or that kind of thing. I like that because to me its sort of, ok, this is a base line. I know its not going to be the exactly the same in all browsers but I’ve had good luck with getting pretty damn close cross-browser sizing that way. The other way to do it is with ems and there’s a great article by Richard Rutter, actually, about sizing text with ems that he wrote a few years ago. And he explains a way of using a percentage as a base to knock it down to.. oh, are you familiar with it?

Paul: Yeah.

Dan Cederholm: And then that sort of… you can relate em units to pixel amounts. So, if you’re used to sizing text with pixels but want to use ems, he explains a way of sort of knocking down that base so that the math becomes simpler and using… specifying ems but thinking what that would be in a pixel amount.

Paul: Yeah, which is the approach that I normally use. The only thing that kind of (Dan: It is? Okay.) does my head in about that is that obviously ems inherit from one another.

Dan Cederholm: Right, exactly.

Paul: And that’s where it gets really confusing.

Dan Cederholm: It really does, doesn’t it? I mean especially if you’re nesting more than one level deep. Then the math becomes mind boggling.

Dan Cederholm: And so that still happens with the keyword percentage model that I use often… the same problem… so when you’re nesting percentages, things start to get a little weird. It becomes a little difficult to do the math but I found that I’m not often nesting too far… you know, more than maybe two levels or so when I’m sizing things. And if I am, then unfortunately, I have to do the math or try a different approach but, yeah, that is a tricky part of ems or percentages. In a perfect, ideal world, I think the designer could specify pixel, right, and then the browser would resize it from there but, you know, IE actually 7 and 6 and 5 don’t let you resize the text and I’m kinda baffled why its still a problem in IE 7. So, that would be ideal because the designer can say, “Look, this is what I intended to be as a base and this is gonna look the same across browsers for the most part for most resolutions and then the user can always over-ride that.” I mean, the user should always be able to over-ride that. But, unfortunately, for baffling reasons, they chose not to let someone do that in IE. So, that goes back to, I guess, your site statistics and if IE is a low percentage, which is probably not going to be the case for most sites, you could sort of weigh that and can say, “Well, I’ll go with pixels.” And, I mean, a lot of people do go with pixels now anyway, and just not worry about it. But I tend to, you know, I bump up si… I don’t wear glasses, for instance, and I bump the text size up on a lot of sites.

Paul: Yeah, I do too.

Dan Cederholm: And so, if I’m doing that, and I have pretty good eye-sight, I imagine a lot of people would as well.

Paul: Ok so what…

Dan Cederholm: Having that control is important.

Paul: Yeah. So, one last question before I let you go (Dan: Yeah) and get back to your normal work… You were talking about browsers there. And so, Internet Explorer 7 has come along with sort of this zoom page functionality.

Dan Cederholm: Right.

Paul: How does that enter in all of this? Does it change the landscape in any way?

Dan Cederholm: I think it definitely helps. That’s what sort of baffles me even more. I’m using the word, “baffle” a lot today. (Paul laughs, Dan chuckles) Why they would add the page zoom to IE 7 but not allow you to re-size font set in pixels. So, I think it helps in a way but the problem there is that it will… your viewport stays the same. So, when you zoom the layout, you’ll start to get horizontal scroll bars and you’ll have to sort of navigate the page that way, whereas just zooming the text, the viewport stays the same and you can read the page a little easier, I find. I mean, it’d be interesting to talk to someone that has low vision and uses, you know, zoom or text bumping up on a regular basis. I think that that’s sort of the… the downside I see to it is that its, it can help but, let’s say that you’re looking at a block of text and you use the page zoom feature and you’re window is small. Let’s say you’re on a small screen device or something or at least you’re monitor is small or whatever. So, zooming in will make it easier to read but you might have to do some extra navigating of the windows to keep reading that. Whereas bumping up the text, you shouldn’t have to do that. It should stay within it’s container and the window should just… yeah, you’d be scrolling down but you won’t be scrolling horizontally.

Paul: I mean that’s a particular problem, isn’t it? With fluid designs, I’ve noticed, with a zoom function that as soon as you start zooming on a fluid web site,

Dan Cederholm: Oh, right.

Paul (continues): you immediately get horizontal scroll bars. Which to me, is ridiculous.

Dan Cederholm (laughing): Right, right. Exactly! Right, so in bumping up the text in a fluid design, should be, I think, should be a lot more… better an experience. That brings up a good point though, with em-based design. Now, when you’re bumping the text with an em-based design, the entire layout, if they layout is set in ems as well, the whole layout will expand. Sort of like zoom, but… So, that’s something to consider as well. Where the layout could go beyond the viewport, you could get horizontal scroll bars as well there. So if you have an extra wide layout in ems, that can be an issue. Just bumping it up one notch or two notches could cause that sort of scrolling problem.

Paul: Yeah. So, the long and the short of this, is there’s no right answer, is there?

Paul: There’s no perfect solution here.

Dan Cederholm: Yeah, there really isn’t.

Dan Cederholm: I mean, like a lot of things in web design, there’s not… yeah, it sort of just depends on a case-by-case. I mean, people fall into sort of things that work for them, you know, like I use the “keyword/percentage” thing and that just seems to work. Other people like the em-based approach to text sizing. But neither one is really right. I think you’re correct in saying there is no real right answer at this point. It will be interesting to see how CSS evolves and affects the way we layout pages. Just the other day, I was looking at the CSS 3 grid layout draft.

Paul: Bleh!

Dan Cederholm: Yeah. (laughs) Which is pretty amazing. And maybe we’ll be able to use it in the next fifty years.

Paul: Well on that cheery thought, (Dan (laughing): Sorry) I’ll have to grapple with CCS 3.

Paul: Thank you so much for your time, Dan. I appreciate you coming and explaining the different options that are available.

Dan Cederholm: Ahh! Its my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Question of the week

Pxels, ems, percentages… which do you use the most? Answer in the comments.

Show 96: Moll on Mobile

Posted in Classic shows on October 2, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul suggests some ways a client can pick which agencies to ask to tender. Marcus asks when is speculative design okay and Cameron Moll explaining how to get started on the mobile web.

Podcast: Download (31.0MB)

News and events | When is speculative design okay? | Who to ask to tender? | Cameron Moll on the mobile web

News and events

Social Participation as a business tool

Back in 2006 I spoke at refresh06. One of the presentations I gave there has since proved a popular subject and I have been asked to speak on it again a number of times in various forms. It is on the subject of social participation and how to use it as a marketing and business tool. Social networks and communities are often seen as the domain of the teenage crowd with sites like YouTube and MySpace dominated by this demographic. However, community based applications are applicable to all audiences and can be a powerful tool for businesses.

After preparing the latest incarnation for a presentation I am giving at IBM, I thought I would do a run through (as I have only limited time). Discovering the new record feature in keynote I decided to record the whole thing and upload it for all to see. Hope it is useful.

Test your website for mobile compatibility

So this week we have Cameron Moll on the show talking about some of things covered in his new book “Mobile Web Design”. In his book he mentions an interesting site that I would like to pass on to you. It is a web application that allows you to test how well your website would appear on a mobile device. You simply enter your website address, wait while it calculates your results (it even gives a random mobile web development tip while you wait) and then view a complete breakdown of any issues with your site.

The report is distilled down into a single score but you can also see performance in each of the individual areas including:

Speed
Cost in terms of data access
Quality of code

and a whole host of miscellaneous tests. However, best of all is the fact that it also provides an emulation of what your site would look like on a whole host of mobile devices.

Laying out inline images

My next story tackles one of the mixed blessing of content management systems. Although it is great that content management systems allow clients to add content themselves they almost always fine a way of screw up the look of a site in the process. One way that they manage this is adding inline images. They are often required to add specific classes to images for them to be displayed correctly. Unsurprisingly the client sometimes fails to do this and the design becomes broken.

This week the List Apart website proposes one way to slightly reduce this risk. They use javascript to detect content images on a page and then apply different classes based on the width of the image in relation to its containing tag. In other words the Javascript detects whether the image is a full column, half column, or quarter column image and lays it out appropriately.

Its not the perfect solution and there are still ample other ways clients can screw up a design but it is a nice use of javascript that enhances a design without being mission critical. I think seeing this kind of use of Javascript and we should all be looking to use it for this type of thing.

10 Usability nightmares you should be aware of

My last story this week is another top ten list from the guys at smashing magazine (they do like their lists!). This one is a list of the top 10 usability mistakes and I have to say it is an entertaining list focusing on some big name sites. The list includes:

Hidden log-in links
Pop-ups for content presentation
Dragging instead of vertical navigation
Invisible links
Visual noise
Dead end
Content blocks layering upon each other
Dynamic navigation
Drop-Down Menus
Blinking images

Each mistake is explained in detail including some offending screenshots. A worthwhile read for us all.

Marcus’ bit: When is speculative design okay?

I have decided to talk about speculative design work this week because we have recently produced a couple of designs and, although we recommend that it should be avoided, sometimes you simply can’t.

Unpaid prospective work is the bane of all of graphic based agencies and freelancers. It’s also something we have looked at before, but it’s such a significant subject I think it’s a good idea to look at it again.

The worst case

Some ‘clients’, and I use the word loosely, are simply looking for free work. It seems that they think ‘art’ or ‘drawing’ is not real work and is something that only fools pay for. They usually ask for a number of different page designs and concepts and will often ask for revisions on delivered designs.

The project often ends up being dropped by ‘the board’ and then mysteriously, a few months later, something very similar to your design appears for all to see.
These people are effectively stealing from you. Don’t do it.

When is it ok?

If you take the line that we should never do unpaid work then the answer is ‘never’.

However, life simply isn’t like that so you need to make some choices. You could argue that as long as the client is genuine i.e. it’s a real project that someone will win and subsequently get paid for, then it’s ok. It’s a fair fight and the best design will win.

But, this isn’t just about getting paid.

Educate (how many times do I use that as a heading!)

Speculative design is a beauty contest. The whole point of the exercise is to impress the client. This can possibly be seen as taking a somewhat derogatory view of a client’s ability to make the distinction between a design for them versus a design for their users. But even for those that understand the distinction, I don’t think it is possible to separate ‘what I like’ from ‘what is right for our users’. If there is a choice, then people can’t help picking the one they like best.

Added to this, there’s the big issue of designing in the dark. Even if a client has supplied a detailed brief and they’re happy to chat on the phone, the guy pitching still doesn’t really know what the requirements are. The early part of any design project involves detailed discussions about an organisations USPs, target audience, brand values, site statistics, site goals, etc etc.
User interface design is a collaborative process between the agency and the client that goes through an iterative cycle based on user feedback. This simply doesn’t happen with speculative design work.
So, in summary, always have this conversation with prospective clients. I know for a fact that on one job, we won the work by doing so. The client saw it as the most professional and well thought through approach taken by the agencies pitching for the job.

However, sometimes you have to do it or you will jeopardise your chance of winning the work – but still have the conversation and ask whether or not producing an initial concept will adversely affect your bid.

Paul’s corner: Who to ask to tender?

With literally millions of web design companies worldwide where do you begin when trying to draw up a list of potential agencies? Who do you invite to tender?

Ask the expert: Cameron Moll on the mobile web

Paul: Okay so joining me today is Cameron Moll. Good to have you on the show Cameron.

Cameron Moll: Hey, thanks Paul.

Paul: I think this is your first time on Boagworld, is it not?

Cameron Moll: Yeah it is.

Paul: Ah that’s good stuff we alway like to get new people on instead of having the same old boring people on every time. Nice to get someone from the States as well. Which is good.

Cameron Moll: Yeah absolutely and I’m kinda bummed you didn’t pick me for your hundredth episode.

Paul: Well if your in London you can come to our hundredth episode and join in the show. Do you happen to be over then by any chance?

Cameron Moll: Uh, when’s that gonna be.

Paul: Uh, October 20.

Cameron Moll: Um, unfortunately not.

Paul: Argg.Shame, what a shame. Yeah, so we’re looking forward to our hundredth that should be fun. So I mean the reason we’ve got you on the show today is because you’ve just produced a book called Mobile Web Design. This you already know I’m sure. So we thought it would be good to get you on the show just to talk about some of the things that you kind of cover in the book, and give a bit of an introduction, um, to the world of developing mobile websites. And um the question I wanted to kick off with is in your book you dicsuss kind of four different responses to kind of mobile web. In other words four different approaches people could take when they start thinking about the subject of mobile web design. And I just wondered whether you could talk us through those four different approaches that people could use.

Cameron Moll: Yeah that’s probably a good place to start. Um, most of these are straight forward right. It’s I think a pretty simple thinking to understand how one would approach the mobile web. And uh, you know I produced these about two years ago as I was trying to understand how someone like myself, you, how we would make that leap over to mobile. The more I was researching it the more it became apparent that you know there is really these four methods, and what they boil down to is, uh, is this. So one, you essentially do nothing. Two, you reduce the number of images and styling therby reducing the file size, uh, the page weight and so on. Three, handheld style sheets and then four, mobile optimized or what some refer to as content adaptation. And uh, the breakdown is essentially this, if you’re going with that first approach your saying “You know what, I’m going to do nothing.” I’m either lazy. I assume that my users have devices that can support the content I already developed and uh, you know when you think about the mobile web obviously the question that comes to mind is what technology am I going to use? How am I developing content for mobile devices? And fourthly, most devices out on the market today will support well structured mark up out of the box. And so most of the devices being sold, most of the devices that people have in hand today are going to support your html markup. So a lot of user will take that approach, I guess developers that is, take the approach to say you know what, what I have developed it good enough. I’m going to push it out there. And with things like the iPhone and some of the higher end Nokia devices that are out on the market, most of those devices can support a full desktop experience. Right, so it’s this idea that I refered to as content zooming. And so with the iPhone I can see the full website. I can pinch or zoom in. With some of the Nokia devices and Oprea mini 4, I can have that same experience. And so the thinking with that first approach is, lets just leave the content as is and allow those higher end devices to access them.

Paul: Sure (thoughtfully like he is paying attention)

Cameron Moll: Uh, the second approach. This essentially takes the existing markup and content and says lets pull out the images. Lets pull out the styling and allow users to access that raw content. And the thinking there is we’ll reduce the file size. We’ll take out all those big images, that unnecessary styling. Most of the devices out on the market today, well I shouldn’t say most, but alot of them don’t support the styling that you and I are used to using on the desktop. So, the thinking here is just to pull all that out and allow the device to see the raw content. And after all people are after the content not necessarly the background images and colours and things like that. Now the third approach is perhaps right now the most controversial, and that being handheld style sheets. I mean these have been promoted as kind of this poster child of all things web. So any device whethe it be a mobile device, a car a watch or what have you should potentiall be able to take the same markup and with a style sheet specific for that device, again it might be a printer it might be a mobile device. Being able to attach specific style sheets that render the presentation differently for that given device. So the idea being, you know if I just attach a handheld style sheet to my markup. I don’t touch the markup. I don’t touch anything else. I just add that handheld style sheet then great it’s going to display it differently and so on. Of course there are drawbacks to this approach and I guess what I’m skipping here is there is drawbacks that I cover in detail in the book to.

Paul: Yeah (thoughtfully like he is paying attention)

Cameron Moll: To each of these approaches. They all have pros and cons. The biggest one here with handheld style sheets, cutting to the chase, is the fact that not all devices support it. I would guesstimate, I don’t have any exact figures, I don’t know that they exist. But is guesstimate only about half the devices out on the market will support handheld style sheets. And even of those that do the support is somewhat shotty. In that some of those devices will correctly obey a property such as “display none” but they’ll still in the background download the associated content with that. So if you’ve got a large image for example, and you attach to that “display none” it won’t show it but it’s still gonna download in the background that image or that content. So right now, at least, using handheld style sheets is a bit of a pipe dream. It’s just we’d love to be able to have the power to access those, that capability. But right now it’s just not all that feasible.

Paul: Hmm. (thoughtfully like he is paying attention)

Cameron Moll: Finally, on the fourth point, mobile optimized content. This is where you say “You know what. I understand that the environment of being mobile, this idea of context is different that it is when I am sitting at my desktop.” It’s different because I might be using one hand for data entry. I’ve got a much smaller screen and naturally I’m out on the street. I’m out driving or something along those lines. So we say what’s different about that experience, then sitting at one’s desktop. Proponents of this fourth approach essentially say, “You know what the other approaches, especially the do nothing approach completely ignore context.” And that is what is the user doing when they’re out walking. When they’re on the tube or the subway and so on. So this last approach says, okay the context of being mobile is different than anything else. People want to do things differently when they’re out and about. So we’re gonna reformat our content to cater to that experience. We’re gonna present and entirely different experience, and altered experience perhaps to that of the desktop that addresses the specific needs of being mobile. The arguement I make in the book, I guess coming full circle with these approaches is, I often get asked the question “Well what’s the best approach then Camerson?” I don’t know. And you ask 20 different people in this industry and you’ll get 20 different answers. Right now I think the most feasible approaches moving forward are the first approach, do nothing, and the last approach, to create mobile optimized content. The arguement being is one, you need to understand first of all the context of mobile users and therefore adapt that experience to that context. But at the same time you have alot of capable devices out on the market that may be able to render a full experience that users are used to elsewhere.

Paul: I mean you talked there about context and in particular the fact that peole might be using it one handed or whatever else. What are kind of the major differences that you are seeing between kind of a user experience designed for the desktop compared to user experience designed for the mobile device? How do they alter? What should we be doing differently?

Cameron Moll: Well I think that the key phrase here is mobile right. So Barbra Ballard, I quote her in the book, I love her quote that essentially says that when we’re talking about mobile it’s referencing the user not the device. And I think if we start there saying okay mobile is about the user not necessarily the device that they are using but the user. We then start to understand. Okay what is this user trying to do? Where are they? What are the limitations that they confront? And what are the oportunities that are provided through mobile that might not be provided elsewhere? So, it’s not about how do we make this experience similar to the desktop, but how is it different? How do we make it different and how do we welcome that different experience? So this idea of context, it’s this idea, you know, you have this great content, and we hear this phrase “content is king.” Well I argue that context is king. Cause when a user is mobile that content is of little value if you ignore the context in which it is being used. That inevitably leads to the question. What are the needs? What are the problems? What are the tasks that users may encounter in an environment of mobility. Then that leads to what are the opportunities that mobile provides for that given context. For our content, for our company that the PC doesn’t.

Paul: Yeah. I mean it’s a very interesting area because it’s almost somethign you need to address on almost an individual project basis. Looking at what content you’re working with, and working out what of that content is actually relvant to a mobile device and which isn’t. I mean you use an example about that somebody’s probably not going to want to look at your portfolio page on your personal website on a mobile device. It’s just not the right context. I guess that’s what your getting at there.

Cameron Moll: Right. You bring out a very interesting point and that is, let’s say a given company. Let’s say you and I as developers are working within an organization right. And we’ve got 20 projects that we manage. Something you said earlier keys to the point of looking at those 20 applications or websites and saying okay first of all which of these 20 apps might be relevant to someone being mobile. We cut that down to say 5 or 6 or whatever the number becomes. Within those applications or sites if we’re talking about existing content here within those applications or websites it’s those 5 or 6 as being perhaps suitable to mobility. We then look within those entire applications, so within a given application for example that might have 20 different tasks that a user does with that application. We then say okay which of those tasks are relevant to someone being mobile. So it’s this process, at least with existing content, looking at what are the applications we provide and within those applications what are the features that are going to be relevant. Now what that also ignores though is the fact that we’re not saying what are new opportunities? What applications have we not developed that might cater to mobile? Or within an application that we have developed, what opportunities such as location awareness might be provided to a user that we just haven’t even thought about it.

Paul: Yeah. I mean that whole about the fact that you get into this mentality that a mobile device is a cut down version of what you provide on the desktop. Actually, there are opportunities to do stuff on a mobile device that isn’t actually possible on a desktop and the location aware stuff is a good example of that I guess.

Cameron Moll: Right exactly.

Paul: Okay. So lets say as a web designer I’m beginning to get a bit excited about the mobile web. It’s obviously the way that things are going. You provide some excellent statistics in your book about take up levels of mobile devices and I’ve cribbed those and used them on the show before. So I think that there is a lot of people that are listenin to the show and going yeah this is something that I am really quite excited about. But where do I start? What kind of technical skills to I need to develop mobile websites? Is it enough to just know standards based design? Or is there other thins I need to know as well?

Cameron Moll: You know that’s a perfect question. If you look at where we are at now today it’s totally different then say 4 or 5 ago. I remember the same hype 4 or 5 years ago where people were saying mobiles coming. Developing websites for mobile devices is the next big thing. It just kind of died out. I think largely it was due to the fact that back then you still had to develop in WML, which is not a cryptic language. It actually provided a lot of clarity and unity to the mobile web environment 4 or 5 years ago. But at the same time it required that a lot of us had to learn a new language in addition to HTML or CSS. That’s no longer the case. So this second time around when we hear this hype about the mobile web, to me at least it feels much more real. Because now we have again, as I mentioned earlier, most devices out on the market, in fact nearly all of them support HTML, XHTML, and some level of CSS. So that means that you and I, we already know HTML. We already know CSS. We can take that knowledge and start developing content for mobile devices. Whereas 4 or 5 years ago we had to learn a new language just to get over that barrier of providing content. So the good news is, for the most part, really if you know standards based design and development techniques, you are 90% there. I think the other 10% is left to understanding context. So trying to understand what those limitations are with mobile devices and mobile users. And also looking at the opportunities. so again we’re talking about smaller screens, data entry. Those being limitations but at the same time location awarenes. Users just want to do things different. They’re out on the go, which can be a great advantage depending on what kind of content you’re providing. So I think the good news here, long story short, yes. You and I can just build on the knowledge we already have if we just start to understand just a little bit about what the users are doing.

Paul: I mean you say. It’s interesting some of the words you use. You say ‘for the most part.’ Or ‘some browers understand CSS.” And I think that’s the other big fear that people have when they start investigating the mobile web, is the huge plethora of different browsers and devices and all of this kind of stuff. And it seems like how the hell am I supposed to test on that. It’s impossible to test on every conceiveable device and every conceiveable browser. Where do you start? Where do you put your initial efforts?

Cameron Moll: You know when I first started talking about mobile I think I was a bit to pessimistic in that I would stand up, say in a conference or in an article, and say okay if you’re going to test for mobile devices be prepared to test on dozens of browsers and if you think 4 or 5 desktop browsers. And getting consistency right for those is difficult. Wait till you see the mobile web. I’m a bit more optimistic now. I hope the book at least comes across that way and when I talk about it at conferences it comes across that way. And the reason being is this. There are some pretty easy ways to deal with that challenge of consistency. Of testing for mobile devices. Of just developing content period for mobile devices right. So you and I, you use probably the web developer extension for Firefox. We both probably at some point used Opera. Both of those browsers with those extensions and plugins can, at least at the very start, render and initial small screen preview. They both have options to be able to do that. So starting at the very least we can develop, again because we’re developing in XHTML rather than WML, we can within the browser at least do a very quick test to see roughly how it’s going to show up for the user. After that, once you’ve got at least the markup structurally sound you can then jump over to emulators. Now there are plenty of online emulators. .moby provides one. Opera mini provides another and there’s several others out there. But also there’s desktop software that you can download to be able to emulate mobile devices. So then taking 5 or 10 mobile devices I can now test how my content’s going to render, and it’s very close to how it will actually render on the device. But you can’t stop there. The last step has to be actual devices. And I think this was what was insurmountable for me starting out as a mobile developer. At least a beginner saying oh gosh do I have to go out an purchase 100 devices to be able to test my content. Well fortunately you can get away with 5 or 10 devices. If you can get 5 or 10 devices that vary widely. By that I mean one being a very basic phone, another one being a PDA,another one being a popular device such as the Razor. If you can get 5 devices that vary widely, 5 to 10, the chances are that that content is going to render well for most devices out there on the market. That will get you close enough. A lot of that is based not just on my personal preference but on the case study that I offer in the book. That is the Yahoo! website for the FIFA world cup last year. They took that approach. They said you know it would be difficult to test on 100 devices but we think if we can get 5 to 10 widely varying devices that chances are our content is going to display well for a global audience. Which indeed it was for that particular website. So that’s the arguement that I’ve made. I’ve hear others make that arguement as well. And it’s not difficult to get that number of devices right. So you can probably get 3 to 5 from yourself, from friends, collegues and so on, on loan for a couple hours. If you’ve got a blog you can ask for volunteers to do testing. I’ve done that before and it works pretty well. And then finally anyone can hop on eBay and do a search for unlocked mobile phones and purchase phones for an affordable price and get you know 5 to 10 devices. That’s how I did it. You know I hopped on eBay. I bought about 5 phones that were unlocked and then I just take my SIM card and swap that around the phones when I am doing testing. So it’s really not that difficult once you’re done developing your content to make sure that it renders well for mobile devices.

Paul: What do you think about the kind of growing thing that we’re seeing at the moment about designing mobile sites for specific devices? Like the iPhone. Do you think that is a bad route to go?

Cameron Moll: You know I’m not going to say it’s a bad route to go. But I do question it’s integrity. Three years ago or so, when I bought, well this was a little bit after I bought my Treo, for example which is a feature rich PDA. There were all kinds of Treo specific sites that had been developed. So you had something like, lets just say you had something like ESPN.com/mobile/pda/treo would be the web address for that content. And it was formatted just for that device. When you think about all the devices that are out on the market you then realize that that becomes a big chore to try to develope content for X number of devices. Now I think with the iPhone at least you have that same experience being repeated. For me it feels in part like you know years ago when we hit up a website and it said best viewd with Internet Explorer 4.0 or something like that. You know that is what we’re seeing now with the iPhone. Granted the iPhone provides a much different experience and a much richer experience, which is great, but at the same time I worry that we are spending a lot of effort on a device that 1. Is not a market majority and 2. The device itself, the iPhone itself might change at some point in the future. I might have a larger screen. It may render content differently. Which then will require that we go back and rewrite that content yet again. So the arguement I’ve made is if it makes business sense to develop and iPhone optimized site well more power to you. Go for it. But I advocate as a default creating content that can render on as many devices as possible. Not necessarily just one device.

Paul: Cool. Thank you so much Cameron. That is incredibly useful. Where can people find out more about your book then?

Cameron Moll: The web address is mobilewebbook.com or they can find a link from my website cameronmoll.com.

Paul: Excellent. It’s a .PDF book that you can download instantly. Now waiting around for delivery at $19. The best thing of all is it’s nice a short. Just over 100 pages. Isn’t that right? Something like that?

Cameron Moll: That’s correct. And I’ll give your listeners a heads up that we’ve got a print version coming out in October to be announced soon.

Paul: Oh that’s excellent. So you’ve got the choice either way. Alright thank you very much for coming on the show Cameron. We’ll get you on again in the future no doubt.

Cameron Moll: Hey thanks Paul.

Show 90: Digg

Posted in Classic shows on August 14, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Marcus abandons Paul to go on holiday. Paul talks about competitive analysis and does an in-depth interview with Daniel Burka, the creative director at digg.com.

Podcast: Download (22.1MB)

News and events | Daniel Burka talks about Digg | Competitive analysis

Hello? Is anybody there? I am so lonely, nobody to talk to, nobody to rant at, nobody to take the piss of! Your listening to boagworld.com, the podcast for all those involved in designing, developing and running websites on a daily basis. My name is Paul Boag and this week, I am sad and alone as Marcus is away on Holiday (or should I say vacation?).

I have to say it is not the same without him. Of course on the upside in many ways its a lot better. Less waffle, no interruptions, no skype problems and you get to hear my undiluted genius. So thats okay then :)

Because we don’t have Marcus around this week, todays show will be a little different. For a start Marcus wont be saying much, which should make the show shorter. However, in his place we have an extended interview with Daniel Burka the creative director at the social news website Digg. We cover loads of stuff from the difference in designing for social networking sites to working with AJAX and designing for the iPhone.

I will also be doing my segment as normal. This week I will be providing a quick and dirty introduction to competitive analysis. We will be looking at what you can learn from your competitions websites and how you go about extracting the maximum amount of information.

But before we can get into all that good stuff we first need to look at what has been happening in the world of web design over the last week.

News and events

Eric Meyer tries to prevent history repeating itself

First up in the news segment of the show today is a passionate call to action by Eric Meyer. Like myself, Eric has been working in the web for a very long time and is all too familiar with the problems of the past. He is a veteran of the browser wars (how dramatic does that sound!) and remembers the many problems that period caused.

During that time many web designers simply gave up trying to support multiple browsers and instead displayed the now famous message…

“Your browser is not compatible and must be upgraded”

It is therefore particularly disturbing when we thought those days are over to see the return of a similar message. As Eric points out in his post, those types of messages are returning in the form of…

“This site is for iPhone users only.”

As Eric says: Stop it! Stop it right now. He is absolutely right. There is no reason whatsoever for shutting out users from viewing iPhone optimized pages. Sure they might not look as good on a non iphone browser but other than that they should work fine on a compliant browser. To be honest, even if they don’t, that is still no reason to block non iphone users. If I choose to look at an iphone site on my Windows mobile device or even on my desktop browser, I am not going to expect it to look perfect. However, I could have all kinds of reasons for wanting to do it from wanting to check out the functionality to using an alternative mobile browser that is just as capable of displaying the content.

In Short, Eric argues (and I whole heartedly agree) that the “best viewed in…” approach to web design is a fools errand. Whether it is the iphone or something else, make sure you avoid that road at all costs.

6 Keys to Understanding Modern CSS-based Layouts

Talking about best practice, Jonathan Snook has posted a helpful article for those of you still struggling to move across to modern CSS-based layout.

As Jonathan says in his post…

Much of CSS is pretty straightforward and, I suspect, quite easy for most people to grasp. There’s font styles, margin, padding, color and what not. But there’s a wall that people will run into… that point where a number of key elements need to come together to create a solid CSS-based layout that is consistent cross-browser.

Jonathan addresses this challenge by talking about 6 key principles that will help you get over this hump. He talks about; the box model, floating columns, sizing with ems, image replacement, floated navigation and sprites.

Its an interesting list although I am not entirely sure I would include the same items. For example there is no mention of HasLayout or IE conditional comments. However, Jonathan does say it is just his take on things and encourages people to add suggestions in the comments so they are definitely worth reading too.

How to mix fonts

So you might be listening to this feeling smug about your CSS skills but how are you with typography? Working with type is a challenging area and one that is very easy to get wrong. That is especially true when trying to combine multiple fonts together in an effective way.

Fortunately, David who listens to the show, has sent me a link to a cheat sheet on mixing typefaces. Not only does it provide specific examples of typefaces that work well together, it also gives you some basic information on typography.

I am a great fan of cheat sheets and have a number pinned to my wall including my much loved microformats cheat sheet. So, if you are looking for some advice on typography add this to your collection.

Making money through forums

My final news story for this week’s show comes off of the back of a story knocking around here in the UK. A number of large companies have pulled their advertising off of Facebook following the discovery that those ads were appearing on the profile of the BNP (a pseudo- fascist political party in the UK). These companies were unhappy that their brands being associated with the organisation.

This Facebook story is indicative of a wider problem that advertisers seem to be having with social networking sites and forums in particular. So the question then arises, can you make money from a social networking site?

For most of us this is not a question we have to deal with. Most of us don’t run social networking websites. However, many of us do run forums and we are looking to make a bit of extra cash from them.

If that is you then you might want to check out “Can forums still make money?” on sitepoint. This post suggests a load of ways you can improve your return on your forum and make some cash to cover hosting costs. The post is very realistic suggesting that the vast majority of us are not going to get rich from our forums. However, it might help pay for your cleaner (which is what I spend my Adsense revenue on!) and so it is worthy of your attention.

As a slight aside before I wrap up the news segment of today’s show, the article also links to some useful tips from Google about maximizing your return from Google Adsense, so you might want to check that out too.

Talking of social networking websites, that brings me on nicely to my interview with Daniel Burka from Digg…

Daniel Burka talks about Digg

Paul: Okay. So joining me today is Daniel Burka the lead designer/creative director/God of all things user interface at Digg.com. Is that a fair way to describe you Daniel?

Daniel: That was a very polite introduction. Thank you very much.

Paul: Well, it is always good to butter up the guests at the beginning…

Daniel: [laughs]

Paul: I find it goes down better that way. [laughs] So Daniel, I thought that it would be great to get you on the show, simply because you seemed to have worked so extensively with web projects centered very much on social participation and web applications, you know, and various other Web 2.0 buzzwords. Obviously Digg.com is a good example of that. And a lot of listeners of this show are still working on content heavy brochure-ware type sites. But, they seem to be really interested in more interactive elements to their site. And so we thought, let’s get an expert on the show that seems to specialize in this area. So, here is my first question Daniel. What do you see as being the main differences between designing and social networking sites, compared to more traditional content heavy sites that I am sure you have worked on in previous lives, so to speak?

Daniel: Oh yeah, I mean absolutely. I worked on those kinds of sites in the past. The big difference with something like Digg is that all of the content on the site, pretty much, is provided by users and so we're building conduits as frequently as we can where people can provide their input, provide content you know foster discussion, these kinds of things so I guess wherever possible we're not only designing the technically areas that they can do it but focusing the design on encouraging them to participate.

Paul: So how to you do that? How do you encourage someone to participate in using kind of design tools and design approaches?

Daniel: Right. I guess the big thing is to make it obvious that other users have provided content to the site. So, making it clear that the Digg count went up because other people you know dug the story. You know, showing which users submitted certain things or which user made a comment. You know that indicates, Oh okay. Other people, like me, have participated and that might be something I might be able to do too.

Paul: So how did you deal with the kind of early days before Digg had really taken off? Where perhaps you had less content than you do now and you kind of want to give the impression that there is loads going on, when perhaps here isn't?

Daniel: Right. I guess by the time I got involved in Digg which is about 4-5 months after it had started. So Kevin and Owen originally developed the site.

Paul: Oh okay

Daniel: And then they hired the company that I work with in Canada. They hired us to come in and basically do a design review and redesign of the site and that was the primary focus of the redesign was to look and say, Okay, what is this site about? And what the site is about providing input and so the original design which was more definitely designed from an engineer's perspective. It had all of that content, it had all of the facts and the bits and the place to Digg something, but it wasn't very clear at all what you should do or why you should do it.

Paul: Hmmm.

Daniel: And so, you-know probably the most interesting thing I have ever done on Digg was to take the Digg count, to make it really big and stick it on the left and stick a really explicit Digg It button under it. So, I mean that's clearing indicating X number of people already participated.

Paul: Yeah.

Daniel: And if you want to participate hit the big button.

Paul: Yeah. The kind of putting right in front of peoples face where they can't possibly miss it, so to speak.

Daniel: Right. I mean that is the entire purpose of the website is to, you know, say you like something.

Paul: So what other kind of things did you implement in those early days when you came in and started redesigning the site?

Daniel: The original focus, I actually thought this was a kind of interesting approach to take. Steven and I were looking at the site and trying to determine that. It already, in some ways, had a fairly large scope to the website. So we were trying to determine where do we get started. Often that is redesign the look of the site or redesign the home page. We looked at it and what is the most important thing here and the story format, I think, was probably the most important thing about Digg. And so we looked at each individual story in the list. There is a whole row of them on the homepage. We got about 15 on there now. And kind of a singled one of those and dissected it and said, What is important about a story? Why did the user submit it? Why is another person going to be interested in it? How do I encourage them to participate into that story? And so, that story format counts for a few different iterations since we started.

Paul: Hmmm.

Daniel: I think that being the primary focus of ours.

Paul: I mean what about the kind of more rich elements that you started to introduce? Where there is a lot less page refreshes that perhaps there once was and you kind of changed the way the people interacted with the site by introducing AJAX and things like that. I mean was that a big shift? What kind of thinking went into that process?

Daniel: Absolutely. I mean that is critical to Digg's success. Owen and Kevin had already started playing around with AJAX and this was before anybody like Jesse James Garrett that coined the phrase, AJAX. So, we were still calling it Asynchronous Javascript and XML request. Thank God someone has shortened that. And the fact that you are requiring mass participation to make something interesting would be entirely stymied if we had forced a page reload every single time a person wanted to participate.

Paul: Ummm.

Daniel: So we are using that all over the place. The Digg It button is the one real obvious place. And then you know especially in the comment system. There are various other areas where we're basically allowing you to have a really low-threshold of participation. No long page loads. Immediate reaction that what I did I got a reaction back from that, so I get that positive feeling.

Paul: So how does that kind of process work within Digg? I mean are you actually involved in coding the AJAX elements or do you just do the user interface? How do those kinds of accountabilities split up?

Daniel: Right. I guess we've got a really good balance I think between the development and the UI design. We are really tightly integrated with the different teams. And we are getting big enough now that we can actually speak about them as teams. So generally the flow at Digg starts with it's great we have a really design focused process here that Kevin will come up with an idea and then he and I will bounce the idea back and forth usually and figure out what the pros and cons are and then kind of rough out the design aspect. And then, basically take it from the conceptual stage code it statically and then work with the developers in terms of coding the functionality into it. So I don't do a lot of PHP or very much Javascript, but I provide with them XHTML and CSS and obviously the images and work with them implementing the basic flows.

Paul: I think a lot of the impression I get is a lot of organizations is still struggling to work out whose responsibility is the AJAX elements. It's kind of client side stuff that is very user-interface oriented. So should it be a designer job or is it kind of so intrinsic in the kind of connecting to the database and pulling out the content and that kind of thing which is actually a developer's job? It's quite interesting to hear how different people do it.

Daniel: Right. We probably fall into the developer's side of things. You know, it is submitting content to the database which is not horribly different than a normal form submitting to the database.

Paul: Yeah.

Daniel: So that is probably how we line it up.

Paul: Yeah. You guys seem to be doing some interesting things at the moment. One of the things that I imagine is particularly challenging is that you got a tech-savvy audience which is where Digg started. But you're constantly at the moment in this process of broadening that audience out to be more of a mainstream audience. And I'm just interested from a kind of design point of view, and user-interface point of view, what challenges that has presented you as far as shifting that audience. You know kind of in-mid process if you want. Most websites have a fairly good idea of who their target audience is upfront. But you are having to adapt that as the site evolves and I imagine that must be tricky at times.

Daniel: Oh, absolutely. I mean we started off as you said as very a tech-heavy site at about this time last year. I guess just over a year ago we broadened out very explicitly by introducing other content areas to the website. As we grow, and as a less tech-savvy audience comes in, there definitely is a real dichotomy between the perceived power-user who understands the very complex form type systems versus people who barely used a comment system on a weblog. On different areas of the site that level of experience I guess really comes to the fore. Although, I think I really take inspiration from the FireFox Project in that regard – particularly in Van Gudgers response. He is one of lead engineers on the FireFox Project. One of his best qualities being saying No! during the FireFox development and a lot of power-users perceive that they want all of these options at their finger tips. They want a hundred different options, if there are a hundred possibilities. Where as, in reality, having a simple system actually works better for both the power-user and the relative novice. I think the correlation between what happened with the Mozilla Suite, which was the previous iteration before FireFox which had a lot of different features and a lot of different buttons and customizability, versus FireFox which is really the torn-down simple browser. Which really ended up serving both audiences better.

Paul: So have you had the kind of guts to take functionality away or are you more kind of hiding it away so that it is still accessible to the power-user wants to go and get it?

Daniel: Well that is definitely the balance that we try and make. I think hiding the functionality is actually I was just reading a book a friend lent me. John Maeda’s book The Laws of Simplicity and he covers this subject. I think that it is really interesting that you can hide functionality as long as it doesn't feel intimidating and as long as you are not obscuring the functionality. I think you can actually, quite successfully, create a simple site by tucking functionally under the right areas, I guess.

Paul: That struck me. This whole idea of dealing with different types of audiences is a very challenging area. You have been at Digg for a while now, what has been the most challenging aspect from your point of view?

Daniel: Well, I think managing user feedback is definitely one of the big points of working at Digg. It is very intimidating working on a site where, every time you want something new, you have about 2 million people seeing it the next day and giving you their feedback on it. It is fantastic! It is really inspiring and exciting – and at the same time horribly intimidating. It is hard not to get frozen-up when you are about to launch something in two days and you kind of have to brace for the criticism because you know that people are going to be critical. And I mean that in the positive sense. They are going to critique what you have done. And so, being able to basically listen to a wide range of opinions and make sure that you are listening to everyone. But, you don't necessarily do what everyone says because there are obviously people with conflicting opinions and there are people who have very specific interests that may or may not be reflected by other people. I think managing those expectations that people want to know that you are listening to them and they want to see their suggestions reflected in what you are doing. Balancing those types of expectations is a really challenging part of the job.

Paul: So how do you go about that? How do go about deciding which suggestions you are going to implement and which you are not? Do you have some kind of process for that?

Daniel: I'm not sure if it is horribly formalized. I think the first and really important thing that we've learned at Digg, and I have learned on other projects being worked on, is taking a really deep breath. People will immediately ask for feedback on something, the minute you launch it

Paul: Yeah.

Daniel: They will ask for change. So don't make a change for the first week, unless they point out obviously drastic problems that you didn't anticipate. Take a deep breath. Let people give their feedback. Let them get some experience with the change because people are adverse to change generally. Their first reaction is going to be, Well I was familiar with it the other way, now it is different and I don't feel comfortable with that. And so, you will get a lot of feedback in that regard. And then carefully go through and filter and look for themes of feedback from different people. Try to determine why they were giving that feedback. And then iterate from there. I think that iterative process is so important.

Paul: One of the things that I think everyone has noticed recently about Digg, is that you released this iPhone interface. Everybody is going on about the iPhone endlessly and I am hugely jealous that we don't have it over here in the UK. And so, I am obviously bitter and twisted about it.

Daniel: [laughs]

Paul: But, putting that aside there is this plethora of iPhone applications coming out and Digg is one of the people who have done it. Were you involved in that putting it together?

Daniel: Yeah, absolutely. Joe, who is one of our developers, kind of came over and he was talking about it and was thinking it would be a great idea. And we both kind of got excited and pumped the whole thing out over our weekends.

Paul: Ahhh.

Daniel: Big props to Joe Hewett, who is not the Joe who works here, but Joe Hewett has made this great framework basically to start developing for iPhone applications in Safari.

Paul: Ahhh.

Daniel: He actually released a prototype of it on Friday afternoon. I think? And we started off from there and started developing. That is what does the sliding effects in our interface.

Paul: Okay.

Daniel: And we kind of took what he had done and I think we launched on a Tuesday the next week and on Wednesday Joe had already refined it and made into a kind of framework more people could use. So it was very useful to us.

Paul: So how do you feel about that, because that is a very different interface to be developing? It is much more controlled. You know the browser you are aimed at. You know the screen size. Was it a pleasant experience?

Daniel: Oh, absolutely. It was really really fun. I mean, there were a few things that were really fun about it. One, you are absolutely in that controlled environment. I mean people aren't resizing there fonts. You have a controlled number of fonts. You know the resolution. You can accommodate for when you flip the screen and it goes to wide-mode. And plus you are working with a rendering engine that doesn't suck.

Paul: [laughs]

Daniel: So it is really fun. [laughs] I mean you can even use advanced Webkit only type rounded corners and all kinds of fun stuff like that so, that part of it is really liberating. I can just imagine if all web design was like that. You know if all browsers were actually as standards compliant as they think they are. So that was fun. But, I think the most interesting thing is that you're working with an input device that is this big-fat-honking finger. And so, everything you do you have to be thinking about that. I think it will be interesting to see who succeeds at developing applications like that. But, you really have to think about pairing things down.

Paul: Yeah.

Daniel: When you are clicking with a finger there is no way you can have four or five buttons in a row and expect the person to be able to pick one out when they are sitting on a bouncing bus, with this phone in their hand. And so, buttons have to be really big. The Digg button on the source pages for instance is about two and a half times bigger than one on the normal site. And the links, we considered two different links. One to go to the source and one to go to what we call the Permalink page, the story page, of that particular item. But you know, even having just two buttons per story was much too difficult on the iPhone so we just have one you just can't miss which is a big finger button and it slides over and you get the story.

Paul: Yeah. Do you think you will be doing kind of more with Digg where you are kind of delivering the content, through other various mechanisms; such as the iPhone? I mean, could you imagine doing stuff with desktop applications like using AIR or anything else? Is that an area that you think you would get into?

Daniel: I think the really exciting thing is that we are finally getting a proper API out there. And so, I guess we launched the API maybe two or three months ago. Maybe longer than that, I forget, but I think it will be really interesting to see you know if a desktop experience of dig is really valuable somebody is going to pick up that project and go with it.

Paul: Sure.

Daniel: And they'll develop it on the API. So, I'm not sure if explicitly if a desktop application will be great, but I could see it having certain benefits and maybe toying around with the idea ñ for sure.

Paul: Is there something personally you are interested in as a web designer doing, you know, it's a different medium again isn't it? You're going from a browser based environment to a desktop environment. Is that something that interests you personally?

Daniel: Oh, absolutely. I think it is interesting that those lines are really blurring. I mean, AIRs is that first salvo, in that regard, you really are to a large degree developing a web application. You can develop it in HTML and CSS with basically the same skills it takes to make an iPhone application, or a basic website, you can build an AIR app. That is pretty exciting. I think that once that platform matures, it could open up a whole range of things.

Paul: From a personal perspective, what is the area of your job that you most enjoy?

Daniel: I really enjoy trying to make things easy for people. Sometimes is really irks me if Kevin describes my job as making things pretty.

Paul: [laughs]

Daniel: I think it is such a minor part of design. You know it is an interesting one. But I think sitting down trying to determine, when you are looking at a fairly complex system you are trying to build, and trying to figure out how to not be complex. What to takeaway, how to design something so that it feels simple by putting the really important things upfront. And throwing it by some users and watching them how they do it. I think it is really exciting to see somebody participate in something that is under the hood really complex, but which they have fun and they feel that they are participating. And they do not put a lot of thought into what they are doing, they are trying to achieve what they came to do.

Paul: What about the fact that you kind of have been working on Digg for a prolonged period of time and it is that one site you have been working on continually? I guess because I work for a web design agency where I have a series of clients back-to-back and I am doing different things the whole time. Sometimes it strikes me that we're working on a project for a prolonged time is both a blessing and a curse. I just kind of wondered, what you think? Do you really enjoy being able to spend time digging into that one area?

Daniel: That is a very interesting point, because I also come from the web design company background where I basically would do a different project every month. And until December I was still fairly heavily involved in the day-to-day affairs of my previous company, so it has been a reasonably new experience for me

Paul: Oh I didn't know that.

Daniel: To be working solely on one site, with Pounce on the side. [laughs]

Paul: Yeah. [laughs]

Daniel: Another site I have been working on. So this is really very interesting. Absolutely, there are so many things fantastic about it. It is really fun to be able to go into great detail and have the time to go back into something you designed previously, and to alter it. It is not necessarily that you made a mistake, but a month later you suddenly realize that a big improvement to that would be if I did X. And so you actually have the opportunity to go back and do those kinds of things. Where as I am sure, if you were working with a client, it has happened before that you know six months later you see something you say it is obvious to me now but it is kind of out of your control. The contract is over. You know

Paul: Yeah

Daniel: They're working with a different firm. There are all kinds of things like that. And so, working on something as big as Digg it is really fun too. Within Digg there are lots of different projects. There are different pages. There are new things we are working on. And so you kind of I guess segment them into kind of different projects you can go around in a circle and come back to later on.

Paul: Do you ever envision a day where you throw out the existing user interface and apply a new one? Or do you think it will always be a kind of evolving iterative process?

Daniel: Oh, I think an iterative process for sure.

Paul: Yeah.

Daniel: I don't want to second guess what is possible in the future. We may have some brilliant idea or new technology that blows our minds. But, I think there is no reason to throw out something that is working pretty well. I think there is a kind a rush sometimes to you know, to start from scratch that real desire to start from scratch sometimes. But something like Digg, I mean it has changed fairly significantly over the last two years, but I don't know if too many people notice

Paul: Yeah.

Daniel: Other than a few big pushes we made, that things had changed much. I think that is really healthy that people become familiar with systems. They learn how to interact with them. And to really shake them up, you really better have a damn good reason to do it.

Paul: Yeah. Okay so last question then before we finish up. Is there any stuff that you are working on with Digg that you are allowed to talk about [laughs] because obviously there are things you are not allowed to talk about.

Daniel: Right.

Paul: But the stuff that you are allowed to talk about, what is really exciting you and what are you really enjoying getting into at the moment?

Daniel: Oh, there is a bunch of things. I think I am allowed to talk about that Kevin mentioned the other day that we are working on the images section.

Paul: Cool.

Daniel: So we are going to do right now you can do news and videos. And we are pretty confident we are going to get into images as well. And so we are working on a couple of projects to kind of lay the framework for doing that. So, some people think it is as easy as adding a section

Paul: Yeah.

Daniel: And putting a title on it. But if we want to do that, we want to do it the right way. And lay the ground work first. I am working a couple of things I cannot go into great detail unfortunately there so much secrecy here that we can't

Paul: [laughs]

Daniel: Layout too much of what we are up to. But, I am really excited that we are headed in this direction.

Paul: Yeah. The trouble is that you guys get ripped off so quickly, don't you, that you need to keep things quite.

Daniel: Well. I think it is a combination of problems. One is that we are obviously concerned with people duplicating our features and the other one is that we want to be careful setting expectations. Because if we say we are going to do something, we really want to do it.

Paul: Yeah.

Daniel: And I think people will get disappointed if we say, In two months we are going to launch such-and-such. and you know lot's of stuff happens in two months. And unfortunately if that had to get pushed back, and that two months was a totally random date that I pulled out of my head

Paul: [laughs]

Daniel: [laughs]

Paul: See know, we all believe that it is all going to happen in two months.

Daniel: Shoot! [laughs]

Paul: [laughs]

Daniel: [laughs] People will be disappointed or they will feel like we haven't lived up to their expectations I suppose.

Paul: Yeah. Okay. Well that was really great. Thank you very much for coming on the show Daniel. No doubt we will try and crowbar you again in the future to come and talk to us about Pounce as well. Because that is an exciting project.

Daniel: That would be fun.

Paul: Okay thank you very much for your time and talk to you again soon.

Daniel: Thanks so much for having me.

Paul’s corner: Quick and dirty competitive analysis

Great stuff from Daniel! It was really fun to speak to him even though I managed to offend him after we stopped recording by calling him an American (he is Canadian). Hopefully he will forgive me for the ultimate crime!

Okay, so before I wrap up today’s show lets take a quick look at the subject of competitive analysis. Its actually a segment I have just written for the book I am working on and so I thought I would share what I have covered. The idea is not to make you an expert in the field but simply to allow you to extract as much information as possible from your competitions websites in a quick and easy manner.

As always I have written this up as a blog post entitled “Quick and dirty competitive analysis” so check that out in the show notes if you want to see exactly what I covered.

No show next week

So that is about it for this week’s show. Remember that there will be no show next week as I am going away on holiday too! Yippee! However, if you need your boagworld fix don’t forget you can check out the forum and chat with other people about the poor quality of Marcus’ jokes.

Quick and dirty competitive analysis

Posted in Web strategy on August 9, 2007 by Paul Boag

If you have a long list of competitors, doing a comprehensive review of them all might be too time consuming to be justifiable.

Every organisation should know what their competition is doing online. However, getting your boss to pay for proper competitive analysis is not always easy. I therefore thought I would share some quick and dirty techniques for doing competitive analysis yourself.

I am going to go ahead and make the assumption that you already know who your competitors are. If you haven’t already, make a list of them including their websites. Depending on your sector this could be a fairly long list. It will range from the large well established players to the small and dynamic upstart.

If you have a long list of competitors, doing a comprehensive review of them all might be too time consuming to be justifiable. In such situations you will be forced to narrow the list a little. However, be careful. The tendency when narrowing the field is to focus on the largest competitors. This can be a mistake. Sometimes the smaller sites, or those new to the marketplace, are more likely to be doing something innovative which you might be able to learn from. Instead try and ensure a mix of both larger and smaller sites.

Once you have established which websites you want to review I would suggest trying the following steps.

Basic review

Step 1 is to do a basic visual review yourself. Nothing beats taking the time to look through a competitors website. As you look through each site ask yourself a series of questions.

What is the message and tone of voice being used on this site?
What content and functionality is highlighted on the homepage and in the navigation?
What image are they trying to project through the design?
What functionality and content do they have compared with your own website?
What labeling are they applying to the content areas and site sections?

The aim is to gain a better understanding of the strategy being used by your competition regarding the web. Where you encounter differences in approach from your own site ask yourself why. Why have they chosen to approach the problem in a different way? Does that alternative approach give them an advantage?

User testing

Step 2 is to try user testing your competitors websites. There is no reason why you can only user test your own website. In many cases it can prove extremely useful to test your competitions website because it gives you an opportunity to test out responses to design, content, functionality and site structure. In short you can learn from what they have gotten right and improve on what they have done badly.

I am not going to get into the details of running a user test session here, although this is a subject we should return to at some point. What is important, is that testing a competitors site is a great training ground for making improvements to your own.

Accessibility

My next step when assessing a competitors website is to assess how accessible the site is. Potentially your competitors could be turning away valuable business simply because their site takes too long to download or because it cannot be accessed by people who don’t use internet explorer. Obviously accessibility is also about access for the disabled and this can be assessed using the WAI guidelines. However, if you are a website owner or manager rather than a designer/developer these guidelines may well prove more confusing than helpful.

For the sake of this section I want to suggest two tests that you can use to help assess how many users your competition are turning away.

Browser support

The first is to look at your website on as many different browsers and computers as possible. Many people do not realize that there are other browsers than Internet Explorer and that even Internet Explorer has various versions that will display your website differently. I would recommend you look at your site in at least Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Opera and Safari for the mac. You may well be surprised at the differences you see. You can either download these browsers and test the websites manually or alternatively use a services such as Browsershot that will provide screenshots of website as displayed in different browsers. Obviously, if you use a screenshot service then you won’t get the interactivity of a real browser. However, for the sake of assessing the competition this is normally enough.

Download times

The second test you might want to perform is analyzing how fast the site downloads. In this age of broadband many web designers have become less concerned about download times. However, not everybody has broadband and most sites cannot afford to ignore dialup users. One service that helps you find out how long your site takes to download is a website optimization tool. Ideally you should be looking for download times of less than 10 seconds however anywhere between 10 and 20 seconds is acceptable.

Online visibility

My final step for assessing the competition is to look at how visible their website is. That is to say, how easy it is to find. Do your competitor’s websites rank higher than your own? Do more people link to them? Is there more talk about your competitor’s brands than your own? All of these questions are incredibly revealing.

A good place to start is with one of the many free websites that check various sources to ascertain online visibility. The one that I use most often is popuri.us. This checks your competitors visibility on Yahoo! and Google, but also on blogging search engines like Technorati and social networking sites like del.icio.us.

If you want more specific information relating to your visibility on certain search phrase then you will need a rank-checking tool. Again there are various free services available including Google Ranking, which checks all major search engines despite the fact that its name appear Google specific.

However, it is the question of linking that is most interesting. Who links to your competition and can you persuade them to link to your site? Finding out who links to your competition is remarkably simple. Just use the same popuri.us service I mentioned earlier. You will notice a number of the results are marked “backlinks”. By clicking on the details link associated with these backlinks you will be taken to the appropriate search engine and see all of the webpages that link to your competition. Alternatively you can simply go to the search engine you wish to check and type:

link:http://www.yourcompetition.com

This will return all of the sites linking to that website address. You can now contact these websites as appropriate asking if they would be willing to link to you instead of your competition.

Summary

The above is not intended to produce a perfect competitive analysis but it should get you started. Its a quick and dirty approach that gives you a handle on:

How easy your competitors websites are to find
Whether they are turning potential visitors away
How easy their site is to use
What they are trying to communicate and achieve through their content and functionality

Hope that helps.

Show 87: Trends

Posted in Classic shows on July 24, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul discusses about emerging design trends, Marcus talks about supporting existing websites and Ben Werdmuller introduces us to the open source community tool Elgg.

Podcast: Download (23.2MB)

Eric Meyer: Competition

Before we dive into the show, I wanted to mention a two day workshop Eric Meyer is going to be running in London on the 13th and 14th August. For those of you who do not know Eric, he is one of the world’s leading experts on CSS and XHTML. He has written numerous books as well as speaking internationally on the subject. This is no ordinary CSS training course and if you can you should consider attending

Although this workshop is not cheap at £695 it will tell you everything you need to know in order to build top-quality CSS and XHTML websites. Eric is an incredibly knowledgeable guy and it is definitely worth hassling your boss for the registration fee.

Of course, not all of us have a boss we can hassle. So for those of you with less disposable income we have a free ticket to give away. All you have to do is answer the following questions:

“In which episode of the boagworld podcast did I first mention the subject of web standards?”

To enter simply email me your answer, including the word “Meyer” in the subject line.

Good luck and we will announce the winner in next week’s show (so entries need to be in by 30th).

News and events

Conflicting absolute positions

I discovered an interesting thing about absolutely positioned elements this week. I was reading an article called conflicting absolute positions on the List Apart website and it mentioned that all modern browsers now seem to support 4 cornered positioning. In other words you can set the top, bottom, left and right corners of an absolute positioned element and it will dynamically work out the height and width.

This struck me as an amazingly useful tool that allows for all kinds of possibilities. Most useful, as the article points out, is that you can start doing some interesting combinations of fixed and fluid width elements.

The downside is that unsurprisingly this is not supported in IE 5 and 6. However, the article does suggest interesting workarounds for some specific scenarios. If you have a few minutes check out this article as it is well worth the time.

Quikmaps

We have talked before on the show about various websites that make the process of adding google maps to your site less painful. However, this week I came across another one that I particularly like. It is called Quikmaps and it has a wonderfully clean and easy to use interface.

You can quickly add new points of interest and even draw lines showing routes. You can also select from a massive range of icons and add your own marker info just by clicking on a point.

Finally they make it incredibly simple to add the map to your site. You can enable or disable a range of features (including map controls and draggability) and add it to your site by copying and pasting a tiny fragment of code. However, the nicest thing from my perspective is you can do all of this without registering for the site.

The best websites are useful and ugly

I have to say I am a little disappointed with the latest post by Gerry McGovern. Gerry is a usability expert who’s posts I read on a regular basis. The vast majority are superb but his latest post is reminiscent of the kind of thing written by Jakob Nielsen. In this post he argues that the most usable sites are often the ugliest. In my opinion this is an incredibly blinkered view. Although he points out a number of recent design trends which damage usability that does not mean a website has to be ugly. I have said it before and I will say it again, website can be both attractive to look at and easy to use.

What is more, this post smacked of the attitude that usability is all important. I do not believe this to be entirely true. Usability has to be balanced with numerous other considerations including brand identity and design aesthetics.

Its a shame because in other posts Gerry talks a lot of sense. It would appear that I am left with Steve Krug to champion both usability and design working together.

Survive the digg effect with Amazon Web Services

I seem to be hearing a lot about the Amazon web services at the moment. I have just returned from the Institutional Web Managers Workshop where I was speaking. While there I met Jeff Barr from Amazon who was talking about the different web services they offer. On my return I came across a post on the Think Vitamin website covering exactly the same subject and I have to say I have been impressed.

Amazon offer a growing number of web services aimed at developers. However, the two which have impressed me the most are the simple storage system and the Elastic Compute Cloud. Basically the first is a superb way of managing the growing bandwidth and storage demands of your site while the second allows you to dynamically increase the power of your server environment to respond to peaks in demand.

There are literally endless applications of these technologies and I don’t have the time here to cover the subject in depth. However, if you are developing an online application or if you are likely to suffer from spikes in traffic (such as can be caused by sites like digg) then you will want to explore this more.

Marcus’ bit: Providing the right support

A lot of web design agencies have made themselves, and by association, the rest of us, unpopular by enforcing unnecessary and, quite often, unfair support agreements on their clients. The ‘classic’ support model is 15% of the value of the contract over 3 years. This has somehow evolved from enterprise software solution installations where onsite support is required covering daily usage by thousands of employees. Very few websites need this level of support.

At Headscape we have always taken the approach that support, like the job, is unique to that client. That is, we aim to provide the most appropriate support for that client.

However, what does that actually mean? This article covers the various options we offer our clients and the thinking behind them.

Ad hoc support

This is simply work carried out on an existing site on a job-by-job basis. Other than not having to pay for anything until it is needed, there is generally no bonus to the client with this method in that standard rates are charged and work slotted into the schedule when it can be done.

However, I think it is still important to sign a support agreement stating the terms of the agreement and particularly the process involved for booking work. Usually some sort of email booking process is simplest and avoids writing contracts for every little piece of work.

Minimum monthly allocation

On this basis we schedule in a guaranteed minimum level of work (e.g. 0.5 person-day) every month for at least six months. Because we can plan around that minimum allocation, we can offer a discount on our standard rate.

The agreement for this type of work needs to cover a variety of points:

Again, the ordering process
Term for the agreement and when it starts
Invoicing – usually this would be monthly in arrears with any work over and above the fixed amount invoiced the following month.
Reporting

With this type of agreement, any unused time is usually not carried over into subsequent months or agreements.

High priority work

This is a fairly tricky area to sort out because you have the issue of ‘bumping’ existing scheduled work if high priority work comes in. This is not a problem in slack times but can be if everyone is busy. There is no magic answer other than saying that emergencies do happen and things needing attention quickly is part of any service business’ week to week existence. Bearing that in mind, it is good practice to have an agreement in place that documents how things will be dealt with.

If a client requires the additional assurance of an ongoing support contract with defined levels of response, we offer an annual pre-purchased package of support credits that can be called upon as and when required. One credit equals one hour’s work in value.

Depending on the urgency of the required response, support credits purchase a different period of Headscape’s time. For example, low priority work is charged at 1 hour = 1 credit, whereas high priority work is charged at 1 hour = 2 credits.

To summarise, the golden rule is to agree on whatever terms suit the client best then put it all in writing.

Paul’s corner: Emerging design trends

I received this question from John in Dublin:

I am a designer working on a new clients website. He says he wants the website to feel very contemporary and web 2.0. like. However, my concern is that if I design something that feels like a web 2.0 site, it will be out of date by the time it goes live. It feels like web 2.0. design is on its way out. What do you think the next big design movement will be?

Although this is obviously an impossible question, it hasn’t stopped me from trying to answer it in my latest post on emerging design trends.

Review: Elgg

I have received a number of emails from various people over the last few months mentioning something called Elgg. None of the emails gave a lot of detail but said I should talk to a guy called Ben Werdmuller. After googling Elgg I discovered it is an open source social platform that appeared to be community based in nature. However, my lazy gene kicked in and instead of reading through an entire website I decided to get Ben on the show to tell me more.

If you are considering building a community based website, you should definitely listen to this interview.

Show 85: Bulletproof

Posted in Classic shows on July 3, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul provides some design advice for developers, Marcus provides so post launch pointers and we review Jeremy Keith’s Bulletproof AJAX book.

Podcast: Download (20.3MB)

News and events

Unfolding the fold

The first news story today is actually not news at all. Well, its news to me (because I wasn’t previously aware of it) but the actual post was made back in December of last year.

The post relates to that most irritating of subjects; “the fold”. I have spoken about the fold many times before. The mythical point at which people have to start to scroll. I say mythical because this point changes depending on your screen resolution, browser type and toolbars.

The reason it is so annoying is because clients are obsessed with it. They are convinced that users don’t scroll (a perception rooted in the early 90s) and no amount of persuasion seems to change their minds.

However, hopefully the post I found this week will help. “Unfolding the Fold” is a post on the ClickTale blog that provides some hard stats about the fold and scrolling in general. It demonstrates that the vast majority of people scroll, with almost all of them scrolling right to the bottom of the page. Their conclusion is that there really is no reason to squeeze all of your content above the fold.

d.construct tickets on sale 10th July

If you are in the UK on the 7th September you should be sure to come to d.construct. d.construct is in my opinion one of the best web design conferences around. The reason I like it so much is that it works hard to maintain a grass root feel that is accessible to anybody.

For a start the price ticket is very accessible at £85 + VAT. Secondly, the whole thing happens on a single day so there is no need for expensive hotel bills if that is a problem. Finally, they have a great mix of speakers with many of the big names you would expect but also a lot of less well known people in order to “shake up the scene”.

The reason I mention it now is because the tickets are going on sale next tuesday (the 10th). Historically they sell out incredibly fast. Although this year they do have a larger venue and so that should help somewhat.

I really want to encourage you to attend this event if at all possible. I will definitely be there and it would be great for us all to meet up.

Fonts licensed for web apps

Talking of d.construct, Richard Rutter (one of the organizers of the event) has posted an interesting blog entry on “font licensing“. Admittedly font licensing, doesn’t sound very exciting but potentially it could be. Richard has spotted a press release from a prominent font provider. This press release talks about a new type of license…

Ascender Corporation announced a new licensing program for font software implementations with server-based applications.

Richard goes on to suggest this might be another move towards browsers supporting downloadable fonts. This would allow us to use whatever font we wished on a website rather than being limited to what the user has on his or her desktop.

Richard does warn that this might just be in reference to Silverlight, because Ascender does work very closely with Microsoft. However, personally within the context of Opera’s move towards downloadable fonts, I am hopefully this might be something more.

A new way to visualize your desktop

Finally today, I wanted to mention a technology called Bumptop. I recently watched a demonstration of the system and was blown away. Basically, Bumptop is a new way to work with files that mirrors much more closing the experience of interacting with your desk in the physical universe. You can stack files, throw them around and even crumple them up in a 3D environment.

When I first watched this demo it felt like a novelty, but the more I thought about it the more potential I saw to organize content in a more dynamic and flexible way.

What I like most about this interface is that it is not trying to teach us a new method of interaction. Instead it is trying to replicate something we are already familiar with. The idea of using metaphors we already understand is a staple of interface design and is what makes things like tabs, desktops and folders so successful.

I think as web designers we could learn from technologies like this. We should be looking to build on established conventions people understand rather than always seeking to do the next big thing or be innovative in someway. Bumptop is innovative but it does so in a way that is instantly accessible to everybody.

Paul’s corner: Design advice for developers

I received this great question from Simon that I thought worth addressing on the show…

I hear lots of questions about the technical and business side of Web design, but what I don’t hear is how do the already technical amongst us become better designers – maybe being a visual thing this just won’t work on an audio podcast, but at least you could give us your top 5 ways to grow artistically.

As has become tradition, I decided to blog on the subject a few days ago but unsurprisingly failed to stick to “5 ways to grow artistically”. Instead I managed to produce a long and rambling essay on “when designers design” which I bore you all with on the show.

Marcus’ bit: Post launch Protocol

Everyone, client and agency, seems to understand the principle of not letting a site stagnate. Content should be regularly updated and, ….and what?

We see a lot of client demands for content management systems that are then often not used for lengthy periods of time. Therefore I thought it could be useful to look at what options there are to a site manager after that big day when the site goes live.

Of course, not everything here will apply to everyone but hopefully some of it will.

News and events

Stories, articles, seminars, fun days, whatever. These are your opportunity to create new content very regularly.

Clients are invariably perfectly happy with their site when it goes live. This is understandable, they have more often than not spent months working on it, tinkering with this, fretting with that and a) they need to spend some time on other aspects of their job (that have been neglected) and b) the site really has never been more up to date!

But what often happens is that a couple of months down the line they realise that new content needs creating but they can’t remember any of the CMS training. The 50 page accompanying manual is too scary so things get left. This happens until we are asked to add the new content because we’re too busy and it’s urgent and often, later on, further CMS training is booked.

News and events provide a steady stream of new content that helps keep the site fresh but also the CMS skills of those looking after the site.

Shortcuts

Updating shortcuts to key content is again a simple way of refreshing a site’s content without putting that much effort in.

Homepage shortcuts tend to link to:

Latest news
Latest events
Repeated main navigation
Products
Special offers
Facilities e.g. login, subscribe etc
Important ‘deep’ content
Popular topics

I guess the point I’m making here is a lot of these shortcuts can simply be rotated giving a feeling of change on the site. For example, changing a link to a main section on a weekly basis is a simple task and one that does not require the writing of any new content.

Utilising usage stats may be a good way of seeing which areas of the site need further promotion. In fact, use everything at your disposal, stats packages, CMS, content suppliers, agency support contract, internal marketing team etc so that you are as informed as possible.

Imagery

Don’t just update copy. Adding new banner imagery can really rejuvenate a tired looking design. Always look to include appropriate imagery with news articles, events etc.

Communicate

Keep your eyes open to what’s happening within your company/organisation. There may be a new project/department/member of staff etc that might be outside your sphere, that would really add value to the website.

Make yourself (and your role) known to everyone. Send out questionnaires or surveys asking people what they want to see on the site or if they have any pertinent content.

Think big

Finally, don’t lose sight of the main purpose of the site while dealing with the smaller things. It may be that the main purpose of your site is to promote your brand so updating the look and feel of the site regularly may be a lot more important than updated content. In fact, continually evolving the design of a site over time is probably far more cost effective (not to mention the effect it has on keeping the site fresh) than ‘big bang’ redesigns every 3 years or so.

Alternatively, sales leads may be the site’s primary function. In which case, keep in touch with sales and experiment with ways to boost leads.

The other really big area that site owners need to look at is site promotion. This warrants a post of its own so I’ll look at that another time.

Review: Jeremy Keith’s Bulletproof AJAX

I have decided not to do “ask the expert” this week, so we can have a review instead. Unfortunately we don’t have the time to do both segments every week so I have to mix and match from time to time.

The book I want to review is “Bulletproof Ajax” by Jeremy Keith. I read it almost 6 months ago, but haven’t had an opportunity to talk about it on the show until now.

The book is designed to be the sequel to Jeremy’s previous book “DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model” which was written as an introduction to Javascript for designers. Bulletproof AJAX is therefore written in a similar tone with the focus on making AJAX accessible to designers rather than providing the technical detail you would expect from a developers book.

I have to confess I found the book a little frustrating at first. As somebody that had bought and learnt Javascript through Jeremy’s first book, I felt a little annoyed that the first 2 chapters seemed to be dedicated to laying the foundations we had already covered in the first book. I am guessing the idea was that people could buy this book in isolation without first owning DOM Scripting, but in my opinion the amount of detail provided in Chapter 1 and 2 wouldn’t make that possible. For me those first 2 chapters felt like padding to make a short book feel slightly more substantial.

However, that criticism aside the rest of the book was definitely worth the very reasonable price tag. Jeremy has an excellent writing style that is clear and engaging. He seems to explain complex topics in such a manner that you wonder what all the fuss is about. You come away from the book thinking this “AJAX stuff” is easy and wondering what all of the fuss is about. Admittedly he only covers the basics, but it is enough to get you producing the kind of AJAX applications most designers would like to build.

But, Jeremy doesn’t shy away from the more complex underlying issues surrounding AJAX. In particular he talks about accessibility and ensuring your applications work with Javascript disabled. He does this through a technique called HIJAX. I will not endeavor to explain to you the details of it here, except to say it relies on the server doing most of the heavy lifting.

From applying the principles taught in this book I have to say the HIJAX approach works very well. All of the complex stuff is handled by the developers on the server side and I get to focus on how the information is returned to the user. AJAX is a funny area that sits between client side and server side and leaves designers and developers wondering who is responsible for what. Using the HIJAX approach taught in this book, the division is much clearer.

So would I recommend this book? As with DOM Scripting it depends on who you are. If you are a designer who has read Jeremy’s first book and would like to start producing AJAX applications then absolutely. However, if you haven’t read his first book then I suggest you do that first, unless you are already confident in producing unobtrusive javascript.

If you are a developer on the other hand then my recommendation is to steer clear. This book is not meant for you and you will find it frustratingly lightweight.

The importance of Undo

Posted in User experience on June 13, 2007 by Paul Boag

An easily available undo function creates a sense of simplicity because it instills in the user the attitude of “what the heck, I can always undo it”.

Many internet users lack confidence when interacting with the web. It is our job as web designers to try and reassure them and provide a safety net when things go wrong. Providing various methods by which users can undo actions is a useful crutch to the less confident user.

Benefits of undo

Undo functionality seems to be in increasingly short supply on the more recent raft of web 2.0. websites, especially on sites that make heavy use of AJAX. This is a sad day for web design as the ability to undo provides three crucial benefits:

Alleviate apprehension

I have said this many times but it always bears repeating; the majority of people do not like computers. It is so easy for us to forget that, as we live and breath computers everyday. I have to confess that I am more comfortable working with a computer than the real world. After all, how many times have you tried to CTRL Z reality!

However, although we are comfortable with computers the majority of people aren’t. They are intimidating, impersonal and far from intuitive. This is not only true for the PC but also for the web. After all who would design a system where the interface changes when you move between sections (sites).

The ability to undo, go back or escape is a lifeline to many users. It is immensely reassuring to know that you can always undo something if you get it wrong and when that option is not available it can be incredibly disturbing. Take for example the first time you ever bought something online. Do you remember a feeling of apprehension when you realized that the next click would place the order and that there was then no going back.

A way to overcome complexity

I am a huge fan of simplicity, largely because I recently finished reading “The Laws of Simplicity” by J Maeda. In his book he talks about the fact that the ability to undo creates an impression of simplicity even in the most complex applications.

An easily available undo function creates a sense of simplicity because it instills in the user the attitude of “what the heck, I can always undo it”. Once the user has that attitude they perceive things as simpler than they actually are.

A method to build confidence

The “what the heck” attitude is largely about confidence. A confidence in the power of undo to do its magic, is what allows us to play and experiment with an application. Through experimentation and play we learn and with knowledge comes a confidence in our own abilities. That is the power of undo.

Opportunities to provide undo

Now that I have established the importance of undo the next step is to look at what options are available to us as web designers to provide undo to our users. I have come up with four ways this is possible, however the sad reality is that we continually undermine these different methods in the way we code and design.

Back Button

I must have sat through hundreds of usability sessions over the last decade and I do not recall one where the user did not use the back button at some point. The back button is the primary life line used by most people to correct problems and yet in more and more sites it does not work. The problem lies in the use of AJAX and Flash which break the page metaphor on which all browsers are built. The same problem occurred with frames and was one of the major reasons that the use of frames died out.

Although there are fixes for this problem in both flash and AJAX, they are far from perfect and rarely implemented. Serious attention needs to be given to this problem when developing modern web applications as a failure to do so not only undermine usability but damages user confidence.

Breadcrumbs

There was a time when users didn’t really understand breadcrumbs. However as has been suggested recently by Jakob Nielsen, that is no longer the case.

Although breadcrumbs should never be seen as a replacement for the back button, they do work as a handy alternative for more experienced users. What is more, although they have traditionally been used on page based websites they can also translate well onto web applications.

Favorites

In usability sessions I have also occasionally seen favorites and bookmarks used as an undo tool to go back to a previous page. However as with the back button this functionality is often broken in modern web applications that update sections of pages instead of the entire page. Favorites provide the valuable ability for the user to quickly return to marked “safe points” in their surfing and as a result we should be doing our upmost to ensure that this ability remains.

Home

Almost all websites have a link back to the home page, however not all of them make that link very obvious. A common practice is to make the logo a link back and although in itself this technique is fine, it is not obvious this link exists and so many users are not aware of it.

Having a link back to the home page is a great way of letting the user “start again” but if you are going to provide that functionality it needs to be obvious.

So there you have it; why undo is important and some techniques to undo easier on your website. Hope it helps.

Show 76: Clients and Agency

Posted in Classic shows on April 24, 2007 by Paul Boag

Marcus talks about setting up a web design company while Paul talks about the role of the client and Derek Featherstone talks about making your web application accessible.

Podcast: Download (27.5MB)

News and events

Eric Meyer’s reset style

I have talked before about the idea of having a CSS file that removes all of the browsers styling in order to allow you to work from a clean slate across multiple browsers. Well, over this last week Eric Meyer has picked up on the idea and has been collaboratively developing a reset CSS file via his blog. If you do a lot of CSS work, this is definitely worth getting your hands on.

Microsoft Silverlight

Microsoft are gunning after Adobe on all fronts at the moment including a flash competitor called Silverlight. Like flash, Silverlight offers animation, interactivity and cross browser compatibility (although I don’t seem to be able to get it working on a mac). However, their real focus is on video where they trump Flash by offering high definition quality. It also appears to offer more “standards friendly” methods of inserting and manipulating movies, however as I said I have been unable to test this so far.

The biggest hurdle Microsoft faces will be take up. At the moment Flash dominates partly because in many cases it is installed almost invisibly in the background. In contrast, at the moment, Silverlight is a separate installation that takes place outside of the browser. No doubt this will change in the future.

35 Designers, 5 questions

Smashing magazine are certainly on a role at the moment, publishing a range of superb web design articles. One of the most recent is a post where they asked 35 designers (of which I was one) 5 questions about their approach to web design. The resulting article is a fascinating read and gives you a real insight into how other web designers work. The questions included:

1 aspect of design you give the highest priority to.
1 most useful CSS-technique you use very often.
1 font you use in your projects very often.
1 design-related book you highly recommend to read.
1 design magazine you read on a daily/weekly basis (online or offline).

CSS tools

Another Smashing magazine post. This one lists some very useful CSS tools including form builders, list makers, CSS layout templates and much more. If you are starting out in standards based coding some of the tools here will produce you some brilliant examples of clean code.

Client corner: The role of the client

Myself and Marcus swap roles this week and I take a look at our client corner issue; the role of the client. There is a lot written about the role of web designers but very little written about what part website owners play in the evolution of their sites. It is an area I have been thinking a lot about recently and I wanted to share a few thoughts with you. It is a subject that I have recently blogged on so if you want more information on what I consider the role of the client to be then I suggest you check that out.

Ask the expert: Derek Featherstone on ARIA

We are lucky enough to have accessibility expert Derek Featherstone on this week’s show talking about making web applications accessible. He talks about how HTML is not designed to support web applications and that the methods used to make it work are often little more than hacks. He then introduces a new standard from the W3C called ARIA and explains how this will assist in making web applications more accessible. If you want to know more about what ARIA is and how it can make your applications more accessible then Derek recommends a recent article on the List Apart website.

Agony Uncle: Setting up a web design company

Marcus takes on the lofty role of Agony Uncle this week responding to a question on the forum about setting up a web design company. The question, from Stanton, starts with him setting the scene of someone wanting to break out on their own but worrying about how they will cope without that guaranteed income.

Marcus gets all nostalgic about the early days of Headscape and then provides advice about starting up. He covers all the boring bits about incorporation, insurance, funding and documentation. He then talks about getting business in and not forgetting that someone has to be the salesman!

Show 69: All alone

Posted in Classic shows on March 6, 2007 by Paul Boag

Abandoned by Marcus, Paul struggles on alone through this week’s show. Bravely he manages to cover; the cure to hiccups, how to hunt down those pesky CSS bugs and what’s new in Photoshop CS3.

Podcast: Download (19.4MB)

News and events

SWF image replacement

This week sees the launch of SWF image replacement (swfIR), not to be confused with sIFR which replaces text. swfIR combines javascript with flash to apply cool effects to imagery on the fly. swfIR can add rounded corners, drop shadows, borders and even make images scale. What is more it degrades nicely on unsupported browsers. Of course nothing is perfect and there are some known issues. However, it is certainly a good option if you have clients uploading lots of images which need styling.

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! has launched something called Pipes which apparently allows you to “rewire the web” (and here was I thinking the web was made up of tubes). Basically Pipes allow you to combine and repurpose multiple RSS feeds and APIs. At its most basic level it is similar to a service like Feed Digest however it is capable of doing a whole lot more. Not the most user friendly interface in the world but definitely worth having a play with.

Ajax inspiration

I came across miniajax.com which is a nice little site that showcases the latest gadgets and gizmos in the world of AJAX and Javascript. For those of you who already code Javascript this is a great place for inspiration, for the rest of you it is “copy and paste heaven”.

Accessibility and the UK law

Struan Robertson has produced two great articles that clearly lay out your legal obligations on accessibility if you run a website in the UK. Ignore at your peril:

Client Corner: Choosing a design

With Marcus away it fell to me to tackle the client’s corner segment this week. Sticking to what I know best, I decided to discuss how to choose the right design for your site when confronted with multiple options. We look at:

How deeply a client should be involved in the design process
The dangers of design by committee
The subjective nature of design
The need to include your target audience in the decision process
The importance of brand identity
The problems with choosing a colour palette
The influence of imagery
Layout, resolution and the fold.

Ask an expert: Gary Marshall on instructional copy

Out of all of the guests to appear on the .net podcast Gary Marshall is one of my favourites. He is not a web designer but a technology journalist which means he brings a completely new perspective to the table. On this week’s show I get him in to discuss his impressions on instructional text; you know, the copy the client doesn’t write. From error messages to tooltip help, it is often down to the web designer to write instructional text and what do we know about writing!

Agony Uncle: Bug Hunting

Diagnosing and fixing problems in CSS can be a bitch. Often we resort to randomly trying different things until something works. However, there is a better way. This week we look at bug testing techniques including:

Know your bugs; sites like Position is Everything will help with that
Validate your code
Apply borders
Create a stripped down test case
Systematically remove chunks of code

Review: Photoshop CS3

This week I finally got around to installing Photoshop CS3 Beta and I have to say I really like it. I put it off for ages because normally these upgrades aren’t worth the effort but this one has made some substantial improvements. Probably the most exciting for me personal are the improvements to the interface, which now has docked palettes rather than those annoying floating ones. However, there are a lot of cool features beyond that, including:

Quick Select
Refine Edges
An improved bridge
Smart filters
Improved cloning

For a more comprehensive review check out the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (no I am not making that organisation up!)

Show 65: Dying (Man Flu!)

Posted in Classic shows on January 30, 2007 by Paul Boag

This week on the Boagworld Podcast, Paul and Marcus drag themselves from their death beds to share why you should care about Vista and Drew McLellan explains the pros and cons of Ruby on Rails.

Podcast: Download (21.1MB)

This week on the Boagworld Podcast, Paul and Marcus drag themselves from their death beds to share why you should care about Vista, which browsers you should support and introduce you to the exciting world of terms and conditions. Oh yes and Drew McLellan explains the pros and cons of Ruby on Rails.

News and events

Barcamp

The weekend of the 17th of February sees the second barcamp to take place in London. If you haven’t come across barcamp, it is a gathering of web geeks where everybody takes turns to present a 30 minute session. You can pick which sessions you wish to attend and the whole thing has a very informal feel. Its free and arguably one of the most valuable meetups of the year.

Paper prototyping

There is an excellent new article on the List Apart website. It proposes closing down your PC and returning to good old pen and paper. Compelling stuff, which should make you evaluate the way you develop your designs.

Bulletproof AJAX

Jeremy Keith is about to release the follow up to DOM Scripting, Bulletproof AJAX. As with his previous book Bulletproof AJAX is aimed squarely at the designer community. It will be perfect for people who have read DOM Scripting and want to take the next step. If you can’t wait that long and can squeeze £295 out of your boss then you might want to attend Jeremy’s AJAX workshop down in Brighton. I have attended it myself and it is extremely good.

Custom reading containers

This is an incredible proof of concept that I was emailed last week. Basically it enables the user to resize elements of your web page to suit their requirements. Admittedly it has only undergone limited testing so far and relies on PHP; nevertheless it looks very interesting indeed.

Client corner: Terms and conditions

This week Marcus starts a new series on client contrasts with a “fascinating” look at terms and conditions… I know… control your excitement! Some of the points he covers include:

Make sure you read the T&Cs carefully no matter how boring they are!
Get advice if you don’t understand something
Make sure you note the governing laws that cover the T&Cs
Note the deliverables and rights
Understand your liability if there are problems

Agony Uncle: Browser support

Danny has sent in an excellent question about how far we should go in supporting the numerous browsers out there. Should we support IE5, Opera mobile, Opera on the Wii and so on? In the show I talk about the need to not set hard and fast rules in this area but adapt to the individual requirements of our clients. I talk about not blindly accepting the browser support requested by the client but rather analysing statistics to establish the best browser set to build for. Finally I also explain the concept of graded browser support as implemented by larger organisations like Yahoo!

Ask the expert: Ruby on Rails

Talking of Yahoo, this week our expert is Drew McLellan who works in their development team. He is on the show discussing the pros and cons of working with frameworks like Ruby on Rails. Among other things he looks at speed of development vs. maintenance and generally gives a nice overview on the subject. He certainly helped me have a clearer understanding of the benefits and drawbacks.

Review: Vista

So Vista has hit the shelves and being the uber geek that I am I couldn’t resist upgrading as soon as I got my hands on the disk. I know there are loads of reviews on Vista but I thought it was worth reviewing specifically from a web designer’s perspective. I talk about the problems I had installing Photoshop, the improved FTP support and the multiple website support now in IIS. I also look at how Vista could potentially change the way people interact with the web by bringing things like desktop widgets and RSS feeds to the masses.

Podcast 57: Afraid of Standards?

Posted in Classic shows on November 6, 2006 by Paul Boag

This week Paul and Marcus are joined by Ben Henick author of an excellent article about standards found on the List Apart website. Together they have a frank and open discussion about the downsides of designing with standards.

Podcast: Download (28.4MB)

First of all let me apologise to those of you who were expecting this week’s show to be about online communities. Due to sickness and too much work I didn’t have time to prepare everything I wanted to cover. So instead of giving you second best I thought I would bring forward my interview with Ben.

I know a number of you are sick of me talking about standards but I am sure that this week’s show will be a pleasant change. Instead of me waffling on about the benefits of standards we take a look at the problems faced by web designers when moving across to tableless design.

The show is largely based on the article Ben wrote for A List Apart so I would highly recommend you check that out too.

You might also want to check out Ben’s personal site, his business site or learn more about his involvement in the Web Standards Project.

Also in this week’s show…

We discuss various problems in the new generation of browsers including IE7 zoom and Firefox 2 access keys. We look at the concept of website constitutions, review the definitive article on HTML and I share my trepidation at the upcoming Refresh 06 conference.

Finally we take another look at David McFarland’s book CSS: The Missing Manual following his interview on Inside the Net.

Podcast 47: The mobile web

Posted in Classic shows on August 29, 2006 by Paul Boag

In this week’s show, we look at why you should take the mobile web seriously. What potential pitfalls you will face and what options are available to you for utilising mobile technology.

There are three times as many mobile phones than personal computers. By 2009, it is predicted that there will be 3 billion mobile phones worldwide. This week on boagworld, we discuss an evolution of the web almost as profound at the arrival of the internet itself… the mobile web.

Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax

The mobile web

Without a doubt, it will not be long before more people access the web via mobile devices than desktop PCs. However this huge (and potentially lucrative market) is not without its pitfalls. With over 40 mobile browsers and 160 devices, the mobile web makes the browser wars look like a walk in the park.

In this week’s show, we look at why you should take the mobile web seriously? What potential pitfalls you will face and what options are available to you for utilising mobile technology.

Most of the discussion is based around presentations given by Tom Humes at last years d.construct and Cameron Moll at this year’s @media. They know much more about the subject than either of us and so we highly recommend you take the time to download their talks and hear what they have to say for yourself:

Download Cameron Moll’s slides and MP3 presentation
Download Tom Hume’s slides and MP3 presentation

Also on this week’s show

Once again, I antagonise up every mac user on the planet by quoting from Jakob Nielsen’s new book on prioritising web usability. We talk about the recent list of IE6 fixes that will appear in IE7 and discuss both Refresh 06 and d.construct. I also recommend John Allsopp’s latest article on Microformats, which is ideal for those who want to track their growing popularity.

We review two books on this week’s show:

Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance

Finally, if you haven’t seen it yet check out the superb demo by our sponsor RightCart and see just how fast it is to integrate a shopping cart into your site.

Add your search engine to the browser

Posted in Development on July 20, 2006 by Paul Boag

There is a great new feature in both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2, which will allow you to integrate your site search directly into the browser.

I have been surprised how little buzz the new Open Search functionality in the next generation of browsers has received. After all, the additional exposure it could provide websites is considerable.

The concept

Open Search is a very powerful concept but for the purposes of this post, I am just going to focus on what it can quickly and easily offer website owners.

At the most basic level, it allows you to easily add the search functionality from your site to the search box found in the top right of both IE 7 and Firefox 2. Although this search functionality is only available while visiting a site, it does give users the option to save your search engine to their browsers and even set it as the default if they wished.

How to add open search

At first, the documentation associated with implementing open search appears very complex. This is largely because Open Search is capable of doing a lot more than basic browser implementation. However, below I give you the absolute basics to get your search in the browsers search box.

Step One: Create a description

The description is a very simple piece of XML that tells the browser about your search engine. There is a lot more information you can pass across but this is the basics:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"> <ShortName>Boagworld Search</ShortName> <Description>Search for web site management advice.</Description> <Tags>Boagworld</Tags> <Image width="16" height="16" type="image/png">http://www.boagworld/favicon.ico</Image> <Url type="text/html" template="http://www.boagworld.com/mt/mt-search.cgi?search={searchTerms}" /> </OpenSearchDescription>

Most of the above is hopefully self-explanatory. The most important bit is the URL template attribute. The simplest way of finding out what this is, is to search using the search box on your site. Once you have arrived at the search page, copy and paste the url into the above XML file and replace your search term with {search term}.

However, this will not necessarily work for your search engine. It will depend on the set up on your particular site. For example on boagworld, I had to strip out some of the other parameters being passed across. Other search engines might work in an entirely different way, in which case you will have to refer back to the open search documentation.

Once you have made the changes to your XML file upload it to your server. For this demo I saved it as search.xml and put it on my site’s root: www.boagworld.com/search.xml

Step Two: Pointing to your description

The next step is to point the browser at search.xml when it loads your site. You can do this by simply adding one line of code into the header of your pages.

<link title="Boagworld Search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" rel="search" href="http://www.boagworld.com/search.xml" />

Rename the title and make sure the href is pointing at your uploaded description.

Once you open the page in either Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 you should see your search engine listed under the search engine dropdown.

Podcast 43: The business of web design

Posted in Classic shows on July 17, 2006 by Paul Boag

In this week’s show, we cover: running a web design agency, what employers look for when hiring a web designer, the best stats package in the world, should we stop testing in IE 5, and running multiple versions of IE on a single PC.

Podcast: Download (26.0MB)